Shawn

“The fact that virtually all of the nation’s new housing was built in the white, de-ethnicized suburbs during this period of time meant that the only real area of expansion for black housing was housing already inhabited by “whites,” which is to say ethnics living in the cities. By forcing the emptying of ethnic neighborhoods, Louis Wirth’s system killed two birds with one stone: it opened up new areas for black migration and at the same time it broke up the suspect ethnic neighborhoods by driving their inhabitants to the suburbs, where they were assimilated. Solving the race problem in housing meant breaking up those neighborhoods and making them available to racial minorities who were not welcome in the neighborhood precisely because of their ethnicity.

At some point in the period under discussion, it became obvious that “integration” was nothing more than an unattainable ideal or a meaningless fiction. The system of social engineering that was erected in this country after the war needed that fiction as justification for a housing policy which was ultimately segregationist in intent. The system involved allowing ethnic neighborhoods, “areas now inhabited by whites” to “be made available for Negroes.” The dispossessed white ethnics would then be driven to the suburbs where they were “Americanized” according to class — each suburb would be segmented according to price — and absorbed into the mainstream of American life, which is to say, subjected to the controls imposed by media culture and the car.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The suburb as engine of assimilation was described by Myrdal a full ten years before William O. Whyte wrote his book. The discrepancy in time is easy enough to understand. Whyte was describing the suburban phenomenon empirically after it had happened. Myrdal was describing the intention behind the plan the foundations had concocted to solve the nationalities problem before the plan had been put into effect. In both a priori and a posterior accounts, the role class plays in assimilation is crucial. Neighborhoods have always had a dual identity in America. They functioned as an index of ethnicity but they also functioned as an index of class. The two indices were in fact related because certain ethnic groups traditionally occupied the upper-class neighborhoods (the WASP) and the lower-class neighborhoods (the blacks) and the neighborhoods in between (the ethnics).”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“In 1970 the Quakers released a slim book entitled “Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death: A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee” which was the result of a decision which the Family Planning Committee of the AFSC reached in December 1966 “to explore the issues involved in abortion.” That meeting in turn flowed from the November 1966 meeting that the AFSC had had with Planned Parenthood, and that meeting resulted from the setback the Quaker and Episcopalian forces for sexual liberation and eugenics in Philadelphia had suffered at the hands of Martin Mullen, when the governor capitulated to his demands and backed away from state-promoted birth control in August of the same year. As a result of their meeting with Planned Parenthood, the Quakers decided to “make a study of the availability of family planning services for medically indigent families in the city and to form an estimate as to the extent of the unmet need for such services. “Who Shall Live” was the fruit of this labor.

“Who Shall Live?” is a graphic example of moral theology in the Quaker mode. It begins by announcing that “for 300 years members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been seekers after the truth” and concludes by admitting that they have been so far unsuccessful in their efforts. Where once people like Fox and Penn “thought of himself as created only a few thousand years ago,” the enlightened Quakers who wrote birth-control tracts in the 1960s “now know he is part of an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. In that process he has arrived at a stage of knowledge and technology whereby he himself has the power, at least in part, to determine the direction
in which he will evolve in the future.”

Having decided that their religious forebears were wrong on just about everything because they didn’t understand science, the 1970 Quakers then give some sense of their own grasp of science as it applies to population issues. Looking at the world from outer space in 1968, the Quakers found it “incredible that 3.5 billion people should be living on that small spinning planet.” Taking their cue from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” the Quakers concluded quite logically that if the planet cannot sustain 3.5 billion people in 1968, then it certainly couldn’t sustain 6 billion people in the year 2000. Unless drastic population-control measures are introduced immediately, dire consequences will follow. “Lamont C. Cole, who is a Professor of Ecology warns that we may one day find ourselves short of breathable air,” the Quakers announced breathlessly.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“It was a civics lesson which cities across the northern tier of the country would all learn in similar fashion. Dzink and his Polish supporters had, in good American fashion, convinced their elected representatives of the justice of their cause, only to have the federal government countermand their efforts with a combination of black intelligence operations directed against American citizens and overwhelming military force. The government’s actions in the Sojourner Truth case would also establish a precedent in both housing and racial matters for the post-war period. Whenever blacks claimed discrimination, they could be sure of the federal government’s concern. Whenever the Catholic ethnics
would claim that their neighborhoods were being targeted for destruction, they were written off as racists suffering from paranoid delusion. No matter how much clout the ethnics could muster locally, it could always be countered by some judge, appealing to higher moral principles. The same was true of Poles in Detroit, where “vested powers might have considered Polish Detroiters and neighborhood brokers expendable.” One year later when the worst race riot in the history of the country broke out in Detroit, the Poles again were blamed, but with the experience of Sojourner Truth behind them, Detroit’s residents were skeptical. “After the street battles of 1943,” Capeci writes, “Conant Gardens residents remembered ‘something funny’ about the 1942 housing controversy, something phoney that seemed to come from outside the neighborhood.” Residents of Chicago would soon notice the same thing.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing