Blackprof & Residential Integration

It's about time.

I found Blackprof just in time. This is the website I've been looking for as I get weary of the attitudes, obscurantism and namecalling of some of my progressive interlocutors.

A typical para from Blackprof shows they live in reality, have respect for history and aren't afraid of going there:

Studying race is like studying entomology in that one cannot understand—or even champion effectively—the fortunes of one group without understanding the forces that drive the fates of others. At some periods in history—for example Reconstruction—blacks made great gains while society was systematically depriving Mexicans of their ancestral lands and herding the last surviving Indians onto reservations far from where their ancestors were buried. During World War II, blacks and Latinos registered great gains while Japanese Americans were herded into concentration camps.

At Blackprof, we start out with a subject near and dear, residential integration. If anything I've done approaches something worthy of a graduate school researcher, it would be some of the time I've spent looking seriously at demographics and race in places to live in this country. I've always felt, and still do, that I have the kind of big city fungible skills such that I could live anywhere in the US that I wanted to. So I live where I want. But I've done some of my own Freakonomic studying before I go. This is why I take the Greensboro folks seriously, among other reasons. I enjoy checking out cities.

The subject was David Brooks, whose championship of social mobility is right on target. I wrote:

Brooks is right and has been right for a while. His observations, coincide with mine as we have both been informec by the writings of Joel Garreau.

When you look at the economics of neighborhood formation, you'll find a great number of variables that go into the decisions of where to build and why.

I believe many blackfolks limit their social mobility purposefully - that there is an equivalent of 'tipping' on the demand side for new housing. Blacks who are economically capable of moving into new integrated communities will second-guess that decision with as much seriousness as whites on a racial basis. Here in California, my observation is that the resistance to move is lower, but in Georgia it is higher. Surely Massey & Denton have the full scoop, but I believe that given the choice between the old 'hood and the new 'burbs, there are racial reasons to stay among blacks that afford to go.

I'm looking forward to some interesting insights from these guys that don't make my head hurt.