Reply #133: that is not what happened

[William Z. Foster]

Racism is what caused the exodus from the city, and only then did the infrastructure and public schools begin to collapse. The city proper, stripped of its tax base and surrounded by hostile suburbs and a hostile government in Lansing has struggled ever since.

White people have spent the last 30 years dreaming up rational sounding excuses and euphemisms:

It isn't racism, it is home values.

It isn't racism, it is declining schools.

It isn't racism, it is decaying neighborhoods.

Back 30 or 40 years ago, the white suburbanites were at least more honest. When anyone expressed a progressive view or tried to talk about racism, they would say "you have to be here and see it. You don't know what they are like. Something needs to be done about them."

Now that same argument is couched in euphemisms - "you have to be here and see it. You don't know what things are like. Something needs to be done about these things."

Same tone of voice, same "solutions" proposed, same arguments, same arrogance and defensiveness.

This business of "it's easy to deride the extreme measures being taken when you live far away" is something we have heard all along, too. What it means is "we hope that the rest of the country doesn't pay too much attention to what we are doing here. We would like to go about 'solving' our unique 'problems' without any interference from outsiders, who do not understand what we face." They hope that no one looks to closely at what is happening, that no one challenges it.

That is exactly what the apartheid government in South Africa said, and for the same reasons.
"Don't judge us for our extreme measures, you don't know what we are facing. Butt out and let us handle it our own way. We understand the nature of this problem, and you do not."