The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

New Form of Racism Has Been Discovered

Posted on | February 4, 2024 | Comments Off on New Form of Racism Has Been Discovered

Moving is racist, when white people do it. When a white person chooses to relocate, the consequences are racism. To understand this, you have to understand what Steve Sailer dubs “Dirt Theory”: Any geographical location where black or brown people live is “Tragic Dirt,” afflicted by poverty and violence, and the only solution to their problem is to move them to white-occupied “Magic Dirt,” where everybody is rich and all the kids have high test scores. At least, this is how liberals seem to believe the world works, and have made “Dirt Theory” the basis of their attitude on such issues as immigration. In their disordered minds, people like Harvard Professor Raj Chetty believe that analysis of geographic data about poverty, crime, etc., will yield insights about the causes of these phenomena — places matter more than people.

The latest manifestation of this belief system has now appeared in The Atlantic, prompting Sailer’s headline: “The Atlantic: Whites Use Up the Magic Dirt, Leaving Only the Tragic Dirt for Nonwhites.” The idea is that, when whites move out of suburbs — and black and brown people move in — the consequences are bad for the non-white newcomers.

Atlantic writer Alex Kotlowitz examines this remarkable advance in Dirt Theory in a review of a new book by Benjamin Herold:

Herold opens his book by visiting his hometown, a Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. In many ways, the story of this particular suburb captures it all. When Herold’s family moved here in 1976, the average home price in 2020 dollars was $148,000. Now it’s $95,000. Herold knocks on a door just down the street from where he grew up, and there meets Bethany Smith, who has recently purchased the house with her mom. She’s single and Black and undaunted, raising a son, Jackson, for whom she wants the absolute best, which means finding a well-resourced, nurturing school and buying a home, an investment that will serve as a foundation to building wealth. (She’s also gotten priced out of her gentrifying neighborhood in Pittsburgh.)
But Bethany has walked into a mess of a town. Signs of wear and tear are everywhere: most notably, a collapsing sewer system and a school district that is $9 million in debt. According to Herold, the town didn’t invest in infrastructure improvements, kicking any needed repairs down the road. Financial mismanagement is everywhere. Enrollment in the schools has steeply declined. White families like Herold’s have moved out; Black families have moved in. It’s a pattern, Herold writes, repeated in suburb after suburb. . . . Herold poses the question that drives his reporting: “How are the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who live there now?”

See? White people “extracted resources” from these places, then moved out, leaving behind misfortune for the non-whites who moved in.

What doesn’t occur to Herold or Kotlowitz is to ask why there are so many places like this in America nowadays, ignoring the fundamental cause, i.e., the declining white birth rate. Circa 1960, most American families had three or more children, but that birth rate declined precipitously in the 1970s and has never really rebounded. Although the non-white birth rate has also declined, that decline was slower and happened later, and meanwhile the nation has added tens of millions of new immigrants, most of them non-white. So the effort at what used to be called racial integration is failing because of a shortage of white people.

This is aggravated by the way college education affects mobility. Kids who grew up in Penn Hills and other such suburbs went off to college and never came back. In general, the pattern of migration has been from north to south, and from east to west. Places like Denver, Austin and Charlotte are full of folks who moved there from up north or back east somewhere. The more money you have, the pickier you can be about where you live, and who would want to live in suburban Pittsburgh if they could live in sunny Florida? So not only are there fewer white people in Penn Hills, the ones who do still live there are less affluent than the white people who moved out. And all of this behavior is voluntary.

What really enrages liberals is that Americans are free to live however they want to live, without regard to the “social justice” consequences of their voluntary actions. Liberals can’t force you to stay where you are, or to go somewhere else, to suit their social-engineering schemes, and that’s why they hate you. You and your damned freedom — RAAAAACISTS!



 

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Category: Racism

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