http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
If you ever actually talk to anyone who was personally involved in the former, and they're being frank, they'll tell you that a primary concern was a rational fear for their physical safety and/or that of their families. Which adds up to the latter. Why do you think there are no Serbs left in Kosovo, or no Albanians in Mitrovica?
E. Michael Jones's Slaughter of Cities (http://www.amazon.com/The-Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Cleansing...) is a good overview from a j'accuse perspective. For a mainstream author, read J. Anthony Lukas' Common Ground. Better yet, read them both.
Of course we've digressed into the question of harmful effects (of the civil-rights movement) on white people. My original post was mainly concerned with the effect on black people.
Perhaps you've noticed some cultural changes? Are they for the better? If we could sit down together and watch WSHH for an hour, how exactly would we disagree?
60 years of deliberate policy drove middle class people out of the cities. The forced busing is pretty emblematic of what happened.
http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleans...
The other aspect is that the jobs left the cities. The two factors here were: 1) corrupt city machine politics and high taxes and fees, union problems, etc. 2) William Whyte's discovery that companies moved headquarters out closer to CEOs' estates so the CEO would have a shorter commute.
http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleans...
"In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."
Unlike potato blight, which is caused by one or more well-described organisms whose DNA can even be sequenced.
This is very much the kind of intentional forgetting practiced by many post-genocidal societies. It's very similar to the way Indonesians remember the 1965 massacres, or even the way Chinese remember the Cultural Revolution. There's simply a broad social agreement that "we don't talk about these things."
But here, let me help you out with that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Ground_(book)
https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Clean...
It's very reassuring, however, to note that Detroit is now "one of the hottest food cities." I'll be sure to check out one of those New American bistros next time I'm on Linnhurst.