The Black Middle Class Exodus from Detroit - By Henry Payne - The Corner - National Review Online

The Black Middle Class Exodus from Detroit - By Henry Payne - The Corner - National Review Online

I do like to blog about Detroit. Anyway, I'm sure many of you would reject this piece from the National Review. It is decidely conservative in many respect. And they do harp on the issues of fatherless children. Not that I disagree with mentioning that, however, I do wonder if for many people that issues just goes through one ear and out of the other.

What is certainly something that should catch people's ear is the fact that for whatever reason the Black middle-class is leaving the city of the Detroit for more suburban or Southeastern locales.

“This is the Motor City and this is what we do,” announced Eminem in this year’s iconic Super Bowl ad boasting that Detroit was back. That boast rings hollow this week after 2010 census figures revealed Detroit’s population is now just 713,000 — a breathtaking 25 percent decline from a decade ago.

This is the Motor City and this is what Democratic urban policy does.

Press reports lazily wrote the figure off to the “crumbling industrial base of the Midwest” (New York Times) and a victim of “the auto industry’s slump” (Associated Press). Sure Michigan as a whole was the only state to lose population due to car trouble and a hostile, anti-business union culture. But if Detroit is a victim of the Not-as-Big Three, how come the census found that all three counties bordering Detroit — all hammered by auto job layoffs — have increased in population?

What is driving down Detroit’s numbers is a black middle class in full retreat to the suburbs — fleeing the high-crime, high-illiteracy dysfunction that two generations of fatherless inner-city homes have bred. Detroit is America’s poster child for disastrous federal welfare policies that have gutted the black family and made inner cities everywhere unlivable.

Tuesday’s timely A1 USA Today story, “Black populations fall in major cities,” tells the tale. “The black population is declining in a growing number of major cities, fueled by distinct trends,” reports the paper. “Blacks — many in the middle or upper-middle class — (are) leaving cities for the suburbs.”