Regional Supercities And Race
12/01/2009
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Reporters have a lot of leeway in how to spin a story by what quote they put at the end, unanswered. For example, the Washington Post's article on white politician Mary Norwood's bid to become the first non-black mayor of Atlanta in 36 years ends with an unanswered (and thus tacitly approved) expression of pure racial animus:
"Atlanta is a black city, a symbol to the world," Houck said. "Putting Mary's face on that picture would be hard for a lot of people to stomach."
In other words, according to the Washington Post it's A-OK for blacks to vote in Tuesday's mayoral election purely on anti-white grounds.

One interesting point in the article:

Atlanta, with a population of about 500,000, saw its black population share decline from 61 percent to 57 percent between 2000 and 2007, according to the latest Census figures. During the same time period, the white population grew from 33 percent to 38 percent.
This reflects a trend I've noticed in competition to be the regional supercity, the acid test of which is attracting a larger white population. For example, Washington D.C. is increasingly white, with African-Americans driven out to loser cities like Baltimore. New York, the supercity of supercities, has had a declining population of American-born blacks since way back in 1979. In our increasingly winner-take-all world, you can expect certain cities in each part of the country to emerge as the winner with rising rents. They will use Section 8 rental vouchers to drive out African-Americans to surrounding loser cities, increasing the disparity between winners and losers.

This makes municipal politics particularly fraught, since victory in a mayoral race (e.g., Rudy Giuliani's victory over David Dinkins in 1993, or Richie Daley's over black candidates in 1989) is often seen as a symbol of whether the city will be friendlier to whites (and become a winner city) or blacks (and become a loser city). Much of intra-black politics consists of struggles between blacks who are willing to make deals with high rent whites versus low rent candidates (e.g., Washington D.C., where the federal government more or less staged a coup to regain control of the capital by arresting the very low-rent black Mayor Marion Barry).

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