A NEW SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM?

In my gloomier moments, I wonder if we're not one looted convenience store away from some jurisdictions again becoming sundown towns.

Major portions of many of our large, Democrat-run cities have become unlivable. Crime, lawlessness, and a general breakdown of the norms of civilization are rampant. Many young people in these cities are untrained, ignorant, and, one suspects, unemployable. But they don’t seem to mind, and our society apparently doesn’t expect more from them. Maybe liberals like the prospect of a generation with no prospects, who will forever be dependent on government.

These trends come together in spectacular displays of anarchy like the ransacking and looting of a Wawa store in Philadelphia, one of many misgoverned Democrat cities, on Saturday night. Reportedly something like 100 young people, described as teenagers although some appear older, participated.

Earlier this year, a candidate for Milwaukee County's board of supervisors came close to calling for such measures. "I don't want this neighborhood to turn into an African shantytown."  He subsequently apologized and deleted his campaign.

That might have been the proper thing to do, but it's not as if people aren't noticing what he noticed.

The criminal element among the black community – estimated to be about 4% of the population – is also estimated to be responsible for about half the violent crime in the United States. That is poisonous enough, but in a lot of ways, it’s a self-limiting phenomenon. Black offenders with a penchant for violence will eventually encounter a final come-uppance: other offenders in open gang war, law-enforcement once they have pushed too far and too openly, even eventually vigilante action, should the black criminal element venture too far away from their protected turf. Vicious predators in the back country eventually run into a terminal 3-S solution.

That's my Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom, who continues,

Tolerations and patience among ordinary citizens already appear to be running out when it comes to the black criminal class; might it be running out for the antics of the black activists and the lunatic intellectual racists as well? Not that I think there will be any overt demonstrations, such as there would have been early in the last century; any actions taken will be more along the lines of quiet shunning and physical avoidance.

That sort of shunning and self-sorting will go on, even if the real estate business wants to make it harder for people to figure out where the dangerous quarters are.

So who are the real racists here? The people searching for a home, or the real estate honchos who want to pretend they’re “better serving” consumers and being more “equitable” to black/brown/Asian communities by excluding important data that all people look to – white, black, Hispanic, etc – when trying to rent/buy a home?

My prediction on this is that it’s going to backfire big time on Redfin and Realtor.com, much the same as “Defund the Police” backfired on House Democrats. Because as it turns out, no matter what a person’s race is, they want police around to protect them and they want to know the crime data for cities and neighborhoods because their first priority is to keep their family safe.

We can close the windows, and pretend there's no thunderstorm outside, and it's raining all the same.

As a society, we never, ever talk about this stuff in public. Our newspapers and TV stations don’t report on it. Nobody runs op-eds about it, because this discourse is not permissible, any more than it is possible in our media to discuss anything to do with LGBT people or Muslims in a negative light. The taboos are very strong, especially in the age of cancel culture.

That might be so, and yet, if the previous creation of sundown towns, based on flimsy evidence, contributes to contemporary inequalities, what will be the effect of a new era of sundown towns, perhaps based on income characteristics, rather than racial characteristics, on inequalities yet to come?