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Topic: Gentrification is violence couched in white supremacy

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Gentrification's insidious violence: The truth about American ... - Salon
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/08/gentrifications_insidious_violence_the_truth_about_american_cities/ - 223k - Cached - Similar pages
1 day ago ... Gentrification is violence. Couched in white supremacy, it is a systemi
Post Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:01 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Tuesday, Apr 8, 2014 02:34 PM EDT

Gentrification’s insidious violence: The truth about American cities

Too many claim white people are at risk in communities of color. Really, it's those communities that are threatened
Daniel José Older


Gentrification's insidious violence: The truth about American cities
(Credit: HBO)


A few years back, when I was still a paramedic, we picked up a white guy who had been pistol whipped during a home invasion in Williamsburg. “I can’t believe this happened to me,” he moaned, applying the ice pack I’d given him to a small laceration on his temple. “It’s like a movie!”

Indeed.

While film narratives of white folks in low-income neighborhoods tend to focus on how endangered they are by a gangland black or brown menace, this patient was singular in that he was literally the only victim of black on white violence I encountered in my entire 10-year career as a medic.

“What is distinctively ‘American’ is not necessarily the amount or kind of violence that characterizes our history,” Richard Slotkin writes, “but the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism.” Slotkin was talking about the American frontier as a symbolic reference point for justifying expansionist violence throughout history. Today, we can see the mytho-political uses of symbolic violence in mainstream media portrayals of the “hood.”

It’s easy to fixate on physical violence. Movies sexualize it, broadcasters shake their heads as another fancy graphic whirs past sensationalizing it, politicians build careers decrying it with one side of their mouths and justifying it with the other. But institutionalized violence moves in far more insidious and wide-reaching patterns. “Gentrification,” Suey Park and Dr. David J. Leonard wrote in a recent post at Model View Culture, “represents a socio-historic process where rising housing costs, public policy, persistent segregation, and racial animus facilitates the influx of wealthier, mostly white, residents into a particular neighborhood. Celebrated as ‘renewal’ and an effort to ‘beautify’ these communities, gentrification results in the displacement of residents.”

Gentrification is violence. Couched in white supremacy, it is a systemic, intentional process of uprooting communities. It’s been on the rise, increasing at a frantic rate in the last 20 years, but the roots stretch back to the disenfranchisement that resulted from white flight and segregationist policies. Real estate agents dub changing neighborhoods with new, gentrifier-friendly titles that designate their proximity to even safer areas: Bushwick becomes East Williamsburg, parts of Flatbush are now Prospect Park South. Politicians manipulate zoning laws to allow massive developments with only token nods at mixed-income housing.

Beyond these political and economic maneuvers, though, the thrust of gentrification takes place in our mythologies of the hood. It is a result, as Park and Leonard explain, of a “discourse that imagines neighborhoods of color as pathological and criminal, necessitating outside intervention for the good of all.” Here’s where my pistol-whipped patient’s revelation about his cinematic experience kicks in. The dominant narrative of the endangered white person barely making it out of the hood alive is, of course, a myth. No one is safer in communities of color than white folks. White privilege provides an invisible force field around them, powered by the historically grounded assurance that the state and media will prosecute any untoward event they may face.

With gentrification, the central act of violence is one of erasure. Accordingly, when the discourse of gentrification isn’t pathologizing communities of color, it’s erasing them. “Girls,” for example, reimagines today’s Brooklyn as an entirely white community. Here’s a show that places itself in the epicenter of a gentrifying city with gentrifiers for characters – it is essentially a show about gentrification that refuses to address gentrification. After critics lambasted Season 1 for its lack of diversity, the show brought in Donald Glover to play a black Republican and still managed to avoid the more pressing and relevant question of displacement and racial disparity that the characters are, despite their self-absorption, deeply complicit with. What’s especially frustrating about “Girls” not only dodging the topic entirely but pushing back – often with snark and defensiveness against calls for more diversity – is that it’s a show that seems to want to bring a more nuanced take on the complexities of modern life.

In an appallingly overwritten New York magazine article with the (I guess) provocative title “Is Gentrification All Bad?,” Justin Davidson imagines a first wave of gentrifiers much the way I’ve heard it described again and again: “A trickle of impecunious artists hungry for space and light.” This is the standard, “first it was the artists” narrative of gentrification, albeit a little spruced up, and the unspoken but the understood word here is “white.” Because, really, there have always been artists in the hood. They aren’t necessarily recognized by the academy or using trust funds supplementing coffee shop tips to fund their artistic careers, but they are still, in fact, artists. The presumptive, unspoken “white” in the first round of artists gentrification narrative is itself an erasure of these artists of color.

“In the popular imagination, gentrification and displacement are virtually synonymous,” Davidson writes without giving any actual data to back up his claim. And, he adds, “a sense of grievance and shame permeates virtually all discussions of neighborhood change.” Davidson’s euphemistic, maybe-it’s-this-but-probably-it’s-that take on gentrification is precisely the type of reporting we hear on WNYC and other media outlets on a regular basis. The standard frame for a story on gentrification pits the upside of “urban renewal” against what’s painted as a necessary byproduct of this renewal: some folks have to move out. The underlying premise is, are these bakeries and coffee shops worth a few people having to move? And the underlying answer is, of course! The entirety of Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor was a continuous stream of bring-in-the-rich schemes, openly flaunted and always at the cost of New York’s poor. What’s missing from this analysis is that the forced displacement of peoples and dispersal of communities, whether through economic, political or cultural policies, is a long-term human rights violation.

For groups facing economic and cultural marginalization in the U.S., community means much more than just a residential area. In a country whose institutions historically fail or deliberately erase us, community constitutes a central pillar in surviving hetero-patriarchal white supremacy. Technology has brought new possibilities for collective action and resistance, but the centrality of physical community remains crucial. What becomes of community organizing, which is responsible for our continued survival here, when communities are increasingly uprooted and scattered?

The shifting power dynamics of today’s urban neighborhoods are reflected even in issues of food and nutrition. “Once-affordable ingredients have been discovered by trendy chefs,” cultural critic Mikki Kendall writes, “and have been transformed into haute cuisine. Food is facing gentrification that may well put traditional meals out of reach for those who created the recipes. Despite the hype, these ingredients have always been delicious, nutritious and no less healthy than other sources of protein.” Writing about this phenomenon at .. Media, Soleil Ho stated that food gentrification takes “the form of a curious kind of reacharound logic wherein economic and racial minorities are castigated for eating ‘primitively’ and ‘unhealthily’ while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class as ‘exotic’ delicacies.”

“Even gentrifiers themselves are convinced they are doing something terrible,” Davidson continues. “Young professionals whose moving trucks keep pulling up to curbs in Bushwick and Astoria carry with them trunkfuls of guilt.” It’s an odd and eloquent assumption about the mind of a gentrifier, but really, it’s irrelevant what they think or what Davidson thinks they think. The gears are all already in place, the mechanisms of white supremacy and capitalism poised to make their moves. Davidson talks of a “sweet spot”: some mythical moment of racial, economic harmony where the neighborhood stays perfectly diverse and balanced. There is no “sweet spot,” as Andrew Padilla at El Barrio Tours points out in his excellent point-by-point takedown, just fleeting moments of harmony in the midst of an ongoing legacy of forced displacement.

Here’s a refrain you’ll hear a lot in conversations about gentrifications: “Well, it’s really a class issue.” Davidson’s piece manages to avoid any race analysis whatsoever. Of course economics plays a huge role in this. But race and class are inseparably entwined. Rising rents, along with institutionally racist policies like stop-and-frisk, have forced black people to leave New York and urban areas around the country at historic rates. And yes, there are many layers at play: When non-black people of color with class privilege, like myself, move into a historically black and lower-income neighborhood, the white imagination reads our presence as making the area a notch safer for them. The mythology of safety and racial coding regards our presence as a marker of change; the white imagination places higher value on anything it perceives as closer to itself, further from blackness. We become complicit in the scam; the cycle continues.

These power plays – cultural, political, economic, racial — are the mechanics of a city at war with itself. It is a slow, dirty war, steeped in American traditions of racism and capitalism. The participants are often wary, confused, doubtful. Macklemore summarized the attitudes of many young white wealthy newcomers in his fateful text to Kendrick Lamar on Grammy night: “It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” But as with Macklemore, being surprised about a system that has been in place for generations is useless. White supremacy is nothing if not predictable. To forge ahead, we require an outrageousness that sees beyond the tired tropes and easy outs that mass media provides. This path demands we organize with clarity about privilege and the shifting power dynamics of community. It requires foresight, discomfort and risk-taking. It will be on the Web and in the streets, in conversations, rants and marches.

We need a new mythology.


Daniel José Older is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and composer. Following the release of his ghost noir collection, Salsa Nocturna, Publisher’s Weekly declared Daniel a rising star of the genre. He has facilitated workshops on storytelling, music and anti-oppression organizing at public schools, religious houses, universities, and prisons. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Haven Review, TOR.com, PANK, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres among other publications. He’s co-editing the anthology, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From The Margins Of History and his forthcoming urban fantasy novel The Half Resurrection Blues, the first of a trilogy, will be released by Penguin’s Ace imprint. You can find his thoughts on writing, read his ridiculous ambulance adventures and hear his music at ghoststar.net/ and @djolder.
Post Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:05 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Racism and “Urban Apartheid”. What Drives Gentrification? | Global ...

Jan 20, 2014 ... The gentrification of a neighborhood often produces conflicting impressions on residents and non-residents. On the one hand, the area seems ...

www.globalresearch.ca/urban-apartheid-what-drives-gentrification/5365493


Gentrification, Displacement and New Urbanism: The Next Racial ...

In this new era of racism, colorblindness, an ideology defined by its opposition to ... Overall, this method of gentrification failed to give the desired payoffs of ...

www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/gent.htm


What is Gentrification? | Flag Wars | POV | PBS

So what do we mean by "gentrification"? ... are often mystified by accusations that their efforts to improve local conditions are perceived as hostile or even racist.

www.pbs.org/pov/flagwars/special_gentrification.php


The big money behind gentrification

Feb 1, 2013 ... Protest against gentrification in West Harlem, New York. .... What is the connection between gentrification, racism and national oppression?

www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-7-no-2/the-big
Post Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:05 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

POV

Change is constant in modern city life. So what do we mean by "gentrification?" How does it happen? Who wins and who loses? What comes next? Writer and urbanist Benjamin Grant explains.



uHaul moving truckFlag Wars tells the story of what happened to the Olde Towne East community in Columbus, Ohio when the neighborhood went through the process of gentrification in the mid-to-late 1990s. For much of the twentieth century, urbanists, policymakers, and activists were preoccupied with inner city decline across the United States, as people with money and options fled cities for the suburbs. But widespread reports of the American city's demise proved premature. Beginning in the 1970s, urban life slowly began to regain prestige, particularly among artists and the highly educated. By the turn of this century, many cities were thriving again, and their desirability among the wealthy and upwardly mobile was putting intense pressure on rents, real estate prices, and low-income communities.

What is Gentrification?

Gentrification is a general term for the arrival of wealthier people in an existing urban district, a related increase in rents and property values, and changes in the district's character and culture. The term is often used negatively, suggesting the displacement of poor communities by rich outsiders. But the effects of gentrification are complex and contradictory, and its real impact varies.

Many aspects of the gentrification process are desirable. Who wouldn't want to see reduced crime, new investment in buildings and infrastructure, and increased economic activity in their neighborhoods? Unfortunately, the benefits of these changes are often enjoyed disproportionately by the new arrivals, while the established residents find themselves economically and socially marginalized.

Gentrification has been the cause of painful conflict in many American cities, often along racial and economic fault lines. Neighborhood change is often viewed as a miscarriage of social justice, in which wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for "improving" a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.

Although there is not a clear-cut technical definition of gentrification, it is characterized by several changes.

Demographics: An increase in median income, a decline in the proportion of racial minorities, and a reduction in household size, as low-income families are replaced by young singles and couples.

Real Estate Markets: Large increases in rents and home prices, increases in the number of evictions, conversion of rental units to ownership (condos) and new development of luxury housing.

Land Use: A decline in industrial uses, an increase in office or multimedia uses, the development of live-work "lofts" and high-end housing, retail, and restaurants.

Culture and Character: New ideas about what is desirable and attractive, including standards (either informal or legal) for architecture, landscaping, public behavior, noise, and nuisance.

How does it happen?

America's renewed interest in city life has put a premium on urban neighborhoods, few of which have been built since World War II. If people are flocking to new jobs in a region where housing is scarce, pressure builds on areas once considered undesirable.

Gentrification tends to occur in districts with particular qualities that make them desirable and ripe for change. The convenience, diversity, and vitality of urban neighborhoods are major draws, as is the availability of cheap housing, especially if the buildings are distinctive and appealing. Old houses or industrial buildings often attract people looking for "fixer-uppers" as investment opportunities.

Gentrification works by accretion — gathering momentum like a snowball. Few people are willing to move into an unfamiliar neighborhood across class and racial lines¹. Once a few familiar faces are present, more people are willing to make the move. Word travels that an attractive neighborhood has been "discovered" and the pace of change accelerates rapidly.

Consequences of Gentrification

Yoder constructionIn certain respects, a neighborhood that is gentrified can become a "victim of its own success." The upward spiral of desirability and increasing rents and property values often erodes the very qualities that began attracting new people in the first place. When success comes to a neighborhood, it does not always come to its established residents, and the displacement of that community is gentrification's most troubling effect.

No one is more vulnerable to the effects of gentrification than renters. When prices go up, tenants are pushed out, whether through natural turnover, rent hikes, or evictions. When buildings are sold, buyers often evict the existing tenants to move in themselves, combine several units, or bring in new tenants at a higher rate. When residents own their homes, they are less vulnerable, and may opt to "cash them in" and move elsewhere. Their options may be limited if there is a regional housing shortage, however, and cash does not always compensate for less tangible losses.

The economic effects of gentrification vary widely, but the arrival of new investment, new spending power, and a new tax base usually result in significant increased economic activity. Rehabilitation, housing development, new shops and restaurants, and new, higher-wage jobs are often part of the picture. Previous residents may benefit from some of this development, particularly in the form of service sector and construction jobs, but much of it may be out of reach to all but the well-educated newcomers. Some local economic activity may also be forced out — either by rising rents or shifting sensibilities. Industrial activities that employ local workers may be viewed as a nuisance or environmental hazard by new arrivals. Local shops may lose their leases under pressure from posh boutiques and restaurants.

Physical changes also accompany gentrification. Older buildings are rehabilitated and new construction occurs. Public improvements — to streets, parks, and infrastructure — may accompany government revitalization efforts or occur as new residents organize to demand public services. New arrivals often push hard to improve the district aesthetically, and may codify new standards through design guidelines, historic preservation legislation, and the use of blight and nuisance laws.

The social, economic, and physical impacts of gentrification often result in serious political conflict, exacerbated by differences in race, class, and culture. Earlier residents may feel embattled, ignored, and excluded from their own communities. New arrivals are often mystified by accusations that their efforts to improve local conditions are perceived as hostile or even racist.

Change — in fortunes, in populations, in the physical fabric of communities — is an abiding feature of urban life. But change nearly always involves winners and losers, and low-income people are rarely the winners. The effects of gentrification vary widely with the particular local circumstances. Residents, community development corporations, and city governments across the country are struggling to manage these inevitable changes to create a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Benjamin Grant is an urban designer, city planner and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.


1 Those that do are sometimes called "urban pioneers," and some have pointedly extended the analogy, likening the fate of existing communities to that of Native Americans.
Post Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:09 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Spike Lee is being called "racist" after his angry diatribe regarding gentrification of Harlem. He called the new urban whites coming into Harlem those Mother F** Hipsters. That is allegedly the same as calling them "honkeys".
Post Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:13 pm 
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Crowfeeder
F L I N T O I D

Flint desperately needs more " Gentrification ",I hope the water rates are raised to help accomplish this.
Post Sat Apr 12, 2014 8:21 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

quote:
Crowfeeder schreef:
Flint desperately needs more " Gentrification ",I hope the water rates are raised to help accomplish this.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would expect this kind of comment!



How Whites Are Reacting to the Browning of America

Citing a study by Northwestern University psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, Jamelle Bouie frets that white Americans will react to their future minority status with ever-more conservative leanings and …
Alter Net · 4/10/2014.

The Political Future of a Browning America

Yet for nearly our entire history the racial landscape of America has encompassed a white majority and a black minority. That era is over. Calling the phenomenon "the browning of America," demographer James …
Governing · 1/7/2013.

The Browning of America

Colleen Curry of ABC News reported: "The number of radical hate groups and militias has exploded in recent years in reaction to the changing makeup of America, and new census figures showing the majority of babies born in 2011 were non-white could fuel ...
The Root · 5/19/2012.

GOP districts isolated from demographic changes


WASHINGTON (AP) — Some demographers call it the browning of America. Fueled by immigration and higher birth rates among Hispanics and blacks, the U.S. population is becoming less white. These changes, however, have largely bypassed …
Yahoo News · ByStephen Ohlemacher · 3/31/2014
Post Sat Apr 12, 2014 6:08 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Alter Net

The Washington Monthly / By Martin Longman

How Whites Are Reacting to the Browning of America

Some white people see their future minority status as threatening and it pushes their political leanings to the right.


April 10, 2014 |


Citing a study by Northwestern University psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, Jamelle Bouie frets that white Americans will react to their future minority status with ever-more conservative leanings and angst, perhaps making the country’s future electorate as racially polarized as Mississippi’s electorate is today. Here’s what the study found:

Using a nationally representative survey of self-identified politically “independent” whites, Craig and Richeson conducted three experiments. In the first, they asked respondents about the racial shift in California—if they had heard the state had become majority-minority. What they found was a significant shift toward Republican identification, which increased for those who lived closest to the West Coast.

In the second experiment, they focused on the overall U.S. shift with census projections of the national population. Again, they found that white Americans became more conservative—and more likely to endorse conservative policies—when they were aware of demographic changes that put them in the minority.

The final experiment—where questions were further refined and targeted—saw similar results. As Craig and Richeson write, “Perceived group-status threat, triggered by exposure to majority-minority shift, increases Whites’ endorsement of conservative political ideology and policy positions.”

I’m not sure why the study was limited to self-identified white independents. If you want to know how white people will react to future events, you ought to ask white people, not some arbitrary subset of white people. But, Bouie must see a rightward drift of white independents as an ominous sign in itself, since that would tend to increase the racial polarization within the two-party system.

By coincidence, this morning I read an excerpt from Stony Brook University Prof. Michael Kimmel’s book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (reviewed here). This particular excerpt focused on the Aryan Nation and white supremacists, but the book looks at angry white men in general. What he found was a strong correlation between white men failing to inherit any significant wealth or to achieve a status commensurate to their father’s, and a sense that white people are getting a raw deal. In the following passage, Prof. Kimmel actually seems to conflate the Republican base with white supremacists, but that’s because he sees both as points on a continuum, distinguishable only be the degree to which their discomfort and anger has caused them to hate.

That such ardent patriots are so passionately antigovernment might strike the observer as contradictory. After all, are these not the same men who served their country in Vietnam or in the Gulf War? Are these not the same men who believe so passionately in the American Dream? Are they not the backbone of the Reagan Revolution? Indeed, they are. The extreme Right faces the difficult cognitive task of maintaining their faith in America and in capitalism and simultaneously providing an analysis of an indifferent state, at best, or an actively interventionist one, at worst, and a way to embrace capitalism, despite a cynical corporate logic that leaves them, often literally, out in the cold—homeless, jobless, hopeless.

Finally, they believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. As sociologist Lillian Rubin puts it, “It’s this confluence of forces—the racial and cultural diversity of our new immigrant population; the claims on the resources of the nation now being made by those minorities who, for generations, have called America their home; the failure of some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of our people; the contracting economy, which threatens the mobility aspirations of working class families—all these have come together to leave white workers feeling as if everyone else is getting a piece of the action while they get nothing.”

Maybe in a parliamentary system we would have some kind of ultranationalist party that could serve as steam-vent for this kind of anxiety, but in our two-party system it is inevitable that the more conservative party will take on a significant part of it. It’s this anxiety that explains why the Republicans cannot pass immigration reform even though they have constituencies (the evangelicals, the agricultural industry, the Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street) clamoring for it. They have actually been captured by this racial anxiety and now are held hostage to it.

What’s also interesting is that so much of this has little to do with policy preferences and how much it is mixed up in simple racial identity. These folks don’t like Wall Street or big corporations. Huge numbers of them benefit directly from federal aid and subsidies, including from ObamaCare, welfare, and food stamps. Given that, I wonder how their opinions might shift if confronted with a Democratic Party led by Hillary Clinton (with her family’s Bubba factor) rather than Barack Obama. Certainly, they would not find her so immediately alienating, which is not to say that the far right didn’t freak-out for the eight years of the Clinton presidency, because they did.

In any case, I am less concerned about the future than Bouie is. Whites are changing in more ways than one. Here in Chester County, Pennsylvania, there were areas where it was possible for a white child to go to school in the 1970’s and never encounter a person of color. Today, in my child’s pre-school, almost half the kids are non-white. The next generation of white kids isn’t going to have the same expectations or experiences, and so the racial diversity of the country will have less potential to disappoint and traumatize them.
Post Sat Apr 12, 2014 7:04 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

The Political Future of a Browning America - Governing

The Political Future of a Browning America. People of color now account for most of the country's population growth. That has profound implications for the way ...

www.governing.com/gov-institute/col-political-future

Governing Institute

The Political Future of a Browning America

People of color now account for most of the country's population growth. That has profound implications for the way elections are won and the nation is governed.

by Mark Funkhouser | January 7, 2013


America's most basic law, the Constitution, is exclusively the product of white men. Since this country's founding, white men have been deciding public policy with little effort to understand how people of color see the world. Yet for nearly our entire history the racial landscape of America has encompassed a white majority and a black minority. That era is over.

Calling the phenomenon "the browning of America," demographer James Johnson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill notes that only 17 percent of the net growth in the country's population from 2000 to 2010 was non-Hispanic white. More than half the country's net growth was Hispanic. Since then, however, Asians have overtaken Hispanics as the largest group of immigrants to the United States. About 430,000 Asians, 36 percent of all new immigrants, arrived in the U.S. in 2010, compared to about 370,000, or 31 percent, who were Hispanic. Asians are the fastest growing racial group in America, increasing by 46 percent from 2000 to 2010 and quadrupling their numbers since 1980.

These are unprecedented and enduring changes, driven not only by the large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America but also by the higher birthrates of people of color--for the first time ever, non-Hispanic whites now account for less than half of the births in this country--and the increasing rates of intermarriage between ethnic and racial groups. The Pew Research Center projects that by 2050 a majority of all Americans could be people of color.

This browning of America is happening in parallel with the graying of America. The result will be a country with both an aging white population and a younger brown population with radically different political interests. This will profoundly impact every institution in American life.

Most political commentators see Republicans and Democrats becoming ever more polarized, but Johnson thinks that these demographic changes will result in some blurring of the lines between the two parties and a more complex political landscape. "I teach in a business school," he says, "and I see kids of color who are incredibly conservative and who will make political choices based on economics first - unless you've insulted their dignity."

In last year's presidential election, Mitt Romney lost despite having the overwhelming support of white America--59 percent of white voters overall and 62 percent of white male voters. White privilege in America has not yet gone away, but it is no longer the case that politicians or business and civic leaders of any one group, white or otherwise, can afford not to try to understand how others see the world.

Today the only way to win at the polls and to govern effectively is to get out of the bubble. Living in an echo chamber--talking only with people who look like you and have had the same life experiences--is a recipe for failure. The most successful politicians will be those who embrace coalitions and who understand both the differences between and the common interests of diverse groups of people.

In a recent Huffington Post piece titled "Whiteness in the Age of Obama," Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy wrote, "It isn't that America is beginning to be everyone's country. It's that it has always been everyone's country, and that fact is harder and harder for anyone to deny." The assertion that an illustrious band of white men put at the front of the venerable document they created, "We the people," is being fulfilled.




Mark Funkhouser | Director, GOVERNING Institute
mfunkhouser@governing.com .
Post Sat Apr 12, 2014 7:07 pm 
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Crowfeeder
F L I N T O I D

Somewhat off topic.however as you brought it up,yes the Republic is in dire straights,thankfully more and more right thinking folk recognize this and are preparing.
Post Sun Apr 13, 2014 12:25 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

quote:
Crowfeeder schreef:
Somewhat off topic.however as you brought it up,yes the Republic is in dire straights,thankfully more and more right thinking folk recognize this and are preparing.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Years ago the old Winchester Hospital on Flushing Road was named the "Crows Nest". In bad condition, the site was frequented by the Satanic Nazi Warriors out of Flushing. They wore paramilitary garb and painted the entire building with racist drawing depicting the hanging and murder of black men and women. The also had a weird obsession to a book called the "Necronomican" and they painted prayers to these Babylonian demons in the book.

I always thought "Crows net" referred to the crows nesting on the site that alerted the warriors that someone was visiting their site.

Now I am inclined to believe that at least some of the name meant a veiled reference to Jim Crow laws and segregation of the races.
Post Sun Apr 13, 2014 7:17 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

The Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred

Nov 5, 2007 ... The Necronomicon. By Abdul Alhazred. Please note I am reproducing this exactly as I found it - typos, broken layout, and all. After all, I didn't ...

homepages.pavilion.co.uk/glyng/necronomicon.html


This entry links the original book to Aleister Crowley.
Post Sun Apr 13, 2014 7:20 am 
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