I know there are neighborhoods where you’re more than likely to get victimized if not killed if you’re the wrong ethnicity and/or not part of the right gang. There are neighborhoods where even postal workers won’t go. Neighborhoods that even the police avoid if possible.
Are there any “white” neighborhoods like that?
I know there are bad neighborhoods where whites live, but these to my knowledge are mixed neighborhoods that are just “generally” bad.
Any exclusively white neighborhoods where it’s just too dangerous to enter if you’re not white and/or in the right gang?
Does the name “Howard Beach” mean anything to you?
Back in early 1960s, my all-white Irish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx was a dangerous place for blacks to venture - at least young male blacks who were alone would have been at great risk of getting beat up by the local gangs. Fortunately, it’s not like that now - in fact, its a very mixed neighborhood today. But there may still a few places like that in NYC today.
Unless you are snow white (the color, not the girl from the story), don’t go to Grundy, VA. There are NO people of color in the entire town. At all. Ever. Nasty things are rumored to happen there whenever anyone attempts to alter this situation.
Please do not take this post to mean that this is at all the norm in my part of the country, because I assure you it’s not. Also, please don’t think that I’m in any way glad this is so or that I support it in any way, because I assure you I don’t. I know about this because my grandfather was a truck driver, and had to leave his black co-driver outside of town every time he delivered there.
Besides, you could live here your whole life and never even know where Grundy is. It’s a remote mining town and there’s no reason to go thru there, you only go there if it’s your final destination. People in that community mostly keep to themselves.
There are some towns (unincorporated) around here that I wouldn’t direct anybody to; black, white, asian, whatever.
Gun tote’n, government hate’n, coon hunt’n weirdos. So far right, they’ve come back around and hit themselves in the face. I mean Kooks! Stay away from anything that looks like a compound. These guys are scary.
If you take **//\etalhea|)[/b’s post and replace Grundy, VA with Polk County, TN, you have my region’s “bad” white community. It’s not quite as bad here as he makes it out to be there though.
I think it has to do with the “remote mining locale” myself. That makes the area fairly inhospitable and insular so phobias and prejudices can just grow an’ grow to astronomical heights.
I know this isn’t really what you’re asking for, but there are plenty of exclusively white neighborhoods where they don’t welcome dark-skinned folks with open arms – but these are often known as “good” neighborhoods, not “bad” ones.
When I grew up in Pasadena , Texas there was a kkk main office right off red bluff road (one of the main entrances to the city from the plant areas on the ship channel! I don’t recall anyone being especially proud of this BUT nobody did anything about it!
This was in the late fifties and early sixties. I do remember that they moved the office that was there to a small town in east Texas… Vidor I think.
The stigma continued for YEARS ater that!(we had one black kid in our high school out of approximately 1500 kids at our school. There were 3 high schools in the school system when I graduated in 1969 with similar numbers and results)
It got so bad that even in 1989 I was on a softball team with several black players, they refused to go to pasadena with us for a tournament citing possible racial problems!
I still hear words of derision when I tell where I went to school “ah you grew up in stinkadena where they don’t allow blacks?”
Thankfully that has changed now the town is thriving with ALL minorities welcome! Maybe more informed people realized that ALL people pay taxes and can benefit society!
I am assuming the OP has in mind urban areas - as most common stereotypes of big city mayhem involve a minority group of one sort or another.
This was (old geezer voice) back in the 1980’s (/old geezer voice), but I remember visiting Atlanta and being told to avoid certain neighborhoods that were “hillbilly ghettoes”. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration but I pictured men in overalls swigging moonshine from the ninth floor balconies of dillapitated housing projects.
The Collinwood neighborhood in Cleveland has such a reputation. It was pretty well deserved 20 years ago (white beatings of blacks was a fairly regular news item). It may have settled down since that time, as the area has become more integrated.
It has not been that long since the Waterford, outside Pontiac, MI had a similar reputation. The first black families to move into Waterford (and into Warren, MI and Parma, OH) were all driven out by attacks on their homes. Depending on what you consider “long ago,” those incidents are now history–but they are quite stark in my memory.
Similarly, the South side of Boston went through an actively antagonistic period when court-ordered bussing to desegregate the schools was ordered.
While most of the violence had died down by the 1990s, these are not simply places that had nebulous reputations. They are places where attacks took place.
Craneop2, I went to South Houston High School in the 70’s. We had a Klan chapter meeting on school grounds once a month. Filled with losers, but still scary to think about.
I always liked the fact that our school buses has PISD written on them. (Pasadena Independent School System) Fit my mood each morning…
We have Elohim City up here in OK. Worse than the Klan ever thought about being. Thinks David Koresh was a nice young man. Possible links to Timothy McVeigh… Just bad. Other town type places similar to this exist in out of the way areas.
San Antonio has lots of “cities within the city.” Places that are geographically in the middle of San Antonio, but have made themselves into separate “cities.” One of them, Alamo Heights, is well-known throughout the city as a place where Minorities Are Not Welcome. Instead of gates at the city limits, since that would be illegal, they have Opie Taylor-style cops…and those cops will pull over just about any minority they see driving through. Heckle them, ticket them, do anything they can to make it clear that they aren’t welcome. The same is true of people on bikes, pedestrians, etc…anyone who isn’t white is all but run out of town by these petty little underpaid Alamo Heights cops.
My fiance and I lived on the outskirts of Alamo Heights when we moved here–no one had told us about the little white supremacist cops–and when my fiance, who is Hispanic, would ride his bike, cops would follow him or pace him. Just looking at him. All the time. To the point that he felt uncomfortable riding his bike anymore. Residents of Alamo Heights would give him inferior service, if they worked in the stores, and dirty looks if they were customers. If I was by myself in a store, all the salesladies would clamor to help me…but if I went in with Mr. Levins, they would all mysteriously vanish. This kind of treatment was so ubiquitous that we moved as soon as we could; it was like living in another world, or stepping back in time, and I’d never seen anything like it.
This is not the kind of obvious and apparent racism that would make it dangerous for minorities to live in Alamo Heights…but it definitely, in my mind, qualifies as a disgusting bastion of white racism.
Oh, and did I forget to mention the cops who tore the interior of a couples’ car apart in Alamo Heights? Pulled this elderly Hispanic couple over, searched their car to the point that half their stuff was blowing away in the wind, and, when they didn’t find anything, just smiled and said, “Have a nice day.”
The couple had done nothing wrong, violated no traffic laws of any kind…and yet these AH cops pulled 'em over, took up an hour of their time, and ripped their car apart. Making them feel like perps.
But I guess it worked; the couple said they would be avoiding Alamo Heights from then on.
The OP seems to be asking only for white neighborhoods where outsiders (especially blacks) would be in danger, but I’ll risk being accused of hijacking.
There is nothing uniquely “black” about the social pathologies we see in the ghettoes of America. There’s little anyone could say about the South Bronx today that people weren’t saying about New York’s Irish neighborhoods in the 19th century. All the problems associated with black ghettoes today (crime, violence, drunkenness, unemployment, illegitimate children, etc.) were common among Irish New Yorkers not so very long ago.
Wherever unemployment and poverty are rampant, you’re likely to find such antisocial and destructive behaviors. In the Rust Belt, in cities that have lost the factories that once provided high-paying jobs, you’ll find that white people exhibit all the same patterns you see in the worst of the black ghettoes.
Boston’s Charlestown and South Boston neighborhoods have long had a reputation of being actively hostile to nonwhites and controlled by Irish gangs. I don’t know whether that’s still true today. The public housing projects in these areas remained all-white into the mid-1990s!
And while going through a rundown-looking area of south St. Louis on a train a few years back, I saw a highway overpass covered with swastikas, SS lightning bolts, and racial slurs. That’s gotta tell you something about the neighborhood.
I’m with astorian here. Ghetto is ghetto whether it is black, white, brown, yellow, or purple. It’s people’s behaviour that makes places bad, not the colour of their skin.
Ghetto is a word that originally meant “island where Jews were forced to live” according to M-W online. People are thrown together due to societal or economic restraints. This does not make them bad people.