White Racism is Why Detroit Sucks, Says Conference

by: Greg Allmain

Those present at the Michigan Roundtable Equity Action Summit were treated to some laughable insanity this past weekend, with conference attendees being told that Detroit’s problems lie squarely with (presumably White) racism and gentrification.

Conference speaker Monica Lewis Patrick blamed the usual suspects: “racism”, either “institutionalized” or “overt”. Patrick said that the public services in Detroit skew heavily towards the places (mostly occupied by younger, White hipster types) being gentrified and sees the remaining parts of Detroit as being plagued with “over-policing the neighborhoods and treating longtime residents like they are the criminals.”

Yet none of this could possibly be due to Detroit’s demographics, according to Patrick—much the opposite! Oddly enough, in this 82-percent-Black city, Patrick points all the problems at White “one-percenters” like the ever present Koch Brothers and other prominent business leaders in the area.

From a Michigan Live report, Patrick lays it all out like a faithful, “racism”-obsessed leftist activist should:

“I think racism is a mechanism to create division because their whole goal is to get us to draw a line in the sand along race, along religion, along sexual identities,” she said. “If we buy into it they would have you think that the urban centers are off an island unto themselves and those who live in the predominantly White communities are the only civilized” ones.

As already mentioned, the idea of White racism somehow being the driving force in Detroit’s downward spiral into a Third-World backwater is worth a hearty laugh. As a basic search on Detroit’s demographics will show us:

As we can see, there has been a precipitous drop in Detroit’s population for the last five decades or so, most notably of White people. As for the “civilized” part, the locations of homicides and shootings also illustrate how hard it is to somehow pin Detroit’s notorious crime rate on Whites (click here for the full, interactive map): From an October 2013 report in Forbes:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s crime database reports Detroit had 386 murders last year, up from 344 in 2011 and essentially unchanged from 2000 – when the city had 200,000 more residents. The steady outflow of residents has driven Detroit’s murder rate up to 54.6 per 100,000, more than 10 times the national average and the highest in the country among large cities.

The report continues, oddly enough, touching on Patrick’s points about “civilized” people and that “gentrification” problem:

The violent crime rate for the Detroit MSA is 574 per 100,000 population, 48% higher than the national average – and virtually all attributable to the area’s much more dangerous urban core. (emphasis added.) Only a handful of murders in the Detroit MSA were reported outside of Detroit itself.

The ‘mystery’ of Detroit has people continuing to grasp at straws with a reality they can’t seem to confront. Whether it’s the liberati-types of MSNBC sneering that Detroit is a “libertarian paradise” or people such as Patrick, who explicitly blame the alleged racism of 17 percent of the city’s inhabitants for the other 82 percent’s severe problems, this stubborn refusal to accept reality makes Detroit’s problems seem unlikely to go away.

read full article at source: http://theden.tv/2014/04/03/white-racism-is-why-detroit-sucks-says-conference/