White Flight: You Did It, Dear Liberals

even if you won't admit it

We know what The Narrative is on the white flight from America’s big cities, starting in the Sixties.

It is White Racism. As soon as a black family moved onto a city block, the whites started leaving, the dirty racists.

OK, fine, says Jack Cashill, an Irish American, in Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities. His family lived in Newark, NJ, in the Forties and Fifties. and he was there.

Here’s The Narrative, courtesy of Michelle Obama, quoted by Seth Forman at The American Spectator:

“As families like ours, upstanding families like ours … as we moved in, White folks moved out.” Whites, she said, were repelled by such things as “the color of our skin” and the “texture of our hair.”

Not true, says Jack Cashill. He talked to a friend:

When Cashill asked one lifelong friend why he and his widowed mother finally left their block in the early 1970s, he answered, “It became untenable…. When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets broken into for the second time, that’s untenable.”

Did I mention that “women expect to be protected”?

Of course, it wasn’t “upstanding families like” the Robinsons that did this. It was black young men from fatherless families.

Like most who have studied the subject, Cashill is perplexed that crime and victimization rates exploded among blacks in the 1960s. The only difference Cashill could discern between 1950 and 1960 was the decline of in-tact families. When the city was 17 percent black in 1950 and crime was low, 16.8 percent of non-white households nationally were headed by a single mother. By 1960, 34 percent of black children were being raised that way[.]

That’s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. And that’s when liberals told Moynihan and everyone else to shut up, racist.

And liberals have been yelling “Racist” ever since, whether the issue is education, jobs, or crime.

Here are some other things that went wrong in America’s inner cities.

• “The American Housing Act of 1949, which brought ‘urban renewal,’ wreaked havoc on Newark, with local politicians and businessmen often sacrificing their own communities for the money and power it could bring them” by tearing down residential housing and putting up “government housing project[s].”

• Highways: The East-West Highway (now I-280) cut Cashill’s Roseville community in half, and took the Cashill home with it.

• Jews left first, because public schools. Weequahic High School was a top performing high school in the 1950s. “But by 1959, blacks grew to 35 percent of Newark’s population, Weequahic was integrated with less-prepared students, and academic rigor suffered, leaving Jews at an impasse.” Irish, and Italians, having their own Catholic schools, stayed longer.

Now, it is pretty obvious to me that Liberals Did It, from gubmint housing to gubmint schools, to gubmint welfare that freed poor women from the indignity of having to put up with low-class men.

But I want to suggest an idea here, to explain why fatherless boys are so violent. Men are protectors; so if there is no man in the house, the boy does the protecting. Oh, I get it that black teenage boys having gang wars in the ‘hood doesn’t sound like “protecting.” But I suggest that the fatherlessness triggers some Jungian “archetype” that makes fatherless boys into gangbangers, “protecting” their turf from the enemy.

In a separate article Jack Cashill tells how his reading of his book at the local library was canceled in Fredonia, NY.

“Very soon after our website posting which announced Jack’s appearance at the Barker,” library board President Jeff Adams wrote in an email to my wife Joan, “we began to receive numerous correspondence ranging from general disbelief to adverse protestations from within the local community,”

“Oddly,” Adams added, “all of this response came from women.” There was nothing odd about it. Women have long taken the lead in controlling what they see as harmful behavior.

And Cashill adds: “liberal female activists have increasingly come to see just about all forms of conservative speech as harmful.”

I would say that, in politics and religion, humans cannot admit they are wrong. This is probably OKish in religion because, these days, you can always quit your church if you are fed up with the church ladies. The church ladies can say forever more that, “I can’t believe he said that,” and it doesn’t matter.

But in politics, it does matter. In my view, everything that is wrong with the world today has arisen because of the political domination of the educated class. They want to insert politics into everything — whereas in the old days, kings were mostly content just to plunder their people for money to fight their wars.

Point is that, if a capitalist proposes a brilliant plan and it doesn’t work, then he goes broke and not much harm is done. But if the educated class imposes its education ideas on the rest of us, there is no way to deal with failure. In politics, you never admit you were wrong.

But notice how failure works in politics. If politics is the fight against the enemy, then the result is either victory and equestrian statues or failure and the rulers are outta here.

For everything else, we should avoid government, because government leaders will apply force to keep the fight going until victory or defeat.

I have wondered, over the years, why the Democratic leaders in big cities don’t seem to care about the sufferings of their constituents. The answer comes out in the Cashill experience. When there’s a big project, the politicians stand to benefit:

with local politicians and businessmen often sacrificing their own communities for the money and power it could bring them.

And as long as the voters keep voting for them, the politicians can keep looting the big projects with 10 percent for the Big Guy.

Of course, One Fine Day, a politician will emerge on the national stage and blame liberals for everything, and the Democratic faithful will be hurting just enough to vote for him.