nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Much of what I know about diversity I learned from my home county. The Washington Post, in a two-part series on demographic shifts in the DC area, attempts to do the same, but unfortunately doesn’t learn the right lessons:

From Loudoun to Fairfax to Montgomery, communities that are growing are also growing more integrated, with people of every race and ethnicity living side by side. Prince George’s stands virtually alone as a place that is gaining population yet has an increasing number of residents living in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly one race — in this case, African American.

… Integrated neighborhoods often are created when Asians and Hispanics move into predominantly white neighborhoods, said John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has studied segregation patterns for 30 years. He says these “global neighborhoods” pave the way for more blacks to move into a community without triggering white flight.

In other words, these “global neighborhoods” offer a ‘solution’ to the lack of diversity common to any established neighborhood, and therefore to the natural tendency for people to prefer living near others like themselves. (That does not, of course, just mean race; I know many whites (SWPLs, of course) who would prefer living around nonwhites, as long as those nonwhites are sufficiently like themselves.) The error should be blatantly obvious to any unbiased observer with basic knowledge of the area, but considering that two of the ‘reporters’ are placeless technocrats shipped in from far out of state, not to mention that the Post itself has a deserved reputation as a low-grade propaganda outlet for sappy feel-good left-liberalism, it’s sadly predictable that it wasn’t obvious to them.

The difference between Montgomery and Prince George’s County is that Prince George’s went black first. (Once you go black, you never go back? Not until the gentrifiers come in, anyway, but I doubt they’d like suburbs.) This is going to seem trivial, but considering that a piece that missed this point so catastrophically was published, I feel obligated to point it out anyway: the large-scale entrance of minorities is a much more recent process in Montgomery, and presumably Virginia also. The concomitant collapse of the affected neighborhoods has not yet overtaken inertia: the people I know who want to leave started talking about doing so around two years ago, and I suspect it’ll take them a few more years before they finally move out.

Here is the process: non-Asian minorities move in, the neighborhood gets worse, whites move out. This is a well-known process. (In the case of this area specifically, I suspect blacks move in first, then Hispanics, causing the blacks to leave after the whites, but I haven’t seen anything, either in data or on the ground, to make that more than a hypothesis. All I know is that Hispanics came into Prince George’s after blacks.) And yes, the neighborhood does get worse. Laurel, for example, is, at least in parts, a distinctly well-off area, but the last time I had to take their local public transportation, half the seats were missing, the other half were slashed, and the bus had blown-out speakers blasting gospel music. I am not making this up. And the last time I had the misfortune of having to go to the mall there, it looked like a scene from a bad post-apocalyptic horror movie: there was just about nobody there, half of the storefronts were empty and trashed, and the place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months. (That visit was truly frightening, in a way few things are. Imagine seeing an area that you are familiar with dead, killed by an unstoppable process that has already sunk its tendrils into the entire landscape of your youth, and knowing that you may never be able to go back home because there will be nothing to go back to.)

The difference between Prince George’s and other areas, then, is not that those other areas are shining visions of the utopian future dreamed up by the elite; it is simply that they are in different stages of the same process. As anyone on the ground will tell you, Montgomery County is getting worse, but Prince George’s has already gotten worse. (And the notion that Hillandale, of all places, is a beacon on the path toward Enlightenment is particularly laughable. If Hillandale is anything at all, it’s an example of what not to do in suburban design. The only reason racial tension hasn’t hit the absurd level it has in places like Greenbelt is that the place (or rather, nonplace) is so alienating that the neighbors might as well not exist. But that’s a separate issue, for a future post.) In twenty years or less, Montgomery will look demographically like Prince George’s, for two reasons: areas tend to get worse as they get less white (or Asian, possibly), and people like to live near others like them.

I’ll close with an even more telling quote from the same article. This one needs no comment.

As an adult, [Sterling Crockett] yearned for a place where he could feel proud of who he is, where race isn’t everything, and where he and his family would live around other upwardly mobile blacks.

“I saw it as an opportunity to get into a community that is inhabited and run by African Americans,” Crockett said[.]