Tag Archives: #Race

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Philadelphia Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier doesn’t want her “Black and brown” constituents paying more in property taxes

One great thing about moving back to our home state of Kentucky from Pennsylvania: property taxes are much lower in the Bluegrass State! Property taxes on what was our home in Jim Thorpe are currently listed as $3,228 according to Zillow, while we paid slightly under $400 in property taxes on our current abode last October.

No, $400 is not a typo!

Black and brown homeowners unfairly targeted by Philly’s new property assessments

The Kenney administration cannot claim to center either racial or housing equity if they are making it more difficult for working class and Black and brown homeowners to afford to their homes.

by Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D – 3rd District) | Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D-Philadelphia). Photo from her city biography page and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

Philadelphia prides itself on its high homeownership rates, especially among working class residents. But the massive property assessment increases that were announced earlier this week present an immediate threat to this fact of life in our city — especially in Black and brown neighborhoods experiencing rapid gentrification. A disproportionate number of these neighborhoods are in the 3rd Councilmanic District, where residential assessments have increased by 50% on average.

I will admit to some amusement that The Philadelphia Inquirer’s use of the Associated Press Stylebook has led to the “Black and brown” formulation when it comes to race. The AP decided that black was to be capitalized when referring to race, but white was not. Continue reading →

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Gentrification is a good thing!

On its website main page Thursday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in plugging a new story, Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis through the eyes of those experiencing it, there was a link to an older story, Philly blocks besieged by shootings have long endured poverty, blight, and systemic racism. Dated September 16, 2021, I had seen it before. The story documents some of the blocks with the highest number of shootings, and tells us what we already knew:

But in Philadelphia, the epidemic of gun violence has been intensely concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks — like the one where Johnson was killed, according to an Inquirer analysis. These shootings have left behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of the city’s residents, nearly all of whom are Black and brown.

I admit to being wryly amused by the Inquirer’s stylebook, seemingly copied from the Associated Press, which decided that, in reference to race, “black” should be capitalized, but “white” should not. The stylebook led to “black” being capitalized and “brown” being left in lower case. Social justice, racial justice, and just generally being #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading leads to some real stupidity.

As unchecked gun violence has reached unprecedented heights this year, it has continued to disproportionately batter these same communities, where residents also endure higher poverty levels, lower life expectancy, and more blighted housing, the analysis shows.

Naturally, the “anti-racist” Inquirer wants to blame everything but race, unless it’s the racism of white people!

After several paragraphs noting violent areas, including the blocks around the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, about which we have written previously, and around which the Philadelphia Police Department has mostly ignored the open-air drug markets, I came to these two paragraphs, two I found very important:

The vast majority of the city’s developed[2]By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the … Continue reading blocks with housing — more than three-quarters of them — haven’t experienced a single shooting since 2015. Entire swaths of Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and Roxborough, far whiter and wealthier than the rest of the city, have not seen a shooting for years.

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

“(Y)ears of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity”, huh? Let’s not beat around the bush here: the writers managed to avoid the word itself in their long article, but the word is gentrification.

Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses.[3]“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a … Continue reading It is a common and controversial topic in urban politics and planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood, but the resulting demographic displacement may itself become a major social issue. Gentrification often shifts a neighborhood’s racial or ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and businesses in a gentrified architectural style and extending and improving resources that had not been previously accessible.[4]West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020., [3][5]Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.

The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, which dominates the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies.

But it appears that the residents of these poorer neighborhoods don’t want wealthier, and let’s be honest here, whiter people moving in:

In a plan for a safer, vibrant 52nd Street, worried West Philly neighbors see gentrification looming

Angst is roiling minority neighborhoods as they struggle to balance the opportunities and the threats created by gentrification. “West Philly is the new Africa,” one resident warned at a community meeting. “Everyone wants the property that’s in West Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin | February 21, 2020

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher.

Morris’ declaration opened the floodgates of fear and anger that recent night at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library. Maciunas and Jesse Blitzstein, director of community and economic development for the nonprofit Enterprise Center, which is spearheading the project, were peppered with skeptical questions ranging from the validity of surveys showing community support for the improvements to the maintenance of trees that would be planted.

There’s more at the original.

As we have previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer have told us that racial segregation is very much part of the problem in city residents feeling unsafe, and Philadelphia is one of the United States’ most internally segregated big cities. But that very same Editorial Board, less than two years ago, were very wary about gentrification. To be fair — and I so rarely am when it comes to the Inquirer — the Board have at least mixed feelings when it comes to gentrification.

While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[6]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[7]Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.

Philadelphia is not concerned about black residents moving in and integrating nearly all-white neighborhoods, and that is what the Inquirer’s Editorial Board said ought to happen. But somehow, liberal cities don’t seem to want that to happen in reverse, don’t seem to want white people moving into majority black neighborhoods.  Yet, as the Inquirer noted:

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

Gentrification seems to reduce violence!

Gentrification ought to be something every city wants. Not only do revitalized properties raise property values around them, but when white ‘gentrifiers’ move into a majority black neighborhood, they are clearly white people who have no racist attitudes toward blacks, people perfectly willing to have black neighbors. Is that not a good thing?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the housing was not dilapidated, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say that.
↑3 “Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use”.
↑4 West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
↑5 Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
↑6 Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
↑7 Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.
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Killadelphia Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw ought to worry about her primary job first?

We already knew it was a bloody few days in the City of Brotherly Love, but the city didn’t update its figures on Friday, due, I suppose, to the Good Friday holiday. Now they have, and it’s ugly.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that there have been 140 homicides in the city as of 11:59 PM EDT on Easter Sunday, April 17th. That’s 11 more dead bodies since the previous Sunday, and 8 of them occurred since the end of Wednesday, April 13th, 8 murders in 4 days.

So, about what has Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw been worried?

Please join me in welcoming @Phillypolice‘s first Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer, Ms. Leslie Marant! Ms. Marant’s position and office have been established to oversee diversity and inclusion efforts at every level of our organization. A lifelong Philadelphian, she …is uniquely qualified to succeed in this position. Having demonstrated tireless dedication and passion to the field of DEI work, she is the former Chief of Staff for the Universal Education Company, as well as the former Chief Council to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. She has earned a B.S. in Finance & HR Admin, and a Juris Doctor & Master of Laws, Trial Advocacy from @TempleUniv. We will benefit enormously from her experience as we continue to build and rebuild trust with the communities we serve. Welcome!

The Commissioner’s statement quoted is from three separate tweets. The image of the tweet on the right is a screenshot taken by me at 9:15 PM EDT on Monday; click on the image to take you to the original tweet.

“(D)iversity and inclusion”? It would seem that “diversity and inclusion” efforts have not been exactly successful in the city’s shootings and killings! Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw should worry about her primary job, bringing criminals to justice, first?

According to the city’s Shooting Victims database, there had been 49 people shot from Thursday through Sunday, 33 of them black, 12 listed as Hispanic white, and 4 as non-Hispanic white. That brings April’s total to 133 shooting victims, 104 of them non-Hispanic black, 12 Hispanic white, and 6 non-Hispanic white. No other racial/ethnic groups are listed as shooting victims.

Philadelphia’s population, according to the 2020 census, was only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, yet, thus far in April, they’ve been 78.20% of the shooting victims. Yet the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had exactly one story on the shootings and killings this morning, and it was dated on Saturday, April 16th. The publisher, Lisa Hughes, the Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, and their minions don’t want to report at all on shootings and killings in minority communities, because that would be raaaaacist!

By this afternoon, the Inquirer’s Editorial Board weighed in:

50 shootings during the weekend warns of a deadly summer in Philly | Editorial

As summer approaches, and with the city once again on pace to record more than 500 homicides this year, officials must act now to stem the possibility of bloodshed later.

by The Editorial Board | Monday, April 18, 2022

When it comes to gun violence in Philadelphia, it’s long been clear that warm weather can have serious consequences.

A 2018 New York Times analysis found that days when the temperature exceeds 50 degrees have nearly 70% more shooting victims in our city than days when the weather is 49 or below. A similar trend, the Times found, plays out in other cities that also experience seasonal weather changes.

It should hardly have come as a surprise, then, that an unexpected stretch of sunny April weather during the holiday weekend also saw the number of incidents of gun violence tick up dramatically in the city. During a 24-hour stretch from Thursday to Friday, the city averaged a shooting an hour, and of the two dozen people who were shot, five were killed. All told, from Thursday to Sunday, the city saw a total of 50 shootings. During that four-day stretch, the high temperature in the city did not dip below 52 degrees.

The weather has been cool in the northeast on Monday, so maybe there won’t be as many shootings and killings, but the forecast is for a warming trend, to finally get back to spring normal temperatures.

The Editorial Board, a self-described “group of journalists who work separately from the newsroom to debate matters of public interest,” but who seem to have a strong commonality of #woke leftist views, continue with typical liberal pablum ideas: opening more swimming pools this summer, the School District offering in-person educational programming for all students over the summer, and a roster of summer programs.

While restoring programs and reopening pools are important steps for cooling tensions, the stakes and the scale of this crisis demand the same kind of bold intervention that we’ve seen from Mayor Jim Kenney on COVID-19. That means finding more ways to fight gun violence, not telling residents and colleagues that you’ve done all you can.

Apparently Commissioner outlaw believes that hiring a Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer is the way to go! Yeah, that’ll sure calm down the gang-bangers!

Call me a cynic if you will, but somehow I’m not confident that the city’s wannabe gangsters are going to be all that interested in summer school.

If the city is once again unable to open all of its pools, then avoid hitting poorer neighborhoods with most of the closures. If library hours and programs cannot be fully staffed, find ways to support branches in our most vulnerable communities. If trash collection once again falls behind, prioritize neighborhoods where residents have smaller homes and fewer cars, leaving them without options to store and transport their waste. Hold the Police Department accountable, track and transparently evaluate anti-violence programs, and ensure the implementation of recommendations from the “100 Shooting Review.” Integrate violence prevention into everything the city does, as this board called for at the outset of the year.

Apparently to The Editorial Board, “poorer neighborhoods” is a synonym for black and Hispanic neighborhoods. As we have previously noted, the Board are very, very concerned about the racial disparity in the danger faced by Philadelphians, and blamed it on Philly being one of the most internally segregated cities in the country. Curiously enough, if you read their editorial carefully, you might come to the conclusion that the Board want white residents to feel as endangered as black residents do, sort of a socialist leveling down rather than raising up.

The fact is that there are a lot of poorer white Philadelphians as well, and they aren’t shooting each other at the same rate black city residents have done. However, neither the Editorial Board, nor the Mayor, nor the District Attorney, nor the Police Commissioner can admit that the homicide rate in Philadelphia is a racial problem more than an economic one. There is something in the culture of urban black communities that is leading the young men males of those communities to carry guns and blast away, but it is apparently wholly raaaaacist to point out that statistically obvious fact.

But you cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to acknowledge the problem, and the while liberals of Philadelphia are unwilling to face the problem because it is so very politically incorrect.

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2222 Wallace Street

We noted, on April 5th, a rowhome for sale at 4931 Hoopes Street, in West Philadelphia. The purpose was simple: to demonstrate how bad the neighborhood in which a 13-year-old was shot happened to be. We included four pictures of this disaster listing, for documentation, because photos disappear from zillow.com once a home is sold.

The house is completely unlivable, save as a squatter could make his home there. More importantly, while a house flipper might be interested in the property, he’d quickly forget the notion, because he could never recoup the money that he’d have to spend on the place to get it up to snuff because the property values in the rest of that dilapidated neighborhood are so low. Even if a flipper could buy the place for $1.00, there’s a possibility that he couldn’t make money fixing it up and selling it.

According to the zillow listing, property taxes on this place are $875 a year. If someone fixed it up and resold it, it would be reassessed, and the taxes increase.

2222 Wallace Street; the unit for sale is on the left. Photo from listing on zillow.com. Click to enlarge.

Now, why did I bring this up? There was a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighting another row home for sale, in Fairmont, at 2222 Wallace Street . . . . for $875,000.

There is already a pending offer on this home.

The photos make it look well done, and it’s a beautiful home, though I will confess that were I to have redone this home, I would not have selected the styles that the remodeler chose. Nothing personal; it’s simply not my style.

Taxes? According to the zillow.com listing,[1]I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, … Continue reading property taxes on this unit were $10,881 in 2021. That works out to $906.75 a month, which is higher than any mortgage payment I’ve ever had to make on any of the houses I’ve owned. Yet, as we previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer are aghast that how safe people are in the city depends upon their skin color. While I have no idea what race the family who put in the pending offer on the Wallace Street house are, generally speaking most black and Hispanic Philadelphians can only dream of owning a home in that neighborhood.

I was wryly amused that the Inquirer ran this story, given how the Editorial Board were lamenting that the city is very racially segregated, and that an $875,000 listing is not exactly one which will draw many black or Hispanic prospective buyers. Still, article author Paul Jablow has such stories about once a week.

References

References
↑1 I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, and here is the listing on that site.
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The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer tell us just how racist they are I don't think that they ever realized what they did

As we noted on Thursday, a poll by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 70% of Philadelphians believe that public safety is the most important issue facing the city. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, April 7th, 127 people had been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love[1]The referenced site is updated weekdays during normal business hours, so if you check it on a day after this has been posted, the number you see may be higher..

And on Friday, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have told us that segregation is the problem:

In a segregated city, race determines safety. That’s unacceptable. | Editorial

Segregation is at the core of so many of Philadelphia’s problems. How do we move from moral indignation to meaningful action?

by The Editorial Board | Friday, April 8, 2022 | 9:30 AM EDT

In his budget address last month, Mayor Jim Kenney listed the issues facing the city — “a global pandemic, political turmoil at the national level, and intensified violence” — and proclaimed: “We are facing those challenges together.”

That might be true in spirit, but in practice, Philadelphia is not facing all of its challenges together. That is the reality of a segregated city.

A new poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts, again, demonstrates this disparity with a statistic that is unacceptable: The percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.

With this, the Editorial Board have admitted what the Inquirer does not like to say out loud: the problems of crime, especially violent crime, are problems primarily among black and Hispanic Philadelphians. The city’s Shooting Victims statistics indicate that, for April, through April 7th, there were 39 victims in Philadelphia, 31 of whom were black, and 8 of whom were white. Of the 8 white victims, 6 are listed as Latino. White Philadelphians are relatively safe.

Following a couple of paragraphs in which the Board tell us what we already knew, that while city residents felt much safer, and that the bullets flying around the city hadn’t flown in their neighborhoods, we get to the money line:

This disparity is only possible because Philadelphians of different races don’t share the same neighborhoods — despite more than half a century of lip-service to integration as the policy of the United States.

It’s certainly true that Philadelphia is one of our most internally segregated big cities, something the Inquirer has previously reported, complete with colorful — pun most definitely intended — graphics.

But if zip code 19118 — Chestnut Hill — is 2/3 white, doesn’t that mean that it really is integrated?

Of course, Chestnut Hill is an expensive place to live. Home to Chestnut Hill College and several tony private schools — Springside Chestnut Hill Academy’s tuition rates are currently $33,250 for grades 1-4, $39,700 for grades 5-8, and $44,150 for grades 9-12 — and with a median family income of $50,554 in zip code 19138 — primarily West Oak Lane and East Germantown — there can’t be too many families there who could afford Chestnut Hill Academy.[2]Full disclosure: while working in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I did some concrete work at Chestnut Hill Academy. It’s a beautiful place.

The Board continue on to tell us about the Kerner Commission warning us that continued segregation risked prolonging social unrest, and that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. My mother, who was a mortgage company employee, end eventual vice president, told me about the non-discrimination restrictions under which she had to operate. Even though we lived in the Bluegrass State, my mother grew up in Maine, and segregation was something foreign to her.[3]The house she bought, in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, had a restrictive covenant on it, disallowing sale of the property to anyone who was black, but by that time restrictive covenants were legally … Continue reading

The Kerner Commission’s report was sadly prophetic. The only thing it failed to anticipate was gentrification and how white city dwellers would go on to create segregated pockets within the heart of big cities. More than half a century after the Kerner Commission and the Fair Housing Act, Philadelphia remains one of the nation’s most diverse and most segregated cities.

It seems that the Board are opposed to gentrification, but gentrification means, among other things, white people moving into and improving homes in what have frequently been heavily minority areas. These are white people who have no objections to having black neighbors. I previously noted a Lexington city task force recommendation which stated:

The Task Force was created out of concern about neighborhood change when that change includes:

  • Properties turning over at an accelerated rate;
  • Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.

Really? The city is going to work to stop integration of neighborhoods?

The Board cannot be supporting increased integration, to fight violent crime, and be opposed to white people moving into primarily non-white areas.

What does it mean to be a segregated city in a gun violence crisis? According to the Controller’s Office’s gun violence mapping toll, the zip codes of Rittenhouse Square and Chestnut Hill, where about 70% of the population is white, haven’t experienced a fatal shooting since before 2015. Contrast that with nearly 200 fatal shootings in North Philadelphia-Strawberry Mansion, where more than 90% of the population is Black, or nearly 240 in the Kensington-Port Richmond area, with a Hispanic population of 50%.

Rittenhouse Square is a beautiful park — and a safe one. The Black and Hispanic neighbors of McPherson Square and Hunting Park deserve to feel equally safe in public spaces near their homes.

The Board illustrated their editorial with a photograph of people, all white people as far as could be discerned, enjoying a “balmy March afternoon” in Rittenhouse Square.

Segregation is at the core of so many of Philadelphia’s problems — including gun violence, which to this day almost perfectly aligns with the borders of the redlining maps created by the federal government to keep, particularly, Black home buyers out of certain areas.

How do we move from moral indignation to meaningful action? How do we deliver on the promise of fair housing such that we implement what the Kerner Commission called “the integration choice?”

The first step is to retain affordable housing options that already exist (some are being lost now in University City) and creating alternatives to predatory financial institutions for those seeking home loans (such as creating a public bank). But fundamentally, segregation will persist as long as Philadelphia continues to fail to provide basic amenities to all neighborhoods. Good schools, clean streets, open libraries and recreational centers — those shouldn’t be a privilege for the few who can afford it, but a feature of life for all Philadelphians, regardless of zip code.

Until the recent Bidenflation, conventional mortgage loans could be found, fairly easily, for under 3%. Of course, a conventional loan required 20% of the purchase price as a down payment, and that means people have to be disciplined enough to save their money for that purpose, and if someone can’t be that disciplined, can he really be trusted to make his mortgage payments? It wasn’t that long ago that we saw a major economic recession caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Gun violence is both a disease and a symptom. It’s crucial that our city’s goal be twofold: ensuring that all Philadelphians feel safe, and that the ranks of those who do not isn’t determined by skin color. Only when that is the case can Philadelphia truly say it is facing its challenges together.

For what are the Board asking here? They have already let us know that they don’t like gentrification, wealthier white people moving into predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and fixing up distressed homes; that, they claimed, led to segregated white pockets in the city. Somehow, no one seems to see the increased values in gentrifying areas lifting the net worth of the homes of black and Hispanic people living in those areas, or the value of white residents who are completely accepting of living in an integrated neighborhood. The Board seem to want more black residents in Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square, but unless those residents can afford to move there, either the city, or someone, will have to provide the same subprime mortgages that caused the crash, or build ‘affordable housing’ in places which would then see other people’s property values decline due to it.

There is, of course, a not-so-subtle undertone to the Board’s editorial, the theme that white people make places safer, while blacks and Hispanics make areas more dangerous. The members would deny that, of course, but it is right there, obvious to anyone who reads what they wrote.

References

References
↑1 The referenced site is updated weekdays during normal business hours, so if you check it on a day after this has been posted, the number you see may be higher.
↑2 Full disclosure: while working in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I did some concrete work at Chestnut Hill Academy. It’s a beautiful place.
↑3 The house she bought, in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, had a restrictive covenant on it, disallowing sale of the property to anyone who was black, but by that time restrictive covenants were legally unenforceable. It would, however, have cost legal fees to get the covenant language removed.
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The new complaint from the left: we are treating Ukrainian refugees differently from Middle Eastern ones

Robert Stacy McCain noticed this before I did, but I have an excuse: I was working in my shop, finally repairing a small sidewall workbench in my shop. It’s narrow, primarily used as a sanding station — and too often, a flat surface on which to stack things — and had been damaged and sagging due to last year’s floods. The bench is narrow because I had to leave room for vehicles to pull into the garage. I added support where the plywood bench was sagging, leveling it out, and then added some edge banding using scrap hardwood I had, and if you really care, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr McCain noticed that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times was making the Russian invasion of Ukraine about race, because that’s just what she does.

    Infamous Race Hustler Uses Ukraine War to — You Guessed It — Hustle Race

    by Robert Stacy McCain | March 2, 2022

    The brilliance of Critical Race Theory is that it enables practitioners to see racism literally everywhere:

      Left-wing New York Times reporter and controversial 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was slammed online after accusing journalists covering the Russian invasion into Ukraine of “racialized analysis and language” in their reporting, indicating their “sympathy” for white victims of conflict and refugees in particular while claiming Europe is a fictional continent intended to separate it from non-“civilized” nations.

      On Sunday, Hannah-Jones, author of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project, called on fellow journalists to “look internally” regarding acknowledging their racial biases in their coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      “Every journalist covering Ukraine should really, really look internally. This is why I say we should stop pretending we have objectivity and in instead acknowledge our biases so that we can report against them,” she wrote. “Many of us see the racialized analysis and language.”

      She added, “And honestly, these admissions of shock that this is happening in a European country are ahistorical and also serve to justify the lack of sympathy for other invasions, other occupations and other refugee crisis involving peoples not considered white.”

      Later in the day, Hannah-Jones called the European continent a “geopolitical fiction” intended to separate it from Asia and which led to the “alarm” over an invasion of people who “are like us.”

Further down:

    Would you like me to tell you the most perfect thing here? The author of this Breitbart article is Joshua Klein. You know that this race-hustling stuff has become a losing game for the Left when you see Jews calling it out. And while we’re on the subject of ethnic politics, why do you think there was such a shift of Latino voters to the GOP in 2020? It’s because they are likewise getting fed up with this BLM/CRT nonsense.

    Keep in mind that it’s not as if prejudice against Jews and Latinos doesn’t exist in America, or in the Republican Party for that matter. It’s just that sensible people, whatever their ethnicity or position within the Universal Oppression Matrix, can recognize a scam as obvious as the one being foisted upon us by such “intellectuals” as Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    At a time when we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, nobody wants to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling.

Well, it seems that Mr McCain was wrong: at least the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer thought people would want to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling:

    Infuriated, not shocked: People from the Middle East are noticing that now you care about war in Ukraine | Opinion

    A Syrian refugee and Palestinian in Philadelphia hope the Russian invasion to Ukraine will make people care about their people’s suffering.

    by Abraham Gutman | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | 9:24 AM EST

    The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to an outpouring of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But Ukrainians are not the only people who suffer under oppression. And people from the Middle East, who are used to their plight for justice going ignored, are noticing the difference.

    Moumena Saradar, now 45, was born and raised in Damascus. In 2011, when a brutal civil war started, she was too worried about the safety of her five children to stay. One morning, a sniper started shooting in her neighborhood. “The bullets were just a few feet away from my kids when they were going to school,” she recalled over the phone this week. “We are lucky that they are still alive.”

    Her family went to Egypt in 2012. It was hard starting a new life, especially after they left everything back home. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, and were chosen to come to the United States. But her struggle was not over. “It wasn’t easy at all. We were going through one year of interviews with different agents, officers, background checks — but luckily we made it and we came here in summer 2016.”

    Philadelphia has been her home ever since. She works as a medical translator and as a part-time Global Guide in the Penn Museum, walking visitors through the Middle East exhibit.

    While Saradar waited for refuge, people didn’t talk about Syrian refugees the way they talk about the people leaving Ukraine. On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump suggested Syrian refugees might be terrorists in disguise, and promised, “If I win, they’re going back.” The sentiment wasn’t his alone. By November 2015, governors in 30 states publicly demanded that resettlement of Syrian refugees halt, and the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution — with the not-so-subtle title American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act — to limit the number of refugees from Syria.

    Today, the refugee discourse feels completely different. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 63% of voters — including half of Republican voters — believe the United States should accept Ukrainian refugees. When the White House announced that it was prepared to do that, right-wing politicians and media didn’t pounce — as many did just a few months ago, when the refugees the United States was preparing to accept were from Afghanistan.

There’s more at the original, but the article fails to consider the obvious: the invasion of Ukraine is categorically different from the internal strike that has afflicted so many nations in the Middle East. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that was invaded by the military forces of another sovereign nation, and the nearest equivalent we have to that was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ukraine, though there were Russian separatists in control of parts of two eastern provinces, was not an internal civil war, marked by multiple groups, using terrorism against civilians as one of their primary weapons, and Ukraine didn’t have an equivalent of Da’ish, more commonly known as the Islamic State, trying to impose a radically harsh version of Shari’a, Islamic religious law, on the lands it controlled.

Syria, from where Moumena Saradar came? That was a civil war, encouraged at least in part by the United States during the Obama Administration, and its then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as part of the Arab Spring. The Arabic revolts toppled many authoritarian rulers, only to see them mostly replaced by other authoritarian rulers, but Bashir al-Assad managed to hang on to power in Damascus, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War, which is still going on today, eleven years after it began. Given the chaos of the civil war, the poor record-keeping in the country, and the difficulties in getting records from the Syrian government, is it any particular surprise that the United States was being cautious concerning the Syrian refugees allowed to enter?

Of course, the United States was involved: the US had several units in Syria, troops sent in under President Obama, though it was supposedly a secret, a secret that isn’t a secret any longer. President Trump wanted to pull all American forces out of Syria, but met with some resistance by the Pentagon, and he didn’t get all American troops out by the time he left office.

Ukraine is part of Europe — the Europe that Miss Hannah-Jones claims is a fictional entity — and Ukraine is right next door to Poland. When the refugees escape Ukraine, they are directly escaping into a NATO nation. If the European nations don’t accept the Ukrainian refugees, they would be bottling them up in Ukraine, in the path of Russian troops.

    One reason for the difference, Saradar says, is the way the crisis is covered by the media. And she has a point. Pundits and reporters have drawn a racist contrast between Ukraine and places in the Middle East that suffered war. News viewers have heard that Kyiv is a “civilized city” and that the civilians at risk have “blue eyes and blond hair.” An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about the war in Ukraine opened with: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts.”

Kyiv absolutely was a civilized city, a European civilized city, in ways that Damascus and other Middle Eastern capitals simply are not. Many of the European nations which have accepted Middle Eastern refugees are experiencing significant cultural shocks, as Arab Middle Easterners are bringing in customs and morés which are far more different from those of Europeans than would be those from Ukrainian refugees.

    Jude Hussein, 24, has also noticed the difference. She is a member of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Commission who was born in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the territory of the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. I asked her how it felt to see an outpouring of support to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. “It wasn’t shocking, but it was infuriating,” Hussein responded. “The same human-rights violations that are happening now in Ukraine have been happening for decades in Palestine.”

    This is a dynamic Hussein has gotten used to. “When Europe is on the line, whether it is a violation of human rights or international law, the world has their eyes wide open and they are willing to act on such violations. But when it comes to the Middle East, and Palestine, especially as brown people, the world always shies away.”

The Inquirer article included a photo of Miss Hussein, who certainly doesn’t look all that “brown” to me! The caption on the photo shows Miss Hussein, “a Palestinian American, celebrating International Palestinian Solidarity Day in Philadelphia on November 29, 2021.” In other words, she was demonstrating against Israel, an American ally, and the only truly democratic and civilized nation in the Middle East.

    She’s right: Less than a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pennsylvania started looking at ways to divest from Russian companies — including removing Russian vodkas from state liquor stores. Gov. Tom Wolf called the removal of Russian products “a show of solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine, and an expression of our collective revulsion with the unprovoked actions of the Russian state.”

    This was the same Tom Wolf who in 2016 signed a bill that prevents the state from contracting with businesses that boycott Israel. At the time, the governor said that Pennsylvania “will not encourage economic punishment in place of peaceful solutions to challenging conflicts.”

Let me be frank here: the United States does, and should, favor Israel, and ought to disfavor her enemies. The Arab nations and cultures sponsor terrorism and anti-Americanism, as part of their cultures, and we ought to be much more suspicious about admitting refugees from those nations — were I President, the number of such refugees admitted to the United States would be zero — into the United States. They do not add to our nation, but increase division, just as Miss Hussein was doing when she was demonstrating against Israel.

Ukraine is not our enemy, and Ukrainians don’t hate the United States and the West. The Ukrainian refugees ought to be settled in Europe, not the United States, and this ought to be seen as a European problem, not ours. But I have no problem at all with Western democratic governments, and people, recognizing that Ukrainian and Middle Eastern refugees are not identical.

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To our credentialed media, truth is racist! And they just can't handle the truth!

As always, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Monday morning, and it tells me that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2022, 37 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. IT also tells me that ‘only’ 36 people were murdered in the city’s streets on the same date in record-breaking 2021, and ‘just’ 34 in 2020, which saw 499 killings.

That ugly 37 number was three higher than the last time the Police Department updated the homicide numbers, for Thursday, January 20th, yet The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page and crime page show no stories on homicides over the weekend, and the crime page has several stories that are days old.

And so I found this, a Washington Post story, but reprinted in the Inquirer:

    Homicide rates have soared nationwide, but mayors see a chance for a turnaround in 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    by Griff Witte | The Washington Post | Sunday, January 23, 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    Then one day last October, those bullets tore a jagged hole in Mahr’s own family. His daughter Isis was dropping off a friend when a gunman unloaded on her car. The soccer standout, who had been saving money to pay her way through nursing school, was 19.

    “I always feared it,” Mahr said. “I never imagined it.”

    Isis’s death filled him with hurt. The reaction from the community, however, gave him hope.

    The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as homicide numbers soared – in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020. But as 2022 kicks off, city leaders from coast to coast say the stars may be aligning in a very different way.

    Flush with federal pandemic-relief funds, mayors are pumping money into crime prevention programs that have demonstrated early promise. Police chiefs are using advanced data to target places and people for intervention, even as they attempt to mend badly strained neighborhood ties. And communities such as Mahr’s, tired of burying their own, are rising up against those most responsible for the deaths. The result, some officials and experts say, may be a golden opportunity to break the trend of spiraling violent crime.

    “People have said ‘Enough is enough,'” Mahr said. “They’re ready to fight back.”

There’s more at the original. Here’s the link to the Post original.

The main thrust of the story refers to St Louis, Missouri. As we noted a few days before the New Year, KSDK proudly noted that homicides in 2021 had fallen back to “pre-pandemic” levels, with ‘just’ 192 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, compared to 263 in 2020, and 194 in 2019. The 2021 year-end total wound up being 196.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I actually did the math — and we know that math is racist, so that’s obviously a problem — and the numbers worked out to a homicide rate of 8.54 per 100,000 for white males, and 205.48 per 100,000 for black males in the Gateway City. Like Josef Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Both the Philadelphia and St Louis numbers represent too small a sample size to make any meaningful statements about trends in homicides, though with 37 murders in 23 days, Philly is on pace to another record number, 587 homicides. Even if the city’s killings slowed down to 2020’s pace, it would represent a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

And the Inquirer? The city’s newspaper, third oldest continuously published daily in America, is doing its job in steadfastly ignoring the deaths. We can find stories, from five days ago, about the cute white woman killed when some miscreant bludgeoned her to death with a pipe, and, also five days ago, about the man being charged with a firearms violation for fatally shooting the criminal trying to steal tha catalytic converter from his car. The story, from ten days ago, about the retired postal worker who defended himself with his legally-owned firearm, still shows, but there’s nothing there about the vast majority of the killings, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the victims were people about whom there was nothing exceptional about their killings.

I have mentioned, many times, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ statement that she was making the newspaper into an “anti racist news organization,” but I failed to delve into just what “anti racist” meant. From National Public Radio:

    ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist

    by Eric Deggans | August 25, 2020 | 12:03 AM EDT

    When the topic of racism comes up, I often think of a billboard in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas.

    It was a sign promoting a white supremacist radio station called White Pride Radio. The sign’s message, emblazoned next to the picture of a cute-looking white girl with a cute-looking dog, read “It’s not racist to [heart] your people.”

    My takeaway: Even white supremacists don’t want to be called racist.

    Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you’re “not racist” doesn’t feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

    In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.

I have to ask: does “undo(ing) racism” in my “personal environment” mean that I must move from the 99.07% white county, even though it’s a poverty-stricken county in eastern Kentucky? We didn’t choose the place where we bought our retirement home due to the county’s demographics, but because it was what we wanted, for a very low price. I guess that doesn’t make me ‘anti racist’ enough!

What anti racism has come to mean, in the hallowed halls of American journalism, is to not tell the truth. The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, led the way in that company’s decision to stop publishing mugshots of criminals, by stating:

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Miss Hughes’ article pointed out that she was:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

In simpler terms, under Miss Hughes’ leadership, the Inquirer will take decisions in its news coverage and editorial decisions based not only on whether the information being considered for publication is factual and well-sourced, but on whether it might reinforce negative stereotypes against a particular racial group. It makes itself obvious in the fact that the Inquirer simply does not report, save in the briefest terms, about the individual homicides in the city.

It also makes itself known in what the Inquirer says about the bloodbath in the city’s streets. It’s never about bad people shooting others, but “gun violence,” as though guns magically levitate themselves and fire away at innocent people, without any human agency at all. The editorial policy, as well as the political policies of the city’s Democratic leadership — and Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — has been to ignore the fact that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators in city homicides, and in crime in general, have been black.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected. The problem cannot be seriously addressed because it cannot even be admitted, because to admit it would be racist!

I am not the only one who has made fun of the notion that math is racist, but the Inquirer, along with many of our major, and not-so-major, daily newspapers, have adopted a policy which says, at bottom, that truth is racist, that facts are racist.

Elizabeth Hughes knows this, Inquirer editor Gabriel Escobar knows this, Lexington Herald-Leader editor Peter Baniak knows this, they all know this, but they knuckle under to political correctness anyway, because they just can’t handle the truth.

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Feminista Jones calls out The Philadelphia Inquirer Somehow, though, I doubt that they'll be able to see it

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper[1]The Inquirer is the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right. pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

So, it was with some surprise that I saw this article from Feminista Jones on the Inquirer’s website:

    When Gabby Petito disappeared, the world watched. Destini Smothers was ignored.

    If a greater percentage of African American and Indigenous women go missing and they experience higher rates of fatal domestic violence, why does the media continue to ignore their plight?

    by Feminista Jones,[2]Feminista Jones is an author and doctoral student at Temple University. She is the cohost of Black Girl Missing podcast and a fierce advocate for Black women and girls. Her website is here. For The Inquirer | September 29, 2021

    After taking a trip with her boyfriend, a beautiful young woman went missing, never to be heard from again. The last person to see her alive is believed to be her boyfriend, though he has denied any involvement in her death and has since gone missing himself. Her family desperately searched for her, traveling far and wide, pleading with local police and the media for help, hoping someone, anyone would have a clue into her disappearance. When her body was discovered, all hopes of finding her safe and alive were dashed — she was gone forever, and her loved ones would never hold her in their arms or see her brilliant smile again. They want answers and there are several questions about her boyfriend’s connection to her death since he was the last person to see her alive, according to all accounts.

    Destini Smothers had been missing since Nov. 3. (Obtained by New York Daily News)

    You may be thinking about Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman whose body was recently discovered near the campsite she and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, visited in Utah in August 2021.

    But I was writing about Destini Smothers, a 26-year-old woman from New York who, in November 2020, traveled with Kareem Flake, her boyfriend and father of her two children, from their home in Troy, N.Y., to Queens to both attend a funeral and to celebrate her birthday. When her mother didn’t hear from her, she contacted her boyfriend, who only said that she left their car after an argument, upset because she wanted to go spend time with her friends after they attended a bowling party. He said she left without taking her keys, wallet, or phone. Her mother didn’t believe him and became frantic. She contacted local authorities in November, but she didn’t receive much information about the investigation until March when she was notified that her daughter’s body was found.

    In the days after she went missing, Smothers’ disappearance did not appear on national news outlets, every hour or with breaking news segments on 24-hour cable news shows. Smothers was African American and like so many African American girls and women, her disappearance barely made a blip in local media, much less national coverage.

    When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing.

There’s more at the original, but I would have expected, even if Miss Jones wrote this article for wider publication than just in the Inquirer, she would have tailored this one far more specifically to the Inquirer. After all, Miss Jones lives in the City of Brotherly Love, and someone who writes frequently for newspapers[3]Her biography page states, “Feminista’s passion and talent for writing have led to her being featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Essence, XOJane, Complex, Vox, Salon, and … Continue reading should have paid a bit more attention to her hometown newspaper, and noticed how the Inquirer was just as much of an offender as any other.

Miss Jones goes on, further down, to blame racism:

    There is also a lack of empathy for marginalized people living in a society where whiteness is universal and to be anything other than white is to be generally regarded as inferior. Part of the issue is in the media’s commitment to upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy, thereby prioritizing their wants, needs, and experiences above others. There is no push to regard nonwhite people as equally deserving of empathy, care, and consideration, so when they are victims of violent crimes, their stories are minimized or completely erased to keep white innocence and fragility centered. And due to journalism’s gatekeeping, people of color remain severely underrepresented in the newsrooms to even raise awareness about what’s happening in marginalized communities and amplify their stories.

Upon reading that paragraph, a couple of things struck me. First, Miss Jones was simply whining about “whiteness” and lamenting that non-whites are seen more negatively. Yes, there will be people who will claim that I’m just an [insert slang term for the rectum here], a claim I do not dispute, but let’s tell the very blatant truth here: by American cultural standards, Gabby Petito was a lot better looking than Destini Smothers, and pretty girls sell newspapers.

But when Miss Jones stated that the credentialed media have a “commitment to upholding white supremacy”, perhaps she doesn’t realize that Gabriel Escobar, the Editor and Senior Vice President of the Inquirer, is “one of the highest-ranking Latinos at a U.S. news organization.” Publisher Elizabeth Hughes wrote, four months ago, that the Inquirer was taking many steps to become that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be, including:

  • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

The last thing the Inquirer is consciously trying to do is “(uphold) white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy.” Either Miss Jones was criticizing her hometown newspaper specifically, or she doesn’t really know much about it. But if Miss Jones was trying to say that the Inquirer is unconsciously “upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy,” then she has a better case.

“When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing,” Miss Jones wrote, but let’s be honest here: the credentialed media exist to make money[4]The Inquirer is owned by a non-profit company, but it still has to make enough money to stay in business., and money is made by people paying attention to them, leading to more advertising revenue. Which is the chicken, and which is the egg:

  1. A public which respond more intensely to pretty white women; or
  2. A media which recognizes that to which the public respond?

If Miss Hughes’ goals are to be met, the Inquirer has to lead the coverage. Yet the newspaper deliberately shies away from crime reporting, something Miss Hughes specifically said she wanted, for ‘racial justice’ reasons. These two things are mutually exclusive. I was never a professional reporter, just a Kentucky Kernel staffer while in grad school, but it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the Inquirer would be better served to simply cover the news, and leave the mission and biases outside 801 8th Street.

Will Editor Escobar, will Publisher Hughes, pay attention to Miss Jones’ OpEd piece? It might have been more effective, at least in the Inquirer, had she called them out more specifically, but both are intelligent and educated people; they ought to be able to see that they really have been called out. Somehow, though, I doubt that they will.

References

References
↑1 The Inquirer is the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right.
↑2 Feminista Jones is an author and doctoral student at Temple University. She is the cohost of Black Girl Missing podcast and a fierce advocate for Black women and girls. Her website is here.
↑3 Her biography page states, “Feminista’s passion and talent for writing have led to her being featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Essence, XOJane, Complex, Vox, Salon, and EBONY magazine to name a few publications.”
↑4 The Inquirer is owned by a non-profit company, but it still has to make enough money to stay in business.
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Why does Solomon Jones want mostly white prison guards, but not disproportionately black inmates, tested for #COVID19?

I get it: Solomon Jones, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, really doesn’t like law enforcement, and doesn’t particularly care for white people. Looking at his Inquirer author file, you’ll find columns like this:

So this morning’s column came as no surprise to me:

If Pennsylvania corrections officers don’t want the vaccine, they should look for new jobs

The only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves.

by Solomon Jones | Wednesday, September 15, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

Solomon Jones, from his Twitter biography.

From the outset, COVID-19 exposed America as a society that is more than willing to sacrifice its most vulnerable people. Now, as workers challenge vaccine mandates meant to protect those relegated to the bottom rungs of society, the most vulnerable people will suffer once again.

Last week, the union representing correctional officers in Pennsylvania’s state prisons became one of the latest groups to officially oppose a vaccine or testing mandate. On Friday, they filed a complaint in Commonwealth Court seeking a preliminary injunction to stop an order put in place by Gov. Tom Wolf — a Democrat — requiring prison guards and other state workers to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. The guards say they should not have to be tested weekly unless inmates and prison vendors are, too.

Why, I have to ask, was it important for Mr Jones to point out, in the manner he did, for emphasis, that Governor Wolf is a Democrat? He is, but that’s hardly germane to the story. After all, aren’t unions primarily Democratic, politically?

The lawsuit spells it out this way: “The commonwealth’s failure to apply the ‘vaccinate or weekly test’ rule to all individuals in the congregate setting unnecessarily increases the risk to the health and safety” of union members.

Interesting argument, but I’m not buying it. I believe the only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves.

By refusing vaccination, and then fighting to skip out on COVID-19 testing, these state employees are not only risking their own health. They’re imposing the consequences of their decisions on a vulnerable population. Testing prisoners and vendors doesn’t stop unvaccinated guards from contracting COVID-19. It simply allows those guards to sidestep a vaccination mandate the president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association derided as “a slap in the face” while members expressed their strong opposition. More importantly, it allows them to continue to contract and spread COVID-19 among a population of incarcerated people who are unable to leave the facilities, and thus are particularly vulnerable.

Do these three paragraphs even go together? Mr Jones states that the “only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves,” but then goes on to claim that the union members are concomitantly harming the prisoners.

There are those who believe that as convicted criminals, state inmates deserve any condition, no matter how bad, that comes from their imprisonment. I don’t, especially after watching 26 wrongfully convicted Philadelphians get released since December of 2016. Twenty-four of those innocent people were Black, which makes sense, since 47% of the state’s 37,000 prisoners were Black as of July 30, even though Black people make up about 12% of Pennsylvania’s population.

Nowhere does it seem to occur to Mr Jones that 47% of the incarcerated prisoners have committed somewhere close to 47% of the crimes. He just throws those numbers out there as though readers will see them as obviously unfair. The Philadelphia Tribune, a black community newspaper, reported that about 86% of the city’s 2020 499 homicides were black, while 84% of Philly’s 2,236 non-fatal shootings were black. And, as is always the case, the shooters are around 90% probable to be the same race as their victims.

That means this is not just a major health issue. It is also an issue of racial justice. In a criminal system where Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, and wrongfully convicted far more often than their white counterparts, I’m forced to ask a simple question: How many more wrongfully convicted Black prisoners are sitting inside, waiting to be infected with a virus that could very well give them a death sentence for a crime they didn’t commit?

Why, then, does Mr Jones object to the union’s claim that the guards shouldn’t be singled out, but that everybody, the inmates and vendors, should also be tested? It would take only one vendor bringing in supplies or food, making contact with one prisoner, to pass on the virus to the incarcerated population. We already know that vaccination, while it may reduce the probability of contracting the virus, and apparently does lessen the severity of symptoms in infected persons, can still be transmitted from one vaccinated but infected individual to another person, vaccinated or not. The Centers for Disease Control stated, on August 26, 2021:

    Vaccines are playing a crucial role in limiting spread of the virus and minimizing severe disease. Although vaccines are highly effective, they are not perfect, and there will be vaccine breakthrough infections. Millions of Americans are vaccinated, and that number is growing. This means that even though the risk of breakthrough infections is low, there will be thousands of fully vaccinated people who become infected and able to infect others, especially with the surging spread of the Delta variant.

Yet Mr Jones just waves off the union’s concerns, as though they cannot be real.

Everyone who works with a vulnerable population should be vaccinated. From teachers who work with students who are not yet eligible for vaccination, to hospital workers who are exposed to those with compromised immune systems, to prison guards who work with incarcerated people in a closed environment.

If Mr Jones feels that way, why does he not agree that the vendors who serve the prison ought to have to be vaccinated or subjected to frequent testing? Indeed, since we know that the vaccinated can still contract and spread the virus, and if his concern is really the spread of COVID-19, why wouldn’t he support mandatory frequent testing to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike? With his greatly stated concerns for black prisoners, why isn’t he concerned that the areas with the highest concentration of black residents are also the areas with the lowest vaccination rates?

The prisoners? They can’t be forced, because that would constitute assault. But Mr Jones should want them all vaccinated and frequently tested.

If our prison guards want to work without getting vaccinated, they are well within their rights to do so, but they should be prepared to find employment somewhere else.

The truth is simple: Mr Jones would love to see the number of prison guards cut, and cut dramatically, to force the cutting of the number of prisoners.

Mr Jones sees this whole issue through the lens of ‘racial justice,’ but, in fact, racial justice is a contradiction in terms. Justice, to be justice, must be handled without regard to race, and Mr Jones does not like that concept at all.