The question is, does the South like it this way?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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fascinating
It’s not a Hell of a lot better in Chicago.
according to the map it’s a lot better in Chicago
I read it as 6% vs 4% in the South, i.e. 94% don’t make it vs 96%. Not a Hell of a lot better to me.
Yep. Chicago looks like ass.
6% instead of 4% is a Hell of a lot better?
in the relevant sense, yes.
southern white folks as an aggregate will accept literally ANYTHING, rather than accept anything that ALSO helps black folks.
if they as an aggregate ever wish to change, i’ll welcome it. but (shrug) i don’t expect them to ever do so.
The south has a 65% high school graduation rate for economically disadvantaged children. Whatever they do with their tax revenue, they do not invest in public education. But they do graduate world class football players.
The South is not investing in public education because Southerners left the public schools for private, mostly religious ones to avoid forced integration 40 plus years ago. As a result, they will not now fund anything that benefits those who are different and then justify that by saying the others don’t appreciate what they’ve been given. Conservatives are always building walls and building ever stronger gates to keep those who are different out. They are, without a doubt, the meanest, cruelest most anti-democratic people I’ve ever known. They (including their Northern and Western counterparts) are doing terrible harm to this country.
I know all this because I’ve always lived in the South. But, re the Times article, the South has always been economically disadvantaged and the ones who are most disadvantaged are African Americans and Latinos. Nothing has changed in 200 years and, we, all of us, continue to pay a terrible price for the fact of slavery.
Yes. Case in point – the Alexandra Pelosi video. They would rather starve than for someone black to get food stamps also.
There is a lot of migration from West Virginia and Ohio into the South.
And a whole lot of rural Southern counties that used to be competitive for manufacturing plant expansion or relocation are not longer because those relocation and expansions are going offshore.
And the business elites still have a stranglehold on politics in the South. What ordinary people think doesn’t matter; it’s what the financiers think.
Do folks in Michigan like Detroit and Benton Harbor the way they are?
Do folks in Pennsylvania like Philadelpia the way it is?
Do folks in New Jersey like Camden and Newark the way they are?
Isn’t that sort of the same question you’re asking?
Do folks in California like Bakersfield the way it is?
Most folks who make it through upward mobility do it in a different place from where they started. I doubt that the study had a way of determining that.
What you are looking at are rich counties and poor counties. And you can clearly identify the majority black counties through the South. And in those counties, yes a lot of white folks who live there like things pretty much as they are.
But New York bankers seem to like those things as they are as well, unlike the 1960s when they were putting investments in the South contingent on the Jim Crow laws being eliminated.
And a whole lot of rural Southern counties that used to be competitive for manufacturing plant expansion or relocation are not longer because those relocation and expansions are going offshore.
The red crescent in the South doesn’t line up with the manufacturing areas, but with the Black Belt, an area that has always been much less industrial and more agricultural than average.
Do folks in Michigan like Detroit and Benton Harbor the way they are?
Do folks in Pennsylvania like Philadelpia the way it is?
Do folks in New Jersey like Camden and Newark the way they are?
Obviously not, since the people there keep voting for politicians who run on changing things.
You are saying that G.K. Buttefield and Jim Clyburn are not interested in changing things?
I would love to see what those numbers look like broken down by race – not just in the South, but across the country.
In the South, my suspicion is that mobility for whites does not lag behind the rest of the country nearly as much as it does for non-whites. The corollaries would be that the gap for racial mobility (which probably tracks closely with this country’s enormous racial wealth gap) is not as great elsewhere, and that non-white kids have far better (though still not good) prospects elsewhere. Which is the same reason why there were mass African-American migrations to Northern urban areas through much of the 20th century. Things haven’t changed much, except that more of the jobs have moved to the Sunbelt.
But I’d love to see the numbers. And I have little doubt that there’s also a significant racially based gap elsewhere.
I would like to see this data broken out to the precinct level. Likely it’s based on census tract-level data so that project would be possible.
The you could compare against voting patterns.
What I see in the map is that a lot of the least-opportunity sections are also the Democratic strongholds of their states.
What I see in the map is that a lot of the least-opportunity sections are also the Democratic strongholds of their states.
Also known as, the black areas of the states.
You can tell that race is an important part of the explanation by looking at which parts of the South are colored red. It’s not South Florida
Here’s map of the counties with the highest black populations:
http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html
It’s an almost-perfect reproduction. The higher the black population in the South, the lower the economic mobility.
FYI, the red ares on the economic mobility map in the West (the Arizona/New Mexico border, central South Dakota) are areas with high American Indian populations.
My question is, what the hell are they doing in North Dakota?
Fracking.
More specifically, leasing land and selling things to people doing fracking, who are coming in from out of state.
Notice that the %s in that region are at 35%. A completely random set of outcomes would result in 20% of the people born into the bottom quintile moving into the top, while the figure in those areas is almost twice that.
That can’t happen unless you’ve got a big influx (in relative terms) of new residents moving in and becoming the new bottom quintiles.
Not just fracking. agricultural states are doing better.
of course the South likes it this way
Define “the South”. Because there are a lot of white, black, and Hispanic folks who don’t like it that way and have spent lifetimes trying to change it only to see the national powers-that-be let the crazies loose again.
I certainly don’t like it that way.
“The South” is the shiny object the distracts the rest of the nation from its own complicity in, say, the failure of Detroit, the stop-and-frisk ethnic bigotry in New York, the colony of the District of Columbia, the suppression of Oakland by outside police hires, the Arizona clusterfuck of Joe Arpaio…need I call out others that defend themselves by saying “Look at the South”.
“Shiny object” implies that the attention is unwarranted, and that the topic of interest isn’t really significant.
Neither of those things are true. Look at the map.
You take care of Massachusetts and it’s support of this mindset. I’ll work on North Carolina. It’s so easy for you folks to forget Louse Day Hicks and the northern campaign against desegregation.
You sound like your forefathers denouncing the Freedom Riders.
How about I take care of America and its mindset? Y’all didn’t succeed at seceding. This is one country.
And it’s very easy to forget about Louise Day Hicks, since it’s been forty years since anyone gave a shit about her.
Except Southerners with wounded pride.
The Bible verse says, “Take the beam out of your eye before taking the speck out of mine.” That makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, “Take the speck out of your eye before taking the beam out of mine,” doesn’t make any sense at all.
Racism and injustice need to be confronted wherever they appear, but it is most important to confront them in the places where they are the worst.
And that sure as hell isn’t Massachusetts. Take care of Massachusetts and its mindset? Been there, done that. That’s why the example you threw out was from before the invention of the catalytic converter.
And one last thing:
Because there are a lot of white, black, and Hispanic folks who don’t like it that way and have spent lifetimes trying to change it only to see the national powers-that-be let the crazies loose again.
You take care of Massachusetts and it’s support of this mindset. I’ll work on North Carolina.
So which is it? Do you want liberals across the country to “let the crazies loose?” Or not?
I asking that we stop playing sectional up-upsmanship and deal with what is a national problem. The crazies, in case you haven’t noticed are in every state. And there are substantial folks who have been working for change for some time in every state.
But after having particpated in making Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes President, the rest of the country starts point again at “Ooooh, look at the unreformed South.” Without figuring out that maybe it would have been good to elect re-elect Carter or elect Gore or not participate in the Gingrich Revolution.
Southern progressives are very clear what is going down here and are working very hard to reverse it. But we are getting little help from the establishment Democrats or folks who would rather point fingers than build support outside by taking on their similar issues on their home turf to make it a national issue.
I asking that we stop playing sectional up-upsmanship and deal with what is a national problem.
Telling me to mind my own business, worry about Massachusetts, and only let you worry about North Carolina is your idea of dealing with a national problem?
But we are getting little help from the establishment Democrats…
Maybe they’re taking your advice to “worry about Massachusetts.” Maybe you should’t respond with an outburst of sectional solidarity when Democrats in the rest of the country notice that things are worst down South.
dumbass question. Of COURSE the Southern power structure likes it that way.
That gets to it. Antagonism means no possibility of solidarity in unions or other labor action. No unions, low wage scale.
Now the power structure in the rest of the country is discovering this Southern “magic”.
That’s the Black Belt, BooMan.
Of that bottom 20% in that crescent in the Southeast, what % do you think are black?
Turning it around, in that crescent, what % of the black residents do you think start out in the bottom 20%?
I think the South likes it just fine.
That’s also the area of Democratic strength in Alabama and South Carolina and a substantial part of the Democratic base in Georgia and North Carolina.
Of course it is.
The Democrats are the party that the oppressed people in our society turn to.
Surely, you’re not making a southern-fried version of the wingnut argument that Detroit is poor because it votes Democrat, instead of vice-versa. Are you?