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The recent discussions about crime in the city cause me to reflect on the community of my upbringing. Has anyone else lived or spent a significant amount of time in any of the city's higher crime areas? What did you learn from it, if anything? How did it change you, if at all? I think the day-to-day culture and overall psyche of high crime urban areas can be interesting, to say the least.
For one, "criminals" were rarely as nameless and faceless to me as they are now -- the people involved in violent crime were multi-dimensional human beings rather than merely abstract concepts. It's because they weren't much different than I was and, in some cases, they were my friends.
As in most other neighborhoods across the country, there were several multi-generational households on my block. Not only did the neighborhood kids grow up together, in many cases our parents, aunts and uncles had grown up together also. Our grandparents might have known each other for several decades. Ultimately everyone chose their own path in life but, at the outset, we were all the same.
As my neighbors and I matured, a certain subset of neighborhood kids got involved in progressively more serious antisocial behaviors and activities. There were shootings on the block -- not many. There were spikes in that type of activity from time to time. Ironically I rarely felt truly unsafe living there. Again everyone on the block knew our family, as we knew theirs. And there was mutual respect all around -- everyone at least had relatives who had lived antisocial lifestyles at some point. Everyone was equal.
Generally no one had to worry about the well-being of their elderly relatives or anything like that. The neighborhood kids who sometimes grew into aggressive young men still knew to put the nonsense on pause if someone's grandmother came into a room, for example. In fact the vast majority of us were raised by single mothers, so our respect for women ran deeper than most outsiders might have realized.
That being the case, everyone still practiced common sense. You locked your doors. You didn't go out walking alone at night. In fact you didn't walk at all at night. And you often didn't even stray too far from your block, or from your friends' and relatives' blocks. Being someplace else in itself was generally not an issue if you were not participating in the antisocial lifestyle, but things could get out of hand quickly when a person didn't know what to expect in different surroundings.
It's easy and obvious to use examples of those who were imprisoned for violent crimes as cautionary tales, but the vast majority of neighborhood residents never committed any violent crime -- so in light of that, the outcomes for the rest of us were unbearably tragic as well. We were mostly just regular folks trying to live decent lives, but were dejected by the depressed physical and psychological state of our community, and thus uncertain about how much progress could be made in one lifetime. The pessimism is what would often do the rest of us in, the notion that any simple effort to improve one's life was incapable of producing desirable outcomes, and was thus a waste of energy.
I felt I had to practically flee that community to rediscover my optimism and thus create a future for myself. I sincerely hope the recent violence in KC is no more than a short-term spike, that it does not indicate a long-term trend. Also along those lines I hope the culture of antisocial behavior and pessimism in some communities has not spread beyond its already overly-wide borders.
The amount of ignorance and brainwashing that is so rampant in our inner cities is off the charts. It's as if these people live in North Korea and don't have access to real information or something. If everybody thought like you, our crime problems would be solved in a matter of years.
The racial crap sucks though. I can't believe what some white people will say when they are anonymous (read any online comments). Yes, urban blacks do commit most of the crimes in this country but much of the reasons we have ghettos today is because of what white people did in the past by oppressing these people. And in some cases it still happens.
But the way people group all blacks is nuts. Many do get out of the ghetto and away from the thuggish lifestyle they grew up around. Most black people live normal urban/suburban lives like any other race. But how do we fix the deep problem of those that just don't want to get out or don't know how? I'm not sure we will ever fix that. Even though white people have a lot of responsibility for why we have this problem, I think it's going to take the educated black population to really fix the problems and make changes that will have any impact. I just don't know what that is.
The amount of ignorance and brainwashing that is so rampant in our inner cities is off the charts. It's as if these people live in North Korea and don't have access to real information or something. If everybody thought like you, our crime problems would be solved in a matter of years.
The racial crap sucks though. I can't believe what some white people will say when they are anonymous (read any online comments). Yes, urban blacks do commit most of the crimes in this country but much of the reasons we have ghettos today is because of what white people did in the past by oppressing these people. And in some cases it still happens.
But the way people group all blacks is nuts. Many do get out of the ghetto and away from the thuggish lifestyle they grew up around. Most black people live normal urban/suburban lives like any other race. But how do we fix the deep problem of those that just don't want to get out or don't know how? I'm not sure we will ever fix that. Even though white people have a lot of responsibility for why we have this problem, I think it's going to take the educated black population to really fix the problems and make changes that will have any impact. I just don't know what that is.
You raise good points. While a lot of ugly external racial motivations created many ghettos, the reduction or elimination of ghettos is going to require a lot more internal motivation on the parts of residents. I do believe that racism persists in our society more than some people want to admit. I also believe many working and lower-class blacks are quick to see racism in many hard-luck situations where non-racial factors are more likely at work. I have no idea what the solutions are, but obviously it's best to have people both inside and outside of tough-luck communities fully buy into solution-oriented thinking.
In my opinion, the first obvious proposal would be to restore the nuclear family in low-income, high-crime urban communities. Just about every study done on the issue makes clear that being born to unwed parents usually has psychologically and economically disastrous outcomes for children. No other group of solutions is going to have long-term effectiveness without the restoration of nuclear families being at the core of things.
The sad thing is I'm not sure there's a way to force people to buy into the research -- especially when one lives in a culture of pervasive activity against said research. It's well-known that many poor black men abandon their children. What I believe gets less attention is the fact that many poor black women often reject the presence of fathers in their childrens' lives. Many times there's just an overall willful disregard for how big a deal having a nuclear family -- or at least some semblance of one -- really is.
Beyond that there's a laundry list of things that could help, but one key idea I keep reading about lately is how some of the cities associated with relatively low levels of urban crime plus more moderate, cooperative politics are places that historically have deliberately minimized the concentration of low-income housing in any one area of their cities. I'm thinking about Minneapolis and Toronto, although I don't have specific information on how their affordable housing programs work (or how they have worked in the past). I think reducing low-income housing to a percentage of no more than 15% of units in any one area, but at least 10% percent in most areas, might help prevent or lessen the concentration of antisocial pessimism in some communities, plus expose most low-income families to healthy social habits and culture on a day-to-day basis.
Of course this proposal gets tricky if very low-income households constitute more than 15% of an area's population. It also gets tricky if well-off suburbanites use their economic and political clout to lobby against the presence of any working class population in their communities. These are some of the reasons I go against the grain and generally (not always) support gentrification. It's an organic way to bring healthier racial and socioeconomic balance to our urban communities, plus horror stories about displacement are exceptions rather than the rule (since at least initially gentrifiers are more likely to occupy either new or formerly neglected housing in those communities rather than housing they attained as a result of someone else's eviction).
One last thing I'll add: deal with the guns. Whatever NYC has done to convince street guys that frequent illegal gun possession and activity is not in their best interests needs to be replicated absolutely everywhere.
In the case of NYC, I think the main reason why murder and other crime has gone down so much the past couple decades is because the criminals are being priced out. Same is probably true to a lesser extent in LA. And, likely, Chicago still has a problem because there's still a lot of cheap housing there. KC, too.
But the way people group all blacks is nuts. Many do get out of the ghetto and away from the thuggish lifestyle they grew up around. Most black people live normal urban/suburban lives like any other race. But how do we fix the deep problem of those that just don't want to get out or don't know how? I'm not sure we will ever fix that. Even though white people have a lot of responsibility for why we have this problem, I think it's going to take the educated black population to really fix the problems and make changes that will have any impact. I just don't know what that is.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my home neighborhood of Oak Park was definitely not a ghetto. It was part of the area where blacks settled first once the southern barrier of 31st Street fell. Most of the families I knew there were working couples with decent jobs, like my postal worker Dad and VA nurse Mom.
"Thug life" wasn't even a Thing back then either.
I tend to lament what I consider the conflating of black "authenticity" (whatever that is) with street values that took place sometime in the 1970s as having had a deleterious effect on too many African-Americans. And I'm not alone in thinking this: back in the early 1990s, a fellow named Brent Staples, a product of a rough neighborhood in Chester, Pa. (the oldest and poorest city in the state) who caught a break via a black faculty member at what's now called Widener University*, wrote in a New York Times "Editorial Notebook" (he's on the paper's editorial board) that this equating of street values with black authenticity has been harmful to the race.
And I too don't know whether today's equivalent of Du Bois' "talented tenth" is in a position to effect significant changes in attitude or culture among the African-American Left Behind. But I do know of one person who made an attempt: Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who moved into a low-income black neighborhood (I don't know whether it was in Philadelphia or in New York, where he was on the Columbia faculty for a while) in the hopes that he could help improve it. His story and that of two white professors who also moved into lower-income, heavily minority neighborhoods are related in a new book called "Gentrifier." One of the things all three agree on is that the word "gentrification" is actually unhelpful as it's a broad-brush term that gathers under it several more complex and interrelated phenomena.
I agree with dallasgoldrush that deconcentrating poverty will help speed the change. But an article that ran in The Atlantic two or so years back noted that crime exploded in medium-size cities where housing projects were dismantled and their residents dispersed. The article noted that "[a]ccording to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee."
You can read the full article, which begins with a rather grisly set of murders in a quiet suburban area of Memphis, here:
Its explanation for the explosion, sad to say, plays right into the hands of those who fear Housing Choice (nee "Section 8") voucher recipients moving into their neighborhoods.
And if this is the case, then what?
*I worked in Widener University's communications office for about 18 months from 2006 to 2007 and interviewed Staples for an alumni newsletter I launched there. His coming-of-age memoir "Parallel Time" was one of the first, and is still the best, of a slew of black male coming-of-age memoirs that hit bookstores during the 1990s. As I wrote in the article based on the interview, "By crossing a freeway, he stepped into a totally different world and never looked back." (The Widener campus, which sits in what used to be the well-to-do section of Chester, is separated from the poorer rest of the city by Interstate 95, which borders the campus on its south.)
The linked article about Memphis definitely presents some potential blind spots in efforts to de-concentrate poverty. I encourage middle class people to welcome some working class people to their communities, but I certainly don't encourage anyone to welcome or tolerate working class social dysfunction and crime. It's a really tricky balance, understanding there's a social imperative for the middle class to help the lower class, but at the same time supporting the middle class's right to protect themselves from the lower class. I guess I'd reiterate that organically occurring gentrification (not mass displacement of the poor) is something I hope would prove healthy and effective over time. I'm certainly no expert, but perhaps D.C. or Brooklyn would have examples that could be useful case studies? What about Harlem or Hyde Park in Chicago?
And I'm glad that you pointed out not all gentrifiers are white/non-black. A notable example of a black gentrifier, in addition to the one you cited, is Cory Booker, the New Jersey Senator and former Newark, NJ Mayor. His deliberate immersion in a high crime urban community (in stark contrast to his privileged upbringing and elite professional credentials [Stanford, Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law]) is well-documented. I don't know what kind of impact his presence has had on his community in Newark. I would imagine the security detail he had as mayor didn't hurt.
And you're right that "Thug Life" was far from a Black-American Motto back in the 1960s. I know I wasn't around to see what pre-1970s urban KC was like, but my family's history helps me piece some things together.
My maternal grandparents migrated to KC from rural Louisiana and Mississippi in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Initially my grandmother was a live-in housekeeper for a middle class white family (it sounds modest but, compared to her rural sharecropping background, it was a dream come true). Grandma's favorite thing to do in her bustling new town was "ride the streetcar to the show on Vine Street".
She soon meet my grandfather and they married. They worked multiple jobs and acquired a bit of rental property as their family grew to 8 total children (including my mother). Eventually their property was bought by "Urban Renewal", and they used the proceeds to purchase the large East Side home where I would eventually grow up.
Grandma said that at the time of their purchase (sometime during the late 1960s or early 1970s), the area was well on the way towards losing its last few white families. My grandparents didn't mind because the home was beautiful and spacious, and the neighborhood was full of similar properties and families.
My grandparents' children all became very different people who lived very different lives. A couple of my uncles in particular lived hard. One was killed in the 1970s, before I was born. A joke I once heard told about him was that he'd give you the shirt off his back, but he'd rob someone else to get the shirt.
The way my uncle had lived in the 70s was definitely much different than the way my modest, hard-working grandparents would have lived in the 40s, just one generation earlier. I don't know what caused such a drastic change from one generation to the next in what had been a very stable family. One of my hunches is that my parents' generation (working class blacks in the post-civil rights era) simply didn't care about keeping up appearances for white people, and thus felt free to just release their rage in ways my grandparents would never have dared. They took advantage of the freedom to speak to white people however they wanted, and to live the way they wanted to live, but without always being prepared for the added responsibilities. This happened all over the country, and generation after generation of families in underclass communities since then have been utterly devastated as a result.
During the early 1990s different groups of my relatives began to slowly branch out from urban KC, heading to suburbs ranging from Roeland Park to Raytown to Lee's Summit to Grandview to Overland Park to Blue Springs. Some relatives became upper-middle class, acquiring terminal degrees and household incomes well in excess of six figures. For others things didn't change much at all. During the late 1990s and into the 2000s, some of us began relocating out-of-state altogether, joining the wave of black reverse-migration to the "New South" and its booming sunbelt cities, with excitement and energy not unlike our grandparents felt when they first went North in the 30s and 40s. In some ways, at least for me, things have come full circle.
So there you have it, the background for why even though I don't live in Kansas City and often avoid it like the plague, I don't hesitate to chime in on the direction of the city and offer my unsolicited input. It's because, for better or for worse, I'm one link in a family with 80 years of rich history in the city. Some of the history is good, some bad, some ugly. At any rate it can't be taken away from me. KC was my first home, and I don't care to care to allow criminal-minded knuckleheads to increase the city's already numerous challenges.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my home neighborhood of Oak Park was definitely not a ghetto. It was part of the area where blacks settled first once the southern barrier of 31st Street fell. Most of the families I knew there were working couples with decent jobs, like my postal worker Dad and VA nurse Mom.
"Thug life" wasn't even a Thing back then either.
I tend to lament what I consider the conflating of black "authenticity" (whatever that is) with street values that took place sometime in the 1970s as having had a deleterious effect on too many African-Americans. And I'm not alone in thinking this: back in the early 1990s, a fellow named Brent Staples, a product of a rough neighborhood in Chester, Pa. (the oldest and poorest city in the state) who caught a break via a black faculty member at what's now called Widener University*, wrote in a New York Times "Editorial Notebook" (he's on the paper's editorial board) that this equating of street values with black authenticity has been harmful to the race.
And I too don't know whether today's equivalent of Du Bois' "talented tenth" is in a position to effect significant changes in attitude or culture among the African-American Left Behind. But I do know of one person who made an attempt: Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who moved into a low-income black neighborhood (I don't know whether it was in Philadelphia or in New York, where he was on the Columbia faculty for a while) in the hopes that he could help improve it. His story and that of two white professors who also moved into lower-income, heavily minority neighborhoods are related in a new book called "Gentrifier." One of the things all three agree on is that the word "gentrification" is actually unhelpful as it's a broad-brush term that gathers under it several more complex and interrelated phenomena.
I agree with dallasgoldrush that deconcentrating poverty will help speed the change. But an article that ran in The Atlantic two or so years back noted that crime exploded in medium-size cities where housing projects were dismantled and their residents dispersed. The article noted that "[a]ccording to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee."
You can read the full article, which begins with a rather grisly set of murders in a quiet suburban area of Memphis, here:
Its explanation for the explosion, sad to say, plays right into the hands of those who fear Housing Choice (nee "Section 8") voucher recipients moving into their neighborhoods.
And if this is the case, then what?
*I worked in Widener University's communications office for about 18 months from 2006 to 2007 and interviewed Staples for an alumni newsletter I launched there. His coming-of-age memoir "Parallel Time" was one of the first, and is still the best, of a slew of black male coming-of-age memoirs that hit bookstores during the 1990s. As I wrote in the article based on the interview, "By crossing a freeway, he stepped into a totally different world and never looked back." (The Widener campus, which sits in what used to be the well-to-do section of Chester, is separated from the poorer rest of the city by Interstate 95, which borders the campus on its south.)
Thanks. Yours likewise. I think your story is actually a fairly common one among upwardly mobile working- and middle-middle-class blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights era or after it.
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The linked article about Memphis definitely presents some potential blind spots in efforts to de-concentrate poverty. I encourage middle class people to welcome some working class people to their communities, but I certainly don't encourage anyone to welcome or tolerate working class social dysfunction and crime. It's a really tricky balance, understanding there's a social imperative for the middle class to help the lower class, but at the same time supporting the middle class's right to protect themselves from the lower class. I guess I'd reiterate that organically occurring gentrification (not mass displacement of the poor) is something I hope would prove healthy and effective over time. I'm certainly no expert, but perhaps D.C. or Brooklyn would have examples that could be useful case studies? What about Harlem or Hyde Park in Chicago?
I haven't visited lately, but the word I hear is that Harlem, especially around 125th Street, has gone full-on gentrified - but many of the gentry are themselves black.
Hyde Park is a special case; it's the neighborhood the University of Chicago* poured money and resources into in order to build it up as a defense against the encroachment of Chicago's South Side ghettoes. The reclamation of Bronzeville, the "Black Metropolis" to Hyde Park's north, is a better test case to watch. Here's something I wrote on it for Next City, a piece that arose from a trip I took down that way during the 2014 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association convention:
IIRC, President Obama, who made Hyde Park his home while on the Chicago faculty, chose to locate his Presidential library in Bronzeville.
*The University of Chicago was the college I was most interested in attending when I was applying to colleges in high school. Then I got the fat envelope from Harvard and did what most kids who get it do. "What if I had gone to the University of Chicago as I had originally intended to?" is one of the very few what-ir questions I ask about my life.
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And I'm glad that you pointed out not all gentrifiers are white/non-black. A notable example of a black gentrifier, in addition to the one you cited, is Cory Booker, the New Jersey Senator and former Newark, NJ Mayor. His deliberate immersion in a high crime urban community (in stark contrast to his privileged upbringing and elite professional credentials [Stanford, Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law]) is well-documented. I don't know what kind of impact his presence has had on his community in Newark. I would imagine the security detail he had as mayor didn't hurt.
Well, I can't tell you what effect his presence had on the Newark neighborhood he chose to live in, but I can say that his effect on the city he ran has on balance been positive. I had a chance to spend a recent Saturday in downtown Newark - it happened to coincide with the annual Portuguese festival in the Ironbound, a historic Portuguese-American community immediately to the east of Newark Penn Station - and the downtown was noticeably less rundown and forlorn than I remember the last time I got off a train there and walked around about 10 to 15 years earlier. Newark has one large corporate citizen that never abandoned its downtown - the Prudential insurance company - and that certainly didn't hurt, but there were signs of reinvestment and renewal all around it, including a Whole Foods Market, and lots of old commercial buildings being converted into residences.
I get the impression that current Mayor Sly James - a rough contemporary of mine who I never knew despite the fact that we both grew up in Oak Park, just a few blocks away from each other - has enjoyed similar good fortune in his tenure at 414 E. 12th. The crime plague hasn't seemed to put a serious dent in his popularity, which I sensed crossed Troost Avenue as easliy as I did growing up.
[family history deleted to keep this followup post from becoming way too long]
There are some parallels and some differences in our respective family histories.
The Middle South figures in both: much of my mother's family resides in Texas and Louisiana, though the Davis that gave birth to my Mom, two sisters and one brother made it up to Omaha by the 1920s. My father's side of the family claims Missouri lineage dating back to when the state was a territory, but my Dad's mom made her way to Kansas City from the piney woods of East Texas.
Grandpa Smith was the non-live-in servant to one of the wealthy families who lived on Sunset Drive, while Grandma Smith was a nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital, then located at Linwood Boulevard and Prospect Avenue. I already told you what Sandy Smith Sr. and Stella Davis Smith did. But attitudinally, the Smiths had a decidedly petit-bourgeois attitude while the Davises were one step removed from the farm. My mom was the first in her family to graduate from college and go on to a post-graduate degree (she's a double Jayhawk: BSN 1954, MSN 1970, University of Kansas, the first black woman to earn either and both degrees from the school), but she said of the Smiths that they were "light, bright and almost white." (On my first visit to him in 20 years, my Dad's older brother Cole showed me a portrait he had sketched of a great-great-grandfather of mine. The guy was white.)
But as for that "black sheep" part, I had one cousin - on Mom's side of the family - who spent most of his adulthood cycling in and out of prison for various robberies. He and I didn't quite get along; he thought I wasn't enough of a man, and tried to steer me in the direction he thought I should go, but I wasn't having it. He calmed down (and got religion: Islam) late in his life, which ended earlier than it should have.
Mom flung me and my brother into the white world hard, and we've both remained embedded in it while negotiating that separate-but-not-quite-equal black one. I've had at least one educated African-American comment on the "confidence" with which I carry myself around white people, and I think both that confidence and the lack of same some blacks may show are symptomatic of our continued separate and parallel existences and associations as blacks and whites. Who should make the first move towards merger and who should do the cultural adjusting are questions I suspect many interracial couples grapple with, but it's not only them who do (or need to do) the grappling.
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So there you have it, the background for why even though I don't live in Kansas City and often avoid it like the plague, I don't hesitate to chime in on the direction of the city and offer my unsolicited input. It's because, for better or for worse, I'm one link in a family with 80 years of rich history in the city. Some of the history is good, some bad, some ugly. At any rate it can't be taken away from me. KC was my first home, and I don't care to care to allow criminal-minded knuckleheads to increase the city's already numerous challenges.
You know where I live now. I recently Tweeted a photo of my ride to work on the Broad Street Subway to a KC resident (a white guy living east of Troost, FWIW, who Gets It) with the note that "once Kansas City gets one of these, I'm def coming back." (His jocular reply: "Once they figure out how to run it on a road, they will.") But Kansas City is the place that shaped me and made me who I am, and I wouldn't trade growing up there for growing up anywhere else in the country. I remain a "forever Kansas Citian" no matter where I live - and I've noticed that a lot of KC expats feel that very same way; it's like some sort of magical bond forms instantly when we encounter each other on the street in some East Coast city. (Longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin took this one step further, writing in a Father's Day essay in that mag in the late 1980s that the "theme" to the way he was raising his daughter was "All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, you are being raised in Kansas City.")
Like you, I probably won't come back here to live; unlike you, I don't avoid it like the plague. On the contrary, I've embraced the place and serve as an evangelist for it abroad. But it's awfully damn special, I take an interest in its welfare, and I agree that those knuckleheads shouldn't derail its evolution into one of the coolest cities in the country.
Hey folks, it's been a few years since posting. I miss KC, but there is one deal breaker to where I will not consider moving back to the area.
It is the crime. Not just the crime itself, but the complete, utter refusal to acknowledge it as such. Most of the violent crime committed by black thugs. However one isn't allowed to say that.
Here's how a typical thread like this goes whether on this subforum, /r/kansascity , or any other KC based subforum:
OP: describes a horrendous violent crime
other poster: points out was committed by blacks
SJW: how DARE you suggest a black person would commit a crime!? white people commit as many or more crimes!!
someone else: tries to explain the entire history of american poverty and black oppression (all from generations ago) while apologizing and trying to excuse the crime.
another (or the same SJW): why don't you go home to your mcmansion at 135th and quivira, joco racist!
It's the same tired trope. But here's why I'm concerned. In the past, one could avoid most of the violent crime by staying out of the core of KCMO. However in the past few years, there have been a lot of crimes against innocent victims minding their own business, in areas once considered safe.
A black Muslim dude shooting at many cars, killing one, on the freeways. Turned out this one was working at my mother's company the whole time.
Numerous muggings (all by blacks) at Oak Park Mall.
A man attacking a random old woman with a hatchet.
The pissed off old white guy killing the Indian at Austin's, a bar I briefly went to on Friday nights.
The pissed off old white guy who thought he was killing Jews, actually killed Methodists.
The Indian creek shootings, all targeting a specific type of old man. Yet police say it's definitely not a serial killer.
Biker gangs going around bashing in mirrors and attacking drivers on the freeways.
The two 13 year old thugs that carjacked a woman in Lee's Summit, and beat her to death.
... and many more.
I live in a city much more liberal than KC, and yet we don't have anywhere NEAR this level of violence, especially at innocent strangers. And yet, it all gets sweeped under the rug in KC forums. Everyone likes to pretend it's not an issue "oh just don't hang with the wrong people" or "just stay out of this TINY TINY part of town, and even most of that is super duper safe", or "don't leave anything in your car, leave anything visible in your house, don't walk around at night, look out at every moment, but we promise it's safe here". A millenial friend of mine moved to a bad area east of Troost, and with a straight face, tried to convince me that his new area is safer than his hometown of Belton. Bull****. This is called cognitive dissonance. KC is as cucked as Sweden.
I know I will likely get banned for calling it like it is, and honestly, I don't care. I may be making wrong assumptions based on how the geography of crime stats is determined (i.e. by city vs county lines?), but I find it disheartening that KC still often makes the top ten of crime when the majority of its population is in a very far flung suburban area given that KC annexed farmland like it's Houston or something, and most of the other top ten are boxed in like St. Louis.
I wasn't trying to make this sound like it's about race, as many many blacks have left the thug world to lead solid middle class lives, often in suburbia, and often while embracing conservative values. However the constant SJW bull****, name calling, race baiting, virtue signalling etc won't get ANYWHERE toward solving the actual problem, the KC area's obscenely high violent crime rate. And for new millenials moving into the urban core, distractions like the streetcar, power and light district, downtown lofts, river market revival etc will only go so far before crime gets to people, and they leave. The meh economy, with crap professional salaries and domination by a few evil megacorps isn't helping matters either, but that's for a different thread.
I haven't visited lately, but the word I hear is that Harlem, especially around 125th Street, has gone full-on gentrified - but many of the gentry are themselves black.
Harlem (as well as many parts of Brooklyn and Queens) are gentrifying like there is no tomorrow. Whites are probably still the minority though as you said, it's being by all races. Pretty amazing what has happened in Harlem, but man you are still very close to some rough areas there.
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