Suburbia
What seems like a bland, boring and overdone topic has been bouncing around the ol’ nugget of late: the suburbs.
As is often the case, multiple different triggers have gotten me thinking about this topic. One was a recent podcast by The Zman, Transcendental Ruminations. The gist of the portion of the show in question was a dissident guy looking to build an intentional White community, but one that avoided the unpleasant parts of regular life. Only the beautiful Whites get to be part of this new experiment. Then this morning I was reading a post at The Occidental Observer, The Economic and Social Costs of Direct and Indirect Kleptoparasitism by Blacks and Jews looking at White flight. Finally also this morning some local radio hosts brought up the question of onerous home owner’s association (HOA) rules and the harassment encountered by people who didn’t follow the rules, including people getting in trouble for having political signs in their yards or parking a business truck with the name of the business painted on the side, parked in their own driveway.
Combined they got me thinking about the purpose of the modern suburbs, something that I think has changed in a subtle but important way from the original suburbs.
This is the standard genesis story of American suburbia….
Suburbs came into being largely as a result of “White flight” as Whites fled the cities we built because of blacks moving in. At the turn of the last century, just a few decades after the end of the Civil War, something like 90% of blacks lived in the South. During the “Great Migration”, millions of blacks moved North to cities like Chicago and Detroit. Around half a million stayed in Chicago and we can see the results of those black Chicagoans in nearly real time at places like Hey Jackass!. Just last weekend saw 51 people shot in the Windy City, 9 of those fatally, and most of those shot and the shooters are the descendants of freed blacks who moved North last century in the “Great Migration”.
Whites that were able moved to suburban neighborhoods, far enough away to avoid blacks while still within commuting distance of the cities where most jobs were still located. These suburbs were marked by cleanliness, neat yards, good schools, low crime and uniform anonymity. According to pop culture, the uniformity and pressure to conform drove lots of suburban Whites batshit crazy but at least the schools are good (“good schools” being realtor code for “very few black pupils”).
That is mostly accurate. It isn’t the complete picture or the current picture.
The suburbs were designed to provide a bolt hole for Whites, somewhere they could live in peace and quiet apart from blacks by distance. The thought, whether it was ever spelled out so specifically or not, was that blacks were not wealthy enough or ambitious enough to move out of the cities where their presence was cratering property values. Slowly but surely, the suburbs started to change and one way they changed that is quite significant was the advent of HOAs.
Everyone has seen stories about ridiculous rules from home owners associations, regulating grass length or how many Christmas lights you can have but I believe these HOA rules have a deeper and uglier purpose:
The onerous and often silly rules in HOA suburbs don’t exist to keep black and mestizo people out. The prices already do that. Instead they are designed to keep the wrong sort of White people out.
The “right” sort of White people are middle class Whites with some sort of office job, people that go to work and drop their one or two kids at daycare on the way. The right sort of Whites enroll their kids in the public schools, have them in activities and keep their yards clean and tidy. They preferably don’t come home from work dirty. They drive newer minivans or SUVs and get their oil changed by some mechanic, never at home.
The two times we lived in traditional suburban neighborhoods, in Independence, KY and Okemos, MI, we were outliers. Partly because we had so many kids (6 kids aged 9 and under in KY, all 8 in MI). Partly because my wife stayed home with the kids. What ended up happening is that the neighbor kids would all end up at my place just because my wife happened to be home. We were definitely oddballs because of our family size and because my wife didn’t “work”, as if caring for a household with 8 kids was a cakewalk compared to sitting in a cubicle somewhere.
Many, perhaps most, suburban Whites prefer not to think about their country bumpkin cousins. The country is something to be nostalgic about but not to live in. For all of the talk of embracing the work ethic, the idea of the kind of work that gets you dirty seems a bit repugnant to a lot of Whites. They might watch Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe but wouldn’t do those jobs.
It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the day there were far fewer “office jobs” in America and most Whites were “working class”, some sort of skilled tradesman or factory worker. Where I grew up with a dad who was a doctor, my next door neighbor was an auto executive but the most down-to-earth person you would ever meet, but my best friend growing up two houses down had a father who worked the night shift as a factory worker and his mom was a part-time bank teller. Now people in that economic strata could never afford a house on the street where I was raised. Whites that don’t have “middle class” jobs are relegated to less snazzy and closer to the city working class neighborhoods or they move out into the country. Whites who work blue collar jobs and maybe like to fix up cars in the driveway in their spare time seem to be an unpleasant reminder to more advanced suburban Whites.
Charles Murray looked at this in great detail in a powerful and underappreciated book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. A lot of Whites think they have more in common with their Indian neighbor with a high tech job in their cul-de-sac than they do with their rural White cousins who have chickens and perhaps a car up on blocks in the yard. What these suburban Whites don’t understand is that their Indian neighbor doesn’t feel the same way. Sure they like the White suburbs but they are Indian first. The same with the tame blacks or mestizos in their suburb, they might live in a White neighborhood because it is simply safer than where they moved from but they never forget who they are.
We see a related phenomena out here in the country when some prissy upper-middle-class White family moves out of suburbia to “get back to nature” or play homesteader, only to promptly start pissing and moaning about the smell of manure or getting stuck behind combines during the fall harvest or the lack of Chinese delivery. Like Californians moving to Texas, they seem incapable of recognizing that they are lamenting the aspects of country life that allegedly drew them out here in the first place.
I have seen some of this in my own life. If you visited my childhood home, you would have seen a large suburban home with lots of books that were actually read, magazines like National Review and American Spectator alongside the Journal of the American Medical Association on the coffee tables. Shelves full of classical music records played on a Blaupunkt turntable. However, when we visited my paternal grandmother usually just once a year, it was in a lower working class Polish neighborhood where my grandparents never owned a car (see: Repost: What My White Privilege Looked Like to get a feel for their neighborhood). When I went with my maternal grandparents to visit distant relatives we ended up in the hill country of Ohio east of Columbus, in places like Zanesville and Crooksville. Those relatives were more likely to stay up late, playing cards and smoking cigarettes and drinking crap beer like Pabst Blue Ribbon than they were to drink a glass of wine while quietly reading a book.
Looking back it feels at times like my family was trying to pretend we didn’t come from such humble beginnings. To me, my family is the quintessential American success story, my father was a young man from a dirt poor polack family in Toledo who put himself through college and medical school without any support from his own family, built a practice, raised four kids who went to college and retired to his lake home with his wife as a pillar in the community. My parents though often seemed to be trying to hide that history.
In some ways I place some blame for the decline of rural White America at the feet of the suburban mindset where young Whites were encouraged to leave home, go to college somewhere else and never come back. The brain-drain has been devastating on rural White communities. This was something we saw starkly when we lived in rural northern Michigan. The smarter and more ambitious kids would flee south to state colleges and then get jobs in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids or metro Detroit. The ones who stayed behind were, just being honest, dumb and lazy. Multiply this by several generations and you get a similar dysgenic breeding pattern you see in black ghettos, with meth and fentanyl instead of crack, minus only the insane levels of violence that mark black urban communities.
Those same suburban Whites became apex consumers, looking for cheap consumer goods made overseas even though they could have afforded to buy American back in the day. They wanted eye-popping returns in their 401k plans so mutual fund managers chased stocks of companies that cut corners to make quarterly profits, often by moving jobs overseas. Gutting the manufacturing base of America was terrible for small town and rural Whites but it was great for upper-middle-class suburban White stock portfolios. Those suburban Whites didn’t know or didn’t care, they were just happy to see their retirement account statement each month.
The American suburbs once were a place of refuge for Whites to escape the growing crime and social malaise of cities as blacks moved in but gradually became a fortress keeping not just blacks out but also lower class Whites that made suburban Whites uncomfortable. This divide between Whites has been devastating, not just for the lower class Whites who have been driven out of suburbia but also for suburban Whites who have lost connection with what it took to build this country they take for granted. Now America is full of weak, doughy suburban White kids who can’t change a tire or fight, content to spend their time locked into a phone screen while their distant cousins, without hope or opportunity, inject themselves with heroin and die in overdoses.
Drive around suburban America today and it is hard to imagine that these people came from the same stock that explored the world, conquered the globe, split the atom and landed on the moon, the most feared warriors the world has ever seen.