Thread: What it's like for Whites to Live Around Blacks . Being White In Philly

Later, driving up Broad Street as I head home to Mount Airy, I stop at a light just north of Lycoming and look over at some rowhouses. One has a padlocked front door. A torn sheet covering the window in that door looks like it might be stained with sewage. I imagine not a crackhouse, but a child, maybe several children, living on the other side of that stained sheet. Plenty of children in Philadelphia live in places like that. Plenty live on Diamond, where my son rents, where there always seem to be a lot of men milling around doing absolutely nothing, where it’s clearly not a safe place to be.
I’ve shared my view of North Broad Street with people—white friends and colleagues—who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They’re sunny about the area around Temple. I think they’re blind, that they’ve stopped looking. Indeed, I’ve begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you’re white, you don’t merely avoid them—you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.

Being White in Philly | Philadelphia magazine

Originally Posted by Linda Kelso

I spent a couple of years around the Harrisburg, PA area. Check that out if you haven't. Talk about a blighted, crappy neighborhood. Glad I decided to come back home!

As in Detroit the problems of Harrisburg are mostly the cause of "white racists." So says the former city receiver David Unkovic. Racism Helps Create Fiscal Distress, Ex-Harrisburg Receiver Says

“Our American way of life continues to largely separate African-Americans from equal opportunity and equal education,”Unkovic wrote. “That separation is easier to maintain thanks to our system of local governments which tend to isolate the poor, including many minorities, in defined political subdivisions where they receive substandard education, substandard services and substandard opportunities.”

....In Harrisburg, a city of about 50,000, whites make up a just a third of its population, compared with 82 percent statewide. About 32 percent of residents live in poverty, according to U.S. census data. The city has a “limited ability to raise additional revenues,” considering half of its property exempt from taxes, Unkovic said.

Of course this white lib wants nothing to do with blacks and poor people as he lives in Wynnewood, PA a town that is 93% white with a median family income of $111,683. I'm sure Unkovic and his wife set up multiple play dates for their children with poor blacks from Harrisburg while they were growing up and had every intention of raising their family there.

If that was not the case then I have two words for him...

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