As minorities move to suburbs, hate follows
 

http://www.freep.com/news/metro/mino...e_20050718.htm
(Link is good for only 14 days)

This article is from the Detroit Free Press

As minorities move to suburbs, hate follows

Racial tensions rise with population changes
July 18, 2005


BY NIRAJ WARIKOO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

They've had enough.

For three years, Reginald and Lori Doster have put up with racial slurs, KKK graffiti and an arson attack that terrified their daughter.

So next month, the African-American couple plan to leave their Taylor home, taking with them bitter memories of living on a predominantly white block.

The Taylor case is one of a string of recent incidents in which black people are being greeted with racial violence after they move into neighborhoods with no or few African Americans. With Detroit's black population increasingly leaving the city for the suburbs, it's a problem some fear may continue. And it comes at a time when the issue of minorities moving in next door has become widely debated.

On June 29, ABC-TV canceled a series it had been hyping called "Welcome to the Neighborhood," a reality show that featured white evangelical Christians choosing from a diverse group of families to move into a home on their block. Some of the episodes ABC had planned to air showed white neighbors making bigoted statements toward minorities. After pressure from fair-housing groups, the network pulled the series.

In metro Detroit meanwhile, a series of anti-black incidents in recent weeks has raised concerns with civil rights groups, police and residents.

"It's ridiculous that someone in this country would have to deal with this," Reginald Doster, a computer administrator, said at his Taylor home last week. "You're dealing with ignorance."

•In Trenton two weeks ago, police reported that two crosses were burned on consecutive nights on the lawn of a home owned by an African-American man who moved in the week before with his white wife and their two children.

•In Warren last month, an African-American family came home to discover someone had trashed their house and scrawled its walls with white-power slogans.

Police continue to investigate both incidents, but such cases can often be hard to solve. In the Trenton incident, police nabbed two men shortly after the second cross-burning, but released them. They're now waiting for the lab results of some evidence, said Lt. Greg Plagens. In Warren, police are waiting for lab results, said Sgt. Jeff Knoblauch.

In the Doster case on Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced a 33-year-old Taylor man, Michael Richardson, to four years in prison for lying during a grand jury investigation into an arson at the home. No one has been charged in the arson. But federal investigators say Richardson lied about who may have set the fire.

According to court records, days after the Dosters bought the home, someone broke a window and poured gasoline through it. Much of the home was damaged.

"This fire was just a part of a months-long campaign to drive the Dosters out of the neighborhood," said federal prosecutors in a report. The Dosters spent thousands of dollars to clean up the home and redecorate it. In October 2002, someone scrawled "KKK" on the side of their home.

And in the months following, investigators and the Dosters said, the pattern continued. Kids taunted Lori Doster with racial slurs, and someone tore up their tires.

The harassment took a psychological toll. Reginald Doster had trouble sleeping. The couple's daughter, who was 9 at the time of the arson attack, was afraid to sleep in her bedroom, which faced the back of the house. And their 14-year-old son, who had been an honor student, saw his grades slip.

"I didn't understand it," said their daughter, Vianca, about the arson attack.

Her mother, Lori Doster, added, "She didn't know what race was."

"Until we moved here," said Reginald Doster.

Some of their white neighbors acknowledge that there is some racism in the area, but they say what happened to the Dosters was wrong.

"I hear people talking, you hear people saying" a racial slur, said Audrey Emery, 67, who is white and lives a couple of houses down from the Dosters. "My feeling is I have nothing against blacks ... I know a lot of black people. We're like brothers and sisters."

Emery said she felt bad when the Dosters' home was attacked.

"This is a free country. You can move where you want," she said. "It's just wrong."

It's also against the law, say civil rights activists. But when the racial demographics of a community change, violence may increase, said an official with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In metro Detroit, the problem of black people encountering racial violence when they move into white neighborhoods goes back decades, say historians. One day in September 1925, a mob of hundreds of whites rushed the Detroit home of Ossian Sweet, a black doctor, who had just moved into a white neighborhood. And during the post-war era, many blacks were hassled after moving into all-white blocks.

In Trenton, Warren and Taylor, as with other Detroit suburbs, from 1990 to 2000 the African-American population increased, according to U.S. census figures. In Taylor, the African-American population jumped 93%, to almost 9% of the city's population, compared to 4% in 1990.

"It sort of goes in phases," said Shanna Smith, head of the National Fair Housing Alliance, about such incidents. Her Washington, D.C.-based group helped convince ABC to drop the controversial TV show about minorities moving into a white neighborhood. The local office of the alliance receives about 150 complaints of housing bias every year, but that figure also includes cases in which blacks and other minorities are denied opportunities to move into a neighborhood.

Across the state, there were 276 hate crimes related to race and ethnicity in Michigan for 2003, according to the FBI. But it's unclear which of those specifically dealt with minorities moving into white suburbs.

James Netter, a real estate agent from Wayne who is African American, said government must deal strongly with racial attacks. He remembers that in 1996, a church in Wayne with a largely African-American congregation was defaced with swastikas. The recent incidents concern him.

"My daughter is there in Iraq fighting for democracy and freedom, and yet she couldn't come to Trenton and buy a house in peace," said Netter. "What hypocrisy."

White residents are also upset by the racism.

"There's no place in society for those acts," said Heather Holland, pastor of St. Philip Lutheran Church in Trenton. "It just saddens me and makes me angry."

For the Dosters, a sort of resignation has set in. In their family room lies a stack of cardboard boxes they will soon fill to move into a Taylor neighborhood they hope will be more accommodating.

"I'm still ticked off, but what can you do?" said Reginald Doster. "This is what happens in America."

:mad: :mad: :mad:

It makes me embarassed and ashamed to be from this area. I grew up in Warren and live very near Trenton and was shocked to hear about those incidences. I admit that I have neighbors who make comments when minorities move into the neighborhood and we get into arguments about it. My daughter is so sensitive toward others though. Her best friend is an African American girl whose parents I'm good friends with now. There are only a handful in their school at all. My daughter told me the last week of school that one of the girls has a white mom and she is worried that other kids will harass her when they find that out.

Taylor though, that doesn't surprise me a bit. There are parts that are nice, but much of it is high crime, low lifes and the city has a bad reputation for a lot of things. It wouldn't surprise me if there were skinheads, KKK, etc going on there.

I just don't get how humans can treat other humans that way.

Dee

:mad:

Doesn't surprise me, unfortunately. My own family (native Detroiters) say some not horrible but certainly not good things about black people sometimes. And they are all well-educated, intelligent people. Now, they would NEVER burn a cross or something like that, but I just think a lot of native Detroiters and people in the area are really ignorant and just don't even realize it. My husband is Puerto Rican - he's really dark because he's got African blood. I've started reminding my family that my babies will be part African and it embarrasses them and shuts them up real quick. :rolleyes:

There is an ad here in the NYC area for the equal Housing authority (I haven't seen it but Mr. xo_kathy has) of a white guy sitting at a desk making phone calls about an apartment. He uses different accents and names that fit the accent (Jose Gonzalez, Kim Li, etc.) and keeps getting told the apt. is no longer available. Then he calls as himself - Joe Smith or something - and lo and behold, the apt. is still available! It's so sad...:(

I don't understand. You read all these things about stuff happening to black people and other minorities but we don't ever hear on GC about the stuff they do to us (robbing old ladies, raping women, stealing little kids bicycles, crack dealing, shooting 7-eleven store clerks, strangling little kids-these are all thing I've seen happen on Tv in the past 6 months and it's all black people that have commited these crimes) The news even has this thing called "thug alert". And they always have some drugged out black people on there who have bloodshot eyes that they're looking for. Just the other day there were these two crack dealing black juveniles who escaped from juvy and went and robbed a walmart. :rolleyes:

I guess I could post my stories of what you just described (robbing old ladies, raping women, stealing little kids bicycles, crack dealing, shooting 7-eleven store clerks, strangling little kids, etc.) but it would be all white people committing the crimes against other white people though. Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the drugged out, bloodshot eyed meth heads that get arrested all the time and are on the news every night for something (ie robbery, sttealing, blowing crap up, etc.).

Oh well - there goes your theory. :rolleyes: :mad: I guess everybody has a few bad apples.

*SMH*

I wonder what that means?

Who is "our men"?

LOLOL - Let's see a thread with a serious discussion vs a silly rant of what someone see on TV so therefore generalizes everyone to be that way.

Nice try though *pats madmax on the head*

Hi. I'm white and I don't suck.

Seriously. WTF is wrong with people.

Oh ok, your inconsistent posts are just silly rants.

Was your Bill Cosby thread a silly rant?

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ighlight=cosby

Shaking my head.

Like someone said, this behavior does not surprise me. The Detroit-area is one of the most racially segregrated areas in the country.

Just more proof that racism is alive and well in the 21st century.

I'd be more concerned if a convicted sex offender lived in my neighborhood, but I guess everyone has their own concerns.

What gets me is that people are surprised that this stuff still happens. I mean, I know folks are given to hyperbole sometimes, but you know, all us cullud folks didn't just decide that we were going to dream up a collective hallucination just to make white folks feel nervous, or scared, or sad, or insert-your-favorite-emotion-here.

It's like that movie Crash and why it makes me so upset - the only time (many) non-black folks have to confront racism is when it "crashes" into them, but for (many) non-white folks, we live this isht day in, day out. It happens. It's real. We're not all lying about it.

</rant>

Actually, I wanna piggyback of your (and madmax's comment) with a question: by using the term "our men", doesn't that sort of... render the issue of the incarceration rate of black males as only a "black" problem?

IMO, any country that willingly turns a blind eye to that statistic has a lot of explaining to do and needs to come up with solutions. It isn't just the problem of the ethnic community.

Honestly, with my post taken out of context, I don't know all I said really or where that comes from. I may have addressed that (in general) or may not.

I'm sure madmax will be more than happy to post the thread instead of just a piece of a post out of context. :)

But I agree - disproportionate incarceration rates is a societial problem that everyone needs to look at.

I think that the behavior is so appalling that we find it hard to believe that people can act in such a way. I tend to see the good in people first and so it is always shocking to me when human beings treat other human beings so horribly. In addition to being embarassed about it, we also feel helpless because we don't know how to make it stop.

Dee

But why? How? I guess that's what I'm trying to get to. There is ample historical record that shows that people have acted like this in the past. Regardless of the progress that has been made -- progress that I'm not trying to downplay, by the way -- it's relatively easy to make the historical case that there have been, are, and probably always will be people who decide to express their racism in a more explicit and perhaps violent way. It's not as if it's happening in a vacuum, or that it's an isolated incident. Do people just not see it? Do they choose not to see it? Or do they see it, and because it's not happening to them, they don't remember it?

(I'm not throwing idle accusations at you or anyone else, AGDee - I'd really like to know the answers).

Honeykiss and Sistermadly,

Don't get upset with the "madmax", it is just his way of flirting with you all...

Now as far as my Slut Puppie, Cashmoney and his comments, you just haveta understand he's been contemplating the taste of special-silky-creamy-smoove-cocoa-truffle-dark-chocolate for a looonnnngttttime but he says he has allergy issues... :rolleyes: Oneday, he'll just take a benadryl and eat it all out--I mean up... Don't let the smoove taste fool y'all... And as a trusted research scientist, white chocolate has limited health benefits...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All kidding aside:

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood and caught hayle my entire life for it. Although we lived in Southern California which was more open to those kinds of ideas. It was not back in the 1970's and early 80's. Nowadays, it has changed, somewhat and it is welcomed...

But the stuff I am reading about this, that is why the midwest and southern states get clowned by the West Coast because of this lunacy. In the 21st century, don't we all human beings have enough to worry about rather than "hatin'" on folks and they color. Dayum!!! Get an EFFin' life and grow up...

But haay...

Don't hate...

'Cuz if you hate, it means you ain't gettin' any or it ain't good...

'Cuz if you were getting suum and it was good...

You'd have no reason to hate...

TOO funny! :D

white people do that stuff as well, dimwit.

:cool:

I guess for me personally, it's not just this issue that shocks me and I end up shocked and appalled often by people's behavior. I tend to see the world with rose colored glasses most of the time and believe that people are inherently good. When incidences like this happen, it's always a blow to me. I'm a Pollyanna whose world view gets blown away fairly often. You'd think it would change my basic premise, but I do still believe that the majority of people are good. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since there are people who molest and abuse children, who blow up the WTC, who commit genocide, etc. Perhaps I don't know how to cope with all that, so I just have to focus on the good, rather than dwell on the bad seeds in our society. Having worked with those who are mentally ill for many years, I tend to have compassion before I condemn, but there is no way to have compassion for someone who commits a heinous crime.

This is the first time I've seen an overt racial hate crime in my own backyard and I do find it very troublesome. I work in a very integrated building and never hear/see racism happening there. Detroit is VERY segregated as far as where people live, but the workplace is very integrated. I do hear comments from some really obtuse neighbors of mine and I am bothered by it and let them know.

I don't take your questions as a personal attack at all. I can't answer for others, but I gave the best explanation that I could for me personally.

Dee

Now I'm confused...
 

Did the black families who bought homes in the suburbs commit these crimes? :confused:

Cash money, were you being serious? OMG! I'm embarassed for you.

BUT - I lived in the Detroit area for two years in the early 90's and I had not seen such segregation since I was a child in the SOUTH.

Eight Mile is not just an Eminem rap. It is a line that sets cultural zones like something from another world. It was creepy.

But we had all sorts of families of all sorts of colors in our neighborhood out in Troy. Maybe we were just weird?
All successful, all just folks, all just neighbors who spoke, waved, had each other over, kids played together, collected mail for each other when one was on vacation, etc etc. This was a very nice neighborhood where median home price was $300K - and that was FIFTEEN years ago.

Very sad that this could happen.

I know when it comes to the south vs. the north things are different. Violent crimes are committed on both ends. But, here it tends to be more african americans that commit the sorts of crimes I mentioned. The child molesters tend to be white but most of the violent crimes are not white people. Yea, most of the hate crimes are commited by white people as are most of the bomb scares (personally, i don't think the black people who would commit drastic crimes are smart enough to create bombs in the first place....but thats my opinion.) Rapes go both ways as far as who commits the most, it's actually kind of even. I'm sure in the north its even on both ends....but in the south you tend to see more african americans on TV committing the sorts of crimes I mentioned. The fact that people on GC are always mentioning stuff about white people doing this and that but never posting how african americans do horrible crimes if not worse, it kind of makes it look one sided. If you mention stuff about non white people then people think you're being racist. I was merely trying to "even" things out, if you will, in this post.

No ill feelings intended.

Cash.

Empty thy PM box Mr. Craig.

lol, GC hypocrisy at it's very best.

http://img289.imageshack.us/img289/6...sracist7gr.gif

i didn't want to say it, but hey...

Thank You.;)

LOL - where do yall find this stuff?

done.

Oh, I get it now. I feel foolish. Cashmoney is just a professional bomb thrower and trouble maker.

You're good at your job, Cash.

Child molestation is not a violent crime? Or does it have to go this far
http://crime.about.com/b/a/163982.htm before it's considered violent?

Key words - south and tv. Do you really think that's the reality of the situation?

And you think creating a bomb is an indication of being "smart"?


Whatever. & I bet some of your best friends are black....:rolleyes:

Yes, sweetheart, I agree with you, ALL folks do some bucket wild isht in the criminal department...

What I find about your comments regarding the Central Florida's criminal element so abashing--simply because I have several family members, including my G-mom that lives in the hood in DAB across the street from Bethune Cookman College--means that your TV stations prop that crap up about crack addicts for TV ratings. Regardless if ACTUAL numbers do reflect an increased incidence of crimes committed by one group vs. another--ALL crimes must be judged fairly according to our judicial system...

Most crack addicts rob because 1) they smoke crack and it causes their brains to malfunction and 2) they support a crack habit and 3) because they can rob it out from there... They do not do it because somebody had a bad day in school today and no body likes them...

Whereas, some lunatic fringe child sex offender kills a cute and cuddily blonde headed white girl from her trailer park home does it because his crank addicted mother did not breast feed him enough, the tooth fairy only gave him $1 and he has no friends his age...

You do the math on the stereotypical statistics there...

I am not saying the AA don't commit any crime. I am not saying that there aren't bad criminal elements in the AA community... And I am not saying that your cops ain't like white on rice in the hood, either--whether or not AA are have actually committed the crime.

What I am saying is that not ALL AA's that come from the 'hood are criminals, which your post is saying to alot of people... And that is why some AA's move to the 'burbs to get away from that criminal element only to find another bad element that cuts deeper than an actual robbing, rape, theft or other violent crime...

Psychological hurt cuts really hard when you think you've arrived, you can afford whatever and then folks think you don't deserve to live there...

Actually, I have a couple who are VERY close to me. One is like an older brother. The older I get the more I realize how wrong he was on a lot of things. Not to mention he is one of the most irresponsible people I have ever known but is also one of my best friends. He was there for me to help when I literally hit rock bottom. And thanks to him I got out of a "rutt" that even my own parents couldn't help me out of. Basically I know he is a true friend of mine through and through and will ride till we die if need be. We've been friends for 7 years now ever since I met him at a UF football banquet in 1998 when he played free safety. And despite me coming from a racist family, not my parents but instead everyone else, he'll still be in my wedding if he's not the best man.

Did you ever smoke weed and watch COPS on Fox network in college? I have a feeling you did. ;)