Every high school student in America should read a recent commentary in the Philadelphia Daily News about the “new Jim Crow.”
Especially if they are thinking attending an “urban university.”
The article described with articulate hostility how black people do not want white people in the black neighborhoods surrounding Temple University near downtown Philadelphia.
The writer does not use code words or dance around this explicit racial resentment: Temple University and its “developer friends” are “not just gentrifiers, but guilty of resegregating Philadelphia on the model of South African apartheid. This is the New Jim Crow,” wrote Chad Dion Lassiter.
It goes on like this for another 500 words: White people are bad. And the white people who notice, like the writer for Philadelphia Magazine who wrote about black on white crime in “Being White in Philadelphia“? They are even worse.
The mayor said “Being White in Philadelphia” was “despicable” and called for the city’s Human Rights Commission to investigate. No need to wonder about the rampant black on white crime in Philly. The mayor figured that out by himself: 400 years of racism.
Scholars like Lassiter do not have to go far to learn about this black on white racial animosity: Temple University is a world center for Critical Race Theory: white racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. And white racism explains everything.
Understandably missing from Lassiter’s lament are the numerous and recent cases of black on white crime, violence and even murder inflicted on white Temple students who have been shielded from this explicit racial hatred.
Some learn the hard way: white students at urban schools are targets. Big, soft, and lucrative. After they learn that, the second thing they find out is that police are not terribly interested in it.
Just a few months ago, a group of black people attacked a female Temple student by throwing a brick in her face. She was just one of several that day. Some did not report it. One who did said cops did not want to hear about it.
At the University of Illinois at Champaign, black people attacked students more than a dozen times in the first few weeks of October. They call it “polar bear hunting.”
At Northern Illinois University during the first month of school, large groups of black people attacked at least four non-black fraternities. Several white people were hurt badly enough to require a trip to the hospital. One of the victims fought back. He was arrested.
Ditto to students who live near the University of Notre Dame just a few weeks ago.
At the University of Southern California earlier this week, a black person was found guilty of killing two Chinese students who wandered off campus. He was just one of those involved in the murder. He laughed when the verdict was announced. Nothing new there.
At the University of Minnesota in downtown Minneapolis, black on white crime is so bad that black student groups are protesting: they do not like the fact that crime reports on the university web site identify the predators as black.
It hurts their collective unconscious, they said. This is a long list that would require 1000 pages. Not 1000 words.
Spike Lee went on an anti-gentrification rant six months ago in New York, saying how much he hated white people moving into his parents’ Brooklyn neighborhood. A few months later, the New York Post ran an article describing how the hipsters of Brooklyn have no idea the danger they are in when they move into their new brownstones:
“All I can say is there should be a sign that reads, ‘Buyer beware,’” said a police source who works in the area. Another police source said, “A lot of the white folks moving into these areas are from out of state. They walk around as if they own the place . . . then they get robbed.”
Earlier this week, The Sun celebrated the fact that lots of young white people are moving to downtown Baltimore. No mention was made of the regular and frequent and intense black mob violence and black on white crime there. A lot of it on video.
State legislator Pat McDonough said black people are “terrorizing” the residents and tourists who live there. The mayor excoriated him, but it just got worse.
A lot of it is documented in the scintillating best seller: White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence to America and how the media ignore it.
In Wilmington, Delaware, the former mayor said he liked it when young white people move into “the most dangerous city in America.” They have not yet learned to be afraid of crime, he said. Afraid or not, that is the first thing new comers find out.
In June in Baltimore, a black bus driver used her cell phone to call a large group of black people to board her bus and attack two white parents and their child. Which they did. Twenty of them, with gusto, while other black passengers cheered them on. The driver thanked them.
On video. If you want to read that again thinking you made a mistake, go ahead.
It took the police two months to investigate.
Earlier this year again in Baltimore, one of the established urban pioneers wrote a story that went viral about crime in her gentrified neighborhood. How she had to borrow a pit bull to walk about the block. How murders are happening all over. “I’m tired of being looked at as if I am prey,” wrote Tracey Halvorsen.
Like most urban pioneers, Halvorsen was very careful to say how race had nothing to do with it: They were not black criminals. They were criminals who happened to be black.
Many black activists disagreed: Race had everything to do with it, they told her: Her white racism was causing all the danger and violence. And only white privilege could lead anyone to have an expectation of safety anywhere in Baltimore.
In Portland, black activists succeeded in stopping the construction of Trader Joe’s in a black neighborhood: Their reason: too many white women like the upscale grocery store. They demanded more public housing for black people instead.
In Oakland, black activists spoke out against community gardens. That’s another troublesome white thing.
At the University of South Carolina, the black police chief blamed the white victims for a rash of racial violence against students.
In Rochester, New York, more than 1000 recent refugees from Burma and Nepal have been victims of unrelenting black violence. When the local paper finally got around to reporting it earlier this year, it spent as much time apologizing for the story than it did talking about how black people terrorize Asians.
Every major paper in the country has run essentially the same story: white people are not welcome in black neighborhoods. Some reject these stories as racist or urban legends and move in anyway. More often than not they find their lives become one constant struggle with crime, violence, trash, harassment, threats, vandalism, racial resentment and official indifference. They quickly learn they have to “share their neighborhood” with crime and violence.
They talk about it on dozens of Facebook sites around the country.
“We are prisoners here,” said one resident of gleaming new condo complex in what used to be the ghetto of Washington, D.C. “We see them at night. Outside. Waiting for us.”
And when those who refuse to believe the stories of constant violence become victims, they always hold a community meeting. And for the first ten minutes, they always talk about how upset they are with the constant crime.
But at minute 11, someone always stands up and says ‘yes, but we have to solve the reasons for the crime.’And that always means for next two hours, blaming white people for the racism that caused those conditions.
And the beat goes on. At a college near you.