But I believe those teens are expressing something that has long simmered beneath the surface. They are expressing the rage that comes with exclusion. They are expressing the hurt that comes with invisibility. They are engaged in the inevitable push and pull of change.
Temple University, my alma mater, has reached out to the community with scholarships for local youth, according to spokesman Ray Betzner. They've put reading programs in place, tutored high schoolers and even talked to their own students about respecting longtime community residents. But Temple would be wise to reach out into the community with an eye toward creating stronger relationships and greater opportunities for the young people who've been pushed aside by a generation of exclusionary development.
The community would be wise to reach back.
So these attackers are among "people who've been pushed aside by a generation
of exclusionary development." Like many urban universities, Temple is
surrounded by black
ghettos,
but these are being gentrified thanks to a steady influx of white suburbanites
and immigrants.
If you're barely treading water, and your rent jacks up because of gentrification,
you'll be pissed too. Who wants to be evicted? Blacks, though, are always the
victims, and never agents, of any neighborhood's improvement. Why is that?
In Detroit, a
post-apocalypse ghetto of burnt out houses, gutted factories and urban raccoons,
Mexicans revived a section near downtown. Unlike the rest of Detroit, there are plenty of restaurants and
shops in Mexicantown, and it's perfectly safe to walk around.
If there were fewer Mexicans, blacks would have more jobs, obviously, so why are
our borders wide open? In "Race and Crime
in America,"
Ron Unz suggests that Hispanics are being imported to replace blacks. They can
do the same jobs, sans mayhem. In 1992, East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate
in all of America.
Then a transformation happened as Hispanics flooded in. Ron Unz:
Over the last twenty years, the homicide rate in that small city dropped by 85%, with similar huge declines in other crime categories as well, thereby transforming a miserable ghetto into a pleasant working-class community, now featuring new office complexes, luxury hotels, and large regional shopping centers. Multi-billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife recently purchased a large $9 million home just a few hundred feet from the East Palo Alto border, a decision that would have been unthinkable during the early 1990s.
The more blacks there are in a neighborhood, the more crimes, the lower the
housing values and the more dysfunctional the public schools, and everyone
knows this, including, say, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant from Mali and
Bangladesh. Black maladaptation is only getting worse.
What you have, then, is a group that will largely be excluded from better jobs,
universities and housing. As long as the United States shall last, blacks
will be an underclass. Their symbolic successes, as in having a half-black
president, can't gloss over the fact that the majority of them are barely
afloat.
The in-state tuition for Temple
University is $15,688,
and the school accepts 56% of its applicants. It's reasonably priced and easy
to get in. Only 13.1% of Temple
students are black, however, in a city with 44.1% blacks. Before you charge
racism, do consider what Walter Williams has to say:
Among high-school students who graduated in 2014 and took the ACT college readiness exam, here's how various racial/ethnic groups fared when it came to meeting the ACT's college readiness benchmarks in at least three of the four subjects: Asians, 57 percent; whites, 49 percent; Hispanics, 23 percent; and blacks, 11 percent. However, the college rates of enrollment of these groups were: Asians, 80 percent; whites, 69 percent; Hispanics, 60 percent; and blacks, 57 percent.
Though all races are being admitted to college too liberally, blacks benefit
the most, for only 1/5th of blacks in universities should even be there.
Feeling out of place, blacks across the country are demanding separate
dormitories.
Blacks are also given preferred treatment when it comes to government jobs and
contracts, so the academy, state and media are all in their favor, yet their
failures have only increased.
In Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell
observes, "The [black] race as a whole has moved from a position of utter
destitution--in money, knowledge, and rights--to a place alongside other groups
emerging in the great struggles of life. None have had to come from so far back
to join their fellow Americans."
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