Haven't seen this discussed here: Charles Blow's call for a "reverse Great Migration" [View all]

[misanthrope]

https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/blacks-should-move-to-the-south-to-gain-greater-political-economic-power-nyt-columnist-charles-blow-140625014.html

Excerpts:
“They could control the Senate seats for up to 14 senators, they could control more electoral college votes in California and New York state combined. That's what state power looks like.”

SNIP

The South is prime for this reclamation of power, Blow explained, because Blacks will “never be a large enough percentage of the population in the West to have any real power. The thing about the South is that many of these states are already about a third Black.”

“It doesn't take that many Black people to move back to the South in order to change the dynamic,” he said, adding that it would give African Americans greater political power and enable Black states and communities to demand necessary allocation of resources, and enact policies favorable to minority communities.

END


I like Mr. Blow's work but I feel he is sincerely misguided with this perspective. He speaks of his positive experiences growing up in a majority-Black city in Louisiana. He went to a HBCU. He moved north to a majority-white area and now has returned to a majority-Black city in Georgia. Of course he feels good about it.

Thing is, the rest of the South isn't Atlanta. The ATL is a bustling, thriving modern metropolis. A great deal of the South doesn't fit that description, as evidenced by the abundance of ambitious Black Southerners who relocate to Atlanta from all over the region in order to realize their potential.

The shape and tone of the modern GOP is due to Southern culture and politics overtaking the party. That's what the South is, a place where the residents have been steeped in that for centuries.

And even in the ATL, you don't think Black folks get anxious when they see blue lights? Anyone remember Rayshard Brooks? While Jim Crow might not exist in legal code down South anymore, that doesn't mean corruption doesn't thrive or that the attitudes have dissipated. One exceptionally close electoral run off in Georgia does not a steady trend make.

He pointed to Black public officials in various majority-Black Southern cities. What he failed to acknowledge are the predominantly white suburbs that encase those cities. The white folks didn't disappear, they just moved out of the city limits. And in Southern states, those lily-white, old boy networks control the state politics. Given the proper motivation, they would find ways to gerrymander Black citizens into as much irrelevancy as they could get away with.

From the white South's visceral reaction to Obama, I can already tell you what their reaction would be to such a "Reverse Great Migration." It wouldn't be pretty.

Pull Black voters from Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan to send them down South and what you would do is erase the razor-thin margins Democrats have in those northern states -- giving those electoral votes to the GOP -- and further disenfranchise those who moved South into overwhelmingly white states.