Looked at with the long view, the trend is always toward progress and equality. There are hiccups along the way--sometimes lasting decades--but the long-term trend is toward greater equality, so the Republicans, and indeed, the Democrats as well, will have to continue to move left to remain viable. I seem to remember Kevin Phillips making a similar prediction in <i>American Theocracy</a>, that the fundamentalist power play would wither sometime around 2010. Seems to have withered a little early, but that’s fine with me.

Amanda, I’m a bit surprised at your mentioning white suburbia as a place created by even the possibility ‘of racist “white flight” motivations’.  Suburbia and its whiteness (which is less and less true all the time) is largely an economic creation, as the illusion of upward mobility--and its accompanying better schools, nicer neighbors, rising home values, and easy living--suckered millions of middle class people into a lifestyle they could just barely afford.  The rhetoric of white flight to suburbia may have underlying facts to back it up, but the cause was much more a desire for a better life than any fear of black and brown people.  If that was the case, then the post-Civil War era would have been the beginning of suburbia.

one facet of it is very interesting, which is the idea that urban liberals’ influence is increasingly spreading out over the country, and isn’t confined to the coasts.

Anyone who’s read Teixerira and Judis or Richard Florida in a political context understood that it never a question of blue states and red states—that simplistic narrative was the product of a lazy MSM, a relic of an outmoded “winner-take-all” Electoral College system, and a convenient fiction that both major parties found useful to accept until recently.

Major cities and college towns (i.e. “ideopolises") aren’t limited to a few coastal states, and the DLC faction of the Dems ignored that reality for far too long, even as their populations grew at the expense of rural and exurban areas (a trend that will only accelerate as fuel prices rise). Dean and Obama have eliminated that self-destructive approach for the foreseeable future.

I saw a map that charted how the election would’ve gone if it just counted the votes of 19-29-year-olds—overwhelmingly blue, coast to coast, heartland, you name it. Texas went blue, most of the Deep South went blue.

Sure, jon.  You neglect to remember that I’m white, grew up in a nest of white people, and know how they think. And yes, hostility towards non-white people is a large part of the reason it’s assumed that neighborhoods and schools in suburbia are better.

The rhetoric of white flight to suburbia may have underlying facts to back it up, but the cause was much more a desire for a better life than any fear of black and brown people. If that was the case, then the post-Civil War era would have been the beginning of suburbia.

Two things--the post Civil War era didn’t have the communication or transportation technology necessary to create a suburban lifestyle. It’s important to remember just how recently the US was still an agrarian nation. Secondly, the very basis for the “better life” that white people were looking for in suburbia was an escape from the cities which were populated by, you guessed it, brown people. Some were African-Americans, some were recent immigrants from countries considered “less desirable,” but the net effect was the same--racism was at the root of suburbia.

The US war machine will remain, after being rebuilt by Obama, for the next Republican president to make war with.

I would have guessed that it’s because it’s cheaper to live in the suburbs than the city, so lower income people who work in service industry jobs migrate there, especially since there are plenty of service industry jobs in the shopping mall-dominated suburbs.  But according to the Washington Post, it’s the inroads made by Obama with white, college-educated people that shifted the balance of power.  That makes sense, because the middle class is really feeling the squeeze right now, but it does worry me that this group will slide right back into voting based on racist, sexist appeals made by right wingers once the economy is not tanking.

I think one thing you are not taking into account is that the Democratic constituencies moving to the suburbs are not just low-income service industry workers. Some traditionally Republican voters went with Obama this year because of the economic situation, but I also think the suburbs have a lot more creative-class, professional whites who still are somewhat hipster in their cultural orientation. As many American cities have been revitalized, they have become very expensive. When you have a couple of kids and the same amount of money gets you a two-bedroom condo in the city or a three-bedroom house with a yard in a suburb and you’re not really hitting the bars and the clubs the way you used to because of the kids, well, it just starts to make more sense to move to the suburbs, even if you swore up and down you would never do it. But you don’t become conservative just because you make that move. What’s positive about that for us is that this tendency of the suburbs to vote Democratic won’t be as transitory you seem to imply, especially if the Republicans keep stressing the social conservatism.

While I certainly believe their premise and think it is coming more and more true, I just think the economic crisis and general awfulness of the last 8 years had more to do with it. I don’t think we’re at a spot where these trends are producing reliably Democratic results in red states. It might not even get there by the next election. It’s still going to be a battle.

http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/

“You neglect to remember that I’m white, grew up in a nest of white people, and know how they think.”

Wait, you grew up in small-town Texas, right? That’s hardly representative of the suburbs. I grew up in Northern Virginia, one of the new swing suburbs that’s beginning to dominate its state. It’s pretty white (only 8% black when I left town, though there were significant numbers of East and South Asians), but I don’t remember a whole lot of people going around hating the blacks or anything. Suburbanites today are the kids of the white-flyers, and they’re a lot less likely to have issues with race than the blue-hairs.

Now if we want to talk about class issues…

Suburbia and its whiteness (which is less and less true all the time) is largely an economic creation, as the illusion of upward mobility--and its accompanying better schools, nicer neighbors, rising home values, and easy living--suckered millions of middle class people into a lifestyle they could just barely afford.

This is not inconsistent with racism. 

A great number of suburbs started as actual sundown towns, where people of colour were deliberately kept out.  Of course most white people wouldn’t move to a place with crappier amenities just because it was all white (although some certainly would), but a lot considered it a nice bonus, on top of the new buildings and better schools.  It was, in fact, advertised as a nice bonus: see this ad.

Also, bear in mind that a lot of white people believed, and indeed still believe, that people of colour drive down property values just by being there.

To Jon:  you touch on a fascinating topic.  The depth, breadth, and complexity of the dynamic that you are describing is the subject of James W. Loewen’s Sundown Towns.  I highly recommend this book.

Among the most important developments in ‘race’ relations in this country have been the creation and growth of layers upon layers of social, political, and economic phenomena that center largely on race but can be discussed without ever directly mentioning that core motivation.  Also, some of these phenomena have matured to the point where the fingerprints of active racism are hard to find if found at all.  “White flight” and the metastasis of suburbia and exurbia were driven by a number of phenomena (cheap oil, the post-WWII middle-class surge, etc.), but it is incredibly naive to believe that racism was not also a core motivation.

Suburbanites today are the kids of the white-flyers, and they’re a lot less likely to have issues with race than the blue-hairs.

I think it’s more complex than that.  I grew up in Toronto, where close to half the population is now “visible minority” IIRC, but in a very white neighbourhood, and attended schools where there were a lot of white and Asian kids but very few black or aboriginal kids.  And a lot of white and Asian people there don’t see themselves as racist, but, you know, those Jamaicans sure are violent, and aboriginal people, well, they just never get it together, and so on and so on.  And this is in a “progressive” city in what would be a deep, deep blue state if it were part of the U.S. 

So I’m skeptical about claims that younger people don’t have “issues with race”.

Jeff, jon, I live in Cleveland, Ohio and race had a whole heck of a lot to do with the expansion of the suburbs around here.

I really hate that map b/c it’s so misleading.  It still looks so red, even though many of the red areas don’t have very many people living there.  You know, red mountains majesty.  When a red/blue map is projected through density, the country is far more balanced-looking.

But then the red map is how the MSM kept up talking about McCain all along.  If you cede large swaths of the nation with low density to McCain, and then look at a geographical map, it looks like J. Sid. 3 had a shot.

Just this morning I was reading an op-ed about how McCain knew it was over, but losing PA and OH was a surprise.  Losing PA was a surprise?  To whom?  That state was Obama’s for at least a month before the election.

I also think the suburbs have a lot more creative-class, professional whites who still are somewhat hipster in their cultural orientation.

Probably, but I suspect that tendency is confined to the coasts, where it’s going blue anyway, and it’s because the cities there are so expensive.  It’s certainly not true in Texas, where the cities and suburbs have an extremely tense relationship.  But maybe it’ll come here.  Marc and I were marveling at how Plano, TX---which is like ultra suburbia---had an actual smattering of hip looking condos in a fake downtown area that could, with a little spit polish, be a halfway decent place to live if you’re desperate.  And people with tattoos walking around in broad daylight.  It’s not Austin, or even Dallas, but it’s clear they’re trying to lure the creative class into Plano.

When you have a couple of kids and the same amount of money gets you a two-bedroom condo in the city or a three-bedroom house with a yard in a suburb and you’re not really hitting the bars and the clubs the way you used to because of the kids, well, it just starts to make more sense to move to the suburbs, even if you swore up and down you would never do it.

Yeah, I know a lot of parents who feel they have a target on their backs, and the suburbia hunters will get them any day now.  I find it funny, because a lot of the old houses that are too small for kids in this city were actually used by families 40, 50 years ago to raise families bigger than people have now.

When the economy is good people are probably more likely to vote on “social issues” but what people consider to be social issues seem to be changing. 

Gay marriage might be a big deal to people over fifty but not such a big deal to Gen-Xers and younger, but I am sure younger people will also find social issues that effect their voting.  Hopefully, these issues will not be of the wingnut variety.

Wait, you grew up in small-town Texas, right? That’s hardly representative of the suburbs.

My boyfriend grew up in a classic suburb.  Let me ask him.  Wait right there.....

His response? “White flight is called white flight for a motherfucking reason.” Natch---the folks in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston are blatantly hostile to the cities where white people don’t have a majority, much less a whitewash like they do in the suburbs.

I am glad Obama claimed victory last Tuesday, but political power ebbs and flows and this wasn’t even an historic spread in our lifetimes.  Obama won by 6.5% of the popular vote, a very nice margin indeed.  But he was running against the least popular party in recorded Presidential history.
Reagan beat Carter by 9% in 1980 and in 1984 won by 18% of the popular vote and won every state but mine.  THOSE are asskickings! And yet within 8 years the Dems were back in the Whitehouse.  If Obama and this Democratically controlled Congress don’t get things done they could be out in 4 years.  You know how fickle this country is.  The rhetoric writes itself against Obama next time around if he is ineffective - “See, we told you he wasn’t experienced enought for the job.” Conservative will be back in power, albeit with a different message at some point in the not too distant future, and then it will swing back again.  It’s the nature of the beast.

Wait, you grew up in small-town Texas, right? That’s hardly representative of the suburbs. I grew up in Northern Virginia, one of the new swing suburbs that’s beginning to dominate its state. It’s pretty white (only 8% black when I left town, though there were significant numbers of East and South Asians), but I don’t remember a whole lot of people going around hating the blacks or anything.

Well, I grew up in the northern suburbs of Detroit (between 13- and 14-Mile roads, if anyone knows the area) in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and I would have to concur with Amanda on this. True, there wasn’t much open hostility towards blacks, but I think that’s at least partially because there were almost none living there at that time. As I recall, we had all of two black students in school with us (I left the area right before high school), and one of them was the son of a big-name Detroit Lions player. It’s a lot harder to get worked up about the blacks if you don’t perceive them as encroaching on your territory, but it’s also a lot harder to learn to interact with them and move beyond perceiving them as some alien and vaguely threatening Other if you don’t ever actually meet any.

So I’m skeptical about claims that younger people don’t have “issues with race”.

While I agree with you, I would say that younger people don’t have the same obsession with race that prompted Boomers and earlier generations to institutionalise it and elevate it to an issue of contention that dominates every single bloody public policy discussion, often to the exclusion of everything else.

Part of the message Xers and Millenials were sending by voting for Obama was that, whatever our personal bigotries are, on a national scale we have bigger problems to worry about than the colour of the President’s skin.

Alot of folks seem to assume that the suburbs of 2008 are the same as 1960.  Many suburban areas around the country have become more ethnically diverse, especially as many of the companies that are creating jobs are often located in suburbs, not in the cities.

A great number of suburbs started as actual sundown towns, where people of colour were deliberately kept out.

Yes, here in California, we’ve had the issue of restrictive covenants forever, it seems:

Kitty Felde: Hector de la Torre lives in South Gate. When he took a closer look at the deed for his post war suburban home, he was surprised. Buried inside was this paragraph:

“No lot in said tract shall at any time be lived upon by a person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian race, and for the purpose of this paragraph, no Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Hindu, or any person of the Ethiopian, Indian, or Mongolian races shall be deemed to be Caucasian.”

Hector de la Torre: When these restrictive covenants were added to the deeds for the property by the homebuilder, they put these restrictions and were probably a great marketing tool for them, for folks to know that they were going to live in the quote-unquote “right neighborhood” with no minorities in them. The irony, of course, is that now, as time has evolved and we have the most diverse state in the United States, being a Mexican-American, I couldn’t live in my own house.

Felde: De la Torre isn’t just a South Gate homeowner, he’s also a state assemblyman. And he’s introduced a bill, AB 2204, that would require county recorders to delete racial covenants from deeds anytime a property is sold. The bill is opposed by the California Association of Realtors and title insurance companies.

Both groups point out the covenants have been unenforceable since California passed fair housing laws in the mid-’60s. Craig Page, with the California Land Title Association, says county recorders won’t have the time or the money for detailed deed searches.

And one of the attractions of California up to the late ‘30s was that it was perceived as ‘white’, the vast majority of African-Americans having come here during and after WWII.

Dr T, maybe.  But unfortunately your side is going to try to win by disenfranchising record numbers of non-white voters.  That’s the main reason it could swing back, especially now that a series of events have demonstrated to non-white voters that Republicans cling like hell to racist policies and politics.  In a country that’s becoming increasingly diverse.  Republicans have been internally warned for a long time that if they don’t evolve on race issues, they’re going to perish, and I think they listen, but the problem is that they don’t have anything else.  Open class war is also going to fail, because the working and middle classes are just larger than the upper class the Republicans cater to.  Without race-baiting to create the illusion of white against everyone else instead of rich against everyone else, what do they have?  Abortion, gays, and guns---in other words, wingnuttery.  And the public showed this time out that they REALLY don’t like wingnuttery.

Well, the example I’m thinking of is Chicago, where I lived for many years. It’s easy to forget, with Illinois being so reliably blue these days, that it used to be a swing state. DuPage County used to be as Republican as the city was Democratic. One reason Illinois has gone blue is that the suburbs have gone blue. And it’s not a one-time economic downturn change. It’s a major demographic shift. You have a lot more jobs in the suburbs, period. Not just service sector jobs, but all kinds of jobs. I and many people I knew used to reverse commute because we liked living in the city but couldn’t find a job in the city. But if I had stayed there, it would have been untenable with the kid. I spent two hours a day in the car. We would have moved to the suburbs or one of use would have had to quit working. Also, as someone else said, many immigrants are going directly to the suburbs, skipping that first generation that used to live in the city.

But I know that’s not everywhere. I live in Tucson now, and it’s a much more classic urban/suburban divide politically, even though we’re just a mid-sized city and really, our urban amenities are not that great. Pima County is blue because of the city of Tucson. If you look in the suburbs and unincorporated areas, it’s majority Republican, and many people there continue to have an active, visceral aversion to anything associated with the city.

While I agree with you, I would say that younger people don’t have the same obsession with race that prompted Boomers and earlier generations to institutionalise it and elevate it to an issue of contention that dominates every single bloody public policy discussion, often to the exclusion of everything else.

Yep, like I tell my students when we talk about race, the situation isn’t good, but it’s better. We might never reach good, but we can always improve.

And I’ll add my voice to that of the others who talk about suburbs being havens of racism. I grew up north of New Orleans, and white flight was definitely at play. It’s not a coincidence that David Duke won his sole political campaign in the New Orleans suburbs even while New Orleans itself was electing black mayors one after the other.

I find it funny, because a lot of the old houses that are too small for kids in this city were actually used by families 40, 50 years ago to raise families bigger than people have now.

I’ve had real estate types ask when I plan to move out of my “starter home” now that the kids are getting bigger. 

Said “starter home”, at 1700 sq ft, is more than twice as large as the half-house my husband’s slightly larger family lived in most of his childhood, and about three times the size of the trailer that my similarly sized natal family lived in my entire childhood.

Something got miscalibrated pretty badly here.

Amanda’s definition of wingnuts - Obama voters who believe Constitutional Ammendments should be passed to legalize gay marriage.  You really are out on a little island there aren’t you, sweetcheeks?

Oh, and I’m sure that the widespread practice of redlining in most of the older major cities like Chicago, Philly, and Boston had absolutely nothing to do with race ... other than denying mortgages to certain people.

Racial fear, in regards to suburbia, is compounded with a series of other motivations.  That some go along with the majority doing something doesn’t mean that they agree with the entire rhetorical underlying philosophy behind that action.  The suburbs have been sold as many things, including their incredibly non-white-free demographic, but just because there is racism there doesn’t negate the many other elements that caused them to become full of people.

The primary reason to move to the suburbs was and still is a lifestyle choice.  Bigger homes, yards, privacy, increasing wealth in home values, prestige, and all the rest made for a good dream that many non-whites have embraced in recent years as well.  Some of those selling points remain valid, some never were.  But there’s growth in the suburbs from all directions: from urban, rural, foreign, and within.

Did all those immigrants hate the other brown skinned people in Mexico and Guatemala?  Did all those children of farmers hate those seasonal workers so much they had to leave?  Did all those black families leave the city centers for suburbia because they wanted to sport bowties and play golf among their favorite pasty white people?  Yeah, some white people left the cities because the blacks suddenly could vote their own people in, but there’s more to the story of suburbia than the fear of blacks.

Jeff:

I grew up in Northern Virginia, one of the new swing suburbs that’s beginning to dominate its state. It’s pretty white (only 8% black when I left town, though there were significant numbers of East and South Asians), but I don’t remember a whole lot of people going around hating the blacks or anything.

You’re missing the point. Part of the motivation behind white flight is for racist folks to get to somewhere that they don’t feel like they have to go around hating on the blacks all the time. There’s active racism and there’s passive racism. White flight is an example of passive racism.

I also grew up in northern Virginia, but unlike, apparently, you, I have pretty vivid memories of the remarkably racist slant to the way that people talked about “the bad parts of town,” to say nothing of how DC was perceived.

Dr T:

Amanda’s definition of wingnuts - Obama voters who believe Constitutional Ammendments should be passed to legalize gay marriage. You really are out on a little island there aren’t you, sweetcheeks?

1) You have the reading comprehension of a small pile of dry twigs, don’t you?

2) Fuck you, asshole.

Bye, Dr. T.

Jon, I have little reason to believe that you are being other than deliberately obtuse. 

Bill Russell, African American star for the Boston Celtics, was trying to make that very same lifestyle choice for his family, but nobody would show even a wealthy African American a home for sale in the suburbs.  If he didn’t have big bucks up front, nobody would give him a mortgage.

The “it will hurt my property values” refrain was so pervasive in the suburbs, that a statistician and late acquaintance of mine named Marie Schaeffer did a landmark analysis of home value patterns intended to disprove the fear that “blacks moving in destroy neighborhoods”.

If that isn’t racism, I don’t know what is.

They’ve actually done studies that show that neighborhoods have a tipping point, where a small percentage of black families will move in and then suddenly a whole shitload of white people leave.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it:

The foundational work in this field was done in the early seventies by the economist Thomas Schelling, then at Harvard University, who argued that “white flight” was a tipping-point phenomenon. Since that time, sociologists have actually gone to specific neighborhoods and figured out what the local tipping point is. A racist white neighborhood, for example, might empty out when blacks reach five per cent of the population. A liberal white neighborhood, on the other hand, might not tip until blacks make up forty or fifty per cent.

White flight is a surprisingly uncomplicated phenomenon.  White people literally judge how “safe” a neighborhood is by its ethnic make-up.  They don’t consult crime statistics or a school’s ratings.

But Amanda, that’s just a “lifestyle choice” ... just like making sure that no black people buy your house or your neighbor’s house is just a “lifestyle choice”, or being denied credit due to your race is a “lifestyle choice”, or breaking into a house owned by blacks and vandalizing it or burning it is a “lifestyle choice”, and having entire neighborhoods slated for disinvestment is a “lifestyle choice”.

I grew up in Northern Virginia (lived my whole life there except for college, actually), and I have to point out that NoVa (and to some extent suburban Maryland) is a weird anomaly in the world of suburbs, because DC has fixed boundaries that would take an act of Congress to alter. As a result, we have inner suburbs that in anywhere else would have long since been absorbed into the city, middle suburbs that are comparable to inner suburbs of other cities, and possibly “normal” outer suburbs.

That said, the shift in the political leanings of the suburbs here has clearly been driven by increased urbanization and in-migration of a more diverse population. After the 2004 election, Republicans were crowing about how things were looking good for them in the future, because the communities with the highest percentage growth were red. This displayed a poor understanding of math (the highest percentage growth of necessity comes in the places with the lowest population) and of the idea that political affiliations change as the population grows and needs change.

The outer suburbs of Northern Virginia have trended steadily blue as the population has grown and people need government services, instead of being able to fool themselves that they were self-sufficient and shouldn’t pay taxes. Time wasted because the Republican legislature won’t spend money on transportation infrastructure becomes much more important than money saved on taxes. Hell, during the most severe drought years, people out there found out that part of the reason it was cheaper to live there is that those counties though they could have all these new subdivisions and still not pay to have a hookup to draw water from the Potomac!

I don’t remember a whole lot of people going around hating the blacks or anything. Suburbanites today are the kids of the white-flyers, and they’re a lot less likely to have issues with race than the blue-hairs.

Count me in on “it’s called white flight for a reason.” When we moved to the ‘burbs, “better schools” and “safer neighborhoods” had an unspoken “without all those damn blacks” attached to it.  And once the blacks are totally gone, you never have to speak of it again!  Hurrah! 

After a decade ensconced in suburbia, my parents lost what comfort they used to have with any kind of diversity.  It’s amazing to me what they consider to be a “bad neighborhood” now, especially considering the kinds of places they grew up in.

Aww, damn.  I like calling my 4 year-old daughter sweetcheeks.  Now it’s been polluted.

If you LIEbrals look at the map at the top of this page, you’ll see that it’s STILL mostly red.  Ok, so there are almost no people in those areas but...the COUNTRY is still red!  Red ragin Republican red, because even if the people of this country have turned into Marxist traitors, the land is still extremely rite-wing.  There’s no arguin with facts, the map tells all, DEMONcraps!

Hee, Amanda, I drive past those very condos every day in Plano. And they are cute, and the downtown area has gotten a little bit of mojo, because it’s close to the train station and has some restaurants. Across the highway westward is all McMansionJesusLand, but downtown and east, where we live, ie., wrong side of the tracks, is pretty diverse; we’re one of maybe four white families on our street, vastly outnumbered by Hispanic and black families in our area. And I saw plenty of Obama stickers over here. East Plano, represent! Even if we had more money, I’d rather fix up my little rental house and stay in this area. McMansionJesusLand is scary, and their restaurants suck.

there’s more to the story of suburbia than the fear of blacks.

Dude, are you only reading one sentence out of every three or something?  Who ever suggested that people ONLY move to suburbia for racial reasons?

even if the people of this country have turned into Marxist traitors, the land is still extremely rite-wing.

I heart RiM.  If only land could vote.

They’ve actually done studies that show that neighborhoods have a tipping point, where a small percentage of black families will move in and then suddenly a whole shitload of white people leave.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it: 

I’ve seen those studies, but, as we’re seeing, the state of race relations is dynamic, not static. I think that phenomena still holds true to a greater extent, but how about the future. The fact that tipping points are different, depending on the tolerance of the white involved, says something.

(And, of course, we’re just talking about white/black relations here; there ARE other colors in the mix. I very much doubt there’s white flight when it comes to Asians).

If only land could vote

Somehow, I don’t think the land would have voted for McCain/Palin.  The wolves would have peed on it if it did!

Ms. Kate, the land gets weirdly excited by lupian golden showers....

Redshift- A branch of my family is long-time Fairfax county folk.  There’s another unique aspect of those northern VA suburbs that’s relevant to its political makeup: it’s the suburb of the seat of the federal government.  That means it’s always been and will be bi-partisan.  Congressional staffers, gov’t employees, lobbyists and lawyers for all sorts of causes/interest groups, think-tank academics, reps from all the myriad gov’t and defense contractors, national media types, Pentagon, State Dept, Commerce, etc, etc.  Some of those folks may come and go with new administrations but the general mix stays about even.  It was “purple” in the modern sense when my mother was a kid in the ‘50s.

Someone above pointed out that many new immigrants now move directly into the suburbs rather than cities and that’s also certainly true there.  Fairfax county today has large populations of SE Asians, Filipin@s, and Latin@s that didn’t really exist 25 years ago.

I wonder if the phenomenon of white flight is actually responsible in a weird roundabout way for the slow dissolution of racism.

My grandparents were racists. They grew up in New York City, had lots of contact with black people, and came to the conclusion that “the blacks on welfare” were destroying their home. By the time I knew them, they had been living in the suburbs my mother’s entire life. My mother was a liberal white girl from the 60’s, which means that she tried to fight racism in the ways she understood but still said things like “You shouldn’t date a black boy, because if you got married and had children, they would be tormented by society.” (To which my response was, a, I am not attracted to any black boys so why are you pointing this out—just because I have black male friends doesn’t mean I’m going to date them—and b, any child of mine will be tormented for being *smart*, so why should I give a shit about conforming to stupid societal rules just to save my kids pain that they’ll suffer anyway for being what *I* am?) I, however, went to first a “nice” public school in a very white suburb where there were only two or three black kids per class, and then, when the (white) older children tortured me and the principal did nothing, I went to private schools where the two or three black kids were from middle-class, well-educated families like mine.

I never met poor black kids. I never met black kids who made any kind of big deal about race. This led me to some of the usual white liberal privileged crap that many white liberals exhibit until they learn better, if they ever do—the belief that racism was dead, the belief that we shouldn’t “see” color—but it also meant I had no reason whatsoever to be racist. I was *privileged*, and didn’t see it for years, but since the few black kids I met were very much like me, I had no reason to develop the notion that black people are inferior or even significantly *different* than me.

The white people who flee the cities because they’re afraid of black people, but who won’t openly admit even to themselves their own racism, are not transmitting their racism to their children. Kids raised around very few black people, with parents who talk the talk of being against prejudice even if they really don’t walk the walk, don’t *learn* racism. The most reliably Democratic strongholds in the nation are either majority black, damn near majority black, majority minority that isn’t black or majority coalition of minorities (such as California), or totally white. It’s white people who have greater numbers than black people, but are surrounded by enough black people to feel threatened by them, that appear to be the ones who care enough about racism to vote based on it, or to let it dominate their behavior.

I also suspect that the middle class people who would feel profoundly uncomfortable driving through a city neighborhood with a lot of burned out buildings, boarded up windows and overgrown lots, where there are many black people, would also feel profoundly uncomfortable driving through a rural neighborhood with a lot of tarpaper shacks and broken-down trailers, where the lots are overgrown and/or undergrown, and covered with broken down cars, where all the people they see are white. *Poverty* makes middle-class people uncomfortable, not just the presence of people of color. And when you live in the burbs, you are just as likely to encounter poor rural whites as poor urban blacks, depending on where exactly in the burbs you are.

I don’t see why I have to do this, but here goes: I admit that racism had a huge influence in where many people live!  I never denied it.  But suburbia isn’t suburbia everywhere.  Here in the West outside of California, where many communities have only existed since the 70s and 80s (if they’re the old ones,) things are a bit different.  And not necessarily because we aren’t any less racist than our forefathers and mothers.

I was saying that race relations are only one factor in this broad electoral change regarding the suburbs.  Maybe it’s because I live in a suburban area with mostly new families who moved from faraway, but my image of suburbia is one where all the issues of big cities eventually catch up with us and we realize we actually need a competent government and to pay taxes to support those schools and roads and parks that got us to move here in the first place.  That’s what’s making us more Democratic, but not any more or less racist.  Most of us don’t know our neighbors, nor do we particularily care to.  We don’t want to live with a lot of blacks, browns, or whites, which is why so many front yards consist of garage doors and enclosed entryways and backyards are walled rather than fenced.

But I know a bit about racism, since I’m from the Midwest.  Insular communities that had enough trouble with Methodists in their Lutheran midst really weren’t that keen on that brown family or those black folk.  I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis that was very different from my current suburban setting.  As far as I could tell, the first black family moved in around 1978.  And this suburb was an entire block-widths away from a largely black section of North Minneapolis, so I know that racist policies had to have had a lot to do with the makeup of things.  But now that I’m in Arizona, things are very different.  We don’t care who our neighbors are, as long as they let us sleep.  It’s progress of a sort.

Sometimes I want to puke when I hear about Midwestern values, but now I’m living among the (almost Formerly-)Individualists.  When I look around, the proverbial puke in the mouth a little bit comes to mind.  Maybe adding your own group to those you want to flee makes white flight an irrelevant concept, but the racial drama certainly ends when so many people just plain hate and mistrust and want to be left alone by everyone.

But really, the two versions of the suburbs are very different.  I can’t discount your version, but learn about this other one before using terms such as white flight to talk about suburbs that are populated by people who just wanted to move somewhere with employment and affordable homes.  Sorry to touch off a bit of drama, it’s always good to be called obtuse and reflect a bit, but I still think there’s some broad brushes being employed when suburbia is thought of as having only former urbanites fleeing the dark-skinned hordes and their voting rights.

Alara, I would just like to say that I always appreciate your comments.

I’d like to just point out that moving to the suburbs is not always a great way to live more cheaply anymore.  Maybe my local viewpoint is kind of skewed because here in New York City the transportation infrastructure reduces the cost of living immensely (even while the cost of living is otherwise incredibly high).  But even if that three-bedroom house does cost less (and provide more space) than a two-bedroom apartment, the cost of buying, insuring, maintaining, and constantly gassing a car makes up a lot if not more than the difference over time.  And it is very, very difficult to live on Long Island, in most of New Jersey, or pretty much anywhere in Connecticut without owning a car.  Moreover, a lot of people have to own a car and still pay for the regional railroads just to get to work and back every day.  Altogether, the suburbs around here carry a pretty hefty price tag. 

Is this true elsewhere, or in New York some kind of outlier?

McMansionJesusLand is scary, and their restaurants suck.

So true!! It is almost as though you can TELL when you are in a Rethug stronghold by how VERY VERY much the restaurants suck.

Does the kind of person who votes Republican lack tastebuds? That sould be an interesting study.

Also, Xtians are the WORST TIPPERS !!  Honestly, what would Jesus say about that? I mean COULD he have made his thoughts about how to treat the poor any MORE clear?

Does the kind of person who votes Republican lack tastebuds? That sould be an interesting study.

I would bet a fair bit of it is “comfort food” or familiarity. 

Republicans as a group are a) older, b) whiter, and c) don’t like change (unless they’re being told something is being changed back).  The way North Americans eat has changed radically in the past 50-100 years—in some good ways and some very bad ones, but one of the things that has made food generally “better” (as we understand that now) is the introduction of “ethnic” food.  I mean, you go on the Gallery of Regrettable Food (yeah, Lileks is a nutbar, but the Gallery is relatively untainted by that) and you see how little the cookbooks promoted herbs or spices or fresh vegetables that haven’t been boiled to shit or other things that you and I would regard as good.

I grew up in posh suburban Connecticut. It was racist as hell. Also divided by religions. Stamford, CT north of the Merritt parkway was the wealthy Jewish area. WASP episcopalian types in Greenwich and Darien and New Canaan. Catholics in the rest of Stamford, except my neighborhood on the sound, which was mostly preppy WASP types. These ethno-religious divisions have blurred somewhat, but the racism remains strong.

Ah, Ann Coulter is from New Canaan.

The way North Americans eat has changed radically in the past 50-100 years—in some good ways and some very bad ones, but one of the things that has made food generally “better” (as we understand that now) is the introduction of “ethnic” food.

There’s a fun little book called The United States of Arugula that talks about that transition and how foodies took over American culture and what they were able to change.  It’s very gossipy—like the foodie’s version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—but that’s what makes it a fun read.

And if you like the Gallery of Regrettable Food, you’ll love The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan (okay, that’s the book’s title, but the website’s page title is less interesting).

“Well, the example I’m thinking of is Chicago, where I lived for many years. It’s easy to forget, with Illinois being so reliably blue these days, that it used to be a swing state. DuPage County used to be as Republican as the city was Democratic. One reason Illinois has gone blue is that the suburbs have gone blue. And it’s not a one-time economic downturn change. It’s a major demographic shift.”

DuPage county, some of the wealthiest suburbs of Chicago, went for Obama, 55% / 45%.  Hey, that’s more so than the nation at large.  And it’s exactly right.  The suburbs do now have the hipster class that grew up and moved out, but they didn’t turn conservative as a result.

Amanda, I adore you, I really do, but you’re very Texas-centric.  Growing up in a nest of white people in Texas is very different from growing up in a nest of white people in the Northern cities.  You may know how white Texans react, but Texas is like a whole different country to most of us, and it doesn’t represent the thinking of most Northerners at all.

“I also think the suburbs have a lot more creative-class, professional whites who still are somewhat hipster in their cultural orientation,” to which Amanda replied:  “Probably, but I suspect that tendency is confined to the coasts, where it’s going blue anyway, and it’s because the cities there are so expensive.  It’s certainly not true in Texas, where the cities and suburbs have an extremely tense relationship.”

That tendency is also found in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Indpls and to some extent St. Louis.  I can’t speak for Detroit as I’m not familiar with it.  The upper midwest cities (=blue states) are a lot more like the northeast big cities than you think—and very unlike what you describe in Texas, in terms of social mores and racial relationships.

Bye, Dr. T.

Thank god.  I thought he crossed the line a long time ago, but Amanda is more tolerant than I. 

I don’t mind reading posts from people with whom I disagree, but they’ve at least got to be adding something to the conversation.  Simply pissing people off doesn’t cut it.

I’d like to just point out that moving to the suburbs is not always a great way to live more cheaply anymore.  Maybe my local viewpoint is kind of skewed because here in New York City the transportation infrastructure reduces the cost of living immensely

New York City is an outlier, both in terms of transportation infrastructure and in the large population of the city compared to its suburbs (typical cities contain under 25% of their metropolitan area population.) Most American cities don’t even have a subway system and bus service is often limited.  As another poster mentioned, most jobs are in the suburbs and it’s cheaper to live closer to your work.  Personally, I live in the suburbs so I can walk to work every day and only use the car when I go to the city for cultural events.

rukwtw3o6wppl10g