Oh the ignorance!!
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4/12/2006
Typical racist garbage from an ill-informed person. I suggest you read about things before you make blanket statements. I am a graduate student studying race relations and social policy and I can tell you that white flight and the problems associated with it are not because crime was already too high. It started in the years immediately following World War 2 when crime was vastly lower than now. Crime rates only began to explode in the mid-1960s. By that time, whites, using a gigantic Affirmative Action program for white people called FHA low interest home loans, had already moved out in waves. These loans and the investment money along with them were only given to those building new houses in the suburbs, while black neighborhoods were denied loans in a process called "redlining" and were kept out of white suburbs by a process called "exclusionary zoning." By the time crime rates began to explode, black neighborhoods had been completely abandoned by investment, jobs (most importantly), and tax base. As to your moronic West Virginia example, whites there suffer from a large number of social pathologies such as high drug abuse rates, teen pregnancy rates, and welfare reciept. If it is such a white utopia, I would challenge you to live there a while. Their violent crime rate is much lower because most of the state is rural, and crime is not as high when poor people are not concentrated in high volumes in a small area. If all the poor of WV were segregated into a overcrowded, disinvested small area, the crime would soar. I guarantee it.
By the way, I am white.
Erik | Washington, DC