It Isn’t About Color – It’s About Class
You are told all day every day that everything in America is about color. White supremacy. White fragility. Reparations.
You are told to divide yourselves along tribal lines. You are told to nurture grievances you didn’t even know you had. You are commanded to splinter and divide and fight amongst yourselves.
You are told to deny reality. Because it’s not about color. It’s about class.
It isn’t black against white against brown. It’s the vast majority of Americans who are struggling to pay the rent every month against the oligarchs.
Take a look at two separate events that happened in the last week.
In New York City word got out that the city was contemplating turning a luxury condominium high-rise in Harlem into a migrant shelter. The residents of the area rose in protest. The Mayor beat a hasty retreat, and the plans were quickly scuttled.
Harlem remains an overwhelmingly black area of New York City. After blacks most of the residents are Hispanic. Whites make up at most 16% of the population.
If you think that makes Harlem poor think again. It has become a trendy place for young professionals to live. One of the big controversies in Harlem these days concerns gentrification and poor people being priced out of the area.
The 35-unit complex at 2201 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd near 130th Street that New York City wanted to turn into a shelter for illegals was built as a luxury living space where residents would enjoy features like an indoor swimming pool and apartments with marble bathrooms. When the developer ran into financial difficulties it ended up on the market and the city jumped on it as a potential site for yet another place to house the masses of illegals flooding into New York every day.
Take a walk around the surrounding area, and you do not see a ghetto. You see an upscale neighborhood with parks, clean sidewalks, and thriving businesses. Within a short walk of 2201 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, you will find all the usual indicators of a gentrifying area – Whole Foods, Starbucks, a Mattress Firm, and, of course, a pet shop and veterinarian.
The comfortable class of individuals, black, white, and brown, with money to spend on luvury condos and pampering dogs and cats, may think and vote liberal, but they have no intention whatsoever of actually living next door to the “great unwashed.”
In Boston, the people of Roxbury found out firsthand that when it came to fighting the housing of illegals in their neighborhood skin color didn’t matter. Money did, and they did not have any.
A little over two weeks ago the City of Boston stepped in and converted the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Community Center in Roxbury into a shelter for illegals. There are now hundreds of beds covering the indoor track and the indoor soccer fields where kids from the surrounding poor neighborhood used to practice.
The residents of the surrounding community have organized and protested. No one cares. No alternative arrangements have been made for the hundreds of children who now have no place to go for after-school activities.
It’s not hard to understand why. Roxbury is a largely black and Hispanic area, like Harlem. Unlike Harlem, it is not gentrifying. It is dirt-poor.
The poverty rate in Roxbury is 31% compared to a city-wide rate of 19%. It has the highest proportion of families making under $15,000 a year and the lowest proportion of families making over $150,000. Over half of Roxbury’s housing units are income-restricted rentals. That’s a higher percentage than any other neighborhood in Boston.
Roxbury is not gentrifying. It is getting poorer. Poverty is on the rise. As one would expect, the crime rate is off the charts. You are 93% more likely to be the victim of a crime in Roxbury than in the nation as a whole.
A crime occurs every 3 hours 26 minutes (on average) in Roxbury. The online crime-tracking website CrimeGrade gives the neighborhood an F for safety. Businesses are fleeing the area, leaving residents with no place to get groceries or critical medications.
The residents of Roxbury are precisely the kinds of folks that Joe Biden and his supporters claim they want to protect and empower. The Democratic Party still masquerades as the party of the downtrodden and the working man. All that is a lie. It is the party of the rich and powerful, the self-appointed elitists who believe they own this country, and the rest of us should sit down, shut up, and do what we are told.
No matter what they say, though, we know the truth. It isn’t about color. It’s about class. Just go ask the folks in Roxbury.