How White Flight Ravaged the Mississippi Delta
1st February 2015
Another thumb-sucker from The Atlantic.
When Carthan was a young boy, he says he’d have risked punishment for simply walking past the Jones mansion without a proper reason. “I look at the house now, how beautiful it is and well-built it is. I was told slaves built it,” Carthan said, sitting at his desk in the central hall, surrounded by his political memorabilia. “And I think about how well they lived back then, and how we lived back then. This house is huge. There are five bedrooms. It has three full bathrooms. We didn’t have bathrooms at all.” He pauses to let the contrast sink in. “It’s something to focus on,” he says.
But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor.
And, of course, the question that is never explicitly asked, much less gets answered, is ‘Are these people better off now than they were then?’ Such questions undercut The Narrative, something that a Voice of the Crust like the writers in The Atlantic are conditioned from childhood never to do.
In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.
Well, then, how did that whole ‘civil-rights era’ thing work out for you? Confrontation of injustice is often necessary but equally often reaches the point of diminishing returns, and the people who don’t keep their ultimate objective firmly in mind will almost always lose their way and wind up in a swamp (sometimes literally). There’s an old saying, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’, and like most Old Sayings it contains a lot of truth. The question ‘How can we get white people to treat black people with respect?’ is entirely different from the question ‘How can we make the lives of white people Hell as payback for the Hell they have made of ours?’, and it remains unclear which question the ‘civil-rights’ people are working from — the available evidence is that they consider the two as equivalent, and as long as that is the case, they’re going to be unhappy with the results.
“Businesses don’t want to come to a town like Tchula,” observed Anthony Mansoor, who owns a hardware store downtown. “That bothers me. The people in this town worked so hard to get to where we are today, and in a lot of ways, things are better. But the town is broke. That’s the bottom line.”
Gee, why is that? Nobody seems to know, or want to. Every business in American isn’t run by racist white people, although you’d never know that from reading Voices of the Crust like this one. Why don’t they leave and go somewhere there are jobs? It’s happened before. The real bottom line is that black people in America have been sold a bill of goods by a Crust who need them as a victim class whose problems allow the modern Left to ride into power and whose votes can be bought in order to keep them there. It’s not complicated at all.