The biggest problem areas when it comes to disparity are the ones run by economically liberal administrations for decades. They also, almost all have income taxes rather than depending on property and sales taxes.

If Michigan and Detroit democrats are so concerned about disparity, they sure haven’t done anything about it.

Strife? Give me an example of recent racial “strife” in the Detroit area. For any incident you may cite, I’m sure I can find an equivalent example in NY, LA, Chicago or even Toronto.

Henry Ford was an anti-semite but it’s an exaggeration to say that his antipathy towards Jews “knew no bounds”. As mentioned, he was friendly with Rabbi Leo Franklin who lived the same Boston-Edison neighborhood as Ford did. The story about the returned Model T is true, but Ford gave all the clergy who lived near him free cars. Ford also hired Albert Kahn, the noted architect, to design many of his factories including the Highland Park Model T plant and the Rouge complex. After the Dearborn Independent started publishing The International Jew, Kahn expressed his displeasure by refusing to meet with Ford ever again. I believe that from that point on, Kahn dealt with Edsel, who was a decent man and rather mortified by his father’s bigotry.

Henry Ford was a genius. He was also whacked out. He had many eccentricities. Greenfield Village grew out of Henry and Clara’s obsessive hoarding. The basement of Fairlane was said to be stuffed to the gills with, well, the kind of things you find in OCD hoarders’ homes, because he wouldn’t let the staff throw anything away. As mentioned, Ford spied on his employees with the Sociological Dept. and Harry Bennett’s thugs, to make sure they were sober and chaste. Meanwhile he’d putter up the Rouge in Clara’s electric powered boat, docking at a secret staircase in the mansion he had built for a young FoMoCo stenographer, who had a sham marriage to one of Henry’s flunkies. Later, he’d have his mistress’ son play with Edsel’s kids. Clara tolerated it, perhaps because she was of the same generation as English ladies who were taught to lie there and think of England.

Yes, but all of LA is not Compton and Beverly Hills, and all of New York is not Harlem and Manhattan. Every city has it’s slums and palaces, but Detroit has the (mis)fortune of having a greater depth of poverty than many, and less gentrification than most.

Detroit is way, way down the median income list, especially compared to cities of the same size, ranking just head of New Orleans. That’s not good company, and a very good reason for level of strife it sees.

The last time I looked, employers in America can’t tell their employees where to buy homes and who they can hang out with when they’re off the clock.

As derm81 alluded to, much of the Detroit area’s segregation is related to the large number of southern blacks and whites who moved here to work in the factories. I saw a figure, I don’t know how reliable it is, that before WWII, there were about 50,000 blacks in Detroit. That figure exploded during the war.

In 1943 there was a real race riot in Detroit, not like ‘67 when it was mostly black folks burning down businesses in their own neighborhoods and multiracial crowds of looters. In 1943 there were whites and blacks fighting with each other. It started on Belle Isle, an island park in the Detroit River, and spread. My grandfather owned a junkyard, scrap paper and rags, and employed mostly blacks (including, as family lore has it, a teenage Joe Louis who lived in the nearby projects). His employees called him on the phone and warned him, for his own safety, not to go in to work that day. Nobody could tell him what to do, so he drove to the shop and ended up in the hospital courtesy of a brick through the car window.

For the record, I live in a multiracial, multiethnic suburb. Race is an ongoing issue around here cf. Kwame’s attempt to play the racism card in a scandal in which all the major players were black, but it’s really not much different than Chicago or Cleveland.

But, hey, as long as you’re bashing Detroit, you might as well call us all racists.

derm81, the “Detroit must die” crowd will say that anything in that library is suspect because it’s named after a UAW leader.

As above: Detroit is one of the more economically divided cities. The poor are very, very poor; the rich very, very rich. The middle-class is practically non-existent compared to, say, LA or New York.

psarhjinian, that was supposed to be a joke, right?

The difference between Compton and Beverly Hills or between the poorer parts of the Bronx or Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan are far more dramatic than between Detroit’s east side and Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills.

The truth is most of the folks living in the Detroit area are solidly middle class. The city and its suburbs have long had very high single family dwelling rates. Having your own home is a key indicator of being in the middle class.

Since this is a thread at least tangentially about anti-semitism, Jews are hated for being capitalists bankers and hated for being communists. Likewise, Detroit is hated for all those well paid factory workers in the UAW, who are, after all, solidly middle class, and Detroit is hated for having nothing but poor folks and rich folks.

But whoever said you have to be consistent. Just so long as you can bash the US, capitalism and Detroit.

That’s patently false. Henry Ford II supported Jewish philanthropies and even set up an assembly plant in Israel that put together knockdown Ford Escorts.

One of Billy Ford’s cousins, I think it’s Benson, is married to a Jewish woman and donated a Torah scroll to her Temple.

The old man was crazy as loon. The family knows it and has tried to make amends.

The main reason why Detroit and SE MI is so segregated is mainly due to the auto industry being located here. YES, other areas have segregation but nothing like SE Michigan. From roughly 1918 and on, the Detroit area witnessed a MAJOR inbflux of not only European immigrants from east coast….but also a large migration from the South. These southerners brought their shitty views with them and Henry Ford didnt help…

Off topic, I know. Spend some time at wayne State’s Reuther Library

Throw in a Hitler reference and you’ll have the internet insult trifecta.

So discrimination and racism is OK with you if it suits your purpose?

Of course affirmative action is discrimination. Kinda reminds you how the South Africans kept records of the peoples race and doled out race specific benefits. Can you say apartheid?

Ford’s company newspaper The Dearborn Independent published a great deal more than just “The International Jew” throughout most of the 1920s. Look it up. Just because most Jew-hatred in the upper Midwest at that time was subtler doesn’t excuse what he did. (Well, it wasn’t always subtler: In Minnesota, the AAA wouldn’t accept Jewish drivers as members in the 1920s and ’30s.)

As above: Detroit is one of the more economically divided cities. The poor are very, very poor; the rich very, very rich. The middle-class is practically non-existent compared to, say, LA or New York.

The poor people just happen to be black. They probably wouldn’t be so problematic if they weren’t so poor.

Have you watched the increasing divergence of wealth in the western world? People hoard money, and pass it on. There are a large number of medical, social and economic benefits you incur by being rich, starting with having healthy, well-educated, socially connected parents.

Imagine you’re born to a crack-addicted single mother in Compton or Harlem (or Regent’s Park, or Cabot Square, or Clichy-sous-Bois, or, well, you get the idea). It’s going to be a lot harder to even get into, say, Yale or Princeton, than for G. Richard Wagoner’s offspring. It’s going to be harder for you to even survive to middle age. And yes, it’s institutionalized, if informally, and certainly moreso in the US where the social safety net is so weak.

My point was in response to bluecon’s about affirmative action. I think AA is deeply flawed, not because it’s discriminatory, but because it’s misguided, and it’s irritating to see many on the left fail to “get it”, or even see that it encourages people to be victims because of their race, rather than pissed off because they’re getting shafted by generations of wealth-concentration.

Also, if you can, tell us how it’s so much better in the western socialist states like the one that was very content to let me die in the emergency room lobby because they could not find my papers (that would be your country btw).

As we say with cars, analogies to not make a rule. Socialized medicine boasts better health metrics as verified by a number of sources, one of which is the US Central Intelligence Agency.

And yes, I’ll agree than Canada’s system is weak. It’s weak because it’s underfunded; because it’s taking steps down the American road of nickel-and-diming people to death, rather than just accepting the cost and moving on.

Of course the government diversity programs that discriminate against white males are racism.

You may like and support the programs, but they are still state condoned racism.

Chief Justice John Roberts
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

He also thought that Jews controlled the nation’s financial institution.

He probably thought that most people would understand that his real targets were the financial institutions and the “bad” Jewish people who ran them. Unfortunately, he failed to make this distinction.

Hence, his continuous baiting of Jewish people and financial institutions in his publications, concurrent with his decision to send a free car to a much-admired rabbi, and his bafflement when said rabbi understandably returned the gift.

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much to reduce the turnover rate, as it was to have enough replacements waiting in the wings so that those who left or were fired could be replaced quickly.

The goal was to keep the line running at all costs. The humans were just interchangeable parts, and the high wage ensured that a large parts inventory was available.

Ok, these companies weren’t perfect (yes, minorities did have to do the less-desirable jobs), but the fact is that for their time, and even up to today, these companies were pushing the envelope on these types of items, Ford in particular.

Henry was an anti-semite, yes. I’m sure the man might have been a racist and homophobic. I would bet 85% of america in those days was. But what other industry would employ just about anyone and everyone, give them a solid wage that put them into the middle class, and would welcome immigrants from all over the world to come to the US and become part of the American dream as well? I can’t think of one.

Was it perfect? Hell no. But for the time, it was extremely progressive. We’re not perfect now either, but today we are still working towards the same thing. One hopes maybe someday we’ll get there.

You are in rare form dude. Please, tell us how the rich are to blame for institutionalized poverty in the US. Also, if you can, tell us how it’s so much better in the western socialist states like the one that was very content to let me die in the emergency room lobby because they could not find my papers (that would be your country btw).

Part of me says “Boo hoo, cry me a river. White men already have an advantage out of the gate.”

Another part of me, the one with a brain, says that the problem isn’t race, but class, and that misclassifying as race allows rich people to escape blame for the real problem: institutionalized poverty. Affirmative action and the like only further disguise the problem, and add a victimization complex to boot: it’s not that they’re black/female/whatever, it’s that they’re poor. And by focusing on race, creed or sex as a disadvantage, we’re only making matters worse.

Crazy Henry was racist in that he would have been shocked if any close family member decided to marry a black person, yet he realized that employing black people, and treating them fairly, was plain good business. Not only did Crazy Henry employ black people at the same pay rate as whites, he sold dealer franchises to black businessmen — this when blacks were not even allowed to set foot in a Cadillac dealership.

Yes, Crazy Henry engaged in some nasty Jew baiting. At the same time he was publishing The International Jew, he employed 3000 Jews in his company. To him there were good Jews and bad Jews. Zionists and Bolshevik Jews were bad, while Jews who were Americans first were good.

BTW, Hitler so admired Ford, that he commissioned a young German engineer by the name of Ferdinand Porsche to design a “People’s Car” — aka Volkswagen.

So, MoTown and the Feds have embraced “diversity” in a more enthusiastic fashion than any other economic sector of American society? Does this mean that embracing “diversity” also means inevitable financial implosion? Quite a disturbing pattern there.

Are there any successful economic sectors that could be poster-boys for “diversity?” Maybe the IT world…but that’s the wrong “diversity” (bunches of Chinese and East Indians, sprinkled with some Jews and European immigrants).

I just thought of one: All those transplant factories in the South. Oh wait, wrong car companies. Fact is, I don’t think there is a poster-boy industry for “diversity”(read: black people) that is both financially viable and politically correct. Seriously, is there one?

The “5/day wage” policy (which came with a lot of catches) was instituted in 1914. The main reason was to reduce employee turnover. Bad working conditions in Ford’s busy factories (visitors were astounded at the incredible level of noise) and a strong economy led to worker turnover exceeding 100% a year.

Henry always wanted total control. In 1916 Henry stopped paying dividends, which forced the Dodge Brothers to come to terms on selling their shares in FoMoCo.

Henry’s anti-semitism was putrid, but in this as in other things he was wacky. There was a rabbi who Henry much admired. He sent a Model T as a gift, and was baffled that the rabbi sent it back.

Nobody has done more to saddle African Americans with high interest rate, discriminatory loans on rapidly depreciating racially targeted crap, either preventing African Americans from buying homes or forcing African Americans to lose their homes, than the big-3.