The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto (Charles Blow)

[TwiceHorn 31280]

I read a freakonomics interview with Blow about this book.  https://freakonomics.com/podcast/frbc-charles-blow/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=frbc-charles-blow

In The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, he urges a “reverse migration” to the South to consolidate political power and create a region where it’s safe to be Black.

This is utterly fascinating.  I think it might actually work.  He advocates blacks returning to states like Georgia with majority black cities to establish majority black states to do and undo what a black majority wants and needs.

Despite the "black power" phrase, Blow doesn't seem particularly militant or vengeful or anything, just searching for a practical solution and it seems fairly well thought out.

Super-intriguing idea.

[Foosters 17733]

It certainly is an intriguing idea. One major question is what will be the catalyst that will set it off. No one wants to be the first for fear that people will not follow.

Where I live, the public schools are absolute shit, so like half the city sends kids to private schools. The decrease in kids means decrease in funding, leading to a cycle of poorer and poorer schools. The white and wealthy decry this and all understand that the issue could be fixed if they all just sent their kids to the public schools. But no one wants to be that guinea pig.

[High Plains Drifter 10977]

 

No penguin wants to be first one into the water. If no penguin dives in willingly, they will start to push each other until finally one falls in. If that one doesn't get eaten by a sea lion or a killer whale, they all go.

 

Anyway, imagine the reaction of the white power structure in a place like Mississippi or Alabama or Florida when over the course of a few years, African Americans rapidly become the majority.

[Satchel 6908]

Blow is on to something, IMO. Texas already has the largest number of black people in the country, followed by Georgia. The migration is already happening.

[bolverk 29399]

6 minutes ago, Satchel said:

Blow is on to something, IMO. Texas already has the largest number of black people in the country, followed by Georgia. The migration is already happening.

Texas having the largest Black population was surprising, so I went to check it out and found an entire website that I'd never heard about.

https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-state-population/

The ranking they have is:

1. Texas
2. Florida
3. New York
4. Georgia
5. California

Of course, the states closest to a majority are different. Here's the ranking by share:

1. Mississippi 39%
2. Georgia (tied) 34%
3. Louisiana (tied) 34%
4. Maryland 33%
5. Alabama (tied) 28%
6. South Carolina (tied) 28%

[DonkeyCigars 144]

Atlanta is already this-- or at least trending that way. I remember watching a clip about Theo Vonn and a rapper from the ghettos of the South, talk about when he went to Atlanta and saw all the black people, and they didn't have to be drug dealers or pimps to be rich, it blew his mind. Rich black people in suits, in nice cars, with middle management jobs and corporate jobs and C-suite jobs. Nice homes and with fancy dinner reservations. In government positions and setting strategy for the city. He said it was amazing. 

Then when all the riots and looting was going on during the time of the BLM protests, I remember Killer Mike stepping up and trying to keep Atlanta from engaging in self-destruction/destruction because, and I'll paraphrase, Atlanta has to be the city on a hill for black people. It's different, it's a Mecca. It's a safe place and a future for black people (a la the OP). And it worked, from what I recall there wasn't a lot of black-sourced violence and destruction on the city. Further, you already have, outside of Buckhead and Sandy Springs/Dunwoody area, the majority of whites living OTP in suburbs.

Found the clip, starting at the 1 minute clip. The 2 minute mark is a wonderful example of black privilege that a black city can provide, that white people enjoy.

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

[Satchel 6908]

Thanks for the update. It’s been a minute since I last checked. If black people continue to rediscover their southern roots, the idea of a concentrated political power could become a reality. If the non dominants in Texas harnessed our political power today, this could become a changed state tomorrow.

[Satchel 6908]

https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-state-population/

[bolverk 29399]

11 minutes ago, Satchel said:

Thanks for the update. It’s been a minute since I last checked. If black people continue to rediscover their southern roots, the idea of a concentrated political power could become a reality. If the non dominants in Texas harnessed our political power today, this could become a changed state tomorrow.

To get at the point @DonkeyCigars is making regarding Atlanta being a mecca or "Hotlanta" for Blacks (are people still calling it that?), here's the list of MSAs by total population from that same source. Of course, MSAs are more akin to economic regions that kind of ignore jurisdictional boundaries, which offer a chance at a direct majority for local elections, the possibilities are intriguing for the strategy.

https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-city-population/ 

Only one metro area (Albany GA) today offers an absolute Black majority, but several others are damn close and likely represent a plurality given the presence of other races/ethnicities. Certainly, the Atlanta region with its already very healthy economy has to be at/near the top of the list for both economic and political opportunities. I'm damned glad for  Stacey Abrams' wisdom in targeting Georgia.

It seems that targeting Mississippi by building a strong foundation off Jackson would make a lot of sense. It sucks that the overall economy there isn't too strong though.

[Slacks 6791]

My territory covers the top and the bottom of that list... Post Covid is gonna be interesting travels...

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

I thought this had been going on for a while now...At least to big cities like Dallas and Houston. (Of course Atlanta, too.) Yeah, Jackson would be a great place to start but that city is a huge mess right now. Memphis might be a happy medium, but it would take decades to turn Tennessee blue as a state. 

[bolverk 29399]

As a follow-up to the OP, the NYTimes had a short review on Blow's book if anyone wants to check it out:

Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW: A Black Power Manifesto

Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown and other grass-roots activists successfully registered an unprecedented number of Black voters in Georgia who had been stymied in the past by voter-suppression tactics. Their work brought key victories to Democratic candidates in the state and demonstrated the political power of Southern Black women.

Georgia’s recent presidential and Senate elections are relevant to the argument of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” There are two Black Americas, he says. One is the world of those who remained in the postslavery South. The other is inhabited by those who fled the South for refuge in what he terms “destination cities” across the North and West during the Great Migration. But these cities are now broken, according to Blow, and the Great Migration has been a “stinging failure.” Blow, a son of Louisiana who recently moved back south — to Atlanta — says Black Americans must bridge this divide.

In what he believes would be “the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow calls for African-Americans to reverse-migrate south, to collectively dismantle white supremacy by using their ancestral homeland as a political base. He imagines a New South where “our trauma history is not our total history.” That Black people have been returning south for at least the past 40 years, he adds, demonstrates that there is fertile ground for his idea in the region, intellectually and materially.

His is a familiar argument, revitalized by the South’s recent political developments. A genesis for Blow’s Black power proposition could have been the Black Belt nation thesis, proposed by Black Communists in the 1920s, or the agenda of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. But Blow instead builds upon the political thought of the freethinking white hippies who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s with the intent of transforming the state’s conservative electoral politics. They succeeded, he says; young Black people today should follow their blueprint.

Seeing Georgia flip blue in the 2020 election became Blow’s “proof of concept,” and for him, one thing now seems clear: The path to lasting Black power is through the vote. Forming a “contiguous band” of Black voters across the South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, in particular — would “upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase” Black citizens’ influence in American politics. The weakness in Blow’s plan is that it requires faith in a political system that has consistently failed Black Americans at nearly every turn.

For Blow, however, the reality that Black Northerners have no recourse but to leave is a painful truth that crystallized for him one night in 2015 when he learned that his son, a student at Yale, had been stopped at gunpoint by a university police officer. Stories like this fuel the book’s searing account of police violence, systemic racial disparities and social unrest in cities like New York, Minneapolis and Portland. This is where Blow is at his best.

As a historian, I wish he had spent more time exploring the nuances of the Black migration framework the book hinges upon. Blow’s claim that the Great Migration “hit the South like a bomb,” causing an intellectual and cultural brain drain that stunted its growth, rings hollow. It obscures the truth that the region was an incubator of radical political activism — often led by its most disenfranchised citizens — during the Great Migration and beyond. The New South to which Blow is now beckoning people to return was created largely by the Black visionaries and community builders who remained in the rural and urban South.

A strength of “The Devil You Know” is its affirmation of Black Americans as a formidable political bloc with whom the nation must reckon. The book is a helpful introduction for those seeking to make sense of fractious political debates about race and voting rights in the South, and the broken promises of American democracy.

[wildcat09 29256]

On 3/9/2021 at 2:27 AM, MaybeACoordinator said:

I thought this had been going on for a while now...At least to big cities like Dallas and Houston. (Of course Atlanta, too.) Yeah, Jackson would be a great place to start but that city is a huge mess right now. Memphis might be a happy medium, but it would take decades to turn Tennessee blue as a state. 

I love brisket but if some black folks want to bring some Memphis BBQ to Houston I wouldn't complain.

[gmr548 16513]

To get at the point [mention=5564]DonkeyCigars[/mention] is making regarding Atlanta being a mecca or "Hotlanta" for Blacks (are people still calling it that?), here's the list of MSAs by total population from that same source. Of course, MSAs are more akin to economic regions that kind of ignore jurisdictional boundaries, which offer a chance at a direct majority for local elections, the possibilities are intriguing for the strategy.
https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-city-population/ 
Only one metro area (Albany GA) today offers an absolute Black majority, but several others are damn close and likely represent a plurality given the presence of other races/ethnicities. Certainly, the Atlanta region with its already very healthy economy has to be at/near the top of the list for both economic and political opportunities. I'm damned glad for  Stacey Abrams' wisdom in targeting Georgia.
It seems that targeting Mississippi by building a strong foundation off Jackson would make a lot of sense. It sucks that the overall economy there isn't too strong though.

Atlanta and DC have both been known as centers of black economic/cultural power for quite a while. Both are getting whiter though.

[RDCanecutter 26276]

Alabama Black Belt Kid here, I think it'd be great. Especially if (and I doubt this would happen but a man can dream) the Black people* spread out into all the old towns to give them a shot in the arm, instead of just packing in together in the 4 main cities like everybody else is doing.

*and anybody else as well.

Edited March 11, 2021 by RDCanecutter

[Fudge Nuggets 19151]

Meh, this would have a better chance of taking off if Kurtis Blow was leading the movement.