Your second statement is simply silly. If you walked through Cabrini-Green, you would be a target because you looked as though you possessed a dime, regardless of your color.
An accurate comparison would be if you could find a black middle-class or lower-middle-class neighborhood where you were intimidated to leave. I know of a couple of neighborhoods on the East Side of Cleveland and its inner suburbs that are predominately black where whites have moved in the last few years. I don’t recall hearing any of them being chased out. On the other hand, a quick run through the last four years of the Cleveland Plain Dealer produces several incidents of cross-burnings and graffiti directed at new black residents in white neighborhoods.
A quick scan, nationally, (limited to the criterion that the events had to be in the 1990’s) turned up the following incidents:
This might be an ignorant question, but is the real estate practice of ‘blockbusting’ still illegal? Back in the day, my father told me that he had to be really careful when taking minorities shopping for houses, due to the fact there was some sort of law that moving a minority family into an all-white neighborhood was seen as ‘blockbusting’. What he understood it coming from was back in the ‘old days’ unscrupulous real estate agents would move minorities into lily-white areas, and pick up the white folks’ properties cheap because they wanted to move so badly (motivated by general racism, or the old ‘there goes the neighborhood’ stuff).
He also said that it worked the other way-if he couple liked a house in an all-white neighborhood, he could get sued for discrimination if he didn’t allow them to make a bid on it.
Spankboy, “blockbusting” was not simply getting a black to move into a white neighborhood. It generally involved an agent calling on each of the neighbors and telling them that x% of their neighbors had already put their houses up for sale because blacks had entered the neighborhood and that they needed to sell fast to get any money out of their houses. When 20 people put their houses on the market at the same time, that did lower the prices for the neighborhood (supply and demand) and it started a stampede. The realtors didn’t care because 7% of 50 houses at $25,000 each was a lot more money than 7% of three houses at $33,000.
Friends of my parents got a blockbuster hauled into court when he made the mistake of showing them the “for sale” pictures of their best friends. They were sure the other family had not intended to move and managed to hold on to the flyer the realtor was holding. They took the flyer (which was bogus) to the federal prosecutor who nailed the realtor.
[[I also presented an article in another topic that said blacks kill far more whites than vice versa. Where’s the outcry?]]
It can also be shown that a huge portion of violent crime in this country is caused by men. Almost 100% of violent crimes against women are committed by men. And I certainly don’t hate all men because of that. You never responded to this point, Klanman.
Actually, Phil, I had deliberately left that one out–along with the other three cases in Parma since 1995. Since my point had been in regards to people fleeing their homes and none of the recent Parma incidents have resulted in the people leaving (that I am aware of) I did not want to skew my evidence too strongly.
Parma does have a deservedly bad reputation. My impression, however, is that after they lost their fights with the Feds, Parma council and police have worked pretty hard to nail perpetrators to get them to stop. I believe that no intimidation incident in Parma in the last several years has gone unsolved, so I thought I would cut them some slack.
