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  #41  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 4:42 PM
lio45 lio45 is offline
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There’s a well-documented phenomenon in Newfoundland: the province’s population is stagnant, but St. John’s is growing because it’s draining people from the rest of the province. In other words, rural Newfoundlanders are becoming black at a rapid pace; it’s fueling the growth of the provincial capital.
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  #42  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 4:47 PM
lio45 lio45 is offline
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
coded racial language does not feel strange at all to me.

it's a very normal and deeply engrained aspect of our language in this country.
I guess that’s only because you grew up with it, because trust me, if you didn’t, what’s normal is to say black when meaning black, and urban when meaning urban.

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but this thread in particular is about how the word "urban" has actually lost a lot of its former code connotations over the past 2 decades or so, at least among younger generations.
Yep, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. Why even need “code”? The whole thing sounds so hypocritical. “I don’t like black music” is fine, you don’t have to say “I don’t like urban music”.

Is there even a way to say “the subway in NYC is too crowded for my tastes, I prefer using taxis” without it automatically meaning “I’m racist and don’t want to be with all these blacks in the subway”?
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  #43  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 5:09 PM
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Originally Posted by jd3189 View Post
As a Black person, it is interesting to consider how "urban" got it's connotation. Before the Great Migrations, most of Black America was in the rural South. Now, with more African Americans living in the suburbs and moving back to the South, things are coming full circle. It may take a little bit longer, but Black culture may soon not be limited to the inner city within the American consciousness.
i wonder if the "urban = black" code was more of a northern cities phenomenon, because blacks tended to very heavily congregate in central cities up here during the great migration, with relatively few ending up in burbs/small towns/rural areas ?

like you said, in the south, black people have been living big cities, small towns, rural areas, and everywhere in between for ages, so maybe that coded language never really made much sense down there?
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  #44  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 5:16 PM
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Originally Posted by ardecila View Post
I know it's not PC anymore but this is a rare example of a word being used in exactly the correct historical context. It's not a euphemism OR a slur.
Only when you're actually referring to a certain type of neighborhood. But I've seen too many people use the word ghetto as an adjective or to describe things/places that are not actual ghettos and we all know what they're trying to say.
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  #45  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 5:19 PM
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btw, the new white-people-speak for these areas is "sketchy"
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  #46  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2021, 10:23 PM
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Originally Posted by badrunner View Post
btw, the new white-people-speak for these areas is "sketchy"
yes, sometimes "sketchy/sketch" has a direct racial coded charge.

but other times i also hear "sketchy/sketch" used to refer to anyplace where the homeless/street people/zombie addicts, of any and all races, tend to congregate, where it isn't really about skin color so much as it is about the general discomfort of being in close proximity to that element of society.
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Oct 17, 2021 at 12:17 AM.
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  #47  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 3:50 AM
LA21st LA21st is offline
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Originally Posted by badrunner View Post
btw, the new white-people-speak for these areas is "sketchy"
I don't think that's white people code necessarily.
I think most races use it these days in my experience and yes its more about drug addicts, who nobody likes.
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  #48  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 11:18 AM
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They still are in England.
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  #49  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 3:15 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Yep, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. Why even need “code”? The whole thing sounds so hypocritical. “I don’t like black music” is fine, you don’t have to say “I don’t like urban music”.

Is there even a way to say “the subway in NYC is too crowded for my tastes, I prefer using taxis” without it automatically meaning “I’m racist and don’t want to be with all these blacks in the subway”?
Pretty sure this is a protocol that developed in the post-war/post-Civil Rights Era when de facto racial exclusion policies became illegal, and thus explicit racial language became taboo. It became illegal for a realtor to say that a neighborhood is "too black" but the same thing could be said by noting that it is "urban".
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  #50  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 3:17 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
yes, sometimes "sketchy/sketch" has a direct racial coded charge.
I mean, "trailer park" means Southern and Appalachian white people, which means the descendants of English/Scottish/Irish peasants, who have always and will always be avoided and jeered at by the white professional class.

Why does the professional class bother patrolling itself over they way they refer to this stuff? Because it's a class marker within the professional class to speak of these people in just the right way. We all know that the underclass is always going to have way more drug use, way more drinking, way more pregnancies, way more abortions, way more violence, way bigger drain on public resources.

The big difference between poor white Americans and poor black Americans is that the poor whites live in large numbers in areas with few professional jobs. They have to work some sort of traveling job like driving a truck or working offshore. Meanwhile, for decades, poor blacks lived a short bus ride from skyscrapers, or even within walking distance.

We need to flip the script on how we think about these people. Somehow they live in the wealthiest country in the world - one where you barely have to do anything to build wealth (I mean, just put $100 from each paycheck in a 401k, and a house only requires a 5% down payment), but they can't manage to do it.
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  #51  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 3:31 PM
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Originally Posted by jmecklenborg View Post
I mean, "trailer park" means Southern and Appalachian white people,
Here in the upper midwest, "trailer park" just means poor white people or code for "white trash". It isn't anything specific to white people in the south or Appalachia.
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  #52  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 3:57 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
Here in the upper midwest, "trailer park" just means poor white people or code for "white trash". It isn't anything specific to white people in the south or Appalachia.

Those people overwhelmingly moved to Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, etc., from West Virginia and Kentucky in the 1950s along with Southern blacks.
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  #53  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 4:10 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Yep, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. Why even need “code”? The whole thing sounds so hypocritical. “I don’t like black music” is fine, you don’t have to say “I don’t like urban music”.

Is there even a way to say “the subway in NYC is too crowded for my tastes, I prefer using taxis” without it automatically meaning “I’m racist and don’t want to be with all these blacks in the subway”?

I think the issue with situations like the first is that there are many different types of music that have black roots and/or are predominantly created by black people. Rap / hip hop, R&B, Reggae, Soul, etc. could all be described this way. Yet none are exclusively black either. There are also white artists ranging from Elvis to the Beetles to Eminem who either covered "black songs," or dabbled in / were heavily influenced by originally black genres. And of course black artists have performed in genres that didn't have predominantly black roots. So if one were to say they didn't black music, what specifically would that mean considering that urban music would include many non-black artists and contributions? Would it mean they dislike for any of a wide range of genres regardless of the race of a particular performer in it? Or they don't like any music created by a black performer regardless of the genre?

Either way, it would be so lacking in precision that it wouldn't be very useful. For instance, if someone didn't like rap including by Machine Gun Kelly or Jack Harlow, they can just say they don't like rap. If they don't like music of any genre that happens to be created by a black artist... well they could just say they don't like black people seeing as music by black performers is too varied to have any other common element for someone to dislike.

And I think that's what it comes down to. Saying "I don't like black music" would itself be code for something else whether or not the speaker was conscious of it.
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  #54  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 4:25 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
looking at census 2020 results and tracking the ongoing phenomenon of black flight/black suburbanization in many US cities, i came to realize that there really aren't that many major US central cities left that are majority or plurality black.
Black flight? Blacks on fleeing cities. Blacks are being pushed out. Equating what is happening now to the white flight of the 50s is just wrong.
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  #55  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 6:16 PM
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Black flight? Blacks on fleeing cities. Blacks are being pushed out. Equating what is happening now to the white flight of the 50s is just wrong.
Whether you like the term or not, Black Flight is an actual thing. I didn't just make it up.

And it's not just an issue of black people being "pushed out" of city neighborhoods, there are a variety of push/pull factors at play driving the move of black people out to the burbs, just as there are/were for the white flighters before them.

No, the circumstances are not exactly identical, but the phenomenons are similar enough that sociologists have labelled it "black flight".
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Oct 17, 2021 at 6:31 PM.
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  #56  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 7:29 PM
montréaliste montréaliste is offline
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“Demographic” is another pregnant word. Pregnant as in “teen mom”, wig shop and party store. Lol
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  #57  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 7:34 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
sociologists have labelled it "black flight".
Sounds like a sociological euphemism. It's displacement. Not flight. White flight was by choice. This isn't.

ETA: It actually makes me angry to see it referred as such.
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  #58  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 7:55 PM
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Originally Posted by bilbao58 View Post
It's displacement. Not flight. White flight was by choice.
In some neighborhoods in cities like DC, it's an issue of displacement, but the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of black people who left cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc. last decade weren't displaced by anything.They mostly left by choice.
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"Missing middle" housing can be a great middle ground for many middle class families.

Last edited by Steely Dan; Oct 17, 2021 at 8:49 PM.
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  #59  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 8:42 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
In some neighborhoods in cities like DC, it's an issue of displacement, but the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of black people who left cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc. last decade weren't displaced by anything.They mostly left by choice as well.
And just by sheer coincidence rents went up and neighborhoods were redeveloped and wealthier people moved in behind them.

ETA: It's also happening, by the way, to less affluent whites and Latinos. People are being priced out of inner city areas.
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  #60  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2021, 9:46 PM
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Originally Posted by bilbao58 View Post
And just by sheer coincidence rents went up and neighborhoods were redeveloped and wealthier people moved in behind them.

ETA: It's also happening, by the way, to less affluent whites and Latinos. People are being priced out of inner city areas.
Thats not true everywhere; particularly in some of the city neighborhoods further away from the city where black people have been moving for reasons such as schools or larger housing in the suburbs or crime issues....like their white counterparts..this is true in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and many other places.

It may come as a shock but not all Black families are perpetual helpless victims like some like to portray and some do make their own choices.

Of course there are poor Blacks; but we often ignore a black middle class that can and do make choices.

For example, my family left inner city Philadelphia to move to a more expensive suburb for the schools. This is common enough.

The neighborhood we left did not gentrify. And most of the South Side of Chicago is not gentrifying, and neither is N.W. Detroit, or Mattapan or Southwest Philadelphia or South west Atlanta...all neighborhoods that have experienced black flight, by choice.

Not to mention Black families who have made their own decision to move down south....by choice.

Black families are not forced to live in mcmansions in Upper Marlboro or Lithonia or wherever.

Black Flight is a thing.

(Long time lurker, lol, this topic compelled me)
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