Journalist, Political Reporter, Cultural Critic, Editor/Proofreader
Alex V. Henderson
Philadelphia, PA
vixenatr
August 7, 2020
This article was originally published by AlterNet on August 7, 2020 and was republished by The Raw Story that day and by Salon on August 9, 2020.
NEWS & POLITICS
Trump Is Making an Overtly Racist Appeal to White Suburban Voters — But Here’s What He Doesn’t Understand About Modern Suburbia
By Alex Henderson
AlterNet, August 7, 2020
Suburban areas in general are much more racially integrated than they were 40 or 50 years ago. In a 2016 report for the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, Alan Berube (deputy director of the Brookings Institute) found that combined, blacks, Latinos and Asians comprised 35% of the suburban population in the United States.
In 2011, John Sullivan (a research associate at the Applied Research Center) found that more and more blacks were “moving from inner cities to suburbs. The proportion of the black population living in the biggest city of a given metropolitan area decreased in all 20 of the nation’s largest metro areas in the past decade. For example, the percentage of the Detroit area’s black residents living in the city of Detroit itself dropped by 16%. Other major cities home to large black populations, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, have all experienced large black population losses as well, as residents have left these places for suburbs or the South — or both. Notably, southern metro areas top the list for national gains in suburban black residents.”
That was almost a decade ago, and suburbia has not grown any less African-American or any less Latino since then. Trump, in other words, is making a racist appeal to a suburbia that no longer exists. The president is trying to terrify white suburbanites by telling them that they will end up with African-American and Latino neighbors if Biden has his way, but in fact, millions of white suburbanites already have African-American and Latino neighbors — even if the president of the United States doesn’t know it.
Alex Henderson is a news writer at AlterNet and veteran political journalist. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Raw Story, Truthdig, The National Memo, the Philadelphia Weekly, the New Civil Rights Movement, Democratic Underground, The L.A. Weekly, MintPress News and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter @alexvhenderson.
Copyright 2022 Alex V. Henderson. All rights reserved.
Alex V. Henderson
Philadelphia, PA
vixenatr