The Philadelphia Experiment: The Streets of Philly Forever Changed

Liberty isn't cracked; the future of Philly is

(Sorry this one is so long... the more we researched Philadelphia, the more needed to be added)

When the population that built and sustained a city is replaced with a different population group - harboring opposing cultural values and norms, plus ability – it’s obvious that that city is in for a rude-awakening.

At a time when DeWayne Wickham writes a column in USA Today chastising Mein Obama for failing to address the Black unemployable rate, news of Philadelphia's transformation from majority white to a plurality of Black people has been reported.

Did we say unemployable? We meant unemployment. Sorry about that. The Huffington Post reports that the Black unemployable… unemployment, Black unemployment rate is reaching Depression-era levels in some cities.
 
Discrimination in Black-Run America is only aimed at white people (that’s what diversity really means, replacing white workers with non-white workers), so relying on the trusty old excuse of racism isn’t going to cut it. Not when the EEOC and the Department of (in) Justice are prepared to sue on the behalf of minority employees.
 

Our hero, Richard Lapchick, just published a report entitled The 2010-11 Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report Card, which laments the lack of People of Color (PoC) in sports newsrooms across the country. The key element to understanding “diversity” is contained in the first quote from Lapchick below:

“The worst news was perhaps that the percentage of sports editors who were women or people of color fell 2.3 percentage points from 11.7 percent in 2008 to 9.42 percent in 2010. White males in particular increased by 3.0 percentage points for sports editors.

“But there was good news with gains for women and people of color in the categories of assistant sports editors, columnists and reporters. For columnists, the percentage of women or people of color jumped 5.7 percentage points (from 17.5 percent to 23.2 percent). The increase for assistant sports editors was 2.8 percentage points (from 19.3 percent to 22.1 percent), and for reporters, it was 2.4 percentage points (from 20.8 percent to 23.2 percent).”

That kind of honesty from Lapchick about what “diversity” really means isn’t found at Diversityinc.com. It’s only good news for “diversity” when white people are replaced with PoC. Judging by the state of Detroit and Birmingham, two cities that were once majority white but now are 90 percent Black, replacing white people with Black people and “diversity” wasn’t cause for celebration. Now Philadelphia, a city that once was overwhelmingly white, now has a plurality of Black people:

African descendants have called Philadelphia home for centuries, with the first U.S. Census, in 1790, listing 2,099 "free" blacks and 373 slaves.

Today, the city's black population is 644,287, according to the latest census, and for the first time it clearly outnumbers all other racial or ethnic groups. (See graphic.)
This evolution happened even though the number of African Americans in the city, excluding Hispanics, declined about 1,800 over the last decade and their share of the population remained about the same.

Key to the new black plurality: the continued steep decline in the city's white population. In 2000, each group accounted for about 42 percent of city residents, but the white share is now 37 percent, after a loss of 82,000 people.

Meanwhile, an influx of Hispanics, Asians, and other groups - now 21 percent of the city's 1.5 million people - boosted Philadelphia's total for the first time in 50 years.
The black plurality coincides with another trend: More and more middle- and working-class African Americans are leaving the city for suburbia. Since 2000, the black population of the city's Pennsylvania suburbs jumped 26 percent - by 47,000.
"You need to look at it not only from a racial-ethnic point of view, but also the distribution of incomes," said Mark Mather, senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit in Washington that interprets census data.

Are relatively "higher-income blacks moving away from the city, leaving behind a poorer population without a lot of prospects?" he asked. "That wouldn't bode well."
Jacquelynn Puriefoy-Brinkley, a former president of Yeadon Borough Council, is a retiree in her 70s. She recalled moving to Yeadon with her parents in 1947, along with other "mostly upper-middle-class" black residents who lived in an enclave on one side of town.

Puriefoy-Brinkley's father owned several businesses and was a salesman for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Yeadon was about 10 percent black, she said. Over time, a larger cross section of African Americans from the city moved in.

Today Yeadon is 88 percent black. NAACP membership forms are available at the circulation desk of the public library. A shopping strip includes the Mohammad Ali Variety Store across the street from the Harlem Cafe.

Going from virtually all white to virtually all black is certainly no triumph of coexistence, Puriefoy-Brinkley acknowledged, but she feels the pattern of movement has been basically positive.

"Maybe the upside," she said, "is that people who didn't have opportunities to live in decent housing or walkable communities have those opportunities now."

With whites abandoning the city, the school system has become a violent reminder of what an all-Black city looks like. The children of the new Philadelphia will start getting condoms at the age of 11, after a study came out reporting that 25 percent of students were sexually active. Larry Auster reported that The Philadelphia Inquirer was running a story on the horrific conditions of schools in the city, where Black grade school students were engaging behavior similar to that found in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nothing is shocking anymore:

At Southwark Elementary, a K-8 school in South Philadelphia in October 2010, a 10-year-old boy "body slammed" into his teacher with such force that she suffered a concussion as she fell to the ground.

In June 2009, a Douglass Elementary student issued a startling warning to a second grader at the K-8 school in North Philadelphia whom she was choking: "I know where you live, and I will burn your house down."

In April 2008, in a third-grade classroom at Taylor Elementary, a K-5 school in Hunting Park, one child held a knife against a classmate's throat and threatened to cut off his head if he snitched.

At the K-8 Morris Elementary in North Philadelphia in February 2008, an angry 9-year-old punched his pregnant teacher in the stomach.

In December 2007, on the playground at Richmond Elementary, a K-5 school in Port Richmond, a 10-year-old girl's classmate forced her head down to his groin.

During the 2009-10 school year, an Inquirer analysis shows, eight of the top 10 highest rates for morals crimes in the district were recorded in elementary schools.

More than half of the 177 elementary schools - including K-8 buildings and other early learning schools - reported a morals crime in 2009-10. Ninety percent have dealt with at least one sex crime in the last five years.

The school system is also overwhelmed with young students living amid poverty, violence, and disorder, some of them largely unparented.

Often, the district has failed to heed the warning signs of violence in its youngsters and figure out a systemic plan to address the problem, with dire consequences.

"By the time they get to middle school and high school, [violence] metastasizes like cancer," said Charles A. Williams 3d, director of the Center for Prevention of School-Aged Violence at Drexel University.

That 72 percent of Black kids in the United States are raised by a single parent (don’t forget the invisible parent, the American taxpayer) shows why the problems found in Philadelphia are widespread (here’s a breakdown of single-parent households for states by race).
 

Escape from Philadelphia?

This article from 1996 had hope that the Black crime rate would drop in Philadelphia. 15 years later, we know such hopes were misplaced.  Back in 2007, Black people marched together in “The City of Brotherly Love” hoping to end Black-on-Black crime. USA Today reported:

Thousands of black men turned out Sunday to support a volunteer effort aimed at reducing violence in this crime-plagued city, lining up for several blocks to register.

Volunteers who join street patrols as part of the "Call to Action: 10,000 Men, It's a New Day" campaign will not carry weapons or make arrests but will instead be trained in conflict resolution, organizers said.

"Nobody else is going to magically come into this community and get it done," said real estate developer Abdur-Rahim Islam, a lead organizer.

Mayor John F. Street, music producer Kenny Gamble and other black community activists joined Police Chief Sylvester Johnson at Temple University for the kickoff rally.

Acknowledging that police alone can't quell a run of violence, Johnson called for 10,000 volunteers last month to help make the streets safer. Philadelphia endures a reputation as one of America's deadliest cities, with about a slaying a day and many more non-fatal shootings.

The nation's sixth-largest city has nearly 1.5 million residents, 44% of them black. It has notched more than 320 homicides this year. More than 80% of the slayings involve handguns, and most involve young black males.

"These (volunteers) can prevent people from being arrested. They can go out there and do things for kids to prevent them from getting in trouble with the criminal justice system," Johnson said.

Non-blacks were also welcome, but organizers stressed the need for the black community to solve its own problems. Most of the victims of gun violence in the city are black.

This attempt at marching failed too.
 

The Christian Science Monitor reported that same year:

Nationally, the murder rate for African-Americans is more than three times the average: 19 black murder victims per 100,000 people versus five for the general population.

In Pennsylvania, the disparity for black homicide is even more pronounced: 30 per 100,000, or six times the national average, according to a study released last month by the Violence Policy Center (VPC), a gun-control research group in Washington.
Those numbers are "disproportionate, disturbing, and undeniable," says the VPC report, which analyzed crime data from 2004 in its study. Moreover, almost 80 percent of black murder victims in the US were shot and killed with guns, the study found.
Philadelphia follows the pattern. The vast majority of black murders in the city – 3 in 4 – are from gunfire, according to police.

Overall, murders have been on the rise – 406 last year. Of those, 317 were gun-related, compared with 233 four years ago. And it's the city's black residents and neighborhoods that feel the effects most acutely.

The so-called Black middle-class has fled Detroit and Birmingham, just as they flee Philadelphia. It doesn’t matter, as the Black Undertow will follow them as they settle in Whitopia’s. What they leave behind our empty skyscrapers, boarded up buildings, and unsafe streets, the former monuments to a long-gone people, the latter reasons for their departure.
 

Why Philadelphia’s Black population hasn’t demanded (like Pittsburgh Black population) that the news stop reporting Black crime is beyond us.
 

That the violent crime is monopolized by Black people in Philadelphia (and Detroit and Birmingham) is a sign of what any city that becomes majority Black can look forward to entertaining:

There are many Black men in and out of prison that, according to some experts, three generations of related men are sharing the same cell in some cases.

Recently a coalition of African-American men — professionals, community leaders, city officials, clergymen and others — announced the formation of a 10-year plan to address some of the problems facing Black men, especially those related to crime.
Bilal Qayyum, president of the Father’s Day Rally, said that The Agenda would focus on education, economic development and health and criminal justice issues.

“We have 2,400 Black murders between 2000 and 2009. Out of that number, 2,458 are Black males so you get a sense of the size of the problem,” he said. “We have a 48 percent high school drop out rate and 48 percent of Black males are jobless — that is they’re not just unemployed but they’re not even looking for work, not even being counted.”

Another aspect that creates a continuing crisis for Black males is the growing number of high school dropouts — as much as 48 percent don’t graduate.

“Let me give you a snap shot of where we are,” said Mayor Michael Nutter. “In 2010, in the six-year cohort, 54 percent of African-American males graduated from high school. Of the 2010 homicides, 86.9 percent were African-American males. African-American males were 65.5 percent of the admissions into the Philadelphia Prison System in 2010. These statistics demonstrate there is a real crisis among Black males.

If you don’t have an education, if you drop out, you’re already a step behind everyone else. If you drop out from high school your options are already limited and if you’re a Black male and turn to a life of crime, life is already against you.”

Bowen said that for Black males under the gun there is a deep sense of hopelessness and that for anyone in that condition sees life from the perspective of survival by any mean necessary.

Philadelphia, Birmingham, Detroit, and a whole host of other major cities are metropolitan areas that will experience massive riots over the summer of 2011. We’re convinced they start in Atlanta.
 

USA Today’s Wickham shows that some Black leaders realize Mein Obama has failed to provide a national jobs program for Black people, comparable to a New Deal-style organization. Wickham fails to admit that a disproportionate amount of tax revenue goes to support Black people already, but that’s alright, we’ll forgive for the faux pas.

But what the entire ruling Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) class, who lord over Black-Run America, has failed to do is admit what "diversity" really means - thanks Mr. Lapchick for providing that service! - and why any law-abiding citizen of this nation should be excited that yet another major US city is now a no-go area.

The streets of Philadelphia aren't safe for one reason, and we have a feeling Rocky could never be made there today.