We begin with:
Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there's a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as "cool" urban places.
But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the "progressive" cities aren't red or blue, but another color entirely: white.
And end with:
This trail has been blazed not by the "progressive" paragons but by places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Atlanta, long known as one of America's premier African American cities, has boomed to become the capital of the New South. It should come as no surprise that good for African Americans has meant good for whites too. Similarly, Houston took in tens of thousands of mostly poor and overwhelmingly African American refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Houston, a booming metro and emerging world city, rolled out the welcome mat for them - and for Latinos, Asians and other newcomers. They see these people as possessing talent worth having.
This history and resulting political dynamic could not be more different from what happened in Portland and its "progressive" brethren. These cities have never been black, and may never be predominately Latino. Perhaps they cannot be blamed for this but they certainly should not be self-congratulatory about it or feel superior about the urban policies a lack of diversity has enabled.
There is so much wrong here. But leaving aside the fact that the author starts out by disqualifying New York, L.A., and Chicago, leaving aside the blinding whiteness of dubbing Atlanta "un-progressive," leaving aside that most of these "progressive" cities have more black people than their surrounding states, I think the implicit argument that these cities should be "doing more" to assure that their black population meets the national average is odious.
Man listen--Negroes like Atlanta. Negroes like Chicago. Negroes like Houston. Negroes like Raleigh-Durham (another area that doesn't make the cut, for some reason.) Negroes like Oakland. Negroes have the right to like where they live, independent of Massa, for their own particular, native, independent reasons (family? great barbecue? housing stock?) Just like Jewish-Americans have the right to like New York--or not. Just like Japanese-Americans have the right to like Cali--or not.
This particular Negro loves Denver--and Chicago too. But the notion that black people are pawns on a chess-board, which conservatives and liberals move around in order to one-up each each other, has got to go. Sometimes--just sometimes--a black dude isn't a problem. He's just a dude trying to marry a beautiful woman, raise a decent kid, retire to an tropical island, smoke some good herb, and drink some good rum.
Let Portland be Portland. And let black folks be themselves. We're getting along fine.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Thanks for telling my story, homie.
Chicago is a great city. Hell, Buddy Guy ain't nobody's fool. But Denver? The only good thing I can think of that ever came out of Denver is I-40.
FAIL: I mean I-25 ... sigh ... so much for my snark.
I-25 goes through Denver, but really you probably meant I-70. Which makes me wonder if you've ever actually been there?... You definitely haven't been there lately. So what is the snark really about? Seriously what is it about?
Microbrew. Denver is the spiritual home of the American microbrew revolution, and the host of the Great American Beer Festival.
Uh Portland and Seattle beg to differ
Honestly, I can't take that article seriously; you can't have a discussion of "progressive" cities other than New York, LA, and Chicago and go on about how they're all white...and just plain not bother to even mention DC in passing. The city itself is progressive as all get-out (not always fully reflected in our laws, since Congress gets to throw out the stuff that's too progressive, like when we voted overwhelmingly via citywide referendum to legalize medical marijuana back in like 1998), and as of 2007, after nearly a decade of gentrification, DC was still almost 56% black (and only 36% white).
Then again, that didn't fit the narrative, so why not just pretend DC doesn't exist, the way the rest of the US does whenever someone points out that whole "taxation without representation" thing.
I'm perfectly happy with the notion of making DC a tax-free zone.
Well, federal taxes at any rate I'm sure you'd levy some local ones.
But it would doubtlessly help the economic situation too.
I hate to sound like I'm 12, but Ta-Nehisi, you're awesome.
Let the whole church say...Amen! As a black man I've never understood why so many so-called liberals think it's a problem whenever the proportion of black people in a city, in a profession, in a college (and I teach college) is lower than the proportion of blacks in the population as a whole. It's not only as if we lack agency, it's also as if we lack a culture and an ethnic heritage, as if barring discrimination in some form, we are simply no different from white people in general (as opposed to whites from particular ethnic and national backgrounds in particular) and should be 13% of everywhere.
It's a bizarre notion. After all, if Reconstruction had worked as intended, blacks would probably still live largely in the South and in those places in the industrial Midwest to which we migrated for purely economic reasons. Why should we be expected to have spread ourselves evenly everywhere?
"As a black man I've never understood why so many so-called liberals think it's a problem whenever the proportion of black people ... "
Google "judicial disparate impact"
It is not a liberal bias. It is the law.
Many of the recent SCOTUS decisions involving race/hiring/election-laws reference it.
Isn't the actual point of the article to mock hip white young progressives that move to Portland by suggesting that they are actually going there to get away from colored people?
White progressives move to Portland for the weed. Also for the slacker culture. See "weed".
See I thought it was for the friendliness to homeless white people, read college students who pursue degrees in which there are little to no jobs and worry about becoming homeless one day.
I love Portland, but no one in their right mind(or without a trust fund) moves to a city where the rents are 3/4 of San Francisco but the salaries are 1/2(if you can find job).
Perhaps the author thinks that black folks should be forcibly moved around the nation until every community has the same percentage of blacks. Let's be reasonable though. Perhaps we could allow a variation of 1/2 a percentage point.
If blacks make up roughly 12 percent of the American population and a city has an 8 percent population of blacks then it is somehow not diverse?
Newsflash. Blacks make up about 1 percent of the population of Wyoming. I'm guessing that population is largely tied to the military bases in the state.
Therefore, a random computer has decided that Ta-Nehisi Coates and his family have to don cowboy hats and move to the base of the Rocky Mountains. I hope you know how to line dance TNC.
So much to criticize about the article's assumptions.
By the way since TNC mentioned Jewish folks in his post I feel that some kosher delis are going to be needed in Wyoming. Now Wyoming has a larger than average percentage of "American Indians". I guess some of those folks will need to move east to take TNC's place.
He'd only put on the cowboy hat because Obama did.
Favorite football team = Dallas Cowboys. There just might be some cowboy stuff lurking somewhere deep inside.
"Just a pinch between your cheek and gum . . ." though that's likely before TNC's time.
Off topic, but that was one of my favorite pictures out of the campaign, ever.
Obama put on the hat in Española, NM.
Wyoming doesn't boast a gritty, gang-dominated, politically corrupt and educationally backward urban area like Española, and they're probably proud of that fact.
But Wyoming does have Dick Cheney. Advantage, Española, NM
Espanola has Joe Maestas. Advantage, anywhere where Joe Maestas is not the Mayor. BTW, they are getting rid of the him the traditional New Mexico way, they are trying to send him to Santa Fe.
O Fair New Mexico, we love we love you so...
That article reads like yet another "oh, you progressives aren't as progressive as you say you are nya nya nya nya." It's immature and schoolyard-ish. It seems to be such an easy narrative in the media these days. Portland's a hipster town. Most hipsters aren't black. Some are. For whatever reason, Portland doesn't seem to be on the list of places most black folk I know want to go. They know little about it, for one. They have no ties. If a black person moves to Portland, I doubt they'd find it particularly regressive. People there are generally nice. There's more black people in Portland/Eugene than in the rest of Oregon after all. And Seattle's practically almost all-immigrant, it seems like to me. All those cities that are cited as non-progressive have historically large black populations. I don't see what's non-progressive to the author about them besides that.
If we tie in urban renewal programs to this notion of progressivism, I'd say Newark NJ where I work aims to be pretty progressive and will be. It's majority-minority. The idea that progressive ideals are measured by the number of black people or that progressivism and black people are two separate things is insulting to say the least.
I live in Beaverton, I am a hipster and I am a Black Hispanic. Which, according to article, means that I simply do not exist. I came here for the bikes and trees and buses and stayed for the cheaper rent and good food and the chance to live a life instead of grinding it out in Brooklyn, New York ( where I was born and raised.)
Well, Portland hasn't always been a hipster town--but the only time it had much of a black population was during WWII, when a lot of blacks moved to town to work in the shipyards. But then there was a flood in the area of town that many blacks lived in (Vanport, which was technically a different city) and many left. TNC, the Vanport story is fascinating--and will seem awfully familiar to our post-Katrina age...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon#Demographics
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cchouk/vanport/
http://bit.ly/1Dm2tA (Oregon Hist.Soc.)
Is Boston not considered considered progressive anymore? Or does it get written off with NYC, LA, and Chicago? Maybe it's mentioned deeper in the article, but after reading the excerpt I don't want to click through and give it the page view.
Boston has black people. Ergo we are not progressive.
And along these lines, Minneapolis is almost 18% black, compared to NYC, which is 25% black. That's not a huge difference. And Austin, while it has a small black population, is less than 50% non-Hispanic white, and more than one-third of the city is Latino.
The author (Aaron M. Renn) feels that the most representative population is at the county level, not the city limits, for reasons he keeps repeating in the comments but I find unconvincing.
Is that just where the good data is available? Or maybe where the data that supports his argument is?
BTW, I was surprised to see Minneapolis listed as progressive, with no mention of San Francisco, the queen of all progressive cities. Is it just Prince?
No. Prince is black. Black people don't live in Progressive Cities. Ergo, Prince doesn't live in Minneapolis. Didn't you read the article?
San Francisco's record with African-Americans is quite poor and remains so. Probably unwise to mention it until they clean up the schools on the East Side. Give it 50 years.
San Francisco also has public schools that are 90% Asian. So ... is San Francisco "diverse"? Would it be more diverse if the schools were 90% African American? I think that's what we're talking about here. Also, not to be too much sticking up for my City, but can you name me an American city that has a good record with schools in predominantly African American neighborhoods? Seems like a country-wide issue to me.
San Francisco is particularly hostile to African-Americans - demolition of The Fillmore to build Geary, the vile state of SFHA buildings in most AA neighborhoods, the lack of transit to the Bayview, particularly before the T. Halloween was even used as an excuse to hate on black people. There's a reason San Francisco has no AA middle class.
Mark - All (sadly) true. Just arguing that "diverse" doesn't mean "black."
Yeah, but once we get past the city's record with African-American people, we get to the current scapegoating of Latino immigrants.
San Francisco is diverse - any city with only 32% white people has to be diverse - but it's very segregated. Even on my block, which (oddly) is inhabited by Blacks, Latinos, Filipinos, Chinese people, Jews, Italians, numerous people with Irish brogues, Russians, other assorted White people, children, gays and lesbians, there's massive economic segregation - between the guy who just built himself a $2M house and the minority families in Section 8 housing.
I'd just say that S.F. is progressive on a lot of things. Race isn't necessarily one of them.
I'd just say that S.F. is progressive on a lot of things. Race isn't necessarily one of them.
Sounds like they don't mind if there is a black man in the White House, but they don't want a black man in the house next door.
No question about. San Franciscans love Willie Brown and Barack Obama. They even love Barry Bonds. But the lack of an African-American middle class means a huge percentage of black people are in public housing here. Consequently, they can be moved arbitrarily to worse and worse neighborhoods as the city decides to raze aging projects and sell the land to developers.
I used to live in Berkeley. It's no less segregated, and sees itself as "progressive."
I'll tell you one thing about this Jewish person, how anybody could love places that have winters like Baltimore, DC, NYC, Chicago, or Denver is an abject mystery to me. Having lived myself in really rainy places, Portland (and Seattle) don't extend much glamor my direction either, but at least one doesn't feel like one's walking around in a meat freezer for months at a time. Even with family there, the prospect of Austin, TX from May to September seems even worse: my god it's 100 every day with 80% humidity, and don't give me this you get used to it nonsense; months of the year spent entirely indoors sounds freaky deaky sci-fi to me.
Where do you actually live? You seem to abhor many climates available in the US.
Northern California about an hour or so north of the bay, 40-60 in winter, 55-75 in spring, 75-100 in summer, but mostly around 80, and 50-80 in autumn. Rains on and off from September to April, more off than on. There are days in February that are staggeringly clear and mildly warm; there are days in July, when even on the hottest day, the breeze from the ocean comes inland for 50 miles or more and it is oh so comfy to sit outside on the porch and eat dinner.
Yeah that is an awesome climate, and for the 10% or so of the worlds population can live in places like that great, but since we can't all fit there we just have to learn to live in other places:-)
Well, la-di-fucking-da. Seriously, what's your point? That the rest of the world (aside from you) are idiots for living in places with less-than-perfect weather? Perhaps you don't mean to, but the only thing you come across as is insular and snobbish--and the very antithesis of progressive.
Denver actually has the nicest climate in the US, in my opinion. It battles with San Diego for the sunniest city in America, and its weather is quite temperate. Summer days are hot, but the low humidity means cool nights. It can get cold and snowy in the winter for a few days at a time, but the same low humidity means that it heats up quickly -- so it's rare that snow sees a third sunrise (or a second, really). There were a good half-dozen days this past winter where the overnight/morning snow had melted enough by noon for me to go for a run in shorts and a T-shirt. And outside of those cold/snowy blasts (maybe 5 the whole winter), it's 50-60 and sunny. We were able to sit on our deck and sun maybe every other weekend this past winter.
Basically Denver's climate from November to March is the Bay Area with a handful of three-day blasts of winter. Pretty nice if you ask me.
People I know who live in Colorado, don't live in Denver, and I have heard quite the zero and below stories. Sorry if I unfairly castigated lovely Denver.
Well, if they live higher up, they're going to see a lot more cold and snow. That is the thing about the Front Range -- you've got communities from about 8500 feet (Nederland, Monument, Evergreen (I think it's that high)) down to about 5000 feet (Ft. Collins, lower parts of Denver), so a particular front could simultaneously bring blizzard conditions to some suburbs, while others merely get 40s and rain, and still others are 50s and sunny.
You do get handful of cold snaps every year--storm front rolls in dumps a bunch of snow, the next day the sun is shining, but it's still bitter cold. But three days later the snow's melted, and it's temperate again. And the mountains have snow, so it's time to hit the slopes.
I've lived in various cities in the midwest, west coast and east coast, but climate-wise I think Colorado is about as good as it gets. I can imagine parts of the South being great as well, but only if you can handle humidity.
This commenter is getting too much attention for his silly thoughts, yet I'll pile on -- and from Portland, obviously one of the worst places in the world.
The average rainfall through most of the Atlantic Coast, and across the Appalachians and everywhere east of the Mississippi gets more rain per year than Portland and the Northwest. The only difference is that over there it comes in sudden summer showers and winter snowfalls, with a lot of hot humid days in the summer months, where it can be hot all day yet an afternoon thunderstorm drops 2 inches in 2 hours and at 5 pm it's hot and humid and sunny again. In the North Pacific belt from San Fran to Canada, you get six months of greyness, on the coast the storms are clearly delineated, east of the Coast Range it's more drizzly. But the temperatures are generally above freezing, and the six month sunny season, and the sunny days of winter, have low humidity and feel great to most people.
I was a little afraid of the slight increase in cold and rain when I moved from Nor Cal to Portland. Then I bought a house with a hot tub. With just the memory of being warm, and the prospect of being warm, I now feel great about gallivanting in any kind of wintry weather. And there's only like 8 to 15 nights a year when the rain is too heavy to get in the tub if I want to.
I can't believe I have to point this out with such a smart crowd, but apparently someone's got to say it: Not everyone likes a consistent year-round climate like Northern CA. Some people like seasons. Some people are more affected by rainy weather than others. One woman's trash is another woman's treasure, etc.
Very true, Persia. I miss the seasons here in SF. Especially fall and spring. The summer and winter? I wish we could have them for about a week or so!
It seems like the author forgets that progressive politics tend to be relative. So while Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas may not look progressive next to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, or Denver, they are certainly much more progressive than the areas of their states outside of the city borders. Moreover, you can find individual neighborhoods within Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas that are as progressive-leaning as the hipster neighborhoods in Portland or NYC or the lakefront liberal neighborhoods of Chitown.
Honestly, the same is true of Portland and Seattle. While the states may have a few other "liberal" enclaves (Eugene, etc.), overall they're pretty conservative. Eastern Washington and eastern Oregon have a lot more in common with the mountain states they border than they do with the large metropolitan areas that their states are known for. Heck, it was only a few years ago that the Democratic governor of WA won the election by something like 0.01% of the vote. You don't have to get too far outside of Portland or Seattle before things change pretty drastically.
Sorry for rewriting your point. It was lunch time and my brain was a bit low in terms of functionality.
Decatur!
Those are some really good points, too.
For whatever it's worth, Raleigh and Durham are two separate but adjacent cities with two distinct personalities. Raleigh is the state capital, and for the past 20 years or so it's been growing rapidly, propelled in large part by state government and what might be called the "intellectual industry" generated by nearby Research Triangle Park.
Durham has always been more blue collar because of its tobacco and textile industries, which are now, of course, long gone. But Durham also has always had a vital, active and industrious AA population. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois visited Durham in 1910 and saw it as a model for a black middle classs. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, the nation's oldest and largest black-owned insurance company, was founded on Parish Street in Durham's downtown in 1890, and Parish has long been called the black Wall Street. (See "Durham's Black Wall Street" from the Duke University Office of Communications, http://news.duke.edu/2007/01/parrish.html)
Durham also has a rich heritage of Southern AA blues music which is celebrated in the Bull Durham Blues Festival.
There's more of course, but the point is this: Durham is more a center of African American culture than Raleigh, and I wince when people refer to "Raleigh-Durham" as though it was one city, like Winston-Salem (which is one city).
Thanks for the Raleigh-Durham shout-out, TNC. And THANK YOU, Southerner, for clarifying that Raleigh and Durham are two entirely different cities with different cultures. My beloved city of Durham is majority-minority and politically it's fairly progressive. We voted for Obama at a higher percentage than anywhere else in North Carolina and like to take credit for his winning North Carolina. We have a large HBCU, North Carolina Central University, Black Wall Street, a thriving arts culture that includes Hayti Heritage Center, one of the oldest Black-owned bookstores in the country, and thriving urban neighborhoods. Sure, we have our issues, too, but you can't count us out of any serious discussion of progressive urban areas, even though we are about 40 percent Black.
OK look, the article was defining progressive city not on the basis of how many people there voted for Obama, but on how much they have instituted progressive local policies, such as mass transit ect. And Durham just doesn't measure up on those metrics. Especially the transit, the streets are aranged like the random scribbles of a 6 year old with crayons.
JD: Have you been to Durham lately? They're ripping out that ridiculous downtown loop that has been such a pain since they put it in during the urban renewal craze of the '60s and '70s. So that may clear up some of the street layout problems you mentioned. And mass transit is your idea of progressive? They have a decent bus system and the city certainly isn't big enough to need a subway. And last I heard, a light-rail transit system is in the works to link all of the cities in the Triangle -- Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, etc.
You want progressive? Go to Ninth Street and browse the bookstores and restaurants. Attend the American Dance Festival, which is headquartered in Durham. Go to one of the special programs at the Carolina Theater in downtown Durham. Check out the Bull Durham Blues Festival. Pick up a copy of the North Carolina Independent, undoubtedly one of the most lefty of all of the left-wing alternative publications. Go to one of Clyde Edgerton's book signings. Check out the Hayti Cultural Center that Maretha2 mentioned. Enroll your kid in the North Carolina School of Science and Math -- if he or she is good enough to get in.
Simply take a walk across the campuses of N.C. Central U. or Duke University, for Pete's sake. Since when is having two major, well-respected universities in the same city not an indication of progressiveness?
And voting for Obama isn't an indication of progressiveness? Are you freaking kidding me? I don't like to get into flame-wars in these kinds of settings, but you've ticked me off with your shallow, ill-informed dismissal of Durham, my friend. Durham is far from perfect and has some of the same problems that all larger cities have. But any culture vulture out there can find plenty of amusement in Durham, and any realistic progressive can see lots of indications that Durham is a decent city.
Southerner,
JD is right, in this article Progressive doesn't mean in a political sense, it is talking about progressive from an urban planning stanbd point, which generally means things like density, walkable mixed used neighborhoods and mass transit.
Whether Durham fits that model or not I have no idea about.
@eric k:
Thanks for your response, and JD, sorry I went off on you there, but your tone struck me the wrong way.
As for progressive urban planning, I'm sure Durham could do better. I do know that other cities in the Triangle -- especially Chapel Hill -- have been very serious about creating and maintaining green spaces and buffer zones. It's been a long time since I was plugged in to Durham politics, so I don't know what, if anything, they've done with that.
But developers are converting the beautiful old late 19th century redbrick tobacco warehouses in downtown Durham into condos, offices, shops, etc., and I assume that qualifies as "density." A couple of former textile mills have also been converted. I think some of this has been designated for affordable housing.
And getting rid of that horrid downtown loop -- which I mentioned earlier -- has got to qualify as progressive.
The Durham Area Transit Authority (DATA), a bus system, has been improved some, and as I said, there's been talk of light-rail for years. Don't know where they are with that.
All this started with TNC mentioning in his original post that Raleigh-Durham was "another city that doesn't make the cut, for some reason." I was trying to clarify that Raleigh and Durham are separate cities with very different personalities, and the discussion went from there.
Not to be an ass, but that isn't really what I wrote. I didn't object initially, because I take your point about being clear, but--for the record--I'm quite clear that Raleigh and Durham are two different cities. Here's what I wrote:
That "area" is there for a reason. The original article doesn't look at cities, it looks at core counties. I was simply noting that the two, together, comprise an area that a lot of African-Americans live in, and have started migrating to, from up north.
Again, I appreciate the clarification. But I never wrote Raleigh-Durham "was another city."
@TNC: You're right, my mistake. I apologize for misquoting you, and thanks for pointing it out. I should've looked more closely.
In my defense, all I can say is I spent many years in that area and have a deep affection for it, especially Durham. I worked in downtown Durham and spent many happy hours at the old Durham Athletic Park before Hollywood discovered the Durham Bulls and put Kevin Costner in a Bulls' uniform.
I tend to react -- maybe overreact is more accurate -- when I see the hyphen.
Understood. It's actually why I didn't say anything at first. I could have worded it a lot more clearly.
Like someone mentioned in the open thread, isn't there quite a bit of segregation within a place like Chicago? The Detroit version of the hipster dreams of living in Lincoln Park, Chicago, and I would bet it is about as diverse as many of the white flight suburbs of Detroit.
I think this site did a better job of discussing this topic
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/19/7-diversity/
No, the Detroit version of the hipster is already living in Royal Oak (if there are wealthy parents in the picture) or Ferndale (if there aren't).
I didn't say they live in Lincoln Park, I said they dream of living there. With all the foreclosures, you can get a steal in Royal Oak these days.
DougEMI,
Lincoln Park is not as diverse as its fellow lakefront liberal neighborhoods Hyde Park or Lake View, but it is a lot more racially diverse than white neighborhoods such as Ravenswood or Jefferson Park or Mount Greenwood, which tend to be more politically conservative as well.
El Toro,
Ravenswood is no longer a bastion of white conservatism. It's largely becoming white liberals who moved away from the lakefront once they had kids and needed some space. Think Forrest Claypool voters. Claypool being a white county politician.
There is also a significant number of hispanics and smaller number of blacks living in Ravenwood. Their numbers are large enough that they likely feel comfortable walking around.
As for Jefferson Park or Mount Greenwood you are spot on. Those areas had some of the only precincts in "da city" that voted for McCain over Obama. Although to be fair, in Mount Greenwood some of the precincts did go 45% for Obama. Which is progress. I was surprised his percentage was that high.
Irishpirate,
Thanks for the update. I need to check out Ravenswood then.
I know this is pedantic, but no hipster dreams of living in Lincoln Park. Not since the 80s or early 90s at the very latest. Hipsters have moved west to neighborhoods along Milwaukee like Wicker Park (where they're being squeezed out quickly) and more likely Logan Square, with a few staying near the lakefront in Lakeview.
The Milwaukee/Blue Line neighborhoods are extremely diverse, and not just by segregated Chicago standards.
This. And they are also moving over to Humboldt Park.
"My Posse's On Broadway" was playing in my head as I read that article.
The article is rather slipshod in its treatment of how the various demographics came to be. Cities that grew around Universities are going to be different than cities that grew around factories. And they will have different problems.
But I took the articles main point to be that people point to a city like Portland as a model for other cities without noting the degree to which it is not dealing with the problems that the other cities are dealing with.
The author is criticizing a certain group of progressives that hold Portland up as the ideal model for, in one example, Cincinnati. I don't know enough about either city to know if his point is correct. Would the public transportation that works in Portland really not translate to Cincinnati? Or is the fact that Cincinnati is conservative for a large city the reason that the policies can't be implemented.
But it should be noted that the comment on the second quoted passage is unfair. The author is not saying that Atlanta is not progressive in some objective way. He is saying that these progressive intellectuals (who I admit I am not tuned into well enough to know if he is right) count Portland as progressive and not Atlanta, and the author is arguing that they are wrong. The word "progressive" is in quotes twice in that passage for a reason.
I am not sure that the author is advocate a recruiting drive for diversity. What he is doing is arguing that the lack of diversity should not be overlooked in assuming that what can be done in a homogeneous city can also be done in a more diverse one.
There is a lot of bad writing there and oversimplification, so I don't want to defend it more than that. The suggestion that people are moving to Portland because they are afraid of being accused of racism if they moved to the Chicago suburbs is pretty silly and pointless.
Right. But I don't really see him citing these progressive intellectuals who argue that Portland is progressive, and Atlanta isn't. From I can tell this is his list--not his critique of someone else's list. And he games the list by ignoring--for no real reason--the three biggest cities that these unnamed progressives cite. Even after that, some of the cities on his list are just bad example. Denver is, like, two percent under the national average. Is that really a failing of "progressives?"
This is the greatest flaw in the article. A lack of black isn't the same as a lack of diversity. Black comprise 12 percent of the population. To expect them to exist in equal numbers in every city in this country is ridiculous. No one asks that about any other demographic group.
Exactly. Living in San Francisco (which I'm pretty sure is close to having a white minority last time I heard, but a relatively low black population) this premise seems particularly ridiculous. Plus, one of my biggest pet peeves is referring to Latinos and Asians as "immigrants" when they may have been here for several generations.
The Chinese helped build the railroads, and the first white settlement in California was Spanish, IIRC. Though odub below has a good point about gentrification.
"A lack of black isn't the same as a lack of diversity. "
TNC: You are right but when I think about the history of demographic shifts, housing policy and other forces that have governed who-lives-where-and-why, it's not as if access to cities or neighborhoods are the same for all non-White groups. I tend to find cities that are high in some people of color but not others to be at least be worthy of scrutiny to see what their history of urban planning and public policy has been. See my point about S.F. below.
I don't really have a problem with that. But I hate the notion that Denver isn't "diverse" because its black pop is 3 percent below the national average. It's rather ridiculous.
I agree that it would have been better had the marker of a white city actually been white population. He does discuss immigrant population and way down in the article Hispanic population. But there is no question that the decision to start with blacks rather than poverty rates in general and the histories of the cities both of which seem more significant (and somewhat correlated with black populations) should be explained.
In the article he is clearly claiming that the list is not his. I don't see any reason to take him to be lying about this. Although I admit it is sloppy journalism to treat this as just conventional knowledge. While trying to do something different I wound up googling Portland, Denver, and Atlanta, and the picture is what the article describes. Portland comes up as the exemplar of progressive politics (admittedly partly because George Will used it as such), Denver comes up in the context of progressive issues about half of the time, Atlanta does not. Obviously there must be some better way of establishing what cities progressives point to as exemplifying their issues, but I can't think of a quick way.
More directly in defense of the article, if the point is in deciding what ideas can work in midsize cities (something that admittedly only comes up in the case of transportation in Cincinnati) then it is not absurd to compare diversity to diversity in other cities rather than in the country as a whole (and being 2% below the national average puts Denver significantly below the average for mid size cities.) Nor is it entirely arbitrary to drop off the most populous cities. The reason that the subway works so well in New York and Chicago is really not applicable to just about any other city in the country.
Again the issue is whether the point of the article is to advocate for Portland recruiting more blacks or whether it is for progressives to look more to Atlanta than Portland in looking for ideas to push in other cities. I take the point of the article to be the latter. You seem to be taking it to be the former. But that does seem to be taking it in bad faith.
or whether it is for progressives to look more to Atlanta than Portland in looking for ideas to push in other cities. I take the point of the article to be the latter.
But why is this so? What does percentage of black population have to do with picking Atlanta's sprawl model a soppossed to Portland's urban planning?
If the Atlanta model is better for cities in the midwest than Portland's then make the case on the merits. Too me it seems pretty bizarre to say Atlanta has X% black people and so does Indianapolis therefore Indianapolis should model itself after Atlanta instead of Portland. As if blackness in and of itself is the most significant factor, not things like what industries are in a given city, what are the age/income demographics, what does the current house stock and transportation infrastructure look like and so on.
It would indeed be bad faith, if that were actually what I said. I assume you're referring to this passage:
Obviously arguing that the author is implying that cities should be "doing more assure that their black population meets the national average" isn't the same as charging that the author is advocating "for Portland recruiting more blacks."
This is not a small point. Cities like New York, for instance, have specific economic programs that attempt to retain ethnic diversity (mortgages in Harlem , for instance, that target people in certain income brackets who've lived in the neighborhood for years.) This is very different than saying New York is "recruiting" blacks.
I took my implication from this chapter:
I don't know how you can read that and charge that I'm taking the dudes assumption in "bad faith." You may not agree with the interpretation but it isn't bad faith.
Also, the point about quotes isn't a small one. People who don't name their adversaries, and don't quote them, routinely shrink the arguments of their opposition. The point isn't a lack of trust. I hyperlink the gentleman's argument for a reason. It allows us to have this exchange--for you to have your interpretation, and for me to have mine, and then for us to debate.
By not linking to any of the people he's evidently debating, it doesn't allow for other people to assess the arguments. This isn't a matter of whether he's being honest or not. It isn't a matter of whether I trust him or not. It's the fact that you might see things that I will not. That you might notice things that I will not. Summarizing and paraphrasing your critics, without attribution no less, doesn't allow for much back in forth. We aren't just taking your word--we're taking your interpretation.
Finally, if the author truly believes that Atlanta is the model more cities should follow, I'd be much more interested in a piece discussing Atlanta--as opposed to a take-down of unnamed, unquoted boosters of other "progressive cities."
Ta-Nihisi Coates
(I find the lack of reply buttons increasingly frustrating because I feel silly typing out your full name but don't feel I know you well enough to use your first name and would look too formal using your last)
I do see where you got your reading, although I note that when the author described what he was trying to do it sounds just like what I said he was trying to do.
I think the actual problem with what the author was trying to do is what you where commenting on in an early post today. He put a lot of effort into highlighting the counterintuitiveness of his article, despite the fact that the article is not all that counterintuitive. But he goes out of his way to show that despite writing for a journal for progressives he is willing to call out progressives and in the article he tends to do this in ham handed ways.
His treatment of race is the most ham handed aspect of that. And I can appreciate that that would hit you more than me. I can see those comments as stupid, without having them actually hit home in the same way. So it did seem obvious to me what he was trying to do, while only being frustrating that some of it was done so poorly.
I guess the use of race seemed akin to arguments I used to see attacking political correctness which always had as the kicker that the people hurt turned out to be other minorities. (And whenever I looked into these stories further they always fell apart as reporting). I think blacks are being used in the audience to tweak progressives because that is what people always use to tweak progressives. And you are fully justified in being offended that people use blacks as a way to tweak progressives.
But I do think you were misreading what he was up to in the article and so being offended at the wrong thing. And his comment below seems to support me in that. Of course there is still plenty in the argument that is actually offensive.
eric K
I think you have hit upon the aspect of the article that is most worthy of criticism. The cincinnati example is supposed to provide some evidence. But there is so much that is different between a city like Atlanta and a city like Portland that to jump to the idea that race is the relevant factor seems ridiculous.
I think his obvservation that rust belt cities are too different from Portland to think that it could adopt Portland solutions seems plausible. But I don't see any reason to place so much importance on the race issue other than getting to tweak progressives for being hypocritical in not recognizing the importance of the race issue.
Obviously cities should look for input from all of its communities so I don't get his defense below that this is specially true of black communities.
@Lon
Fair enough. Sorry about the reply button.
A lack of black isn't the same as a lack of diversity.
This is clearly true, but in other contexts you've talked about how non-black minorities tend, over time, to be assimilated into an ever-more-expansive "white" majority, and pushing American society back to a black/white split.
(I know this isn't any sort of exact quote, and probably an inaccurate paraphrase, but I'm just wondering what, if any, thoughts you have that reconciles the idea that diversity comes in many forms, but that most of that diversity eventually gets subsumed by the white majority).
"This is clearly true, but in other contexts you've talked about how non-black minorities tend, over time, to be assimilated into an ever-more-expansive "white" majority, and pushing American society back to a black/white split."
This has yet to be born out for Latinos and Asians in this country, and this is where I have always disagreed with TNC. Latinos have been here longer than most people realize and so have Asians. Someone here has already mentioned the Chinese involement in building the railroads, and Hispanics and mestizos have been here for centuries in the western and southwestern parts of this country, first as a colony of Spain, then as parts of Mexico before the Treaty of Guadalupe. Some Latinos will say that they are white, because they are, they are not "mixed" like most Mexicans are who are "mestizo." And some will say that they are because of the shame and humiliation of being latino or "brown" the same kind of shame that leads some to ban Spanish spoken in the home. I don't like this analysis that TNC came up with because I simply don't think he gets how "other" many of us Latinos are. And I don't think he gets how "other" Asians are considered either.
I say this from a perspective that grew up in areas with very few African-Americans, and very few white people too - the neighborhoods I was born and raised in were overwehlemingly Latino and/or Asian (specifically East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley eastern suburbs of L.A.) These places are very ethnic, very segregated and have remained so for decades and for generations of families. The city I was born in, Montery Park, has the largest population of Chinese ethnics in the mainland U.S. Not a very white place, literally or in the "subsumed" sense at all. This supposed "subsuming" of all of us into being "white" just hasn't happened.
I just don't buy what is being said here by TW or what TNC has said in the past. And I don't buy it because of experience, and because I'm one of those Latinos who hasn't been "subsumed." I wonder just when the "subsuming" is gonna take place en masse for Mexican-American who have been here for generations (in fact centuries) or Japanese Americans who have been here for generations and so on.
This is clearly true, but in other contexts you've talked about how non-black minorities tend, over time, to be assimilated into an ever-more-expansive "white" majority, and pushing American society back to a black/white split.
Again, this is why I'm a stickler for precision in argument. The author begins the discussion talking about "diversity"--not racial justice, not non-black, not minorities that have trouble integrating. With that in mind, he's simply wrong.
One could, I suppose, write an article looking at how "progressive cities" deal with their black population. But that's not what this article is. It's argument that progressive cities aren't very progressive, because of they aren't diverse, and they aren't diverse because they aren't black.
There is a problem in every step of this formulation. The author disqualifies two cities which include the the largest and third largest metro population of black people in the country. He then neglects to include "progressive" cities that he doesn't like (Washington, which as Yglesias points out has one the best post-war rapid transit systems in the country) or he jukes the stats so that the cities fit his paradigm (Minneapolis is actually 18 percent black, so the author looks at county-wide number even as he indicts the cities.)
With that much shifting, I just don't find the article very credible. And I think, if I wrote something that lax here, you guys would be on my ass. And rightfully, so.
Having lived in both these cities I'd like to comment on the missing link:
Would the public transportation that works in Portland really not translate to Cincinnati? Or is the fact that Cincinnati is conservative for a large city the reason that the policies can't be implemented.
The reason Cincinnati is conservative is that it's full of people from Kentucky and southern A-hi-ah among whom there are two types: White people who ignore, condone and/or enjoy racial segregation, and black people.
The progressive white people who might otherwise be living in Cincinnati fled long ago. The white people left there are not getting out of their cars to ride with black people on a bus.
Don't know if this helps but I gotta run.
Those comments...wow...that's when I started to really feel like a problem.
I've known blacks who grew up in Portland. They all happen to live on the East Coast now and discussed their negative experiences out there.
Also, what the hell does progessive even mean? My observation is that it is a word liberals started using during those eight years to not be tarred with the anti-American brush. (I apologize if I offend those who self-style themselves progressives). As someone who lives in one of the most hipsterish (?) enclaves in DC, I do understand the author's frustration for a certain "type". I just don't have the anger. Nothing changes but the locale, folks wanted to go to the suburbs too for quality of life. I can see the benefits of both.
*hugs xoxo* for Southerner. It's worth a lot to me. I grew up in Raleigh (go heels), RDU is the f-in airport. They are in two separate counties for crissake.
DM: "Progressive" predates Bush by a long shot and if you needed a simple definition, you could say it's "radical left" vs. "liberal" which tends to be more "left of center." Or these days, "center-center!"
It's not "the" radical left, although it might be "a" radical left. I might go so far as to say it's the contemporary mainstream of the authoritarian left.
Was this rant from that website "Stuff White People Like"? Or are we supposed to take it seriously?
I was with you until you mentioned the rum brother.
Is it just urban white people who can leave their families behind easily? Or is that a stereotype, too? I confess I've found it more than tempting at times, but my husband and I ended up staying where we are in part because this is where our roots are.
I think the population that can easily leave its families behind is the population that can easily afford airplane tickets.
My husband and I face this one now... we're in DC, which is far but not *too* far from my family in Boston and his in Raleigh & Wilmington NC. We're at a point where we're both kind of offhandedly considering a drastic move for career reasons, but as we approach the time in our lives where we're also kind of offhandedly considering kids, "accessible family" suddenly seems so meaningful...
I don't know... here in Philly there are tons of urban whites who are still here, and continue to be here... coming from California originally, I'm amazed at how everyone seems to know one another (this holds true for Philly's non-white populations as well, but that doesn't really address your point). But K-Commenter is right: those who can't afford to leave probably won't, whether they want to or not.
Nation of immigrants. People get up and move across the country all the time--generation 1 came from somewhere, and then generation 3 lit out for the west, and then generation 4 or 5 decided that the invention of air conditioning warranted moving to the south, and generation 6 wanted to go to NYC. Some of my ancestors made it out west before turning back for NY where my mom is from.
We settled in Boston in part because we had family nearby, but my parents had moved to be within hours of Boston only after I left home and was preparing to move overseas. And our initial MA presence, and the brother and uncle nearby, is because of the universities.
I think the implicit argument that these cities should be "doing more" to assure that their black population meets the national average
Okay, so the thing where you and Kenyatta fly into Albuquerque and pick out a 2500 square foot house with a pool, for less than half what you spend on rent in Harlem, is off now?
Because other than the fact that there are about 7 black families in this state and 47% of law enforcement attention is on them, this would be a happenin' place to raise your son. (Notice my use of hip vernacular, designed to help the undifferentiated Urban Black Person feel at ease in my progressive backwater.)
Has this Massa guy not been off of the East Coast in person, ever? Has he ever in his life spoken to a person of any race raising a black child and asked the question, Why do you live where you live?
Re: San Francisco.
As someone who lived there and in the greater Bay Area over the course of the '90s and most of the '00s, the city's diversity in regards to other people of color (i.e. besides African Americans) should be taken into consideration but let's also acknowledge that the historically larger Black community was being pushed out because of gentrification that was largely being fueled by affluent White folks moving in while working class folks - Black especially, but not exclusively - were being priced out. SF's lack of commitment to affordable housing during this time where demand was clearly increasing was a very specific form of politically-relevant policy that negatively impacted mostly Brown and Black families.
As an Asian American, my presence in S.F. might have improved its overall diversity if by diversity you mean "non-White" but in my opinion, diversity in the city narrowed not expanded and at least some of that does have to do with the politics of the city.
odub - Good points. I did not read this before posting above. What was done in the Fillmore, for example, was a travesty. But, jeez, SF seems pretty diverse to me, especially when compared to some other large cities. Whenever I go back home to Boston, I cannot believe how "white" it is, even though there are a lot more black people there, in general, than in San Francisco. SF/Bay Area has quite a kaleidoscope of people/cultures meshed together.
Posted this in the open thread but it works here too-Maybe dating or marriage prospects also factor in some people for where they`d like to live, OKCupid did a study of race as a factor in responses on the dating site-
"White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else--and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups' reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%."
Dating is hard enough, if you're trying to do it online, while being a straight AA dude, and living in a city like Portland, or Denver, or Phoenix, the odds are just that much more stacked against you I guess.
I read about this as well, pretty interesting. Surprised me that so many men responded favorably to middle eastern women. Not because of any preference on my behalf, but because I hear a lot more about guys who have Asian or Latina fetishes.
I think a couple of the issues people have been having with the article are due to the fact that it isn't a "general audience" piece but instead is more for the narrow "urban thinker" demographic. Which is not at all to say that "you all didn't get it" but rather that, in the world of geography and urban theory and stuff, giant cities like LA or Chicago or NY actually ARE treated separately, because they're so unlike other cities that there's just not as much that's directly applicable to medium-sized cities. And the particular cities he does use, like Portland, etc. are actually the ones you run into time and again as examples of "good cities." His is meant to be a counter-intuitive argument, but that only makes sense if you know that there is tons written about how to make more cities like Portland and not much at all written about how to make them like Atlanta. I think the city choices are just responding to what people in that field really are preoccupied with.
And I think the article does sort of point towards a reason that there aren't a lot of black people in these cities, namely that these cities manage to be as "nice" as they are by often pricing out lower-income types. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I think his implication isn't that these cities need more black people to be sufficiently diverse, but rather that these cities act like big suburbs, effectively cutting themselves off from "less-desirable" lower-income demographics like Mexican immigrants or blacks, and that people should be hesitant to try to apply what they're doing to older, more-established cities that already have larger minority/poor populations. Or something like that. And that point, I think, isn't entirely unreasonable.
I guess it would have helped if he cited people those people. Moroever, you have to understand what it means to take cities like Chicago and New York out of the mix, and then have a discussion about where black people live. On balance, there aren't very many black people in this country--we're 12-13 percent of the population. There very real reasons why we tend to live in the South, Midwest and along the East coast, which don't have much to do with urbanism.
Maybe a conversation about "urbanism" can exclude those cities--but you can't really have one about black and where they chose to live, in thatr way. But the New York metro area has (last time I checked) the largest community of black in the country.
But this isn't a particularly "black" problem. It may disproportionately affect black people, but it's really a problem of economic diversity. I'd like to see some actual hard evidence of what these cities are doing, if anything, to keep black people out. I don't doubt it.
Man listen--Negroes like Atlanta. Negroes like Chicago. Negroes like Houston. Negroes like Raleigh-Durham (another area that doesn't make the cut, for some reason.) Negroes like Oakland. Negroes have the right to like where they live, independent of Massa, for their own particular, native, independent reasons (family? great barbecue? housing stock?) Just like Jewish-Americans have the right to like New York--or not. Just like Japanese-Americans have the right to like Cali--or not.
This particular Negro loves Denver--and Chicago too. But the notion that black people are pawns on a chess-board, which conservatives and liberals move around in order to one-up each each other, has got to go. Sometimes--just sometimes--a black dude isn't a problem. He's just a dude trying to marry a beautiful woman, raise a decent kid, retire to an tropical island, smoke some good herb, and drink some good rum.
Coates, we've always been seen as a problem...nothing new here, but yes, this was odious.
you, however, are on point.
I am from Oregon, and Portland is every bit as awesome as people say it is...which has nothing to do with its demographic makeup. There ain't many black people in the pacific NW, there just ain't. I guess we should be sorry that we didn't partake much in slavery, because that's what's really responsible for a lot of black demographic distribution in this country. Just to repeat: Portland is not awesome because it's white. It's awesome because people in the NW are progressive and care about urban planning. It's also a new enough city in terms of growth that urban planning has been an actual thing for most of the time that Portland has been being built. I'd love it if P-town were more diverse, and I actually think it would make the city even cooler, but the idea that we need that for legitimacy is fucking ridiculous.
I live in Portland.
Oregon in general had a nasty history of excluding blacks (and I guess, non-whites in general) in the formative years that put us in a strange place.
Here's an article about it.
Quote:
Oregon was the only state admitted to the Union with a black exclusion law in its constitution (Illinois and Indiana had had similar laws, while other states made it difficult for blacks to live there). The state ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed citizenship for all U.S.-born people regardless of race, then rescinded its ratification. Oregon did not ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote, until 1959.
People up here seem to be really self congratulatory about how "liberal" they are and how accepting they are of non-whites, but man are they just as ignorant as anywhere else - actually, probably more so since many of them don't really deal with blacks on a day-to-day basis.
Not saying it's a crummy or bad place to live at all, just that people build it up to be more than it is. The lack of diversity is a handicap that brings down the average "coolness" of the city in general IMHO.
I gotta call b.s. on this.
For example, Illinois wasn't below the Mason-Dixon line but it has high numbers of Black people.
The migrations which followed the end of slavery had far more to do with contemporary patterns of not just Black, but general geographic distribution, especially with shifts in industry and job creation. The idea that Portland's blinding Whiteness is strictly because of 19th century demography doesn't wash.
TNC, thanks for bringing this out of the open thread and spotlighting it. Forgive me, but the cities in the article in question just look cherry-picked. Did the author not consider mid-sized cities like Tacoma, WA (60% white, 12% black, 8% asian) or Sacramento (50% white, 14% black, 17% asian), or any number of diverse communities in northern California? Maybe he needs a bigger data set. One problem with this article is that it raises some useful questions, but doesn't answer them in a satisfactory way. There's almost a suggestion of casuality: people who become progressive therefore move to non-black cities. But the west coast (except the large cities) has always had disproportionately fewer black folks than the south or northeast. Progressive attitudes didn't make it that way. The black demographic flight out of San Francisco had more to do with housing prices than whether people use light rail or solar panels.
As a died-in-the-wool New Yorker now living in Austin, I can't tell you how much this sort of thing irks me. The cherry-picked statistics; the implicit denial of the non-whiteness of Hispanics, Pakistanis, Filipinos, etc.; the idea, as TNC points out, that our goal is to have an even distribution of black people through the country, and that where any individual black family wants to live has nothing to do with it. Agk! This stuff makes me crazy.
For an alternative view, I urge you to look at this: http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_segregation_multi.html, and the more fine-grained segregation maps linked to on the left side. On almost every count, the farther northeast you go, the more segregation you encounter.
And if you sample by state (which makes as much or as little sense as any other metric), you find that there are four states (and DC) where less than 50% of the population is white.
Can you guess which ones?
Whoops. Lemme fix that link: http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_segregation_multi.html
Hm. I think my last post was somehow blocked or diverted. It was just to correct the link in the post above to http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_segregation_multi.html
Fellow Austinite here, and this kind of thing makes me grind my teeth. For one thing, most of Austin is NOT hipster-central. I live in the SW 'burbs, where the only distinction between us and people in Houston is that we vote D's.
Seriously, though, Austin is a majority non-white city. What we are, however, is monolithically middle-class. Because we don't have a large underclass and because we do have a lot of Creative Class jobs, somehow we're all racial hypocrites.
Hmm. I notice Burlington, VT is one of the least segregated by this measure. Considering how white Burlington is compared to, say, Boston, I have no idea what to do with this data.
Yeah, Persia, I assume it means that the very few families of color there live right next door to the white families. Rather than being stuck in a one square block ghetto, I suppose. For very small cities with mostly white populations, this sort of calculation is obviously a bit silly.
First off, thank you for posting a link to my article.
I think you are missing the point of it, so please let me try to explain.
Those of us who live in Midwest cities hear a constant refrain of how great places like Portland and Seattle area. How with their transit systems, pro-density policies, green policies, bike lanes, etc. they represent a more progressive and forward looking urban policy. Not per se that they are left-wing. Heck, plenty of Midwest places are beyond blue politically. But rather that they are held up as the example of what a small city should aspire to be. Places like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee constantly hear how behind the times they are and how they need to get with the Portland program.
But if you look at all those so-called progressive small cities, most of them don't have very many black people in them. That makes them questionable as role models in my opinion.
When I say that you should exclude Tier One cities, it is simply that everyone knows they are not realistic role models for smaller cities to imitate. Telling a city like St. Louis that it should be more like New York is crazy since there is nothing it could do to be like New York. But places like St. Louis are constantly told they could and should be more like Denver, Seattle, and Portland.
I think cities that do have significant black populations, like ours in the Midwest, should do a much better job in making those communities a major plank in their civic strategy. I think places like Atlanta and Houston have done a good job of that, which is why I suggest places like Indianapolis take a look and see what they can learn.
Thank you.
Atlanta and Houston made black communities a "major plank in their civic strategy" by selling them. Also, by buying them.
The fact that black people haven't left those cities in the post-Civil War/civil rights era has much to do land use policies that encouraged growth (cheap housing, plentiful jobs) in general. So you've got that right. But it's very unlikely that Portland or Seattle will ever become, e.g., both the energy capital of the world and a major hub for black history and culture. Probably not best to bank on that as a strategy for attracting minorities.
I agree however that less zoning would encourage a lower cost of living. At the same time, don't discount the negative externalities of urban sprawl-- it is definitely something we are thinking about in Houston.
Also, Houston is the 4th largest city in America. Not really a fair comparison for mid-sized Midwestern cities.
So what is your point?
What does having black people have to do with having mass transit or pro density policies?
Do black people need to commute differently from white people? Do black people not benefit from walkable urban cores that allow them to drive less? I'm really struggling to find your point.
Look your tap dancing around some pretty odious implications here. You may not intend it that way, but the clear implication of what your saying is that white people are all racists who won't live in proximity to black people. So the only reason that cities like mine (Portland) can do what we do is because there aren't any blacks here.
First of all that is not proven one way or the other by your data. As many people have painstakingly pointed out to you the black populations of Seattle and Portland in particular are much higher than the state's as a whole. If we didn't want to live with black people we wouldn't live in Seattle or Portland, we'd move to the suburbs. Which leads to my conclusion from the data, progressive cities have higher white populations because there is less white flight.
If that isn't your point then what is it?
If we didn't want to live with black people we wouldn't live in Seattle or Portland, we'd move to the suburbs.
Good point ... thus, "Searching for Whiteopia" the book I was talking about in open thread.
"Do black people need to commute differently from white people?"
Commuting patterns will be impacted by 1) who lives where and 2) what kind of jobs they work and where that requires them to go.
Are you suggesting that most neighborhoods and workplaces are evenly integrated (by even I mean "in proportion" not "50/50")? In almost any American city I can think of, especially those with heavy class stratification, there are definitely racialized patterns to home and work that would absolutely influence commuting patterns as well.
"If we didn't want to live with black people we wouldn't live in Seattle or Portland, we'd move to the suburbs"
I have a problem with this logic since it seems to ignore the fact that living in the suburbs is not like living in the city for reasons that have nothing to do with demography. Maybe you don't really want to live with Black people but you happen to like the amenities of city living over the suburbs and therefore, are willing to "compromise" on other preferences. I mean, most people would probably prefer to save money on housing than spending more yet people routinely opt against their economic interests in order to procure other things they desire.
I'm not suggesting Seattle or Portland are inherently more hostile racial environments than any other city, I just don't think you can throw out something as simple as, "well, if we really were racist, we'd all move to the suburbs!" especially if you look at the last 20 years of housing patterns that show more Whites moving into the central cities and people of color - Black especially, being moved to outer ring suburbs/exurbs, etc.
I'm not saying my conclusion is proven by the data either, I'm just saying it is an equally plausible reading.
On this specifically:
Are you suggesting that most neighborhoods and workplaces are evenly integrated (by even I mean "in proportion" not "50/50")? In almost any American city I can think of, especially those with heavy class stratification, there are definitely racialized patterns to home and work that would absolutely influence commuting patterns as well.
Yeah, but again so what? If you build a comprehensive mass transit system that covers where people live and where they work what difference does it make if blacks are 2% or 40%?
In Portland our Max line goes through lily white neighborhoods, Hispanic neighborhoods, Asian Neighborhoods, black neighborhoods and so on.
It goes by Intel, Nike, the high tech corridor in Beaverton, the inner city, the east side where the most affordable housing is, the strip mall suburbs of Clackamas County, and the upscale neighborhoods down town. A street car serves the rich Pearl district, but it also connects to Portland State University and Oregon Health Science's University. A janitor leaving in outer Gresham and working at PSU could get by just fine without a car. A poor person in the inner city who could only get a job at a Burger King in Clackmas could likewise get by without a car.
What other than choosing not to build something like that prevents a city like Indianapolis from doing the same thing?
Eric: I'm not trying to pick on Portland and so I shouldn't over-generalize my comments here but if you look at how mass transit is set up in, for example, the Bay Area, the BART system there is far more geared to service commuters from the area's wealthier suburbs (mostly white) than the neighborhoods where most Black and Brown families have settled. Mass transit exists for those populations as well - MUNI in SF, AC Transit in the East Bay, but anyone can tell you that where transit dollars and infrastructure have been invested have been slanted to some groups and not others.
All of which is to say, YES, in many cities, Black people do, in fact, commute differently than White people and public policy in certain cities has not addressed those differences. Again, I can't speak for Portland, not having lived there or studied its public transit infrastructure.
Well in this article the author is specifically talking about Portland and contrasting it with Atlanta and arguing that Atlanta is a better model for places like Indianapolis.
So at the risk of sounding rude, what do your generalized comments based on your experiences with BART have to do with anything?
I applaud you for responding in this way. I'm trying to understand why you consider Portland and Seattle to be questionable role models because they have few black people. Does the presence of blacks make the urban policy of a place like Portland automatically unworkable for Indianapolis?
Is it just bothersome to be told to be more like Portland? If that message is coming with a tone of dismissal of the quality of life in another city (e.g., Indianapolis), well, that's just dumb. But I guess I'm just trying to work out the collision between blacks and bike lanes that you seem to be implying.
Thank you. Firstly, I would say that some of the policies of Portland aren't per se bad. Public transit for example. But "lift and drop" is not appropriate.
I think there are two principal reasons for this:
1. Minority populations can have different policy priorities than upscale whites. For example, rather than climate change, it might be improving urban education or access to jobs. In most Midwest cities, minority communities disproportionately do not have access to a car. Most of the job growth has been in the suburban fringes that are poorly served by the pathetic transit systems that exist in places like Indianapolis. A light rail transit system that goes from an upscale white suburb to downtown may provide few benefits to minorities. This is one reason, I believe, that the local NAACP opposes the Cincinnati streetcar system. Note that the most recent video from the city supporting it features the mayor (who in fairness is black) touting the potential of the streetcar to turn a building into multiuse development featuring "Starbucks" and "condos". But if you lived in a food desert, why would that appeal to you as a voter?
2. In cities of the Midwest and Rustbelt and south, investment in central city areas is often seen through the lens of the history of social justice struggles, making white voters less likely to support it.
These factors are simply present to a much lower degree in a place like Portland.
Hasn't there also been resistance in some towns to street cars/light rail that connects the affluent areas with the poor areas, out of fears it will make it easier for criminals to travel to the affluent areas (I remember reading something about this in regards to a D.C. suburb)? Since criminals and honest working people both live in the poor areas, obviously efforts to isolate the first group will end up isolating the second group.
In most Midwest cities, minority communities disproportionately do not have access to a car. Most of the job growth has been in the suburban fringes that are poorly served by the pathetic transit systems that exist in places like Indianapolis. A light rail transit system that goes from an upscale white suburb to downtown may provide few benefits to minorities.
So build a light rail system that serves those needs. Our system is far more than the street car that goes through the Pearl district. Our Max line runs from lower income Hillsboro on the west of Portland to lower income Gresham on the east, a N-S line goes through North Portland, another line goes to the airport, and the new line goes to SE Clackamas county, which is where the lowest income people (mostly white by way) live.
"Minority populations can have different policy priorities than upscale Whites." Mr. Renn, is it your contention that minority populations all belong to the same economic demographic?
#2 I'll grant you halfway, but #1 is just the problems of poor people generally, and isn't specific to race. Portland may not have many minorities, but that doesn't mean it's the magical city with no poor people. It just means that the poor people in Portland are white, too. And yet they've still been able to have these various progressive urban policies.
Or, it could be that by definition, nobody without a car can move into a suburb without bus service and expect to commute, so people who choose not to have cars are restricted from the suburbs, and people in the suburbs tend to have little use for them.
Add to that just a hint of racism or fear of the other.
I'm not sure that Atlanta provides a good model these days. Have Gwinnett and Forsythe Counties been added to the light-rail transit system yet? Atlanta is also (in)famous for steep racial disparities, segregation and crime.
Please stop treating black as coextensive with minority and/or diversity. It's fallacious and insulting. Austin, for example, is actually a minority white city but because your metric does not treat the Hispanic/Latino population as "diverse" this gets lost in the mix. That skews your analysis. It would also be a shock to much of Austin' Hispanic/Latino population to be told that they don't count as a minority, especially given that the city and its white population have historically treated them as one.
Similarly, your analysis of Seattle (and Austin as well actually) does not take into account the larger than average Asian population.
In some parts of the country, it is simply not accurate to say that African Americans alone are or traditionally have been "the sine qua non" of diversity. Along much of the Pacific coast, Asian populations are a better measure, if you insist on using a single ethnic group to measure diversity (a mistake in and of itself). Throughout much of the Southwest, including Texas, the sine qua non group, if you must choose one, would be Hispanics/Latinos.
Whatever other merits your points about the non-portability of the Portland model to other cities may have, this aspect of you article really undermines your persuasiveness.
Aaron, welcome. Please take a look at this map, and see how the Midwest comes out: http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_segregation_black.html
I realize you're talking about diversity more than segregation per se, but -- really, even if we accept your premise, how much can you crow about having, say, a 20% black population, when they don't actually interact with white people? Is that really diversity?
I recommend Randy Newman's song 'Rednecks' -- especially the last verse -- as a more forceful way of making my point.
Nice to see you here, though.
There is another obvious problem with the way the author of the article in question framed the issue of diversity and that lies in using minority population percentages for the counties the cities cited are in. I'm from Cincinnati. The population of Hamilton County is roughly 850k; Cincinnati, 380K. The black population of Hamilton County is about 25%; Cincinnati, close to 50%. Why the difference? Because the overwhelming majority of blacks in the county also live in the city. That's why the city tends Democratic, while the county as a whole is reliably Republican.
Given the tendency of suburban areas to be less diverse than central cities and the older inner ring neighborhoods which used to be suburbs, this isn't surprising. And since we tend to refer to progressive cities as cities without reference to their suburbs (or we should if we don't), the interesting question when it comes to diversity is what percentage of a city's population is of color, not a county's.
My guess is that Aaron Penn knows the demographic differences between cities and counties (which explains why Keith Ellison and Michelle Bachmann can be elected by voters who largely live in Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis) and used the county figures because they made the cities look less diverse than they in fact are.
I have no explanation for why he thinks it's notable that some "progressive cities" have black populations that fall under the black proportion of the nation as a whole (or why he thinks "diversity" means black), but he might consider that the difference has nothing to do with a city's attractiveness to blacks and something to do with distance from the "old country" (the South), and the impact of that distance on historic migratory patterns.
It may have even more to do with the fact that so many cities have proportionately far larger black populations and the whole time/space continuum thing dictates that we can't be in two places at once.
Michelle Bachmann was elected by voters in Benton, Sherburne, Stearns, Wright, Washington and Anoka counties. Keith Ellison was elected by voters in Hennepin, Ramsey and Anoka counties. The only county with overlap in voters between the two is Anoka and Anoka's a pretty schizophrenic county consisting of first ring suburbs that today have large minority communities and more far flung suburban typical white-flight communities.
I'm willing to accept your point that Cleveland can't follow Seattle's path that easily... but I think racism may be less relevant than deindustrialization: Seattle has done what it does because of Boeing and Microsoft, Cleveland would do well not to wait for Bill Gates to set up shop.
Where things take on a --somewhat -- racial tinge is in our national problem with social and geographical mobility: urban blight is particularly persistent because there are few paths out of poverty into the middle class. It is also particularly persistent because the affluent move -- and chase opportunity -- comparatively more often than those in poverty.
This brings up a way for cities to diversify: be sure to have low unemployment, good wages, low crime and as little recent history of racist actions as possible. Of course, these are very good things for all cities to do, and if Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, DC and Cleveland pull it off, the diversification of the Pacific Northwest will have to wait.
As for the segregation measures -- they are a bit silly. A neighborhood that maintains a proportion of 55% black and 40% white for 30 years who speak with one voice on many issues and attend each others' funerals is "segregated" while a census tract whose northern 30% is 98%+ black, its southern 60% is 98%+ white, physical violence is meted out to whoever strays too far into "enemy territory" and the border is covered in "for sale" signs is "integrated".
I just re-read your piece so please take this response as the fair criticism that is intended. I think I understand what you are trying to say-- namely that struggling Rust Belt cities should not look to "smart growth" cities such as Portland as models of revival/renewal. As it happens, I generally agree with this conclusion-- less land use regulation and more flexible transit policies do seem to lower housing costs and encourage growth. But that's not what you are saying.
I think your reasoning as to why Portland et al are not good models for Rust Belt cities conflates many different problems of class, race, history, geography, and urban planning into a single measure: percent of African-Americans in the population. This is not a very convincing argument for a number of reasons, almost all of which have been outlined above. Among other issues:
(a) % of blacks is not a good proxy for racial diversity,
(b) racial diversity is not a good proxy for urban livability,
(c) ignoring how and why black people first came (or did not come) to a certain place when examining its current black population is somewhat sloppy,
(d) slamming any American city for lacking "the diversity of a Miami, Houston, Los Angeles or... other unheralded towns from the Texas border" is meaningless for obvious reasons of scale, geography and history, and also has nothing to do with the basic premise (what do you want Indianapolis to emulate from Laredo, TX?), and especially
(e) statements such as "It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics" presuppose some sort of ex ante racial preference in public policies that obviate every single other factor that might make a person like or not like a specific policy.
(Also (f) just to set the record straight, the black Katrina refugees that came to Houston barely made a blip in the 4.4mm+ people who already live in the metro area. There were no problems because there was lots of cheap housing, cultural familiarity, jobs due an energy boom, and lots and lots of FEMA vouchers. Our mayor did provide good leadership initially, but in general it was a simple market response in an already cosmopolitan metro area, not a specific policy or strangely welcoming culture here.)
Anyway, I think (e) in particular is hard for regular readers of this blog to stomach, as we long ago established that people are individuals, not "racial automatons" as TNC says. The point is often made here that what's good for America is good for black people. Similarly, what's good for Indianapolis (in terms of jobs, housing, livability, safety, etc) is good for black people in Indianapolis. And those good ideas for Indianapolis might come from anywhere. Possibly, though not probably, even from Portland.
Wish you would have written this earlier, I could have saved a lot of time by simply saying, see Amitav's post:-)
You also hit on the key phrase that especially rankles and is what leads me to distrust the author's motives:
It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics
that is right out of the Sailorite playbook.
*Sigh* Man, I am always late to the party at TNC's place. It's been my modus operandi since he went big time at The Atlantic. Also since there's no longer an RSS feed for comments...
Anyway, yeah, that phrase about Scandinavians was jarring. A charitable reading could mean that the traditional power structure in Minneapolis focused on excluding Jews, etc. from power. But really, it's got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've read in a while... hard to understand what a pro-Scandinavian education or transit policy looks like except in the crudest racialized sense.
Its an easy way of writing off Minnesota's progressive tradition. Its always used against Minnesotans who say small to mid sized cities in the midwest can have progressive policies. Yeah, Minnesota and Wisconsin have a lot of people of Scandinavian descent. Minnesota also has many people of French, Hmong, Vietnamese, Laotian, Somali, and indigenous descent. States like North and South Dakota also have many people of Scandinavian descent but without the "Scandinavian policies"
I think you guys are over-reaching a little. I didn't like the article, either, but by "Scandinavian policies" I assume he simply means the kind of Socialism Lite practiced in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and so on. Scandinavian economic, urban, and social policies are widely considered to be most liberal and equitable in the world. On that level, "Scandinavian policies" has nothing to with whiteness, as such; if India and Pakistan were like that, we could easily be speaking of "South Asian policies".
On the other hand, "Scandinavian demographics", especially in the context of his essay, seems to mean something like "middle class white people". And it's hard to see what the connection between that kind of demographic and that kind of policy is, or what he's suggesting it is. The way he puts it certainly has some unseemly implications.
But the guy seems to have his heart in roughly the right place: I think he's wrong, but I don't think he's malevolent. I'm willing to chalk that line up to inchoate thinking and, perhaps, hasty writing.
Austin-- where I was born and raised-- has lots of black people. Lots of black roots anyway. It was segregated as hell when I was kid (school district integrated in ~1982 by court order). Blacks may have declined in percentage terms because of immigration. But they used to own slaves down there, see. So if one strolls (softly now!) around east Austin, one just might catch sight of a black person-- perhaps around the George Washington Carver library, or perhaps around Huston-Tillotson College (celebrating 134 years of HBCU roots), or perhaps around a barbershop, eatery, or other native habitat endangered by gentrification and/or Latino immigration.
In all seriousness, I think the reason there aren't more black people moving to Austin and "similar" cities is the same reason most people aren't moving to those places-- there are very few jobs that can support the cost of living. Among other things, the land use restrictions in those cities really impair the development of cheap housing for young people/middle-class families. Especially compared to a city like Houston, my adopted hometown. Compared to Portland or Minneapolis though, there is certainly much more of black "infrastructure" in Austin. Just no jobs. Or housing.
I point out, for the record, that the Houston Chronicle just co-endorsed a black man and a gay woman for mayor of this fine city. I guess that makes Houston progressive. Great Vietnamese food, too.
There is an obvious problem with the way the author of the article in question framed the issue of diversity and that lies in using minority population percentages for the counties the cities cited are in. I'm from Cincinnati. The population of Hamilton County is roughly 850k; Cincinnati, 380K. The black population of Hamilton County is about 25%; Cincinnati, close to 50%. Why the difference? Because the overwhelming majority of blacks in in the county also live in the city. That's why the city tends Democratic, while the county as a whole is reliably Republican.
Given the tendency of suburban areas to be less diverse than central cities and the older inner ring neighborhoods which used to be suburbs, this isn't surprising. And since we tend to refer to progressive cities as cities without reference to their suburbs (or we should if we don't), the interesting question when it comes to diversity is what percentage of a city's population is of color, not a county's.
Since I suspect the author knows the demographic differences between urban and suburban areas (the kind of difference that allows both Keith Ellison and Michelle Bachmann to represent residents of the Minnesota County that contains Minneapolis), I find myself wondering if his choice to use population figures for counties and not cities was made to strengthen his case.
Great points. There are definitely a lot of data issues with the article...
To piggy-back on Persia up-thread and OGWiseman, I think lots of people tend to stay where their families are, and/or where others of their kind are, not out of a fear or hatred of others, but because that's what humans do. I don't think the white hipsters in Portland are responsible for the low population of blacks in the Northwest overall.
And I don't know, I don't think anyone who holds up Portland as an example of good urban planning is basing that on a lack of diversity. It's based on physical features. Is the author of the piece implying that small cities with urban building boundaries and a big emphasis on bikes and public transit holds are inherently unappealing to black folks, because of those very features?
This just smacks of contrarianism, as discussed earlier today. Let's expose those hipsters as racists! As if everyone in this country decides where to live based on a conscious examination of the distribution of races.
A lot of what Charles S. says. The question is what could induce anyone who isn't already upper middle class (or above) to move to certain "progressive" cities. If the city is more concerned with lifestyle and environmental protection than creating jobs, it won't draw working class and lower middle class people (of any color) in large numbers. This problem is compounded if city real estate prices skyrocket.
The result tends to be a rich inner city and poorer exurbs, rather than the reverse. Rich people on public transportation, poorer people driving big cars 40 miles out. Middle income people in the middle suburbs in both cases.
A lot of the places where poor people are busy trying to become rich people are in the ugly strip-zoned places on the fringes of urban areas. This is just the kind of thing a lot of wealthy progressives hate. But you can't build a whole regional economy on organic coffee shops and farmers' markets. The other stuff all has to go somewhere, and it goes elsewhere if the progressive cities zone it out.
I guess the really key question is whether the "other stuff" has to go somewhere. Is there an alternative to strip-zoning that could also be inexpensive, promote job growth for working-class and poor people - be safe, livable, affordable, even beautiful?
What I'm saying is, I hope that lifestyle and environmental protection are not inherently opposed to creating jobs forever and ever, so we could have whole regional economies that include jobs that everyone can do, but maybe don't have lots of strip centers and sprawl. I hate to think there isn't a better way, but I know wishful thinking won't get it done.
Light industrial has never been pretty, and heavy industrial has always been hideous. Cheap land, utilitarian structures, layouts designed for moving stuff around rather than for human recreation and aesthetic enjoyment. Every culture has to put the ugly but practical stuff somewhere. Even Paris has quite a lot of it on the urban fringes. And my understanding of city planning is that it has always been that way. Before there were modern industrial parks, there was still that place where the slaughterhouses and tanneries had to be.
Investing heavily in making such places pretty might cost enough to drive some of the low-margin businesses out of existence. Some people may consider that to be worth it. But it IS a trade-off, and it's one that sometimes involves prosperous people taking an "I've got mine" position. Whatever you want to call that position, I tend to think it disqualifies someone from claiming the "progressive" label.
Thanks TNC for pointing out that quite a few of us negroes do like the Raleigh Durham Triangle area.
And quite a few HIspanics, Indians, and Asians, too.
There is another obvious problem with the way the author of the article in question framed the issue of diversity and that lies in using minority population percentages for the counties the cities cited are in. I'm from Cincinnati. The population of Hamilton County is roughly 850k; Cincinnati, 380K. The black population of Hamilton County is about 25%; Cincinnati, close to 50%. Why the difference? Because the overwhelming majority of blacks in in the county also live in the city. That's why the city tends Democratic, while the county as a whole is reliably Republican.
Given the tendency of suburban areas to be less diverse than central cities and the older inner ring neighborhoods which used to be suburbs, this isn't surprising. And since we tend to refer to progressive cities as cities without reference to their suburbs (or we should if we don't), the interesting question when it comes to diversity is what percentage of a city's population is of color, not a county's.
Assuming the author knows the demographic differences between cities and counties, my guess is he used the county figures because they made the cities look less diverse than they in fact are.
Heh. Enjoyed this choice bit of bilge from Renn:
What, if you remove all the data that doesn't fit your preconceived conclusion, then the remaining data will confirm your obvious bias? Well, duh.
Basically an article that posits correlation as causation.
Even given the causal link, there remains a debate whether false consciousness is the problem of white elites in Portland or white working classes in New York or Philadelphia: i.e. is the problem that white Portlanders are too Liberal because there are no blacks around, or that Archie Bunker is too Conservative because there are?
Frankly, it seems that Portland's politics have generated a fairly livable, humane city, rather more livable than Queens or Manhattan. In short, maybe Archie Bunker could build a better neighborhood for himself if he'd get over his racial hang-ups, stop listening to Rush Limbaugh and support health care reform.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned how very young Portland and Seattle are. Neither amounted to much at the end of the Civil War, and neither was all that accessible to the rest of the country until after the railroads came through. Both are really 20th century cities, tracing their rise to the emergence of the United States as a global and especially Pacific Ocean power. They're somewhat isolated -- culturally and geographically -- even now. They certainly couldn't have absorbed the kind of post-Civil War migration that northern cities like New York (Philadelphia, Boston, etc.) did.
Katherine: Los Angeles is just as young; the main difference is that there was far more industrial investment spent on developing a local economy that drew millions there in the first half of the 20th century, from all major ethnic groups. So it's not just age that's the issue in terms of how these cities developed.
Los Angeles is only 11% black, though. More than Seattle, true, but far less than New York or Chicago.
isn't the largest factor that drew people to the greater Los Angeles area all the defense contractors that located there during and after WW II?
Yes, Denver is "all white." Except for the roughly 50% (34% latino, 10% African-American, 3% Asian, 1% American Indian) who aren't.
I Grew up in New MExico, and live near Seattle now, after living in Kansas City for a decade. The Minority groups differ, but the stereotypes stay the same. In White parts of New Mexico it was lazy shiftless Hispanics, in Hispanic parts it was lazy shiftless Indians, In Kansas City it was Blacks, and Mexicans, and here it's Indians and (Interestingly enough) Russians.
The issue is not who its directed against, its the attitude of disliking the other without understanding the other. Progressivism is about understanding and embracing the other, to the point where other gets hard to define rigidly.
Just want to point out that the obnoxious Steve Sailor has picked up Mr. Renn's article and is using it on the few liberal/open-minded sites that accept his bilge. He pushed this idea extensively on a thread of Matt Yglesias's last night. Mr. Renn should get used to being the pawn of racists when he confuses correlation with causation from henceforth. (And I've asked over there -MY's place - why oh why his comment threads attract so many white populists/supremacists but got no answer. Anybody know? Glad commentors here are so reasonable, but I guess TNC is more vigilant.)
because Matt doesn't police his comment threads, so it it is a free for all, if anyone ever complains about TNC being too quick to ban trolls all they need to do is spend a few minutes at Matt's place.
Correlation does not equal causation ftw. That's all that needs to be said.
Don't want to be a wet blanket, but I don't really see what about this article actually would fit under the "correlation equals causation" heading. I think Mr. Renn wasn't so much concerned with causation as with implication, namely, that cities with demographics that are significantly less black than other cities (which they are - most Midwestern, Eastern, and certainly Southern cities are significantly "more black" than the national average, so cities that are actually below the national average are pretty far off) are in many ways poor models for other, more diverse cities.
Now, there are certainly problems with this, that people have already pointed out - blacks aren't a monolithic group, they're not all poor, other minority groups add diversity, economic factors should be considered instead of just racial diversity - but I just don't think that his point was that black people don't want to live in these progressive cities or that these cities are somehow less welcoming to blacks, but that people who hold them up as examples need to take into account the particulars of whatever city they're trying to fix up. It didn't strike me as being about why black people live where they do, so much as it did seem to be about recognizing that different cities have different populations, and acknowledging that these different populations aren't going to end up with the same "ideal" city as an end result.
From the article:
I could be wrong but this really does seem to imply that these cities are not very progressive because their no black people there. I think this is a bit more than simply recognizing that different cities have different populations. It's also more than simply saying that there are different models for the ideal city. He's strongly implying that Denver, Portland, Seattle etc. aren't just "different models," but not progressive models at all.
TNC is right, and I was probably helping Renn out a little much. But I still think that, rather than saying they're not progressive at all, what he's saying is that these "apparently progressive" cities are allowed to be so "progressive" (in the pretty narrow sense of dense urban cores, public transport, bike lanes, etc) at least partially because of their demographic makeup. At the same time, that demographic makeup isn't reflected in other mid-sized cities like Cincy or Milwaukee, so A) the "progressive" model of Denver won't work in Cleveland, and B) there's something to be said for Cleveland having a ton of black people. Anyways, I'm definitely beating a dead horse at this point. I just see Mr. Renn's ultimate point as one coming more from a need to defend Midwestern cities from people who say "Portland is so much more progressive than Indy" than coming from a desire to attack those cities, full stop. But again, maybe my own Midwestern bias is changing his argument in my head.
Anyways, on a totally shameless note, I just have to say that being replied to by Ta-Nehisi Coates made my month, and blew my mind. So thanks for that, and most everything else you post.
yeah but even granting him your more generous reading, keep in mind this line It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics also in the article.
To me there only two ways to interpret that:
1) all white people are such racists that they will only spend on infrastructure, smart growth and so on if it primarily benefits other white people.
or
2) Minorities are incapable of developing nice cities like Portland so if their population gets too high they inevitable ruin the place.
I don't think either reflects too well on the author, and basically shows his article is nothing but trolling.
If someone has a fairer interpretation I'm all ears.
Needless to say I think both answers are incorrect and the quote is nonsense for the many reasons pointed out above, not least of which the way he cherry picked cities to eliminate ones that didn't fit his thesis.
Charles,
I do it all the time! Stick around!
I think that statement actually just means what it says; read it again with a slight substitution: "It's easy to have Republican policies if you have Republican demographics." He's saying that the constituency matters. He isn't saying that too many minorities will ruin a city. Part of what he's saying is that the diversity that comes with having a large minority population also includes a greater diversity of opinion, and that can mean that different groups will have differing views of what a "nice city" is, and this splintering of opinion is enough to derail the more projects. I'm hoping you were at least half-joking when you implied he was a racist troll, because the actual article is not nearly that crazy.
And as for the city choice, all I can say is that there aren't many cities that I could think to include in the group "Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Austin, Denver." Some of the others - Atlanta and Houston and DC have been mentioned - just don't fit his needs because they aren't cities that other cities model themselves after. Maybe Atlanta, but Houston is definitely not drawing imitators because it's both too big and generally unattractive. And DC won't translate well, either, because of its crazy not-in-a-state, Seat-of-Government thing.
Charles--Not much more to add here other than what TNC said. The point I really took from the article was that these cities were whiter because young, white people were "fleeing" from black people. Again, not to say that hipsters and young progressives can't be racist, I just don't think they'd move to a new city solely for that reason.
One thing white liberals always have trouble realizing is that black people are not going to love them and want to hang out with them just because they are white liberals. Black people have their own culture, and they like their culture and are not pining to be enlightened by the glories of white culture. Radiohead and 2pac sound different because they are produced by different cultural currents. It's great whenever those worlds collide and interact, but it should never be something that is forced; it should be allowed to develop on its own. The best thing white people can do is chill and let black people do their thing unharrassed.
Gee, thanks for clarifying that for me.
"The best thing white people can do is chill and let black people do their thing unharrassed."
Hmmmm...
""The best thing white people can do is chill and let black people do their thing unharrassed."
Isn't that what those white hipsters are doing, in effect, when they move to cities like Portland and Seattle -- letting the black folks back in their home cities do their own things?
"How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?"
A line straight out of Albert Murray...
(To link back to an earlier discussion about our country's unique and culture, anyone interested in the fundamental confluence of "American" and "black" who hasn't checked out Murray's "The Omni-Americans" - a classic of the "black folk are more American than Apple Pie" school - should do so.)
In my post on this ( Coates and Co. on The White City ) I posted a photo which I noted gave a sense of the sort of diversity one might find in some of the trendier neighborhoods in New York City. Hackensack, on the other hand, is much more diverse. It's also not trendy at all.
I would like to voice some support for the Renn piece. It makes sense to me in the sense that, for those of us living in highly diverse cities (New York in my case) urban problems are almost all tightly wound in the problems of inequality, fear, and racism against people of color. You would have to have blinders on to miss that. Every discussion, from the neighborhood level (rezonings, police brutality, education, etc) is fully loaded with racial and ethnic politics. I think a lot of times when people from here go to small liberal oases like Seattle or Portland, they think, well it's great that you have done this, and it seems like a wonderful place to live, but you didn't have to deal with sooo much that divides and distorts people's lives here in New York. My girlfriend recently had that experience going to Seattle. To a lesser extent, it mirrors my view on gentrification. In Park Slope and Williamsburg, they have some really wonderful things going on. But unfortunately, in large part, white people did those things by replacing and displacing people of color, and that is not wonderful. So maybe that influences my view a lot as well.
Word.
I'm going to try to speak up a little--just a little--for the article. My angle of vision probably matters: I'm reading as a white liberal activist based in small-town Kentucky. I saw some things worth considering in the article.
1. People I know and like have been moving to Seattle, Portland, and Austin for decades, and the "cities" I spend the most time in--Louisville and Lexington--definitely count them as models. I didn't know that those "liberal oases" had such small black populations. That's worth knowing just as information.
2. Renn writes "But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?" That's aimed at a white audience. It's calling out people very like me for still not being conscious of some of our own motivations.
3. The "Scandinavian policies" dig made sense to me. It's easy to get middle class support for public investments if the middle class imagines the beneficiaries as like them. And it's been historically damned hard to get the white middle class to see black citizens that way. Renn's argument about public transportation is that Portland and Seattle didn't accidentally have communities willing to invest. They had communities where fear of black neighbors wasn't a driving factor in white behavior. It wasn't liberalism or inclusiveness that made the white voters less worried about sharing the train with black people. It was the fact that white people couldn't find anyone to get worried about.
4. I think Renn knows the "liberal oases" have Asian and Latino populations. But writing from the Midwest, he's used to the pattern of white people not finding those kinds of diversity scary. At least for his region, he's right that what cripples cities is undigested white stupidity specifically about black people.
5. I take Renn's deep point to be that folks in every city need to get down to the business of seriously sharing their towns. That's why he thinks Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston are better models: they've gotten closer to dealing with the black-white thing head on. It's why Cincinnati is the example of what not to do: the push for streetcars tried to skip that engagement and got crushed.
6. I think his beef is not with Seattle but with Seattle-wannabes. He's saying that folks in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, are only going to be able to improve their towns by working with the neighbors they've actually got, and getting buy-in for changes that make sense to the people who actually live there.
None of that gets the guy out having made his case in a disturbing and clumsy way. I had to read three times to figure out why the hell he thought the black thing mattered.
Nevertheless, I don't think he's arguing that Seattle should recruit black people to abandon Cleveland or anywhere else. I think he's arguing that Cleveland should stop daydreaming about becoming Seattle, and get on with building new strength on top of the main strength Cleveland already has--which is the people who already call Cleveland home.
A very thoughtful response. Some quick reactions to your points:
1. I don't trust his data. Others have already talked about the problem with city vs. county data. There's also the crucial issue of missing context, i.e., shouldn't it matter that most black people who live in Washington do live in Seattle?
2. I don't get this. Is "liberal guilt" really such a motivation that people would leave behind all their roots rather than move to the 'burbs? And why should we assume it's easier for whites to migrate in this pattern than other groups?
3. What, exactly, is a "Scandinavian" public transit policy, if one assumes that public transit systems can't discriminate against passengers? If this is shorthand for economic/class issues, I get it-- but it's very sloppy shorthand. In 1934, when the Teamsters strike in Minneapolis turned into a multi-day riot, what exactly was the "Scandinavian" interest in the outcome?
Not to ignore the real impact of racial politics, but I don't understand how this translates into racial policy if outright discrimination is outlawed. I understand how a pro-Harlem policy can exist, and how most beneficiaries might be black. But pro-black does not equal pro-Harlem, and vice versa. That's the problem with Renn's very crude shorthand.
4. Can't comment on how people feel, but I think if he had included other races it would have voided his thesis by wrecking his data.
5. There is nothing special about Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta except that they are 'bout business (low cost of living and lots of jobs), and they don't have to rebuild their economies on the wreckage of dying manufacturing industries-- Atlanta has consumer goods, Dallas has telecom, finance, and energy, and Houston has energy, medicine, logistics, and more energy. A lot of being a successful town is about not getting crushed by economic trends; to the degree that certain "anti-progressive" stances (no unions, lax zoning, cheap immigrant labor) have helped growth, there might be something interesting to talk about-- but that's not his point. There is nothing exceptional about race relations in Houston vs. Austin, except that Houston is just bigger and more cosmopolitan.
6. I don't think he even makes this assertion. He is pushing the more nebulous complaint that Midwestern cities are "always told" to look at the creative-class cities for inspiration. Who is doing the telling, and who, if anyone, is actually listening, is not something he addresses. I am really skeptical that city leaders in Louisville dream about how to transform their city into Seattle. They probably worry about more concrete quality of life metrics like crime and home affordability.
On 2), I'm speaking for my own tribe of white educated liberals, and yes, folks like me undervalue their roots, migrate often, and frequently fail to notice the racial content of their own motivations. Birkenstocks make us more conscious of our toes, but they don't guarantee self-awareness on other issues.
On 6), Renn was explicitly talking about mid-west cities, and Kentucky doesn't quite count itself as mid-west, but he does indeed have his finger on the pulse of Kentucky city development discussions. If you asked any reporter from the Courier-Journal of the Herald-Leader about "wanting to be like Seattle," you'd get the names of the key players and a list of the events that indicate the desire. These are good people, trying to build something good, and more than a few are my friends. Still, Renn is right that there's something unhealthy in letting those distant models loom too big in our vision and strategies for our own places.
More generally, I read Renn from my own perspective, and from where I sit, I think he's genuinely trying to get middle-of-the-country small-city liberals to do better work in their own communities rather than longing to be like some place else.
I think Renn knows the "liberal oases" have Asian and Latino populations. But writing from the Midwest, he's used to the pattern of white people not finding those kinds of diversity scary.
I'll second what Amitav said about Renn likely cherry-picking the data to support his hypothesis, but I'll also grant that you may be on to something here. Being a lifelong Southern Californian, it really does seem bizarre to read articles (Renn is far from the only one to do this) about racial diversity in this country that characterize the situation as strictly a black vs. white issue, but I guess in a good amount of the country, that's how it looks.
Anyway, let me just say that as a resident of a region with a lot of Latinos and Asians, there is a lot of nuance to the concept of how integrated a group is or isn't. Latinos are integrated in many ways here. They've been here longer than English-speakers have; there are very few parts of SoCal without an unusually small number of Latinos; many hold elective office and it is not unusual to see Latinos in positions of authority; etc. But at the same time, there large parts of towns in which Latinos make up 90+% of the population (i.e., they are segregated), tensions between older and newer residents of an area often revolve around White-Latino conflicts, etc. There's also the complication of Latinos, obviously, not being homogenous: there are those who speak English at home vs. those who speak Spanish at home, recent immigrants vs. those whose families have been established for generations, those of Mexican heritage vs. Central Americans, etc.
It's easy to look at Asians' academic and business success and assume that everything's hunky-dory there, but again, that's a vast oversimplification. My wife's parents are from Taiwan, and she's said that she feels people look at her like something of an alien when she's not on the West Coast. And if you think white people wig out over seeing Spanish business signs in their neighborhood, that's nothing next to how they react when the boulevards are full of signs in Chinese or Korean. And again, Asians are not a monolithic group, either.
Of course, late to the party again (damn that west coast time lag!)
Kudos TNC. It was insulting to this Latina.
One problem I have when trying to have a conversation about politics with many self-described conservatives is that so many of them start with a rather elaborate set of assumptions about the way people in this country are that is unique to them - there is a heavy dose of derisive and often resentful or sneering talk about "elitist liberals". They seem to be reacting to talking heads and Washington D.C. establishment types and a few obnoxious Hollywood celebrities and old newspaper columnists, as best as I can tell, or at least, the portayal of these archetypes that i have often heard on talk radio or cable news or in books by Ann Coulter and the like. This goes hand in hand with the assignment of an entire set of beliefs to 'these people', I'm still talking about the "liberal elitists" here, such as the desire to control an astounding degree of our personal lives (honestly to the degree of a totalitarian state). I'm a bit confounded by all this.
I swear the entire blogosphere has missed the entire point of Aaron's piece. He sum's it up best in his blog post here.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/001110-the-white-city
When I say “progressive”, I don’t mean it in a left-politics sense – Midwest cities like Cleveland are very blue, for example – but rather that places like Portland and Denver are held up as exemplars that other cities should be imitating in terms of urban policies. I actually happen to be a big fan of a lot of what they are doing and think a lot of it worthy of adapting to other places. I’ll even go so far as to say that changing land use and transportation policies in our urban cores is an absolute imperative if we expect that Midwest cities are ever going to regenerate themselves.
But I am troubled that cities who share a lack of African Americans as a core feature in common are considered the model. Far better would be truly diverse cities like NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami – but those Tier One cities simply can’t be imitated by much smaller places.
Perhaps those cities can’t be blamed for their history and resulting demographics. And I don’t think all American cities should have the exact same demographic mix. But it isn’t realistic to expect that the models that work there will work in other places.
That’s the piece of the puzzle that is missing in places like the Rust Belt and the South. Cities try to “lift and drop” the policies and sales plan of Portland without considering the local context in terms of how things like transit should be targeted to benefit the entire community and promote social justice, as well as how to sell forward looking urban policies in this environment.
Maybe the question should go deeper. The Portland light rail was brought about by NIMBY, that is, opposition to a proposal to build the Mount Hood Freeway and I-505. The result of the NIMBY was that Portland decided to connect itself to Gresham via light rail.
The Midwest does not have as finely developed a talent for discerning good NIMBY from bad. Illinois wants to build an "third airport" in Peotone, Illinois that the people of Peotone do not want. Meanwhile Gary-Chicago Airport is expanding a runway and would desperately love to become the "third airport". It has occurred to few people outside Peotone and Gary to save the nation $10 billion and content themselves with Gary.
Meanwhile, Mitch "Pave The Earth" Daniels wants to build a tollway through southern Lake County, Indiana to connect I-65 with I-57 at Peotone. The NIMBYs don't want to become the southern flank of metro Chicago sprawl for a variety of reasons, and the merchants along US 30's twelve miles of shopping in mid-county probably don't want to lose their customers from points south. The tollway would not relieve congestion on the Borman Expressway; truckers already avoid tolls and the Borman by taking Route 2, about 5 miles south of the proposed tollway.
So, we'll just chew up a bunch of farmland, turn the current fringe of the Chicago metroplex to an inner-ring suburb, deprive the inner cities of a growth engine in ways that some of the exurbs detest.
What about NYC's transportation policies would you recommend any other city emulate? The crosstown buses that crawl along? The Second Avenue subway that so far has probably taken longer to build than all of the previous subways combined? The Kamikaze taxis? The lack of a single, fast rail link from the major airports to Manhattan?
Many of us are not missing the point re: "lift and drop" of Portland's policies elsewhere. We are, however, separately insulted by the idea that "truly diverse" means only a large African American population. Aaron's assertion that this is so, as well as his casual slippage between talking about small African American populations and small minority populations (especially in regards to cities that actually have large minority populations) elides the fact the racial/ethnic dynamics are more complex than black/white.
Note: The every paragraph under the link is a quote, the html tags didn't work right.
The Italics tags only work for one paragraph at a time. Blockquotes can be used for more than one paragraph here.
I can see some logic to Renn's points. I do think that the biking culture in Minneapolis is somewhat rooted in the scandinavian heritage, but that's a very debatable point. In any case, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland and Austin are ALL very welcoming places for non-whites. I would say that Mpls and Seattle probably pride themselves on this fact. This is why the article is so wrong, when it veers off into this:
"I believe that cities that start taking their African American and other minority communities seriously, seeing them as a pillar of civic growth, will reap big dividends and distinguish themselves in the marketplace.
This trail has been blazed not by the “progressive” paragons but by places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Atlanta, long known as one of America's premier African American cities, has boomed to become the capital of the New South. It should come as no surprise that good for African Americans has meant good for whites too. Similarly, Houston took in tens of thousands of mostly poor and overwhelmingly African American refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Houston, a booming metro and emerging world city, rolled out the welcome mat for them – and for Latinos, Asians and other newcomers. They see these people as possessing talent worth having."
Saying that cities like Houston and Atlanta have "rolled out" the welcome mat more than these so-called "white" cities is absurd and borderline patronizing.
Njorl,
I think places outside of the south with few blacks generally are welcoming to non-whites. Indeed, post-Katrina, you had places like Salt Lake City and Minneapolis taking in refugees. There was an article in the WSJ at the time about a liberal, lesbian couple in Minneapolis who took in an African American woman, her mother, and several of her children post Katrina, and how the community chipped in to help get them set-up. Then there was a follow-up article later about how it all ended in disaster and recriminations.
To me the article is not about black people (agency or otherwise). It's about white people. Specifically it's calling out white people who celebrate their own "Progressive" values by living in a smug all-white cocoon.
Portland bothers me too because it's so damn white. I feel funny when I'm in a city by and large without black people. So I don't live there. And no, "non-whites" do make up for a lack of blacks. America, and black Americans, have a unique history, an exceptionalism, an American Core Culture, that to a great extent defines race relation in this country, perhaps even this country.
And it's not that I hate white people (some of my best friends are white). It's the smugness of Progressive in all-white cities that bothers me. These white folks are strangely soft and without edge. Lacking white/black diversity, whites become more boring and life becomes one big "Stuff White People Like," but with more homeless people.
At least non-Progressive whites who segregate themselves are being honest. Though it's ironic because working-class and conservative (even racist) whites generally live and work in much more racially and economically diverse environments than do many white Progressives.
If whites want to live in Portland and blacks don't, that's fine by me. Let Portland be white. Just don't be self-congratulatory (or paternalistic) about your Progressive values if you've chosen to live in an all-white America.
I'm sure there are good reasons for wanting to live in Portland. Hell, it's a nice city. But by being there, you've chosen to run away from--either actively or passively--racial (and class) diversity in America. And since schools, police, courts, public housing are paid for in large part by local taxes, a lot of your civic money will stay in your white city. That's your right. Just don't pat yourself on the back for it. It's not a good model for the rest of the country.
Peter,
This is pretty wrong--if only on the math. It's literally impossible for every city in this country to have a black population like Chicago or Washington on New York. At some point you run out of blacks. But more than that, I'd be careful about dismissing people as "smug progressives"--especially when your basically arguing for black people as ornamentation, and then using them as a club to settle a score with some other class of white people.
I can't think of anything more "smugly progressive" than this notion that black people are objects for white intellectual debate. From that perspective, it really doesn't have anything to do with black agency. You guys don't really believe in it. It never occurs to you that a lot of black may prefer Atlanta to Portland.
I see your points. Especially the idea of using groups of people for intellectual debates (like when I rub my chin and puff my pipe and say, "yes, your style amuses us and make our lives more complete.")
But what if my argument was rephrased in an urban/suburban context (and not using those as code words for race)? I believe, on some moral level, that's it's better to live in a city than in the suburbs. When people leave struggling cities (and I'm not thinking NYC so much as cities like Baltimore), they also leave problems behind. And no longer are their efforts and tax dollars helping solve those problems.
That's fine. I understand people make a choice, often for very good reasons, to live in the suburbs. But I don't want those suburbanites telling me how much better they have it because they ran away. Don't stop listening to me when I complain about schools, crime, library hours, and Section 8 housing. Don't vote to fund road building over public transportation. Some people can choose to and others can afford to run away from issues and problems that should be seen as national but are too often perceived as local. That's their right. But it's not progressive.
[Also, completely unrelated, check out my piece in the Washington Post today. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102303457.html]
Yeah, being an urban dude myself, I tend to agree--though I worry about saying it's better on a moral level. And I get what you're saying about Portland, and I almost get with this dude is saying--i.e. progressive policy in a lot of places is a lot easier absent the black/white fault line. I just think he overdid it. He should have accounted for all the nuance in his case, all the cities that don't fit his model (Washington D.C. being the most obvious) and went from there. I just wish he hadn't been so sweeping.
Also, I think the link is broke. Here it is:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102303457.html
Ta-Nehisi,
With all due respect, you are either not getting it, or you are unwilling to recant your position. You should read the author(Aaron Renn)'s blog, The Urbanophile, to better understand where he is coming from. A couple of points that will clear things up (though Peter Moskos' final few sentences really expressed the point):
1) This guy is assuming a level of urban enthusiast understanding. So when he is saying "Tier One cities" like NYC, Chicago, etc., he is including places like DC, LA, San Francisco, etc. That is not a legitimate criticism.
2) Renn is writing from the perspective of a Midwesterner to an audience of Midwesterners (and he'd be the first to admit, white Midwesterners). So a lot is assumed there. The biggest thing one needs to have in mind when one reads his article is that everyone from a Midwestern city that isn't Chicago is asking themselves, "How did Atlanta (or Portland, Houston, Seattle, Denver, etc., basically any city that had less population than their midwestern city before the Second World War) become bigger (and therefore, better) than us?"
3) Starting from there, Renn's point is that, for Midwesterners who want models to develop their second tier cities, Atlanta and Houston are much better models than Portland and Seattle and Denver because both Midwestern and Southern cities have large black populations, histories of disconnection between their black and white populations, which these Western cities don't, because they don't have large black populations (and his reason for using county statistics is to emphasize the point of small historical black populations, not obscure it). Basically, the historical legacy of race relations that define America hasn't really played out in these places. An interesting question for these folks who live in Portland, Seattle, Denver, and Tucson or any of these places Renn mentions to ask themselves is whether their towns experienced race riots after MLK was assassinated (I have no idea- but I do know that there were empty lots and burned out buildings on U Street in DC from 1968 - 2000). Because if they didn't, then they missed out on some important American history (their disconnection from any real action or contribution to the Civil War would also put these places outside the mainstream as well).
4) The whole point of Renn's post was to argue for these Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati (where I'm from) to view their African-American populations as an asset, as something that makes them unique, as, oh, perhaps, fellow citizens; he cites Houston and Atlanta as cities that have done this successfully, and encourages Midwesterners to view these as the proper models, not the California expat refuges of Denver, Portland and Seattle.
5) Channel your experiences growing up in Baltimore and the zeitgeist of the Charm City at that time, and you've probably got the mentality of the Midwestern cities (apart from Chicago) that Renn is talking about.
Ta-Nehisi, you're awesome. Your delving into the history of the South and the Civil War was impressive. But I think that in your response to Aaron Renn you may be displaying the indifference of an east coaster to the realities and concerns of a Midwesterner. Just remember, we Ohioans may not seem so important, but we do get to choose who becomes President. And we provided the leadership responsible for a Union victory (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Chase, Stanton, to name a few). We are still proud.