Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, didn’t have running water last week. Fortunately, water pressure has now been restored, but the unhappy residents are still being instructed to boil their tap water.
The Washington Post explains that the reason 82.5 percent black Jackson can’t keep its water running is…white people. Specifically, white people who aren’t around anymore:
White then Black residents abandoned Jackson, propelling its water crisis
Jackson’s travail is
…rooted in decades of racism, historians and infrastructure experts say…. White flight beginning in the 1970s drove onetime Jackson residents into neighboring areas.
But the black takeover of the state capital didn’t create Wakanda.
Luckett said the city’s infrastructure problems started around 1970, when federal courts forced Jackson schools to desegregate—16 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Thousands of White families moved out of the city, many sending their children to private schools run by the White Citizens’ Councils, white supremacist groups, he said.
White supremacists! You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them:
The city’s decline since then has prompted better-off Black residents to escape Jackson’s failing infrastructure, not just water but also roads and schools.
As the middle class, white and black, flees, the remaining residents of Jackson are increasingly made up of the dregs of society. The city appears to have had the worst homicide rate of any of the 200 biggest cities in 2021, at 90 killings per 100,000 people, twice as bad as Detroit. As I wrote in this column last January:
At that rate, a black man trying to live out his three score and ten years in Jackson has well over a 10 percent chance of having his life end violently. Not surprisingly, the population of Jackson is now only three-fourths of what it was in 1980.
Jackson’s downfall appears to be accelerating as even the number of blacks declined in Jackson from the 2010 to 2020 Census. Its overall population was down 17 percent from 2000 to 2020, and the new decade’s water and murder crises can’t be doing much to stop the bleeding. “How does the U.S. avoid more urban death spirals of the kind seen in Jackson?”
But a crucial point to note is that there’s nothing unique about how black-run Jackson is depopulating. The same process is happening in quite a few other black-dominated cities.
I pulled together a list of 48 American cities (see the bottom of the article for my data table) and created a scatter plot showing their black share of the population on the vertical axis and their change in total population from 2000 to 2020 on the horizontal axis:
Click for Full Text!