AMERICAN RACISM AND MY VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA AND CAMDEN

[Morpheal]

AMERICAN RACISM AND MY VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA AND CAMDEN

I recall my journey into the downtown heart of Philadelphia in the 1990s.
I had a relationship in Philadelphia, but in the suburbs, with a white, Jewish, professional lady.
I am white.

I noticed the racial tension in the better areas of Philadelphia right away.
People of color behave differently than I would have expected, being from much further north.
In fact I live in Canada. We have racial tensions here too, but it is amazing how different the
social atmosphere is.

Oh, everyone was polite, but there was that notable tension.

Then I found out that the old factories nearer to the river were all black, and that whites do
not go there. It's not considered safe for whites to go there. So I was told. Huge multi storey
factory buildings converted into black clubs, and exclusively black.

Then we drove across the river into Camden, New Jersey. What I saw made me think I had
entered a war zone. This is on the road towards Atlantic City, from Philadelphia, liberty city,
right after crossing the bridge. Buildings half destroyed. Maybe commercial structures by the
looks of them. Completely abandoned. They would not have looked worse if the US air force
had strafed and bombed them. Beyond those monumental ruins, there were attached and
semi detached houses, but no windows. Every window was boarded up. Apparently you cannot
maintain a glass surface in Camden. I thought it was an abandoned part of town, maybe
slated for demolition, but then noticed that there were people, all blacks, coming out of
various buildings, and running as if afraid of being shot down by an enemy in mid stride,
from building to building. They ran, like in combat, and disappeared through the doors of
wherever they were headed to. I assume they were afraid for their own lives, when they
stepped outside of those boarded up houses. Those houses were all inhabited by people.
Black people.

Now, I know that in history Camden was the home of the first black regiment. Something
like that. I am not really up on American history all that much now. Did a course in high
school and read the books. Camden gets mentionned right back to the Civil War. It was that
promise of emancipation. Whatever that means. I didn't see anyone in Camden looking
emancipated and it was more than a hundred years later.

Clearly something was wrong. My lady friend simply took it for granted as how it is. No one
stops in Camden, and you hope to heaven that your vehicle never breaks down until you
get out of Camden town.... and yes, people live in those ruins, behind those boarded up
windows, in that miserable war torn condition that most urban guerillas would tend to
want to stay away from.

Yes, there was racial tension in America.

Maybe it was worse in Philadelphia than in some other places, because of Camden. I don't
think that was it. I don't think it was because of Camden.

I did feel that there is a lot of anti white racism among blacks, as there is anti black racism
among whites. It came across as being a racist country, even from visiting Philadelphia. It
saddened me because I am not a racist and had a small bit pawn player part in the
dismantling of apartheid as it existed in South Africa to give blacks more voice in their
own country and its politics. Little interventions are sometimes like chaos theory where
the ripples caused by the wings of an insect over the Atlantic can cause a storm to occur
in the Pacific. It works that way sometimes. But racism disturbs me. I was even more
disturbed by the tacit acceptance of "that's how it is" and 'everyone knows it is that way"
as if that is how it ought to be. My friend had no concept of anything different. It was
simply what white Philadelphians accepted as the "truth" in "liberty" city.

When I think of those solidiers from Camden who fought for "liberty" and gave their lives
in every war since the Civil War, trying to fight their way out of the poverty and
wretchedness that Uncle Sam has never given one tinker's damn about, I feel sick inside.
I want to vomit and I want to punch Uncle Sam right in the nose, because I hate what
he has done. It isn't right. It isn't how it ought to be.

It was worse in Georgia, but it wasn't as much a war torn wasteland. It was more racist,
and more obviously divided between black and white, and there were larger tensions there,
but somehow there wasn't the level of black despair and poverty that there was in
Philadelphia and Camden. There wasn't that repressed, violent, hatred for white America,
evident to this visitor to "liberty" city. Actually blacks were always very polite in Georgia. Too polite. Unnaturally polite. It still felt like it was a southern plantation with white masters in charge of it, and black slaves doing the labor. That was many years earlier than my visit to Philadelphia, but I hear that not much has really changed. It’s still the south. Whites still expect what they expect and blacks still give them that, for the most part. It’s a conservative sort of thing and it changes more slowly than the propaganda about America tends to want the world to believe. Much more slowly. Change comes so slowly that it seems most blacks had given up, and have given up, making change even slower. One cannot wonder what types of psychological, social and eoconomic beatings, what forms of disempowerment, really cause that condition, stopping real change and maintaining such a strange status quo.

Both experiences were stranger than an episode from Rod Serling’s famous “Twilight Zone”.
It felt so unreal compared to what we are taught and expected to believe, based on how America presents itself, sells itself, con trickiing, the world. Well, my belief was shattered, but then again I tend to be an educated, trained, observer, able to see the truth as it factually presents itself, when others fail. So maybe my perceptions were a bit more outsider than most. Maybe that is why I was not under the magic spell. America seemed more like the emperor’s new clothes, standing so naked there in front of me, while showing off its brass unforms and its designer fashions, its business suits and old school ties. I wondered why Americans can’t seem to see how naked they really are, and why they think the world is so blind that they cannot see through the illusions. Often it is and often they, it seems, are also delusional, believing in their own illusions, and not seeing through it, thus never really achieving any real change.

Of course no one had to worry, during the Cold War years about the destruction of that general area situated as it was near to the famous naval shipyards of Philadelphia. It was expected.

That would be one place on the certain target list for nuclear warheads from the USSR.
Camden and the riverside of Philadelphia would be expected to be gone. Nothing but a
nuclear ground zero. Maybe someone in the suburbs would survive.

Not much resolve to rebuild and develop. Not much interest in progress. It was after the Cold War was winding down and in those latter years some of the downtown of Philadelphia was being developed into small boutiques, just north of the black ghetto down by the river. A small business district in the middle of the wasteland and it was nice, and exclusive, not far from the famous Museum of Art, which deserves its reputation for being one of the best. I spent two weekends there and I think that cultural contrast to the city and the cannibalized shells of stripped down stolen vehicles, racist tensions, ghettoization, and all the other ills, including savage looking aggressions from the bagel men who looked more like desparation than commerce, made the situation all the more surreal. It was hard to believe that this was “liberty” Certainly that libety bell was cracked. Crack house cracked, and mental case cracked, and racism cracked, and urban violence cracked..It was cracked alright. Liberty was so cracked between the rich and exclusionary suburbs and the down by the river slums, Camden cracked by the river apart from Philadelphia. The river as a crack of sewage running right down the middle between black and white contrasts of liberty city. Cracked too between the north and the south and the differences in how racial tensions express across that divide. Emancipation ? I didn’t see any emancipation. I lost respect for Lincoln. Nothing was what the propaganda claimed it was and was to be.

I was led to wonder what extremes of oppression had been brought to bear upon America, since the race riots of the 1960s, to quell political upheaval. It was unimaginable as to what extremes America must have gone to, to oppress political dissent. Dissent was the natural reaction to what I saw in America. Dissent was mandatory, not optional. It was required by the situations. Someone had to fight, in the sense that Saul Alinksy taught fighting for causes, and yet there was no fight left. It was oppressed, suppressed, and that oppression internalized as repression. Oh, there was no fight remaining in most anyone I chanced to see. What had America done to them, since the radical upheavals of the 1960s ? That was one of the big questions. How had America violated the basic human rights of its own dissidents. There was no sign of real freedom in America. Not freedom of political dissent which the situations clearly present as facts, not opinions, clearly evident to any one able to see, hear, and open mindedly experience truth. There was not even the smallest indication of freedom in America. The statue of liberty seemed utterly surreal. Something from noir fiction, and far from any reality.

Camden was no different, however, from much of New York in the 1970s. I chanced to see some of that in my teenage years. The approach to New York, was like approaching something unreal. It was apocalyptic in its impressions, even before the bomb, which it was already expecting any day, any day, ground zero. Ground zero would have cleaned it up, when nearly nothing else ever could or would. I hear Detroit is still the same. An engineer acquaintance visited there only a few years ago. Apparently it’s surreal and near social, economic and political ground zero too. Nothing much has changed, he said, since his previous visit, nearly 20 years earlier.

And for another reason. Camden, being kept so poor, is a great place to recruit soldiers
already made angry enough about other issues, and looking for a legal target to vent their
anger against. Yes, Camden and the ghettos of Philadelphia, make good soldiers. All you
need to do is point those ready made weapons of destruction at an enemy and they will
kill for you, but they would rather kill you if they could.


Robert Morpheal

Anyone may copy, reproeduce, distribute, this article in any form, by any means and is in fact encouraged to do so.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

1. Canada has only 16% of its population being visible minorities. The U.S. has 26%.

That alone would account for a great deal of difference, wouldn't you agree?

[KurtNYC]

3. Canada never condoned slavery

In fact, for many, Canada is where the underground railroad ended.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

4. Canada has also never had as much reliance on agriculture as the U.S.

Even today, only .147% of Canada's GDP comes from agriculture, whereas .9% of the U.S. GDP still comes from it. Although slaves were used elsewhere as well, the vast majority of them were on plantations. This was the major stumbling block to the U.S. eradicating slavery in the first place, and likely would have done so far earlier if not for the perceived needs of an agrarian economy. My comments only serve to recognize that there are huge differences between the U.S. and Canada, and that our differences in race relations have less to do with Canada having moral superiority over the U.S. and more to do with the underlying circumstances. The old nature vs. nurture argument, so to speak.

[jody]

10. Wiki has an interesting summary of "Slavery in Canada", link below.

Slavery in Canada

[jody]

2. Data source for "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" (Edin/Kefalas)

[108]

5. I live in Philly

and this is why I was personally scared for the city had McCain won...BO has really given people hope here...

[raccoon]

7. Huh? nt

[jody]

9. Authors of the book I cited used mothers from Philadelphia and Camden for their research. n/t

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I drove through Camden in the 1970s, and it was absolutely the worst

slum I had ever seen. Sad to think that it's still like that.

We like to think that we've progressed, but Obama's candidacy really brought the racists out of the closet, as does any discussion of urban affairs, welfare, public transit, or public education. White suburbanites tend to be dismissive of anything they consider to be mostly black, and they tend to have an irrational fear of black people, much of it promoted by local newscasts, which highlight stories about black criminals.

[Jane Eyre]

8. As a Southerner who lived in the North during the 80's

I'm a native North Carolinian who lived in various cities in the North during the 1980's, including Boston, Philadelphia, upstate New York and northern New Jersey. I'm not unaccustomed to racism, but I was quite surprised by the institutionalized division between the races that was so prevalent in the North compared to what I knew of racial divides in the South. Whole cities in the North, such as Camden and Newark, are considered "black" cities while other nearby suburban towns are almost exclusively white.

Public schools in cities such as Philadelphia are considered acceptable only for low income African American children. Even my liberal atheist co-worker sent his kids to a Catholic school because he considered the public schools unacceptable. As someone who was bussed an hour's drive to a formerly all-African American school in the 1970's because of court-ordered de-segregation, I was shocked that this system of almost total racial segregation still existed.

The offices in which I worked during those years included very few African American employees. I found that it was difficult to recruit minorities in those areas, largely because there were simply very few non-white residents living near the suburban offices where my company was located.

There was a 60 Minutes feature a few years ago about the emergence of affluent all-black suburbs in Atlanta. There were interviews with some of the residents who said that they found the environment far better in the South than in the North for minorities. Something of the same thing is happening here in NC. At any rate, it is a much more common sight in southern cities to see racially mixed groups out and about during lunch breaks or after work outings. Workplaces, neighborhoods and schools are far more integrated than those I experienced during my decade in the North. Not that we are perfect by any means, but as a Southerner I am glad that we are willing to work at making it easier to bring people together.