The vilification of white ethnocentrism continues. While it’s perfectly okay, and sociologically ‘normal’, for Mexicans to prefer to live amongst other Mexicans, for Chinese to prefer to live amongst other Chinese, and for blacks to prefer to live amongst blacks, it’s not okay (in fact, it’s racist) when whites prefer to live among other whites.
In The Atlantic, Alana Semuels (ahem) has a piece on “Where the White People Live”:
[I]t’s the poor areas, rather than the areas where whites have self-segregated, that get the most attention from policymakers, who have sought to ameliorate concentrated poverty in segregated areas by moving families from black, urban areas to white suburbs. Beginning in 1989, the federal government started dismantling housing projects, spending billions to retool the type of housing available to low-income people in urban cores.
Programs may still integrate schools between white and black areas, as I’ve written about before, and they may move black families to white neighborhoods, as I’ve also detailed. But government programs don’t—and probably shouldn’t—move white families from wealthy areas to somewhere else (although they do provide incentives for home buyers or builders to locate in certain lower-income neighborhoods, thus beginning a process of gentrification).
That Semuels doesn’t say “shouldn’t” but adds the conditional “probably”…. is terrifying, and a possible harbinger of things to come.
Public policy has “focused on the concentration of poverty and residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and high-poverty neighborhoods,” said Goetz, the director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when presenting his findings at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny—to the point where we think segregation of whites is normal.”…
Yes, white segregation (the cumulative result of individuals exercising freedom of choice) needs “scrutiny”.
“Some people argue that when whites and affluent people segregate themselves, it can erode empathy, and it can inhibit the pursuit of region-wide remedies,” he told me. “It can inhibit a sense of shared destiny within a metropolitan area.”
Erosion of empathy (say what?), inhibition of remedies, and worst of all, inhibition of a “shared sense of destiny”.
Wow.
