like Philadelphia Magazine or the tabloid Daily News, they throw flame bait out to stir a pot to get attention and sell magazines or papers.
It's one thing having a "conversation" and another manufacturing something to cause outrage to prompt the conversation.
It's distraction (and the usual suspect media fall for it) in that it's not done to offer solutions but to repeat what has been cyclic efforts to rattle.
Those who are not native Philadelphians have difficulties understanding the dynamics of this city and often try to distill it down to Rocky Balboa and cheese steaks and other nonsense. This has been and still is a Quaker-influenced city and that overlay is deeply embedded into the psyche here. Like other cities, this 400+ year old place has had immigrants move in while displacing others who move on.... and neighborhoods have changed because of that over the centuries (much of the area being discussed was almost all-white through the '40s in fact, with small pockets of black populations on certain streets). So unless one understands how the city has evolved over the years, one really can't have a serious discussion on "race". If anything it goes to show how gentrification aids in keeping the so-called "permanent underclass" by displacing loyal residents of one area and forcing them out by raising their housing costs, shunting them to less desirable areas. Case in point is the toney "Society Hill" that was once almost all black back in the 1800s, well documented by W.E.B. Dubois in his book The Philadelphia Negro - http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:philadelphia_negro
= new reply since forum marked as read
