Whaaa?
Hair,Hair Bryan!
You took the words out of my mouth. Miller Park to Pot isn’t that bad. Now I wouldn’t go driving around there for fun, but I certainly feel comfortable doing it.
Don’t forget the crusing on hwy 100 on the weekends (I can’t beleive they tried to create a supervised crusing area :smack: I wonder if someone said that outloud before trying it), Greek Fest. Oh and it’s great watching the news and hearing every sentance start with “Last night on the city’s North/South side…” which is usually followed by a stabbing, multiple burglries, or a stray bullet hitting a six year old. We have on average (during summer) probabaly just under reported (near) fatal shooting per day. (Sorry no cite, just a guess from watching the news).
Trust me, Milwaukee has it’s nasty parts of town.
I always thought it was to prevent street and drag racing. Y’know, Fast and Furious kinda stuff.
I’m a white girl who used to live in Bed-Stuy and walk home alone at all hours, and I was never afraid, just annoyed/amused by the guys who would call me Snow White as I walked by. I think the difference between now and the 80s is partially the huge amounts of “gentrification” that have gone on (forcing people who would have lived in parts of Manhattan if it was the 80s or 90s to live in places they can actually afford, hence forcing everyone to get used to each other and make it not such a big deal for either side). The other thing is that people aren’t stupid – if you’re a white person living in Bed-Stuy, you’re probably not rich enough to mug anyway. Better mug that guy down the street who has money and just lives in Bed-Stuy cause it’s where he’s from and he likes it. I never saw any violence like that, anyway, though. The only person who ever assaulted me in Bed-Stuy was a 6 yo Hasidic kid, and that was just weird, and not scary at all (I totally won).
A lot of areas that are called “ghetto” are actually not “ghetto”. I grew up in the West End, a mixed income district in southwest Atlanta. Within a two-mile radius from my house, there were multiple housing project complexes and “low rent” housing. Across the street from my house was an abandoned, boarded-up house. It wasn’t unusual to hear gun shot rattling off at night or come home to find the house broken into. But it never felt like a ghetto to me, because just a block down were very nice, expensive homes behind cast-iron gates with swimming pools in the back. We had a viable business district and several prominent community leaders lived on my street…and even a few white folks! Hardly seems like the “ghetto”, even compared to a “good” neighborhood.
I didn’t experience a real “bad” neighborhood until I moved to Newark, NJ. Garbage in the streets, boarded up warehouses, burned out cars, drunks and crackheads hanging out in the street at all hours, lots of vacant lots…these are typical features of the city. But even then, I was never afraid to ride my bike up and through the streets…although I did restrict my activities to the daytime. The only real fear I felt was hitting pedestrians, because for some reason they would take their merry time crossing the street. Perhaps I can attribute my experience in the ATL for why I’m so “hardened”. Also, perhaps I feel a certain degree of protection because I’m black.
I work with someone who was proclaimed that, when she lived in northern Virginia, she knew to stay away from Prince George County. I was like, WTF? How can you stay away from a whole county? And although I’m sure there are some bad areas in PGC, isn’t PGC generally quite middle class, maybe even prosperous compared to the rest of the US? I’m still scratching my head about that one…and trying hard not to assume the worse about this person.
That is not a “ghetto” phenomenon. There are a lot of places where residential neighborhoods with long, straight streets have stop signs at every (or every other) intersection to reduce the likelihood that a driver will unconsciously cruise up to 35 - 40 mph and plow into some pedestrians (or blow through an instersection at the same time that some other car is doing the same).
It becomes an issue when the person driving through the neighborhood fears to be there, to begin with, and the fear mounts with every stop sign that interferes with their “escape.” The same sort of “stop at every intersection” is simply a nuisance in a neghborhood where the person in the car does not start from a base fear.
There are most certainly ghetto areas in Baltimore. West Baltimore is awful and so are parts of East Baltimore. Some of the close-in DC suburbs are also dangerous areas if you are not from there.
This is my favourite statement ever.
I’m from Milwaukee, and it’s true. Milwaukee’s “inner city” neighborhoods are pretty nice! Old brick and bungalow-style homes from the 1920s and '30s, shady trees lining the streets, traffic medians covered with flowers. For example, here’s the Sherman Park Neighborhood, which is 80% black.
And just 3 miles away on the city’s North Side a 13 year old girl is shot..
As I’m speaking, the news is on and I hear about an 11 year old girl gang raped by 19 men, on the north side.
Harvey Pekar used to write about the outright hostility he often encountered as a white person living in Cleveland’s changing Hough neighborhood in the 1960s. Even though I haven’t been in Cleveland for that long, I don’t encounter any such hostility today.
Getting harassed in a predominantly black neighborhood – even poor areas – just for being white seemed to fade away with the decline of black nationalism.
There are very few places in the US where you won’t find any white people whatsoever; maybe East St. Louis or some isolated, deindustrialized sections of Detroit, but that’s about it. Even in Cleveland’s poorest African-American neighborhoods, there are hospitals, schools, municipal facilities, and factories employing people of all ethnicities.
I pulled a 6 year stint at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the mid 90’s. One of the charms of this school is that it sats just on the other side of 35th St of Stateway Gardens and just down the street of the Robert Taylor homes, the nastiest of the nasty housing projects.
The buildings that shared 35th St with the projects had bulletproof windows on their southern side because they kept getting shot out.
We’d lay in bed in the spring and count gun shots to help us fall to sleep. (got difficult when they used automatics)
Twice there were shootouts with the Chicago PD on campus.
There was an L stop there on 35th that you didn’t want to use at night. I know at least 3 people who were mugged on that platform. 1 of them was in broad daylight.
That was the biggest danger in these neighborhoods, getting mugged. Any white people south of 35th St were assumed to be from the school, and thus rich, and thus prime targets for mugging. Not usually leathal, I never heard of anyone actually getting harmed in any of the muggings, but scary none the less.
Not long after I left, Chicago started relocating people and razing the buildings. Cabrini Green, one of the more famous projects, now has $300,000 and up condos where the projects once stood.
As for the seemingly large amount of stop signs in poor areas, its because there are a lot of poor people that can’t afford cars or even public transportation and are forced to walk everywhere. The stop signs are there for the pedestrians’ safety.
Monstro writes:
> I work with someone who was proclaimed that, when she lived in northern
> Virginia, she knew to stay away from Prince George County. I was like, WTF?
> How can you stay away from a whole county? And although I’m sure there are
> some bad areas in PGC, isn’t PGC generally quite middle class, maybe even
> prosperous compared to the rest of the US? I’m still scratching my head about
> that one…and trying hard not to assume the worse about this person.
Prince George’s County is one of the 100 richest counties (based on family income) in the U.S. It’s just not one of the 10 richest counties in the U.S., as are five other counties in the D.C. area. I’ve lived for almost 16 years in a neighborhood that’s probably majority black and that definitely a vast majority of the population of which are minorities (blacks, Asians, Hispanics). Not once have I ever been harassed for being a fair-skinned red-haired white guy.
I’ve been in many areas of both Baltimore and Washington D.C. that many people I know wouldn’t dare to go… hell, I’ve lived in areas that none of my family were willing to go.
Yes, there are areas where it isn’t the safest idea to go walking around, but that wouldn’t be because I’m white, but because the crime rate there is so high. I wouldn’t call the poor areas of Baltimore “ghetto”, at least in the sense of the Jewish ghettos in Poland at the onset of WWII… but they aren’t pretty. I wouldn’t have any problem walking around these areas during daylight hours, but at night I would be extra careful. The key is not to look like a victim and be aware of your surroundings.
The only problem I ever had living in a low income area was that I kept having my car stolen. I kind of miss the low rent I had to pay, but at least my car appears to be safer.
In '69 I was 14 and was walking with my 21 yo sister in Harlem at 11:00 PM. We got off at the wrong subway stop and had to walk about 5 blocks. Three young black kids accosted us and demanded our wallets. We later called the police and they told us we were lucky, if we had been a couple of blocks over we would have been shot. Very scary.
I suspect that this part was simply hype from the cops. Two classmates and I visited New York at around the same period and found ourselves walking around the city well after dark. We were accosted by a couple of guys, but ignored them (we were all pretty good sized). I absolutely believe you were mugged, but suspect that you looked like targets because of your ages and “apparent” wealth, rather than your skin color. The priest at the rectory where we were staying gave us a merry dressing down for “endangering” ourselves, but I suspect that we were not in as much danger as he (and your cops) wanted to believe.
I went to school three blocks from the corner where Detroit’s riot started in '67. (The riot, occurring in July, had no direct affect on classes, of course.) But we generally went out to do shopping and banking in the years before and after the riot and I only recall two guys being “asked” for their wallets and the rest of us were not hassled, routinely or otherwise.
Ten years later, I lived in a Detroit neighborhood that was almost exclusively poor and black and in the year I lived there I had exactly one guy call out from his porch that he thought I looked like I had money. I ignored him and he never got off his butt. No one else ever bothered me.
I am sure that there have been angry young men that have harrassed whites (just as there are idiots in the white community that harrass blacks), but most muggings are based on a perception that the target has money and the general danger to “whites” in black neighorhoods has probably always been exaggerated.
Deb has had two visiting nurse jobs that have taken her into the inner city of Cleveland. These jobs were in the mid-80s and currently–well after the period when hostility was supposed to be common–but she has found that the people tend to watch out for her, since she’s the nurse. The closest thing to harrassment she has actually gotten has been from cops who thought she was out looking to buy drugs. (The police have never actually hassled her, but she has been pulled over a couple of times for cruising a neighborhood looking for an address. As soon as they find out what she’s doing, they generally show her to the right address.)
I don’t think your conclusion (first sentence) can be inferred from the factually correct second sentence. Since the neighborhoods in question are largely populated by blacks, it should come as no surprise that most of the crime is intra-racial. But that doesn’t mean that whites living in the same circumstances would be any less vulnerable on a percentage basis.
Well, that’s an odd term, as it presumes the existence of “angry black ghettos.” Ghettos aren’t characterized by anger; usually they are characterized by poverty, poverty is characterized by crime, criminals rationalize their behavior as anger and target the easiest and most lucrative marks. And don’t be fooled… people of all races get victimized, the people who live there most of all. But an out-of-place round pink face on the wrong block is virtually an invitation for someone to help themselves to a new Accord or crack money for a few days. Southeast Atlanta is a lot like this. I used to live there; I was a little sketched at first, but I discovered that while it wasn’t without risk, it wasn’t really as angry as it looked from the outside. But there are places like South Central LA that are gang turf where it definitely is like a war zone. But gang turf again is a totally different thing.
Even as vague as the question is, I would say unequivocally “yes”. It’s a big country and we do have a fringe, but for the most part white people don’t have to worry about getting killed by black people because they’re white. In fact there’s a goodly percentage of white people who will go years without ever being within a mile of a black person.
There’s definitely some areas in Chicago that, given the choiice, I would avoid. But if I had to pass through in my car on the main streets, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I might click the door locks, drive carefully, and not blast my Perry Como…
Walking down sidestreets - just say I’'d stick out like a white, middleclass thumb - but if I kept moving and minded my own business, I wouldn’t really expect anything to happen to me. Especially in the day. But, as someone mentioned above, there’s probably a way higher chance of being unlucky and having some crap go down just where I happen to be around, than in whitebread suburbia.
When I was a kid living in Chicago there’s nowhere we wouldn’t go - riding busses, walking, driving. Course a lot of my buddies were black and Mexican, and we’d be spending time in their shithole neighborhoods…
(Can’t believe someone is gonna object to the use of the term ghetto to describe poor parts of US big cities!)
Actually they’re across the street from the main building of Cabrini, which is still there and still inhabited, although with a much lower population. My brother says that they’re mostly homeless squatters these days. I still can’t imagine who’s buying those townhomes.
“Hey, Bill, you should come by and see the new place. Yeah, we’re at the corner of Chicago and Larabee, right across from Cabrini. Bill? Hello, Bill?”