by wisconsin_cur » Tue 30 Dec 2008, 21:26:21
Oh why not bump an old not particularly germane thread... Well it is germane for those of us who see peak oil as a problem as much of human reactions as geological reality... but still not directly related.
Black Renters ruffle feathers in San Fransisco
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')NTIOCH, Calif. (AP) - As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren.
In 2006, as the influx reached its peak, the police department formed a special crime-fighting unit to deal with the complaints, and authorities began cracking down on tenants in federally subsidized housing.
Now that police unit is the focus of lawsuits by black families who allege the city of 100,000 is orchestrating a campaign to drive them out.
"A lot of people are moving out here looking for a better place to live," said Karen Coleman, a mother of three who came here five years ago from a blighted neighborhood in nearby Pittsburg. "We are trying to raise our kids like everyone else. But they don't want us here."
City officials deny the allegations in the lawsuits, which were filed last spring and seek unspecified damages.
Across the country, similar tensions have simmered when federally subsidized renters escaped run-down housing projects and violent neighborhoods by moving to nicer communities in suburban Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Even in San Fransisco we have a clash of cultures. My on-going thesis is that we often mistake a change of tribal alliances with the transformation of the species. We think because we like Jews, date a person of a different race or define marriage differently than our parents or grandparents that we are fundamentally an improved version of our parents. When in fact we just have a different set of cultural alliances.
Now we castigate evangelicals or neo-cons or Zionists or other people our parents/grandparents were allied with the same zeal and blanket assumptions as our grandparents had for the groups we now ally with. We only redraw the boundaries or our own place in the cultural conflict. We are still just as human as our parents and grandparents. For my purposes it doesn't matter who is right or wrong because I am interested in the nature of the conflict. A change in flags only represents a change in alliances and while that might be a kind of progress it is an unremarkable one.
We are all human. Liberals, conservatives, black, white, Palestinian, Jew... we are all homo sapien, we are all tribal, we are all imperfect. Take away someone's job, rattle their sense of cultural homogenity (whatever the nature of that homogenity), play loud music or get a pit bull or take away their cheap oil and watch out... one will be lucky if they are only sued. Even in accepting San Fransisco.
This tribal, imperfect, xenophobic species is about to be faced with increasing energy insecurity.
Good Luck with that.