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Putting a period on this point, Al Jazeera reports that whites were 73.8 percent of the Ferguson population in 1990. 25.1 percent were Black. By 2010, 29.3 percent of the population of Ferguson was white, and 67.4 percent were Black. St. Louis, just eight miles from Ferguson, is the 16th fastest gentrifying city in the country. The population there has gone from being 28.1 percent white in 2000, to being 49.2 percent white in 2010.
But there’s more. The story of Ferguson is also a story of private interests weakening government. Creeping neoliberalism (the philosophy of free trade, small government, privatization, and deregulation of capital) is pushing government onto the margins of life in America, especially at the local level. And lest your legitimate resentment of government get in the way of understanding what this means to us, keep in mind that government is supposed to serve the public interest, while “private” interests are just that, they’re private, which means they are, by nature, exclusive.
The deregulation of private, for-profit interests, and the related marginalization of local government has set the stage for rapid gentrification all over the country. Because deregulation allows for massive amounts of capital to be held in the hands of very few people, those privileged few can build whole neighborhoods from the ground-up, bringing in grocery stores and other businesses, and driving the development of public infrastructure like transit lines, the cost of which is borne by everyone. What’s worse, city governments often collude with developers in order to generate desperately needed revenue, leaving displaced residents with no advocate powerful enough to save them. At the intersection of these forces, whole communities can be displaced in just a few years.
So the sorry state of government in places like Ferguson isn’t just about incompetent or insensitive government employees. It’s also about governments struggling to deal with dwindling revenue. Depravation nearly always brings out that which is ugliest within us, and racial anxiety tops the list of such ills among many whites, particularly those who live in suburbs that were created by white flight in the first place. So government turns parasitic, feeding off it’s most vulnerable residents, and justifies it with racial profiling.
What this means is that the story of Ferguson isn’t just a story of white settlers in the 21st century. It is also a story about capital. Capital is driving migration, both at the local level within cities and municipalities, and nationally. But those who are being forced to migrate aren’t just poor. Wealth polarization is so great in the United States that the most desirable urban centers are becoming the exclusive playgrounds of the rich.
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— Scot Nakagawa,
What Goes Down in Ferguson is an Asian American Concern – In Fact, It’s a 99% Issue
French what the fukk
is tariq going to ask for his donation back from french???