So I know I said last week that I'd talk about White Privilege. That can wait, I think. I'll handle it next week. This is Week X in a series of diaries on Race Relations. The previous diary was: I look like what?
Today I'm going to talk about government enforced segregation and agencies that actively split multi-ethnic neighborhoods into Black And White.
Back in the fifties, the Fed'l Gov't decided that they needed to 'Revitalize American Housing' in the cities. That was all well and good -- built fify to a hundred years earlier, a lot of it was getting 'rather dilapidated.'
But that's not the full story. The full story involves creating agencies that would allow Whites and ONLY whites to own houses. If that doesn't seem like much of a big deal, let me just say that owning a house wasn't going to happen in the integrated neighborhoods most of these White Folks were coming from. So they moved OUT.
What to do with the black folks? Mind, they made about the same money as the White Folks, but weren't being given the same opportunities. They got Public Housing -- and Segregation.
::more after the jump::
Let me give you a little perspective here.
Roundabouts the early 1950's, my great-grandparents owned a store in the Hill District, which had a thriving Jewish Community about that time. During the War, they ran a brisk black market trade -- and after the war, there was practically no way someone could not make money if they had a business. Ten years later, my grandparents and my great-grandparents were living together, in one house, in Squirrel Hill (they were renting another one). My great-grandparents had enough money to retire (being landlords).
Since I just got out of a lecture on this, I can talk to someone else's family who lived in the Hill District, just a short distance away -- working and eking out an income about the same as most other people thereabouts. Flash that family forward ten years, and they are living in public housing.
Now, that might not seem so bad, on the surface. If you don't know tax law, that is. Government was subsidizing my great-grandparents -- basically that black family had a regressive tax put on it, merely because they were renting instead of owning a home.
That's the first problem -- but by then we're into a survival of the fittest scenario. The most culturally conformist, the intelligent, the merely lucky, the people with just a little more money -- they're headed out of the public housing, to better schools in other areas [yes, when you don't need to learn a new dialect, your schooling does go quicker], getting houses by the skin of their teeth (where other people had entire agencies devoted to helping them out). And so the people in the public housing deteriorate. At one time, to get public housing you needed to be married and with a job. But Pittsburgh let it turn into a cesspit for the dregs of the urban poor. A place where a kid has no role models -- no one goes to work the way working class folks do.
Next, with the segregation, the school districts were allowed to deteriorate. The segregation came first, then the schools -- worse teachers. Not just that, schools with the hope drained out of them. Just imagine being a teacher, when none of your kids are getting support/discipline/direction from their parents. It's a teacher's job to teach subjects, not provide motivation for students.
And after poor performing schools, you get joblessness -- and a ripe and fertile ground for the 'only equal opportunity job in the inner city' -- running drugs.
And after all of this, or just the segregation (different people left at different times), you get white people who aren't far enough AWAY from black folks -- moving out of the city entirely, out of fear, self-interest, or greed.
Is it any wonder the urban Black man is in such dire straights? When the gov't ghettoizes people, removes opportunities, removes diversity, removes money -- it's not laziness that is the Cause of Poverty.
Pittsburgh's running a half a billion dollar deficit, yet 25 acres of prime land stand... with only a hockey rink in the center.
Welcome to America -- which hand have you been dealt?
Oh, the black guy's name? Sala Udin -- former city councilman.