Rootless Cosmopolitan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2024
I think we ought to talk about White Flight more and the damage that it did to the white people who left.
I don’t want to powerlevel too much, but my family had a beautiful brick building in a great neighborhood in a certain city on the east coast. They were not particularly well-off but they had a small business and they had a great community and a good free public school.
In the 1970s, black people moved into the neighborhood. My grandma had a brick thrown through her windshield. Her daughters got attacked and called names at school. Their business suffered and stopped having clients. Broke and in debt, unable to send their children to private school or afford a fancy house with walls and security, they sold their home and their business for a song and moved to an entirely new state where they had to basically start over, as renters and employees rather than business/homeowners.
Their kids didn’t get beautiful clothes anymore. They got shitty secondhand clothes. No more soda — my mom told me about leaving a glass of water out until air bubbles would form and she could pretend it was soda. No more living close to extended family, who got scattered to the wind.
And the place they left? Shitty, crime ridden, broken down, abandoned. Until eventually it “gentrified” at some point in the 2000s, to much rage and protesting.