Are Block Grants Racist?

Karen Bracken shares a disturbing story about HUD's efforts to force resettlement and break up communities, Inca-style, in the name of race integration:

http://www.cdpublications.com/index.php?mod=fstory&ID=71

This is not about making low-income housing available to low-income workers. It is specifically about an effort to force "black and Hispanic" (their words) families to resettle in places where there's little evidence that these people even want to resettle.

More particularly, it's about plunking low-income housing projects into the middle of rural, agrarian, sparsely populated communities where the local quality of life still relies to some extent on long-standing relationships among families.

Because I live in such a community, I want to raise a red flag--one I've waved before. Yes, we're very unenthusiastic about selling or renting property to outsiders, even to, in my own personal current situation, an in-law and a third or fourth cousin who grew up within ten miles of the place where they're currently making themselves unwelcome. No, it has nothing to do with racism, although it's possible that some people who feel this way about outsiders may also suffer from race prejudice. The feeling I'm talking about has more to do with the ideas of community and continuity and harmonious interpersonal relationships that go back hundreds of years. It also has something to do with the idea of keeping greedhead realtors and "developers" out of neighborhoods where they are well and truly unwelcome.

I don't care what my neighbors look like...although the way a lot of us do look testifies to our ancestors' having accepted the idea that, if they wanted to move into a place they hadn't inherited from their own parents, they should marry into the family that had inherited it. I care about whether they're part of the understanding the old established families have had about things like which animals to confine and which to let roam, what to plant and how to protect it from pests, how to behave when crossing one another's property, and so on. As this web site has frequently mentioned, I have relatives who look African-American, and my husband was a throwback to South Indian ancestors with "blacker" skin than theirs...but I don't want anybody putting any apartment blocks or trailer parks near my home, even if they are close biological relatives of mine.

I certainly do not want any efforts to bring in random urban types who have no idea how to live in a community like ours, just so we can have the same percentage of a certain "minority" look that some other place may have. To me that's disgusting...and racist.

And don't even get me started on the subject of Real Minorities, e.g. the Cherokee, Melungeon, and Yuchi people who have some real ancestral right to be here, or the frequently overlooked Asian-American and recent European immigrant populations, who are actively discriminated against by this despicable, un-American HUD policy.

This link is actually one of five related articles Karen Bracken e-mailed...the one this computer was able to open (without illegally downloading new software, which probably wouldn't have worked). Want to see the rest? Visit www.americadontforget.com. Although this web site doesn't have a separate page for Paypal donations like the other Tea Party site to which we've linked this morning, anyone who has any e-money to spare is encouraged to help us thank Karen Bracken for all the good stuff she's contributed to this site, too.