How Many Millions of White Americans Were Displaced from the Big Cities as a Result of Urban Crime?
I’ve noticed a big push recently to get fear of crime made an automatic reason for achieving refugee status. For example, in the NYT:
Now, Nicholas Kristof has an embarrassing track record of retelling lies people tell him. But even in the unlikely event that this kid’s story is somewhere close to the truth, is a 16 year old youth who already has two years experience in cocaine smuggling the ideal New American?
But anyway, that got me thinking … If fear of being a victim of crime qualifies you as a refugee, how many internal refugees did America suffer in the wake of the Warren Court and LBJ’s New Society helping launch a vast crime wave in urban America in the mid-1960s? How many displaced persons were there in America who get no sympathy in the history textbooks, or even are disparaged as racists engaged in the evils of White Flight?
Consider just one of Chicago’s 87 neighborhoods: Austin on the West Side, just east of Oak Park, IL. In 1960, it had 125,133 residents, almost all white. In 2010 it had 98,514 residents, almost none of them white. (Much of the once quite desirable housing stock has fallen into ruin under the newcomers.)
It would seem reasonable to say that 125,000 refugees were displaced by crime from the Austin neighborhood alone, although unlike Cristóbal, few of them were professional criminals themselves fleeing their former colleagues. Most were law-abiding citizens who fled Austin due to criminal violence against ordinary civilians like themselves, violence stoked by federal policies.
If there were 125,000 from Austin, how many displaced persons were there across America overall in this era? Five million? Ten million? Fifteen million?
I don’t know. Not too many people seem to know. It’s not the kind of history you are supposed to know about in 2016.
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