Damned right, John! Mr. McWhorter's original comments were on-point. His response is on-point as well. It strikes me as somewhat puzzling that we argue with each other over what are actually somewhat orthogonal points. No one, and I mean NO ONE, is saying that deindustrialization did not result in more pressure on poor folks to make ends meet. What John said, and is saying, is that deindustrialization cannot and should not be used as raison d'être for excessive teen pregnancy, violence, or any other malady that (seemingly, specifically) negatively impacted the black communities in any locale that endured deindustrialization. To be clear, none of that invalidates the points made by Mr. Roscoe either, except for the implication that Mr. McWhorter somehow didn't "get it." It strikes me that implying that, "they took the jobs away, so I turned to crime" is, well, I won't use the curse word that is on the tip of my tongue, but "invalid" is probably a better public utterance anyway. (Then again, maybe I don't get it either. If so, it's not the first time!)
"NO ONE, is saying that deindustrialization did not result in more pressure on poor folks to make ends meet. What John said, and is saying, is that deindustrialization cannot and should not be used as raison d'être for excessive teen pregnancy, violence..."
If we as a nation--hell, a species--ever recognize that multiple things can be true at the same time, this world will be a much better place.
Truth be told Mr. Roscoe made a rather snarky “fly on the wall” comment that was also unserious and unbecoming of a serious academic. Had he been serious he would have read the Indianapolis chapter in Winning the Race.
John is apologetic for the length of the book, but it is a serious work, deserving of serious study. Even a casual reader would understand that John was making specific arguments, supported with data, and careful reasoning.
De industrialization is not a sufficient explanation. That does not mean it was not a factor (which was Glenn’s point).
I was going to sit this one out. Not because I think John McWhorter has the better argument, but because there's nothing I can say that William Julius Wilson hasn't already said better.
Let's get a few things out of the way from the jump. I'm not an academic. I write from the perspective of somebody who grew up in a manufacturing town and knows the impacts of deindustrialization from the ground up. I read "Losing the Race," but not "Winning the Race," That said, Indianapolis may not be the best case study if you want to gain an understanding of the impacts of deindustrialization on Black America. It never suffered the impacts of deindustrialization the way places like Akron (rubber and tires) Birmingham (steel), Detroit (automobiles), or Gary (steel) did.
Let's start with population trends, which tell us a lot about the economic health of a city:
Akron - down 37% since 1960
Birmingham - down 42% since 1960
Detroit - down 62% since 1960
Gary - down 62% since 1960
Indianapolis - up 85% since 1960
Let's look at current poverty rates:
Akron - 23%
Birmingham - 26%
Detroit - 32%
Gary - 32%
Indianapolis - 16%
I sourced the population numbers from a site called Biggest U.S. Cities:
The poverty numbers are from the US Census Bureau.
There's a long list of places I can come up with that suffered big hits due to deindustrialization and have large black populations. Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Flint, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, and Toledo come immediately to mind, but it wouldn't be hard to find others.
The debate, to the extent that there is one, is over the relative impacts of culture, deindustrialization, and government policies. John McWhorter seems to think culture and government policies are the primary causes of problems within Black America. I said in my essay that those things played a role, but experience has taught me that black people with good jobs rarely have the kinds of issues that John McWhorter highlighted in his essay.
Black men with good blue collar jobs were the backbones of black neighborhoods before deindustrialization hit. Young people respected and looked up to them. They were role models and set the standards of acceptable male behavior. In other words, they helped shape black culture.
White men with good blue collar jobs were the backbones of White America too. Anybody who has read "Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance gets the point. The people most likely to "screw up" in Vance's book were those without good jobs or a purpose in life. That's true for most Americans. Folks without good jobs or a purpose in life often fall into behaviors that lead to violence and/or "deaths of despair."
Cultural differences help explain the differences in how people from different racial groups respond to these challenges. That said, it should be noted that the urban violence Glenn Loury and John McWhorter often talk about is committed by a relatively small group of people according to criminologist Thomas Abt. Here's an excerpt from an essay he did for The Guardian back in 2019:
In the cities that struggle with high rates of violence, shootings are concentrated among a surprisingly small set of people and places. It doesn’t concentrate in entire communities or neighborhoods. Even in the most allegedly dangerous places, the vast majority of people are not violent, and there are plenty of safe spaces.
In fact, in most cities, about 4% of city blocks account for approximately 50% of crime. In Oakland, 60% of murders happen within a social network of approximately one to two thousand high-risk individuals – about 0.3% of the city’s population. In New Orleans, a network of 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the city’s population, account for more than 50% of its lethal encounters.
Conventional wisdom tells us that to address violence, we need to work from the outside in, starting by fixing everything else: culture, poverty, racism, employment. But all of the most rigorous and reliable evidence tells us the opposite: we have to work from the inside out, focusing first and foremost on the highest-risk people and places.
The people who commit most of these crimes have modest skills. The challenge is finding ways to help them get their lives on track. I will argue until the cows come home that this is much harder in places where good blue collar jobs are few and far between.
One last point: Have you been to Gary? What you think of as "snark" is a genuine interest in how things would play out if anybody came to Gary and tried to convince black residents that culture and government policies were bigger contributors to their problems than deindustrialization.
I wrote that your comment was snarky. That is not a criticism of you, it is a comment on the words you chose to make your point, which I thought were due to an inaccurate understanding of John's point.
Acknowledging that you have not read the chapter on Indianapolis suggests your comment was more of an emotional reaction than an accurate understanding of John's argument.
John's point is that while everything you write above (and Mr. Wilson writes) is valid and important, it does not provide a sufficient explanation for the phenomena John describes in his books. Glenn emphasized deindustrialization as a significant economic factor. Glenn and John seemed to agree that John's argument is incremental, and (he asserts, and it is important to recognize) almost universally dismissed by academic sociologists. One need not agree with him, but it is important to get his argument correct. Implying that John is insensitive to the plight of those who lost jobs is what led me to comment.
Finally, this is not about who has the "better argument" (either-or); it is "both-and". Both you and John offer important points of view.
John was born into a well-to-do upper-middle-class black family with all expenses paid, free of much worry. He has never gone to bed hungry. John has never worked at a plant or factory. He grew up in a bubble that greatly influenced his thinking (white ivory tower mindset detached).
That sounds like an ad hominem argument, that his socioeconomic position disqualifies his opinion, rather than you engaging and offering a counter argument to his opinion.
Mr. Roscoe's reply to me does a nice job in explaining his different perspective. I agree with him there is room for many perspectives when it comes to policy debates, regardless of where and under what circumstances one was reared.
Thanks for your reply. Please watch the conversation between John and Glenn again and listen carefully to John's assertions from 16 years ago and today.
Just before the three minute mark John from 2007 says that deindustrialization "doesn't seem to explain anything." John from 2023 goes on to say that the best way to account for the effects of deindustrialization is, "It didn't help that low skill jobs moved away." He also asserts if the only issue was that factory jobs moved away that people would have moved or set up businesses the way immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean often do. I listened carefully and offered a different perspective on these things in my post.
As for "emotional" responses, listen carefully to what John said just before the seven minute mark. He doesn't want to believe that people didn't respond well to deindustrialization. He doesn't want to believe that the exodus of the black middle class affected the people left behind. He says around the 7:35 mark that some of his reaction is "visceral."
Listen to the fuller conversation and John says around the 29 minute mark that he spent a year doing an analysis of Indianapolis data but has spent less than three hours there:
There are people who believe they can accurately assess economic and cultural shifts this way. I write from the perspective of someone who thinks you can't know a place or a people unless you spend significant time on the ground. I also explained in my first response to you why I don't think Indianapolis is a good case study if you want to understand the impacts of deindustrialization on Black America.
I've spent time in Akron, Birmingham, Detroit, Gary and Indianapolis. No disrespect to John, but my time in these places, combined with having spent many years in the manufacturing space, gives me a perspective he doesn't have. I shared my perspectives on deindustrialized cities and included data to flesh out my points. There's room for many perspectives when it comes to public policy debates so let folks read both essays and draw their own conclusions.
"I shared my perspectives on deindustrialized cities and included data to flesh out my points."
You did, and you did that very well. I appreciate that.
"There's room for many perspectives when it comes to public policy debates so let folks read both essays and draw their own conclusions."
I completely agree.
I am glad that John's two earlier books have elicited a lively response in these comments. I enjoyed the tightly structured arguments John makes in his writing.
I plan to move on to "Woke Racism" to see what John has to say about more recent developments.
Hate to be the guy but, this is as good as it gets. 60 years of bending over backwards and trillions of dollars to help a particular group, and this is the result. Food deserts, until the Mexicans show up and open a market. No employment opportunities until the Mexicans open up a muffler shop, auto repair business, beauty parlor, dry cleaning, auto parts store, restaurants, taco stand on the sidewalk, oranges and flowers for sale on the freeway on ramp, house cleaning service. The list goes on and on.
Blacks get a state of the art hospital, university appointments, political positions in city governments, and turn the whole thing into shit.
"60 years of bending over backwards and trillions of dollars to help a particular group, and this is the result....
Blacks get a state of the art hospital, university appointments, political positions in city governments, and turn the whole thing into shit."
The result is what typically happens in America at large: the scattering of Black progress/success--and the statistics are abundantly clear that there's been notable Black progress/success on a number of fronts over the past 6 decades, particularly for women--into suburbia. Anybody who doesn't see this simply doesn't want to.
I'd also like to know where segregated hospitals are being built in 21st century America as that is clearly unconstitutional. Otherwise, blame White leaders and officials for supposedly turning entire universities and municipalities into shit with their horrendous appointments of the blacks to posts in those institutions.
spiral8802, your m*** should have said no, and your d**** should have pulled out, sparing humanity from another piece of worthless crap. Enjoy your travel through the sewer lines to your final resting place.
Isn't there a line of reasoning that splits the difference between John and Clifton, in which we can posit that an especially fragile black culture was more readily impacted by the economic changes of deindustrialization? In other words, we need not name deindustrialization as a primary cause of black poverty, but can rather liken it to the draining of an already shallow reservoir by which the cracks were more quickly revealed. When Glenn and John argue about how to quantify the effect (a third of the economy?) and judge its significance, the context certainly matters.
The last time I was in Vietnam, a Vietnamese woman approached me and related, " me so horny... take me back to America with you honey... I'll make you plenty of babies." Lol!
By the way, my visit to Vietnam was in 2018 to see what I successfully evaded during the draft. Fortunately, my number was high. Some of my friends died in that stupid war and some came back without d*cks or their minds. Imagine black soldiers who suffered the most casualties were fighting people who didn't call them n*ggers or kill them like the white racists back home. I probably would have returned home joining the Back Panther Party in Oakland, California. But I ended up rescuing white b*ys from an Aryan prison gang. Lol!
I had 4 former Vietnamese doctors (refugees) on my caseload at the same time following their conviction for charges related to defrauding Medicaid in California. I evaluated them for probation vs. prison incarceration per 1203.03 of the California Penal Code. Their excuses for committing the fraud? That's the way they did it in Vietnam. Lol!
I used to rescue wannabe PROUD BOYS and vets from Aryan Brotherhood prison gang rape too during my 34 years working in the prison industrial complex. This was after the Vietnam War came to an end. One of late General Westmoreland's cousins was assigned to my caseload. He was convicted of trafficking large amounts of marijuana. Lol!
The 1965 immigration law: hordes of well-to-do Asians and poor Hispanic immigrants with unearned benefits has hurt blacks. Diversity redirects resources (anti-black racism in a new set of clothes). Racism is a competitive relationship between groups for ownership and control of resources for wealth and power.
Black folks need to wake the f*ck up and shed their self-defeating positive sentiments about immigrants who are on a mission to replace them. Social integration is immeasurable. It can't be deposited into the banks. The non-black small businesses in black communities should not be there.
Asians will not allow small black businesses into their communities, to say the least, other non-black minorities. Racism is a team sport, and forfeiting is not a viable option. Koreans have no business of owning and controlling the billion-dollar black hair care industry. Blacks do no not own and control Korean restaurants or nail salons.
Blacks need to change their inappropriate behavior toward social integration. Blacks bouncing around their dollars several times among themselves in creating group wealth is true black empowerment. Asians in black communities transferring wealth back to their communities is insane. It doesn't take a PhD to be aware of these dynamics negatively affecting black folks. Asians and their probationary white propaganda to get ahead?
I'm reminded of Boyce Watkins a while back lambasting Korean small business owners for dominating the Black hair industry. He often seems to voice fiery calls for Black self-empowerment. I'm actually curious if Glenn knows Dr. Watkins and wonder whether Boyce might make for a good guest on The Glenn Show one of these days.
As I pointed out in the other thread, Asians, in particular the Chinese, are actually making an effort to re-industrialize America and bring back manufacturing jobs to the US. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the pushback against Ford's proposed licensing agreement with CATL for a battery plant in Michigan and likewise Gotion's plans for a battery plant also in the state of Michigan, there is enormous resistance on the part of the American political class and even much of the general population against this on the basis of vaguely articulated national security concerns. Thus I posed the question in the prior thread whether or not in general people believe that economic prosperity should be subordinate to geopolitics. This has ramifications for the economic well-being of all Americans regardless of race.
Separate from the causal question of whether deindustrialization led to the further socioeconomic deterioration of Black Americans, I'm of the belief that Clifton is absolutely correct in emphasizing the multiplier effects of manufacturing. Taiwan, with a population of 24 million, and South Korea, with a population of 52 million, disproportionately dominate high tech manufacturing in areas like semiconductors. Consider the fact that those two countries with a combined population of 76 million constituting less than one percent of the global population of over 8 billion comprise between 80-85% of global semiconductor manufacturing by revenue, and one sees just how staggering the overrepresentation is.
Furthermore, I believe that TSMC alone accounts for around 15% of Taiwanese GDP and likewise I had read that Samsung accounts for around 16% of South Korean GDP. Given that these are single companies, that fact truly is staggering as well. By comparison, I vaguely recall that at one point Walmart accounted for about 2% of American GDP and that was the highest of any single American company I believe.
We tend to think of manufacturing as supporting the lifeblood of communities or even cities, but as the examples of Taiwan and South Korea show, entire countries have been able to catapult themselves into prosperity and geopolitical prominence by cultivating expertise in specific but highly technical and in-demand industries. I'm not an economist by any means, but I'd venture a guess that Taiwan and South Korea are the embodiment of manufacturing multiplier effects par excellence.
I wrote my original post by emphasizing the need educating people in support of those people who actually ruin the country. Technology of course, is important and many high school students of all races will gravitate toward technology, but Im talking about the people that really hold us together like everyone in every trade. Where would we be without them. It doesn’t matter if you are the best tech wizard on the planet and your wont start. Of course you could take a bus, but who would drive it or your car does start but you get into a fender bender and you have to go to the ER, what nurses would be there to help. You get out the ER and now you would have to get your cars body repaired. the point Im making is it takes a lot of skilled people to run this country. Finally, the pay for all trades is much more than working on an assembly line because the tradesman has a skill that adds value. Assembly line workers can easily be replaced by a robot.
Dr. Boyce Walkins should be invited by Glenn Loury to give different perspectives. Walkins and I agree with Dr. Claud Anderson's approach to changing the inappropriate behavior of blacks to compete in this unforgiving capitalistic system. Different Asian groups are more cohesive than blacks (code of conduct). Will it take a catastrophic event(s) to get blacks to wear their glasses from upside down? I'm very frustrated.
Despite who may have better statistics, what is the point of arguing about ancient history. Trillions of dollars later, gentleman, pease stop the insanity!
"But I’d like to be a fly on the wall and see anyone read that chapter and come away thinking I’m a mere partisan hack who’d button up if he knew more statistics."
When in fact, the statistics support John McWhorter's argument better than the 'deindustrialization' one. Again, see 'The Myth of American Inequality' by Gramm, Ekelund and Early. It's a short read, but the statistics, charts and graphs are unanswereable.
Deindustrialization has hurt bBlack and White workers alike. assembly line work is probably gone forever, but it‘s not the end of the world. The most important think we can do is make sure that our children are well educated and prepared to enter adulthood and society with a skillet. This might means going on to college and beyond. Not all Kids want to go to college but they can certainly go to a community college where they can develop a skill in an array of blue collar and white collar jobs that are essential to our economy. We are currently have a 1,000,000 of Nurses. Welders, plumbers, electricians, chefs, pharmacy techs, laboratory techs, radiology techs and on and on are in short supply today. We need to our Community Colleges are affordable and close to residential ares in our cities. Most importantly, we need to find a way to get our parents involved with their children‘s education from pre K and on.
"Deindustrialization has hurt bBlack and White workers alike."
I thought this was obvious to anyone paying attention. Trump supporters were more than business owners seeking tax cuts; more than White evangelicals yearning for a pro-life Supreme Court. A whole lot of them were also iterations of Pat Buchanan's old base, which included many aggrieved men--White men--who fell through the cracks of deindustrialization.
Damned right, John! Mr. McWhorter's original comments were on-point. His response is on-point as well. It strikes me as somewhat puzzling that we argue with each other over what are actually somewhat orthogonal points. No one, and I mean NO ONE, is saying that deindustrialization did not result in more pressure on poor folks to make ends meet. What John said, and is saying, is that deindustrialization cannot and should not be used as raison d'être for excessive teen pregnancy, violence, or any other malady that (seemingly, specifically) negatively impacted the black communities in any locale that endured deindustrialization. To be clear, none of that invalidates the points made by Mr. Roscoe either, except for the implication that Mr. McWhorter somehow didn't "get it." It strikes me that implying that, "they took the jobs away, so I turned to crime" is, well, I won't use the curse word that is on the tip of my tongue, but "invalid" is probably a better public utterance anyway. (Then again, maybe I don't get it either. If so, it's not the first time!)
"NO ONE, is saying that deindustrialization did not result in more pressure on poor folks to make ends meet. What John said, and is saying, is that deindustrialization cannot and should not be used as raison d'être for excessive teen pregnancy, violence..."
If we as a nation--hell, a species--ever recognize that multiple things can be true at the same time, this world will be a much better place.
Charles, we're your parents overprotective? Kept you in a bubble?
John's insane advocacy of decriminalizing narcotics to minimize police contact with blacks? He must have been smoking crack. Lol!
Truth be told Mr. Roscoe made a rather snarky “fly on the wall” comment that was also unserious and unbecoming of a serious academic. Had he been serious he would have read the Indianapolis chapter in Winning the Race.
John is apologetic for the length of the book, but it is a serious work, deserving of serious study. Even a casual reader would understand that John was making specific arguments, supported with data, and careful reasoning.
De industrialization is not a sufficient explanation. That does not mean it was not a factor (which was Glenn’s point).
I was going to sit this one out. Not because I think John McWhorter has the better argument, but because there's nothing I can say that William Julius Wilson hasn't already said better.
Let's get a few things out of the way from the jump. I'm not an academic. I write from the perspective of somebody who grew up in a manufacturing town and knows the impacts of deindustrialization from the ground up. I read "Losing the Race," but not "Winning the Race," That said, Indianapolis may not be the best case study if you want to gain an understanding of the impacts of deindustrialization on Black America. It never suffered the impacts of deindustrialization the way places like Akron (rubber and tires) Birmingham (steel), Detroit (automobiles), or Gary (steel) did.
Let's start with population trends, which tell us a lot about the economic health of a city:
Akron - down 37% since 1960
Birmingham - down 42% since 1960
Detroit - down 62% since 1960
Gary - down 62% since 1960
Indianapolis - up 85% since 1960
Let's look at current poverty rates:
Akron - 23%
Birmingham - 26%
Detroit - 32%
Gary - 32%
Indianapolis - 16%
I sourced the population numbers from a site called Biggest U.S. Cities:
https://www.biggestuscities.com/
The poverty numbers are from the US Census Bureau.
There's a long list of places I can come up with that suffered big hits due to deindustrialization and have large black populations. Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Flint, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, and Toledo come immediately to mind, but it wouldn't be hard to find others.
The debate, to the extent that there is one, is over the relative impacts of culture, deindustrialization, and government policies. John McWhorter seems to think culture and government policies are the primary causes of problems within Black America. I said in my essay that those things played a role, but experience has taught me that black people with good jobs rarely have the kinds of issues that John McWhorter highlighted in his essay.
Black men with good blue collar jobs were the backbones of black neighborhoods before deindustrialization hit. Young people respected and looked up to them. They were role models and set the standards of acceptable male behavior. In other words, they helped shape black culture.
White men with good blue collar jobs were the backbones of White America too. Anybody who has read "Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance gets the point. The people most likely to "screw up" in Vance's book were those without good jobs or a purpose in life. That's true for most Americans. Folks without good jobs or a purpose in life often fall into behaviors that lead to violence and/or "deaths of despair."
Cultural differences help explain the differences in how people from different racial groups respond to these challenges. That said, it should be noted that the urban violence Glenn Loury and John McWhorter often talk about is committed by a relatively small group of people according to criminologist Thomas Abt. Here's an excerpt from an essay he did for The Guardian back in 2019:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/10/us-gun-violence-thomas-abt
In the cities that struggle with high rates of violence, shootings are concentrated among a surprisingly small set of people and places. It doesn’t concentrate in entire communities or neighborhoods. Even in the most allegedly dangerous places, the vast majority of people are not violent, and there are plenty of safe spaces.
In fact, in most cities, about 4% of city blocks account for approximately 50% of crime. In Oakland, 60% of murders happen within a social network of approximately one to two thousand high-risk individuals – about 0.3% of the city’s population. In New Orleans, a network of 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the city’s population, account for more than 50% of its lethal encounters.
Conventional wisdom tells us that to address violence, we need to work from the outside in, starting by fixing everything else: culture, poverty, racism, employment. But all of the most rigorous and reliable evidence tells us the opposite: we have to work from the inside out, focusing first and foremost on the highest-risk people and places.
The people who commit most of these crimes have modest skills. The challenge is finding ways to help them get their lives on track. I will argue until the cows come home that this is much harder in places where good blue collar jobs are few and far between.
One last point: Have you been to Gary? What you think of as "snark" is a genuine interest in how things would play out if anybody came to Gary and tried to convince black residents that culture and government policies were bigger contributors to their problems than deindustrialization.
.
I wrote that your comment was snarky. That is not a criticism of you, it is a comment on the words you chose to make your point, which I thought were due to an inaccurate understanding of John's point.
Acknowledging that you have not read the chapter on Indianapolis suggests your comment was more of an emotional reaction than an accurate understanding of John's argument.
John's point is that while everything you write above (and Mr. Wilson writes) is valid and important, it does not provide a sufficient explanation for the phenomena John describes in his books. Glenn emphasized deindustrialization as a significant economic factor. Glenn and John seemed to agree that John's argument is incremental, and (he asserts, and it is important to recognize) almost universally dismissed by academic sociologists. One need not agree with him, but it is important to get his argument correct. Implying that John is insensitive to the plight of those who lost jobs is what led me to comment.
Finally, this is not about who has the "better argument" (either-or); it is "both-and". Both you and John offer important points of view.
John was born into a well-to-do upper-middle-class black family with all expenses paid, free of much worry. He has never gone to bed hungry. John has never worked at a plant or factory. He grew up in a bubble that greatly influenced his thinking (white ivory tower mindset detached).
That sounds like an ad hominem argument, that his socioeconomic position disqualifies his opinion, rather than you engaging and offering a counter argument to his opinion.
Mr. Roscoe's reply to me does a nice job in explaining his different perspective. I agree with him there is room for many perspectives when it comes to policy debates, regardless of where and under what circumstances one was reared.
Thanks for your reply. Please watch the conversation between John and Glenn again and listen carefully to John's assertions from 16 years ago and today.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/debating-the-deindustrialization
Just before the three minute mark John from 2007 says that deindustrialization "doesn't seem to explain anything." John from 2023 goes on to say that the best way to account for the effects of deindustrialization is, "It didn't help that low skill jobs moved away." He also asserts if the only issue was that factory jobs moved away that people would have moved or set up businesses the way immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean often do. I listened carefully and offered a different perspective on these things in my post.
As for "emotional" responses, listen carefully to what John said just before the seven minute mark. He doesn't want to believe that people didn't respond well to deindustrialization. He doesn't want to believe that the exodus of the black middle class affected the people left behind. He says around the 7:35 mark that some of his reaction is "visceral."
Listen to the fuller conversation and John says around the 29 minute mark that he spent a year doing an analysis of Indianapolis data but has spent less than three hours there:
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/john-mcwhorter-sixteen-years-of-the#details
There are people who believe they can accurately assess economic and cultural shifts this way. I write from the perspective of someone who thinks you can't know a place or a people unless you spend significant time on the ground. I also explained in my first response to you why I don't think Indianapolis is a good case study if you want to understand the impacts of deindustrialization on Black America.
I've spent time in Akron, Birmingham, Detroit, Gary and Indianapolis. No disrespect to John, but my time in these places, combined with having spent many years in the manufacturing space, gives me a perspective he doesn't have. I shared my perspectives on deindustrialized cities and included data to flesh out my points. There's room for many perspectives when it comes to public policy debates so let folks read both essays and draw their own conclusions.
Mr. Roscoe,
Thank you for your response.
"I shared my perspectives on deindustrialized cities and included data to flesh out my points."
You did, and you did that very well. I appreciate that.
"There's room for many perspectives when it comes to public policy debates so let folks read both essays and draw their own conclusions."
I completely agree.
I am glad that John's two earlier books have elicited a lively response in these comments. I enjoyed the tightly structured arguments John makes in his writing.
I plan to move on to "Woke Racism" to see what John has to say about more recent developments.
Hate to be the guy but, this is as good as it gets. 60 years of bending over backwards and trillions of dollars to help a particular group, and this is the result. Food deserts, until the Mexicans show up and open a market. No employment opportunities until the Mexicans open up a muffler shop, auto repair business, beauty parlor, dry cleaning, auto parts store, restaurants, taco stand on the sidewalk, oranges and flowers for sale on the freeway on ramp, house cleaning service. The list goes on and on.
Blacks get a state of the art hospital, university appointments, political positions in city governments, and turn the whole thing into shit.
"60 years of bending over backwards and trillions of dollars to help a particular group, and this is the result....
Blacks get a state of the art hospital, university appointments, political positions in city governments, and turn the whole thing into shit."
The result is what typically happens in America at large: the scattering of Black progress/success--and the statistics are abundantly clear that there's been notable Black progress/success on a number of fronts over the past 6 decades, particularly for women--into suburbia. Anybody who doesn't see this simply doesn't want to.
I'd also like to know where segregated hospitals are being built in 21st century America as that is clearly unconstitutional. Otherwise, blame White leaders and officials for supposedly turning entire universities and municipalities into shit with their horrendous appointments of the blacks to posts in those institutions.
spiral8802, your m*** should have said no, and your d**** should have pulled out, sparing humanity from another piece of worthless crap. Enjoy your travel through the sewer lines to your final resting place.
Isn't there a line of reasoning that splits the difference between John and Clifton, in which we can posit that an especially fragile black culture was more readily impacted by the economic changes of deindustrialization? In other words, we need not name deindustrialization as a primary cause of black poverty, but can rather liken it to the draining of an already shallow reservoir by which the cracks were more quickly revealed. When Glenn and John argue about how to quantify the effect (a third of the economy?) and judge its significance, the context certainly matters.
The last time I was in Vietnam, a Vietnamese woman approached me and related, " me so horny... take me back to America with you honey... I'll make you plenty of babies." Lol!
I saw Full Metal Jacket too
By the way, my visit to Vietnam was in 2018 to see what I successfully evaded during the draft. Fortunately, my number was high. Some of my friends died in that stupid war and some came back without d*cks or their minds. Imagine black soldiers who suffered the most casualties were fighting people who didn't call them n*ggers or kill them like the white racists back home. I probably would have returned home joining the Back Panther Party in Oakland, California. But I ended up rescuing white b*ys from an Aryan prison gang. Lol!
I had 4 former Vietnamese doctors (refugees) on my caseload at the same time following their conviction for charges related to defrauding Medicaid in California. I evaluated them for probation vs. prison incarceration per 1203.03 of the California Penal Code. Their excuses for committing the fraud? That's the way they did it in Vietnam. Lol!
I used to rescue wannabe PROUD BOYS and vets from Aryan Brotherhood prison gang rape too during my 34 years working in the prison industrial complex. This was after the Vietnam War came to an end. One of late General Westmoreland's cousins was assigned to my caseload. He was convicted of trafficking large amounts of marijuana. Lol!
The 1965 immigration law: hordes of well-to-do Asians and poor Hispanic immigrants with unearned benefits has hurt blacks. Diversity redirects resources (anti-black racism in a new set of clothes). Racism is a competitive relationship between groups for ownership and control of resources for wealth and power.
Black folks need to wake the f*ck up and shed their self-defeating positive sentiments about immigrants who are on a mission to replace them. Social integration is immeasurable. It can't be deposited into the banks. The non-black small businesses in black communities should not be there.
Asians will not allow small black businesses into their communities, to say the least, other non-black minorities. Racism is a team sport, and forfeiting is not a viable option. Koreans have no business of owning and controlling the billion-dollar black hair care industry. Blacks do no not own and control Korean restaurants or nail salons.
Blacks need to change their inappropriate behavior toward social integration. Blacks bouncing around their dollars several times among themselves in creating group wealth is true black empowerment. Asians in black communities transferring wealth back to their communities is insane. It doesn't take a PhD to be aware of these dynamics negatively affecting black folks. Asians and their probationary white propaganda to get ahead?
I'm reminded of Boyce Watkins a while back lambasting Korean small business owners for dominating the Black hair industry. He often seems to voice fiery calls for Black self-empowerment. I'm actually curious if Glenn knows Dr. Watkins and wonder whether Boyce might make for a good guest on The Glenn Show one of these days.
As I pointed out in the other thread, Asians, in particular the Chinese, are actually making an effort to re-industrialize America and bring back manufacturing jobs to the US. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the pushback against Ford's proposed licensing agreement with CATL for a battery plant in Michigan and likewise Gotion's plans for a battery plant also in the state of Michigan, there is enormous resistance on the part of the American political class and even much of the general population against this on the basis of vaguely articulated national security concerns. Thus I posed the question in the prior thread whether or not in general people believe that economic prosperity should be subordinate to geopolitics. This has ramifications for the economic well-being of all Americans regardless of race.
Separate from the causal question of whether deindustrialization led to the further socioeconomic deterioration of Black Americans, I'm of the belief that Clifton is absolutely correct in emphasizing the multiplier effects of manufacturing. Taiwan, with a population of 24 million, and South Korea, with a population of 52 million, disproportionately dominate high tech manufacturing in areas like semiconductors. Consider the fact that those two countries with a combined population of 76 million constituting less than one percent of the global population of over 8 billion comprise between 80-85% of global semiconductor manufacturing by revenue, and one sees just how staggering the overrepresentation is.
Furthermore, I believe that TSMC alone accounts for around 15% of Taiwanese GDP and likewise I had read that Samsung accounts for around 16% of South Korean GDP. Given that these are single companies, that fact truly is staggering as well. By comparison, I vaguely recall that at one point Walmart accounted for about 2% of American GDP and that was the highest of any single American company I believe.
We tend to think of manufacturing as supporting the lifeblood of communities or even cities, but as the examples of Taiwan and South Korea show, entire countries have been able to catapult themselves into prosperity and geopolitical prominence by cultivating expertise in specific but highly technical and in-demand industries. I'm not an economist by any means, but I'd venture a guess that Taiwan and South Korea are the embodiment of manufacturing multiplier effects par excellence.
I wrote my original post by emphasizing the need educating people in support of those people who actually ruin the country. Technology of course, is important and many high school students of all races will gravitate toward technology, but Im talking about the people that really hold us together like everyone in every trade. Where would we be without them. It doesn’t matter if you are the best tech wizard on the planet and your wont start. Of course you could take a bus, but who would drive it or your car does start but you get into a fender bender and you have to go to the ER, what nurses would be there to help. You get out the ER and now you would have to get your cars body repaired. the point Im making is it takes a lot of skilled people to run this country. Finally, the pay for all trades is much more than working on an assembly line because the tradesman has a skill that adds value. Assembly line workers can easily be replaced by a robot.
Dr. Boyce Walkins should be invited by Glenn Loury to give different perspectives. Walkins and I agree with Dr. Claud Anderson's approach to changing the inappropriate behavior of blacks to compete in this unforgiving capitalistic system. Different Asian groups are more cohesive than blacks (code of conduct). Will it take a catastrophic event(s) to get blacks to wear their glasses from upside down? I'm very frustrated.
Despite who may have better statistics, what is the point of arguing about ancient history. Trillions of dollars later, gentleman, pease stop the insanity!
"But I’d like to be a fly on the wall and see anyone read that chapter and come away thinking I’m a mere partisan hack who’d button up if he knew more statistics."
When in fact, the statistics support John McWhorter's argument better than the 'deindustrialization' one. Again, see 'The Myth of American Inequality' by Gramm, Ekelund and Early. It's a short read, but the statistics, charts and graphs are unanswereable.
Deindustrialization has hurt bBlack and White workers alike. assembly line work is probably gone forever, but it‘s not the end of the world. The most important think we can do is make sure that our children are well educated and prepared to enter adulthood and society with a skillet. This might means going on to college and beyond. Not all Kids want to go to college but they can certainly go to a community college where they can develop a skill in an array of blue collar and white collar jobs that are essential to our economy. We are currently have a 1,000,000 of Nurses. Welders, plumbers, electricians, chefs, pharmacy techs, laboratory techs, radiology techs and on and on are in short supply today. We need to our Community Colleges are affordable and close to residential ares in our cities. Most importantly, we need to find a way to get our parents involved with their children‘s education from pre K and on.
"Deindustrialization has hurt bBlack and White workers alike."
I thought this was obvious to anyone paying attention. Trump supporters were more than business owners seeking tax cuts; more than White evangelicals yearning for a pro-life Supreme Court. A whole lot of them were also iterations of Pat Buchanan's old base, which included many aggrieved men--White men--who fell through the cracks of deindustrialization.