Her research points to how cities such as Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C. have over the past three decades attracted ever-larger numbers of college graduates. Using Census data, Diamond shows that as college graduates occupied larger shares of these cities' work forces (while avoiding other cities they deem less attractive) income inequality in these cities grew.
Urban industries and amenities catered to the higher-waged worker, making these cities more expensive to live in. Lower-wage workers (those with only a high school diploma) also desired the enhanced quality of life offered by these cities—better food and air quality, lower crime rates—but they couldn't afford to live in them. Simply put, as college grads arrived, lower-waged workers were driven out.
(http://img.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/chart.jpg)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/29/college-graduates-are-pushing-african-americans-out-of-cities/?TID=SM_FB
Sounds like a sob story. Why are we only looking at pushing black people out? And technically speaking, wouldn't an educated black person with a higher profile job who wants to live in a city offering such amenities be pushing out other black people who aren't in the same circumstance?
These are the kinds of stories that evoke no sympathy or amusement from me. Everything has to be about skin color, and more often than not it's about blacks in particular. Somehow I'm failing to see all the articles about how the Chinese immigrants are being pushed out of pricey San Francisco as the rich white/Asian/Latin/black people move in. And actually, the Asian immigrant population has increased while the black population has decreased, everybody under the same circumstances.
How about that?!? I ride the bus with super poor Asian immigrants every day, many/most of whom don't even speak English yet. They're making it?!? Their kids grow up to be geniuses.
Instead of playing some sort of blame game (which does NOTHING to help race relations, which are mainly diminished between black people and basically everyone else), how about we examine other factors?!?
Such an offensive article.
QuoteIt's not that these cities are no longer liberal, per se, but that the brand of (neo)liberalism they now celebrate is unaccountable to the concerns championed by lower-waged workers: universal prekindergarten, affordable housing, and the de-privatization of public space (crystallized by last month's San Francisco's playground fiasco that garnered national headlines). It's a liberalism that has, quite literally, left no room for the low-waged worker, particularly African Americans.
Doesn't answer anything meaningful or serious. Parlays blame mainly to white people for doing absolutely nothing except working hard, studying hard, etc. Most importantly, with all of the low-wage workers out there (there are more Hispanics now than African Americans, and there are plenty of low-wage Asian workers in one of their example cities: SF), why are AA's "particularly" hard hit? Is it all somebody else's fault?
Not to mention he brings up an example from SF and leaves out ALL the background to that. Had nothing to do with privatization (he says "de-privatization" but I think he meant opposite) of public space. A little research into that incident would have revealed the real issues there, which have nothing to do with his article, but it's a good/easy headline grabber.
Booooooo to the article. Not academic at all. Beats around the bush. Doesn't answer any questions. Points the obvious out, but frames it in a negative light by insinuating some sort of blame for plight that doesn't necessarily exist (should I bring up the Dust Bowl and how EVERYBODY had to shuffle around looking for work?).
Stupid professor if this is what he writes.
^^It's a she.
http://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/
Eric Tang wrote the article for the Washington Post. He quoted a female professor, but she didn't write the article.
Quote from: simms3 on November 03, 2014, 11:46:17 PM
Stupid professor if this is what he writes.
My apologies. This sounded like you thought the professor was male.
^well I tend to write quickly in a spare minutes or so, so you're right I probably confused them. Hopefully the woman professor at Stanford who is quoted researches and teaches more than just "poor black people aren't able to cut it in today's elite cities and it's because white people who went to college are kicking them out", and hopefully the male author of the article quoting her and alluding to other things receives a lot of criticism for his lack of objective reporting, clear bias, and silly subject matter.
QuoteIt's not that these cities are no longer liberal, per se, but that the brand of (neo)liberalism they now celebrate is unaccountable to the concerns championed by lower-waged workers: universal prekindergarten, affordable housing, and the de-privatization of public space (crystallized by last month's San Francisco's playground fiasco that garnered national headlines). It's a liberalism that has, quite literally, left no room for the low-waged worker, particularly African Americans.
It kind of ties into my thesis that "liberal" and "conservative" are basically brand names for the same, essential free-market smorgasbord. Whether you shop at Whole Foods or Chick-Fil-A, you're still endorsing a system that encourages structural income inequality. We don't have a true "liberal" party in the United States anymore; we just have different flavors of conservatism with regards to economics, and different brands of social liberalism with regards to society (the right is all about big government intervention when it aligns with their social views, which is the very antithesis of Darwinian, Goldwater-based, Chicago-School defined conservatism. Not to let liberals off the hook, but propping up their idea of a kindler, gentler, greener and more gluten-free Wall Street-consumer culture is the very antithesis of every accomplishment and every astonishingly great moment of the New Deal.)
While the wording of the article is not ideal, and indeed, the subject matter requires much more than a page of copy from the Post, the confluence of poverty and race
is an issue that should be examined
maturely, and we have decades of data to suggest a structural bias that encourages that confluence. Sadly, after Sandy Hook, it's pretty clear that we, the people, are
incapable of having a mature conversation about the confluence of race, poverty, violence and, the dreaded White Privilege.
As for my town, "liberal" DC, the whitening of the city is the very big deal that nobody really talks about (again, liberalism as brand, versus liberalism as structural policy.) And that's true on
both sides of that racial and socio-economic divide.
From an urban standpoint, nobody really questions gentrification in a tangible way, which is to say that nobody really asks what happens to the folks displaced when a 'hood gets gentrified. Or...they ask, but there's no
policy to follow that up. Again, liberalism-as-brand-as-applied to free market fantasia.