A reader replies to my post about the insane Brooklyn liberals who think that a white woman who saw her dog murdered by a black vagrant ought to shut up about it, because RACISM:

"And this is how you get the suburbs."

After almost 13 years in the greater Chicago downtown area, wife and I are in the process of moving to 20+ miles to the far 'burbs.  No more Chicago, Cook County or Cardinal Cupich's novel ideas of Catholicism, as I'll be in another diocese.  All three are blessings.

In 2019, if someone asked if I'd considered leaving Chicago (I'm a transplant), I'd have laughed "Why?".  A world city full of interesting people (overwhelming majority of our friends are foreign born or first-generation), world-class museums,  experimental theatre, free/cheap live music festivals, the lakefront and so many parks, etc., but more sane and cheaper than NYC, LA, Miami, or Boston offered so much.

Then came some of the most severe Covid restrictions in the country, BLM protests (looting two blocks away, vandalism two doors down). police quitting (quietly or explicitly), the mayor and DA uninterested or unable to enforce the law.  Quirky venues and interesting events vanished for good.  The arts went full woke.  Spiking crime.

Everything good about Chicago retreated; everything bad got worse.  We used to not worry about walking around our neighborhood and adjoining ones after dark.  Now we rarely do.  Cars now get broken into out front the building of our 'nice' neighborhood.  Heard six shots fired at the intersection about two months ago, apparently in the air just to mess with the locals.  There's a couple armed robbery gangs on the loose in the general area.  We're done.  We've decided we can drive every now and again for those remaining qualities that make Chicago worthwhile.

I spent September in Baton Rouge, a predominantly black city with a soaring violent crime rate. A police officer said that crime has never been so bad in the Louisiana capital, and now, it has burst out of the black neighborhoods, and is happening all over. I spoke to a friend up in West Feliciana, my home parish, who told me that the real estate market there is booming with people who have the money to get out of Baton Rouge doing so. What nobody says, but everybody knows, is that this is all about escaping black crime. Nobody talks about it for obvious reasons, but people's actions speak louder than their words. Ten, twenty years from now, when the usual liberal suspects bitch about white flight, remember the urban crime wave following the Summer Of Floyd.

I see clips like this every day on Twitter:

It's very hard to be optimistic about the future of race relations in this country. That Baton Rouge cop I mentioned? He said that he didn't see how it was going to get better in the city. I get that. Poverty, drugs, multi-generational family breakdown -- these are problems that no government program and no police reform can solve. And yes, we all know that social scientists have demonstrated over and over and over that fatherlessness is the main factor predicting juvenile crime. The thing that would be the most effective thing to curb violent black crime (aside from police state tactics that nobody wants to see) is recreating the family. But how do you do that? Once the habit of family formation is lost, and the moral structure that creates stable families is gone, how do you recover it?

Whites, of course, should not be smug. Our illegitimacy rate is soaring too. And the overculture in which all Americans live is going full-tilt to destroy family formation and the moral norms necessary to foster it. All people, no matter what their race, who want a shot at a normal, stable, low-crime life, are going to be hard-pressed to stay in the cities if this keeps up.

Longtime readers know that for many years, I have been warning in this space that the racial identity politics project taken up with such gusto by the Left is going to be a disaster. You can't make people hyper-aware of race, and claim that special virtues reside with one race, while another race is especially wicked, without sowing the seeds of racist reaction. At some point, white people are going to get tired of being told how bad they are by (mostly white) elites, especially given the disjunction between that haughty chastisement, and the crime and social breakdown in the black community. I've posted this video from Boosie Badazz, the famed Baton Rouge rapper, from the start of his career over a decade ago. It was filmed in Baton Rouge, where the black community is overrun by gun violence. Look at this image.

If this were white Proud Boys, our media would consider it to be a national crisis. But nobody much worries about it when it's the black community, even though statistics show that the overwhelming number of victims of black violent crime are other black people.

How in the hell are you going to expect good things from a culture that valorizes violent young men with guns? And don't say "It's the guns!" If these were rural Baton Rouge area white guys the same age, they would have hunting rifles, and would not be using them to shoot their own neighbors. This is a problem with the impoverished black male community.

According to the most recent FBI violent crime statistics, blacks make up just over 60 percent of known murderers, and 59 percent of murder victims.

People notice. The media don't want people to notice, but people do. And they do like the ex-Chicago reader above: they move. They don't care about "celebrating diversity"; they just want their kids to be safe in school, and not to be robbed or shot. Bigots that they are...