White Flight

It's been a week since the events of the McKinney, Texas pool party and the nation is divided between who was right and who was wrong. Let's not kid ourselves. If these children had been white, there probably would have been a few police officers show up and tell everyone to leave. You don't need a dozen officers to tell a bunch of teenagers to go home.
Tatiana Rose, who hosted the party, said that it all started because an older white woman, called people, "you black fuckers" and told them to go back to their Section 8 housing.
Rose lives in the neighborhood and this was a pool used in the affluent neighborhood. Accidents happen when you tell someone there is a pool party. Too many people can arrive uninvited. And if this was posted on social media, then that was a problem because anyone could have seen it. Also, with text messages, smart phones and Instagram, you can pretty much tell anyone what you are doing with the click of a few buttons, so people can show up.
This isn't a black or white issue. It's a common courtesy issue. People sometimes show up uninvited and it doesn't matter if they're 17 or 70. When you host an event, you always face this possibility. I covered an event at a social club and when some of the attendees brought their children, there was some talk because, well, the kids were not supposed to be welcome. But no one told them the kids had to go. Needless to say, it was predominantly a white-only attendance. Being in Oklahoma, there can be some people of Native American descent in attendance.
It happens. No one wants to be left out of a celebration, but sometimes, we have to let the people celebrate they way they want to. You wouldn't take your kids with you on date night and you definitely don't want the parents, in-laws and other family coming with you on the honeymoon. Sometimes, you have to be anti-social.
So, Rose, or whoever, may have made a mistake.
But if an older white person did make that comment, it poses a more pressing problem. Gated communities, Homeowners Associations, mini-mansions, etc. all seemed to be another destination in white flight.
One hundred years ago, there was mostly just urban or rural communities. You either lived in the city or in the sticks. Then, non-white people began to move into the more traditional white communities in the cities. So, people moved out of the cities, blaming the violence, even though there has always been gang and violent issues in big cities dating back to times before the Emancipation Proclamation.
The suburbs seemed to be the place to go in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. And as black people moved out, there were mostly in the poorer neighborhoods, the ones traditionally closer to industries and other eyesore scenery. But with the end of Jim Crow segregation and the Equal Rights Act, black people did move into the nicer suburban homes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Then, as we closed the 20th Century, building developers realized that rural farm land was sitting untouched for livestock or agricultural, so why not turning it into residential track housing with two-story, two-garage homes with high ceilings? And people moved from the suburbs, where it was a few blocks from the park or convenience store, to the outskirts of towns where the homes costed a little more, but that's why God created mortgages.
Now, at 2015, more black families or interracial families are moving into these neighborhoods and just like on Blackish, white America doesn't know what to do.
There's no question that Eric Casebolt may have acted differently if this had been the local football, baseball or soccer team, cooling off. He definitely wouldn't have drawn his service weapon and he probably wouldn't have slammed a teenage girl to the ground. He probably wouldn't even responded because another officer would have handled. He was too busy dealing with a reported suicide and an attempted suicide.
He has resigned and it was all for the best. To stay on would only anger other people in the world who think the police are out of control and probably the department's insurance is going to skyrocket, and it would make it almost impossible if he stayed.
But his resignation anger Karen Fitzgibbons, a fourth-grade teacher at Bennet Elementary in Wolforth, Texas, who actually said what many people want to say about segregation. The problem is her views are ignorant and they seem to be the views expressed by many about black people.
White people flunk out of high school every year and many parents, white and black, are oblivious to what they're kids are doing. Remember all the reports of parties in which parents are supplying booze and drugs for their kids? What's the difference?
The difference is race.
And speaking of parents, people are quick to defend the question of "What if it was your child?" with "It wouldn't be MY child."
Really?
Maybe it would.
I hate to bring this up, but Adam Walsh, the little boy from Florida who was kidnapped and savagely murdered probably by Otis Toole, just happened to be next to some other kids at a department store who got into a scuffle and security made the assumption he was with them and made them all leave. That gave whoever killed Adam the opportunity to snatch him.
Besides, it doesn't matter if it was or wasn't your child being slammed to the ground, it was someone who didn't pose an immediate threat to anyone, except maybe the officer's vanity.
Speaking of vanity, you haven't heard much of the white woman being investigated for smacking the black girl with Rose, do you?
And while we defend Adrian Peterson for using a stick to spank his son and Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who hit her son on the head multiple times, we know that we're only doing it because they are black. If a white parent did either one of these things and it was recorded, CPS would be at their door in no time.
But that's an issue for another post...