What's the Matter with Macomb County?

[Strawman]

http://www.freep.com/news/politics/polcol19_20040719.htm

Gil DiNello, Dave Jaye, now these clowns. I'm from Macomb County. God, this drives me nuts. Can't wait to check my mailbox around election time to see which candidate for office is alledgedly a Communist who once had gay sex in a hot tub with Coleman Young while burning the flag. (Think I'm exaggerating?...only a little) To borrow from Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Macomb County?

[RubyDuby in GA]

1. It could be worse

You could be in Georgia.
We have a runoff between a wifebeater and a special interest queen (who has not nice things in her past too). And those are the Democrats.

Our Republican candidates for the US Senate tried to out-conservative each other. The one who won is the "flaming liberal" of the group with only a 92% favorable rating from the Christian Coalition. He's a US Rep who voted to allow abortions on US Military bases overseas. Damn bleeding heart.......

This state sucks. I need two more years of equity in my house and here I come Vermont.

[Jo March]

2. Same thing with Alabama

I dearly love the state in which I was born and raised but I don't live there. It's too conservative for me. Alabama has let herself become a joke in the media because of the right-wing nutcases that we have in office.

[Lefty48197]

3. I think I know what the problem is:

When the racist whites fled Detroit because, (gasp!) negroes started moving in, the ones who hated Blacks the most went north. Think of Macomb Co. as the "Idaho" of Detroit. i.e. where the nuts went to form their beachhead "aryan" homeland.
Don't get me wrong, there are hundreds of thousands of honest, non-racists in Macomb Co. It's just those few nuts that get all the press.

[stavka]

4. ...I think that may not be right

The ones with money headed North, Macomb County stayed put, and had a monthly gun show at Gibraltar instead.

[JNelson6563]

5. Some had to flee

You paint a distorted picture friend. I was part of the white flight outta Detroit way back when......We had to flee the city during the riots, neighborhoods were burning down right by us. I was in first grade and kept getting held up at knife-point for my milk money. My grandfather got beat to within an inch of his life while out for a walk, complete with a cast on his arm. The robbers got two bucks and a half a pack of smokes for their trouble.

So no, not all who fled are racists. Some of us got tired of living in fear.

I now live in the north. I guess that makes me not just racist but rich too. I wish I had known I was wealthy before today. Sure woulda saved me a lot of trouble.

Julie

[Lefty48197]

6. Detroit had riots in 1943 too

The swelling population of Blacks was causing the racists among the white population to shudder in fear. The fear and tension erupted in riots in the summer of 1943. Blacks found themselves targed by White mobs for indescriminate beatings.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eleanor/peopleevents/pande10.html

When it was over, 34 were dead. Twenty five of them Black, seventeen of them killed by the police. Granted, only about 70% of the dead were Black, but that didn't spur a Black migration to Macomb or Oakland County. I'm not sure where the topic of wealth came up, but I doubt the Blacks could afford to leave the city, even if somebody were willing to let them live outside of Paradise Valley.
So not all victims of crime left the city.
Julie, I would like you to re-read my original post. I did mention that there are hundreds of thousands of residents of Macomb Co. who are not racists. I'm pretty sure most of their families moved from Detroit. I also hope you're not denying that there is in fact a virulent anti Black racist group in Macomb Co. A small minority, as I said before, but they sure as hell are there.

[Strawman]

7. I know where you're coming from

My family moved out of Detroit in the mid-80's after our house was broken into and there had been a series of break-ins in our neighborhood. Our house actually decreased in value from $20,000 in 1971 to $18,500 when my parents sold it in 1985. The schools were awful. Nearly everyone I knew went to Catholic school. Neighbors started putting bars on their windows. Slumlords started buying houses in the neighborhood and the people who moved in to rent those houses(mostly poor whites) didn't have any stake in keeping up the property and often didn't.

This is such a polarizing issue and it is so sad. All sides need to listen to each other and show some empathy and not divide into sides along racial lines because I think that's the kind of environment where the Dave Jaye's of the world thrive. I will not deny that racial prejudice and fear of blacks played a big part in why so many white families fled the city and moved to places like Macomb County. But explanations like white people moved to Macomb County to set up their own little Aryan enclave (while that might perhaps be true for a very tiny group of people) show no empathy for middle class white people who really went through a bad experience when they decided to move out of the city. I can tell you being a kid and trying to go to sleep after your house was broken into and torn apart was terrifying. We moved out of the city because of crime. Unfortunately when one lives in a racist society like ours, it is too easy to be poisoned by racial prejudice and mistakenly think there is an inherent association between that crime and black migration into your community. A correlation is mistaken for a causation and every other correlating factor is ignored. For alot of white people in Macomb County and other Detroit suburbs, this interpretation of events confirms racial prejudice that existed prior to them. In other words, sadly, it comes easy. Seeing houses on your block that used to look nice become dilapidated is depressing. Seeing the only investment you have decrease in value is scary, especially if you are old. Seeing everyone you knew leave a good neighborhood where everyone had lived there for years and knew one another and where there was a sense of community, sucks. It creates resentments and those resentments are a goldmine for unscrupulous pols who pander to our worst prejudices and project everything bad that happened onto blacks. When one wags a rhetorical finger in the face of these people who mostly were just trying to make a better life for their families and assert they were irrational, mean-spirited, and singly motivated by their ignorant vicious hatred of blacks, one, in so many words, tells them the left doesn't want to listen to you, you're the bad guy. That doesn't create an environment for understanding and reconciliation anymore than Repug campaign literature calling the some Democrat "Coleman's boy."