Actually, Jerry, Blacks Exiting CA

John Seiler:

In an address yesterday to the NAACP, Gov. Jerry Brown contrasted his highly tolerant and politically correct self with a predecessor. According the Bee, he “said that California has come a long way since the state’s first civilian governor said he didn’t want free African Americans to come to California.”

Has it?

In those days, blacks were restricted from coming here and discriminated against — but came here anyway.

Nowadays, the racial laws have been eliminated and prejudice is a lot lower. But blacks are leaving the state. Reported The Root:

For a variety of reasons, those black settlers found the city of San Francisco an inhospitable place. Now, little more than 150 years after that first migration, many black San Franciscans understand how they felt.

Today, city officials and concerned citizens are grappling with a continuing depletion of black residents in San Francisco, as many of them leave, in part, because of a wave of gentrification that’s pricing them out of the market; and partly because of a sense of cultural and social marginalization at odds with the city’s reputation for tolerance and diversity.

The decline in the population of black San Francisco has been the result of a perfect storm of social ills and social transitions. The Bay Area’s long reputation as a nexus for high technology has jacked up home prices for years, often out of the range of black and minority households; there are high crime rates, particularly in the Bayview-Hunters Point district, where many blacks reside; and a decades-long drop in black businesses has had a corrosive effect on minority entrepreneurship in the city.

Thomas Sowell has written a series of books on global migrations. He recently wrote in his column:

The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.

When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy….

Black Exodus

Under Brown, California is continuing these recent policies that have forced blacks — and others — to leave California. Recent U.S. Census numbers tell the story: In just a decade, California blacks have gone from 7.7 percent of the population in 2000 to 6.1 percent in 2010.

And Gov. Jerry “Jobs Killer” Brown’s policies of increasing taxes and regulations will only chase more away.

Doesn’t anybody at the NAACP see what’s going on?

We seem to be regressing in this area. In 1918, the first black was elected to the California Assembly. He was Republican Frederick Madison Roberts, a newspaper owner (pictured above). He sponsored anti-lynching laws and became “the dean of the Assembly.” He belonged to the NAACP.

He represented the state’s burgeoning black community, which came her for the same reasons as everybody else, despite the discrimination blacks endured: not just the balmy climate, but a burgeoning economy with high-paying jobs and cheap housing. State government was less than half it’s current size.

Today, the jobs are gone along with the cheap housing. The California Coastal Commission, eminent domain, redevelopment and other schemes have driven up housing costs. And state government is so expensive it’s sucking dry the productive private sector.

Now, the Black Exodus has been going on for some time, and will continue under Gov. Brown.

July 25, 2011