Banished—In The Twentieth And Twenty-First Century
09/27/2007
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There's movie out about evictions and expulsions of black Southerners in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's reviewed in the New York Times:

Banished - Movie - Review - New York Times
Movie Review Banished (2006) September 26, 2007
When Jim Crow Came to Town, With Eviction Notices By MANOHLA DARGIS

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary ”Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War.

The blogger Rhymes With Right thinks that the NYT might bring itself to mention that the white men doing the evicting were Democrats, of the kind that Strom Thurmond once was, and Robert Byrd, in a sense, still is:

But what I find interesting in this review, even with the commentary on the Wilmington incident (which I wrote about last year), is the fact that a single word appears nowhere in the entire piece. This despite the fact that it is crucial to the story being told, and the evil being perpetrated. It points to the thing that linked the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of these great evils, and the overwhelming beneficiary of them.

The missing word?

Democrat.

Rhymes With Right - A Fascinating Movie, A Missing Word

My first thought was that if there's any ethnic cleansing of blacks happening today, it's being done by Hispanic gangsters—who probably are Democrats, of course, but certainly not Dixiecrats.

My second thought was that there were people driven out of their homes by violence within living memory—it was called "white flight."

Here's Steve Sailer's description of the process:

My late father-in-law was a classical musician, a union organizer and strike leader, and a Democrat. He owned a house in an all-white neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago that was so crime-free that his first grade daughter walked to her school a mile away. Then, blacks began moving in. Committed to integration, my father-in-law joined a liberal Catholic neighborhood group organized to prevent white flight. In 1968, however, his young children were physically attacked three times on the street and, following Martin Luther King's assassination, rioters looted all the shops in the neighborhood.

So he sold his house for a crushing $18,000 loss. Being a big man who never did anything in a small way, he moved his family to an abandoned farm 63 miles outside Chicago, where they lived without indoor plumbing for their first two years.

And he started voting Republican.

You know, that sounds like it might make a good movie.

 

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