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My theory: most of what is now called "white supremacy" is just boomers attempting to prolong "boomer reality." (Obviously not all boomers)
What do I mean by "boomer reality"? Boomers are an American cohort born in unprecedented wealth when America was the only intact industrial power. They are also quite large cohort and were therefore over their lives able to use their influence to "fine-tune" America to their specifications. Boomers like to drive, therefore America is easy accessible via cars, not so much via public transport. This is also why gasoline tends to be cheaper in America than elsewhere. Boomers love to see their property values soar, therefore pretty much nothing is legal to build anywhere in America. (or so I hear)
What looks like white supremacy is boomers' dislike towards brown immigrants. But I would argue that the reason is not that they are brown, it is because they are not part of "boomer reality." Hispanics are more used to public transport (compared to white boomers) and are also okay with living in higher density. If lots of Hispanics materialize in America, and have a chance to vote for their preferences, this might result in more public transport (which boomers don't need) and more dense housing (bringing boomer property values down).
This also explains boomer opposition towards global warming. Global warming implies that car-centric culture might not be completely sustainable and anything that implies "boomer reality" might not be sustainable is an enemy.
I do think "boomer reality" is now very toxic, but here's how it is different from old white supremacy: Southern white supremacists cared a lot about their own legacy. They were thoroughly evil people, but they did care for their own white children (and noone else). White plantation owners could picture the world without themselves in it. Not the world without plantations (they fought a war over it), but one with different owners (their sons) running these plantations.
Boomers are fundamentally narcissistic and they cannot imagine anyone else as main characters of life, not even their own children. And that's the black heart of "boomer reality". Real white supremacy would be white male tenured boomer professor retiring and giving his tenured seat to his younger -- also white male -- protege. That's not at all what's happening, instead cushy tenured professorships are being replaced with insecure nontenured positions -- mostly held by brown and female people.
Calling this "white supremacy" almost gives it too much dignity. This is fire sale.
"White supremacy" is simply not the right terminology to describe what is happening. It is also unfair because younger whites are not profiting at all from "boomer reality". Accusing a poor white millenial of "white supremacy" is kicking the chained dog. I suspect the popularity of the concept -- alongside most of "awokening" -- is the result of elite millenials getting radicalized by realization that their Boomer parents intend to spend everything on luxury cruises and leave them with jack shit. In other words awokening is fueled precisely by a lack of actual, working white supremacy. (As well as a lack of any other safety net for precarious millenials)
(Don't get me wrong, I do think it is good white supremacy is no more, my point is that boomer narcissism is also bad, but in a very different way)
Why do I think my theory is correct? Because there was a similar generation divide in my native Serbia (then Yugoslavia) in the early 90's although generations were one step back. It was "Greatest Generation", Silent Generation and some elder boomers, versus younger boomers and x-ers (millenials were still young children or not yet born). The former still lived in "communist reality" while that reality begun to unravel for the latter.
One of the reasons why Milosevic ruled over Serbia for so long is because he promised the pensioners that their pensions will remain untouched no matter what. So there was a bloody civil war with younger generations being thrown into meat grinder which had comparatively little impact on the old people (not zero impact due to inflation, but lesser impact). What Milosevic promised to the old was continuation of "communist reality" till they die. And they followed him.
Not saying that the younger Serbian generations were completely innocent here -- there were some rabid warmongers there too -- but the whole thing would have been impossible without the compliance of the old people.
I don't think it is a coincidence that both Trump and Milosevic have promised to the old people continuation of their respective realities. Hence old people disproportionately voting for them.
Returning to situation in America, what I think is going to happen is that "boomer reality" is going to continue unraveling and it will be replaced with "woke reality." The advantage of woke reality is that it is cheap -- you don't need a car and a house to live it, just internet connection. Problem is that it is not all that much more real than "boomer reality". It is based on throwing around inaccurate inflammatory terms like "white supremacy" (as I explained) and on funding things like DEI offices -- which make people MORE racist. A self licking ice cone. None of it is as toxic as boomer reality, true, but it is still a type of unreality.
One variable I am unsure of is how much of boomer wealth will millennials be able to actually inherit. Are boomers really going to spend it all on luxury cruises and nursing homes? If not, if millennials actually inherit something valuable, they might switch from woke into something similar to "boomer reality," possibly also justified by wokeness. Something something building more housing is racist somehow. Obviously I am not saying that EVERY millenial is going to end up like this, but then not every boomer is Trump voter.
But I am just a millenial from Serbia, and first to admit that I don't know jack. What do you think?
God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.
People point at some fairy tale version of a Finnish city where there's playgrounds everywhere and people are walking around drinking espressos and beers and wearing scarves and children are laughing and playing with one another in city squares.
It's not the lack of cars that is causing this unless cars is some sort of euphamism and I'm just not pol-pilled enough to understand what you guys mean when you envision a car free city. My city is a "walkable" city. From where I am sitting typing this there are a dozen coffee shops within a 5 minute walk, countless bars and restaurants, shopping, there's a train that goes literally right in front of my house, and a stop for that train a block away. There are 5 parks I can think of offhand that are within the same 5 minute walk from my house.
Guess what? I still drive EVERYWHERE I go.
I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it, and even then I worry about the wheels being stolen, the seat being stolen, the lights being stolen, or some other set of things being stolen. ALL of this has happened to me or people I am close friends with. I have had bikes stolen that were locked up, parts stolen off of my bikes, etc.
I can walk, but I have to take a bizarre circuitous route that avoids: the park, the local drug store, all of the bus stops, all of the train stops, and any convenience stores which are currently being used as homeless shelters and drug injection sites. Even still I've had friends robbed or beaten up walking through my city.
I could take the idiotic train that our city is so proud of (and everybody who can actively avoids), and be accosted by the schizophrenic psychopaths who are using the train as a refuge from the weather.
The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
A lot of them have done so, probably most notably NotJustBikes, who moved to Amsterdam.
Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable. Car-dependent American cities still have homelessness, crime, and drug use, while many walkable ones in Europe or Japan have much less. Walkability does not mean doing nothing about social problems; Amsterdam did a lot of work (see section 9) to clean itself up.
This is unnecessarily rude, but also seems to neglect history. Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave? Have the policies imposed to make cities and suburbs more amenable to cars, such as knocking down urban neighborhoods to make way for highways, or preventing any housing from being built, contributed to these social problems?
(The actual thing to object to is that boomers aren't responsible for these policies for the most part--it's actually Silent and Greatest, until more recently.)
I strongly disagree! People won't want to walk or take mass transit if they feel much more likely to be victimized in doing so. This creates a spiral, where the most walking-friendly destinations and infrastructure end up neglected, making them even less attractive, and people who want to drive end up going elsewhere.
Yes. People began moving to suburbs almost as soon as they could get cars. Even before, with the "streetcar suburbs" proliferating in the 1920's. Then rising crime and unrest, and safety-hostile urban policies like blockbusting and forced school integration caused mass flight right when the new interstates made it convenient to do so. But notably this happened in the sixties when the boomers were still children or young adults. The highway builders and urban renewists were mostly members of the Greatest Generation. The Boomers just inherited their world, and actually put a lot of effort into fixing the bigger mistakes, leading to an urban renaissance in the 90's, at which point they seemed to have declared victory and turned their attention inward.
Agree and great comment. Just because I'm curious and skeptical, where does the idea of blockbusting come from? Did this actually happen a lot, was it rare, or was it (like poisoned Halloween candy) a complete fabrication?
For those who don't know, blockbusting was the supposed practice of real estate speculators putting black tenants (preferably violent ones) into a previously white neighborhood. When the white neighbors fled, the speculator would buy their houses for cheap and then rent them as a slumlord to new black tenants.
While Wikipedia says "blockbusting was very common and profitable", this feels like a just-so story. I wonder to what extent it really happened. It feels like an effort to blame evil white landlords for a process that would happen naturally anyway.
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Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.
Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.
I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.
If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.
I'll nitpick a bit because why not. Even if streetcar suburbs still existed and functioned, their popularity would still mean White flight, or middle-class flight, from the urban core, resulting in the long-term decay of the latter.
This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).
As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)
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They may be car-dependent now if there street cars are gone. In the one near me it does keep the homeless and adjacent criminal elements from the nearby city from riding public transit out to the suburbs.
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
Perhaps. And many such suburbs were annexed by the city anyways. Point is that the strong impulse to live near the city but not in it predates cars. It was not cars that created the impulse to move to suburbs, or was the desire to move to suburbs that caused people to demand cars.
Suburbs are very old, but the cities they surrounded were never rebuilt to allow the suburbanites easier access to the detriment of the city's inhabitants. Certainly the streetcar suburbs we just discussed did not do that and did not require that. Cars' mere existence are not the problem; it's enforced car dependence: Knocking down urban neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs (which already couldn't handle all the traffic even back in the 50s), building suburbs that can literally only be accessed or traversed in a car, preventing the building of any housing other than sprawling and expensive single family homes, etc.
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