CB
Dennis Claxton
c b wrote:
>CB: OK. I'll play devil's advocate (smile). How about poverty has
>something to do with it _and_ race has something to do with , both ?
I don't think anybody is going to argue with that. But the article we're talking about asserts and smooths over more than it enlightens.
For example, here's the first line:
>As the California population has grown more ethnically diverse
As I said yesterday, first of all this disappears the fact that California has been ethnically diverse for a very long time. Second, it smooths over or misses the fact that looked at from a different angle, California has become less diverse, not more:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20040524/ai_n14576840/
In what demographers are calling a "full scale reversal" of the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century, blacks are leaving California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and retracing steps to a place their families once fled -- the South.
This population shift of hundreds of thousands of blacks is nowhere near the millions who left the South from 1910 to 1970. But the flow is sustained and large enough, according to a study released today by the Brookings Institution, that a new map of black America must be drawn.
Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Detroit -- cities blacks once considered the promised land -- are now seeing more blacks moving out than moving in. As part of this shift, the overall black population in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area has dropped for the first time in 70 years.
Between 1990 and 2000, the black population in the San Francisco- Oakland-San Jose area dropped from 537,753 to 513,561, according to census data analyzed in the Brookings study.
The new migratory pattern reflects the ascendancy of Latinos and Asians.
"We came out to California to find gold and many of us found it," said Noella Buchanan, a pastor at the Community African Methodist Episcopal Church in Corona, east of Los Angeles. "But when it's time to retire, there's this desire to go back home. Even the children who grew up in California are feeling the pull. They're heading off to black colleges in Atlanta and North Carolina and staying there.
"Let's face it. Everything is crazy here. The traffic is crazy, the housing prices are crazy. They're finding a slower pace of life in the South. Out here, we're the forgotten minority. Back there, we're the chosen minority."