"Blacker in Philly": You Might Not Believe in Race, but Race Believes in You

"While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction."

- Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, in a letter dated March 13, 2013, to the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission. 

Black crime/murder threatens Philly, while Mayor Nutter calls for censorship of whites
who dare notice anything is wrong...

Robert Huber's "Being White in Philly: Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said" article in Philadelphia magazine has inadvertently showed the fragility of Black-Run America (BRA). Mayor Nutter wants the magazine "punished."

Without resorting to any discussion of IQ, Mr. Huber's piece is a powerful reminder that normal whites - even liberal, left-of-center whites - understand the importance of race and how it impacts every aspect of their life. 

Though many people will publicly say racial differences don't exist, their every action in life (both public and private) shows that they understand race to be far more than a social construct. 

The true "social construct" is, of course, the concept of equality. Thus, the importance of dialogue in BRA being a one-way street -- where white people are constantly told of their racist past and present, needing to completely atone for their white privilege to ensure a future where their children are permanent second-class citizens. 

Remember, it was only a two years ago when Mr. Nutter entered his Baptist church in Philadelphia and proceeded to lecture the black congregation for allowing black kids to terrorize the City of Brotherly Love via flash mob violence [Philadelphia mayor talks tough to black teenagers after ‘flash mobs’, Washington Times, 8-8-2011]: 

Mayor Michael A. Nutter, telling marauding black youths “you have damaged your own race,” imposed a tougher curfew Monday in response to the latest “flash mob” — spontaneous groups of teens who attack people at random on the streets of the city’s tourist and fashionable shopping districts.

“Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer,” Mr. Nutter, the city’s third black mayor, said in an angry lecture aimed at black teens. “Pull your pants up and buy a 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."

“If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ‘cause you look like you’re crazy,” the mayor said. “You have damaged your own race.”

Mayor Nutter was cheered for excoriating black youth for giving the city of Philadelphia a bad name back in 2011, calling for police state measures ("stop and frisk," as well as curfews -- normally reserved for nations at war or a city experiencing a natural disaster) to end the acts of Spontaneous Blackness threatening to destabilize commercial investment in the city. 

Because the black community, responsible for upward to 80 - 85 percent of the murderers in Philly each year, refuses to 'snitch' on their comrades, Mayor Nutter offered $20,000 per every homicide investigation to anyone who would talk and help the police solve crimes. No matter that thousands of black men rally to end crime in Philadelphia, it doesn't seem to stop. 

The Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest black-oriented newspaper in America, pointed out the violence in the black community dwarfed the violence found in an actual war zone (Iraq). 

But remember, it's the article in Philadelphia magazine which requires the Human Rights Commission to investigate...

Recall that W.E.B DuBois 1899 book "The Philadelphia Negro" was more damning when it came to pointing out the shortcomings of blacks in Philadelphia (then representing only four percent of the city's population). James Sanders, writing at the Huffington Post, pointed this out back in 2010 [How Far Have We Come: Are Blacks In Philadelphia Getting Left Behind?, 2/11/10]:     

Written before the turn of a new century in the late 1800s, Philadelphia's black community was relatively small -- just 40,000 people, making up less than 4 percent of the city's population (though Philadelphia had more blacks than all other American cities, except Baltimore, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.) -- and gathered primarily in what was called the Seventh Ward, what is now southwest Center City. His aim, he stated in the study's preface, was to examine the "Negro problem:" "Let me add that I trust that this study with all its errors and shortcomings will at least serve to emphasize the fact that the Negro problems are the problems of human beings; that they cannot be explained away by fantastic theories, ungrounded assumptions or metaphysical subtleties."

DuBois sought to humanize blacks, to a population that largely saw them as either genetically inferior or otherwise exotic. As he explains in the introduction to the chapter, "The Problem:" "In Philadelphia, as elsewhere in the United States, the existence of certain peculiar social problems affecting the Negro people are plainly manifest. Here is a large group of people -- perhaps forty-five thousand, a city within a city -- who do not form an integral part of the larger social group. This in itself is not altogether unusual; there are other unassimilated groups ...; and yet, in the case of the Negroes the separation is more conspicuous, more patent to the eye, and so intertwined with a long historic evolution, with peculiarly pressing social problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labor that the Negro problem far surpasses in scientific interest and social gravity; most of the other race or class questions."

Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, blacks make up 46 percent of the city's population, some 662,809 people. And yet, many of the problems to which DuBois alluded in 1899 persist today. Predominantly black parts of town -- North Philly, and the so-called "Badlands," for instance -- are all too synonymous with crime and poverty. Too many black students drop out of high school, and give in to lives on the streets or in gangs.

Philadelphia may have come a long way since DuBois time, but in the same breath, many of the same problems persist. Thus, this endeavor: In a two-part series, City Paper will revisit DuBois' work in an effort to track the evolution of black society and culture in Philadelphia over the last century-plus, the good and the bad.

All men are created equal?

We shall see.

Of course all men aren't created equal in Black-Run America -- white people enjoy their lofty situations due entirely to the joys of white privilege, while blacks languish eternally in the churning seas of white racism and the foreboding currents of the "liberal plantation."

You see, there never, ever was a golden age of blacks in America, where crime rates were down, two-parent homes were the norm, and graduation rates were high and poverty were low.

Especially in Philadelphia. 

The book "Philadelphia's 'Black Mafia': A Social and Political History" makes clear of that fact:

The national, urban trends regarding population and unemployment were mirrored, if not accentuated by Philadelphia. Philadelphia's population declined in each of the relevant decades, 3.3 percent from 1950-1960; and 2.7 percent from 1960-1970. The city would experience a (more) drastic hemorrhaging in the 1970s when it lost 260,399 people, approximately 13.4% of its population. Conversely, Philadelphia's black population had increased substantially from 1940-1970. In 1940, AFrican-Americans in Philadelphia numbered 251,000 (13% of the city's population), and by 1960 the black population accounted for 26.4% of the city's population, rising in numbers to 529.000, a 111% increase since 1940. 

In 1950, the respective rates of unemployment for blacks and whites in Philadelphia were 11.7 and 5.4 percent. In 1960, the AFrican-American unemployment rate was 10.7 compared to 5 percent for whites. 

The socioeconomic factors enumerated above likely accounted for at least some of Pennsylvania's glaring criminal justice-rlated statistics illustrating disproportionate representation of African-Americans. For instance, in 1973, 61% of inmates in Pennsylvania prisons were African-American, though blacks accounted for just 9% of the state's population according to the 1970 census. Of these African American inmates, "69 percent were serving time for crimes of violence, 18 percent for crimes against property, and 12 percent for crimes against public order. "For each of the specific crimes of violence except kidnapping [i.e. murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape, statutory rape, lewd act with a child, sexual assault: force undetermined, robbery, and assault], black prisoners outnumbered their white and 'other' counterparts. (p. 69-70)

Let's be honest -- a city can recover from a fire.

A city can't recover from black crime.

This is why Mr. Huber's piece is so important.

It shows normal people realize the truth that dare not speak its not name -- the same truth DuBois pointed to back in 1899.

Though you might not believe in race, race believes in you.

And in Philadelphia, the reality of racial differences have been on display for more than three centuries. Why, just two years Mayor Nutter was a hero for pointing out the types of criminal activity white people refuse to engage in that represents just another night on the town for black youth...