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| Black Americans are leaving the biggest cities in the Northern United States. The numbers of black people living in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., have declined by more than 9 percent during the past 20 years, according to U.S. census data. Detroit has lost more than 35 percent of its black residents; Chicago, about 25 percent; Baltimore, almost 20 percent; and Washington, D.C., about 17 percent. During the same time, substantial numbers of blacks have moved to Southern cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas, reversing the direction of the Great Migration, when 6 million moved from the South to the North from 1916 to 1970. What’s happening?
Keneshia Grant is an associate professor of political science at Howard University and the author of The Great Migration and the Democratic Party. To Grant, this return migration is driven partly by simple economics: Northern cities are more expensive than Southern ones, housing space is at a premium, and many industrial jobs in urban centers have disappeared. Black people have also come to live with the knowledge that racism is just as pervasive in the North as in the South. Many are leaving for prosperous Southern cities, but some are also returning to the places where earlier generations of their families had lived—and some are just moving to the suburbs of Northern cities. As Grant sees it, this migration is changing politics and culture dramatically in places where blacks are leaving. But it’s also shifting power to black people in places where they’re arriving—in ways that could lead ultimately to major shifts in U.S. national politics. |
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| From Keneshia Grant at The Signal:
“The South is being changed by all these people moving there, but it was already changing over the course of the 20th century. There’s less of the extreme violence that people would have been fleeing when they left the South. There’s also more clarity now that racism exists throughout the United States. Many who left the South during the Great Migration believed that the North would be a place where they could achieve equality and not have to deal with racial issues. But they found that wasn’t the case. If someone believes that racism is everywhere, then they might as well be in a place that’s cheaper or warmer.”
“The question isn’t, How is the economy of the city doing? The question is, What does the economy of that city mean for black people? It could be that the economy of Washington, D.C., New York, or Chicago is thriving, more that the Bay Area is booming with the tech industry. But if black people in those places aren’t part of the boom, then they have to figure out another way to live. In some places, we see concerted efforts to include black business owners, to have set-asides for black contracts, or to have affordable housing. But I’d argue that some of these booming cities don’t share the boom. It’s difficult to tell the story of return migration apart from the story of gentrification and displacement—or to say precisely where the one ends and the other begins.”
“Detroit is Motown, and people care a lot about black music in that place. But if many black people are either leaving Detroit or transplants from other places, then some of the culture there—that people have as part of their very being—also leaves. You don’t just lose a black citizen of Detroit; you lose a black citizen of Detroit who’s raised with all the things that people in Detroit care about—and who takes those things wherever they go. The culture changes when the people change.” |
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| FROM THE FILES |
The End of Law and Justice
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| The European Commission announced on May 6 that it would drop sanctions proceedings against the European Union member state Poland. The sanctions were to target what the Commission saw as ongoing violations of democratic principles—including repeated efforts to control Poland’s independent judiciary.
Until the national elections of October, Poland was governed for eight years by the populist-right Law and Justice party. The new government, however, has enacted rules to eliminate political meddling in the appointment of judges to the country’s highest courts—or leveling disciplinary action against sitting judges for following EU laws.
Last November, shortly after Law and Justice was defeated, Ivan Krastev explored the causes of the party’s downfall—and the Polish opposition’s surprising victory. A key factor, Krastev says, is that Law and Justice, in power with the support of the country’s conservative majority, had begun to take their party’s views to extremes a broader majority of Polish voters rejected—creating a liberalizing political backlash and unprecedented support for the opposition’s relatively progressive policy agenda. It’s a curious case in Europe, cutting against the continent’s political trend to the right. |
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| Next Tuesday: Steven Cook on what the U.S. pause in sending large bombs to Israel means for the countries’ relationship … |
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