Chris Arande: The Other America

I respect Chris Arande’s journalism:

“Anthony Rice’s house in Youngstown, Ohio is a mile away from a river valley once filled with factories offering jobs. Many of those left in the 1980s, and with them, many residents.

His home is one of the few occupied on the street. Empty lots or boarded-up homes make up most of the block. He points to those remaining, listing his neighbors and their age. They are all over 70. “This neighborhood is okie-dokie, although not much goes down here”, he says. “Stores used to be all around here, but they mostly gone. The people left are either too old to move or waiting for someone to buy them out.”

The road itself is a patchwork of potholes. “This street hasn’t been paved in like forever. They just don’t care about us. But we used to that.”

Youngstown is the largest city in Mahoning County, Ohio, where Donald Trump narrowly lost a county Barack Obama won twice easily. That was partly because turnout in Youngstown – which is lower income, younger, and close to half African American – dropped by roughly 15% …

A lot of the US is like that. I have seen it all over, when I put 100,000 miles on my car before the election. I have heard and seen the frustrations of countless people – of all races and faiths – in wildly different places, from Nebraska to Louisiana.

To get out beyond successful neighborhoods in DC, New York City and the elite college campuses – beyond where prevailing socio-political opinions are made – is to see another America. …”

Here in the Alabama Black Belt, which is one of the poorest places in the entire country, I live in the very epicenter of that America. This is the place I call home!

In a hundred mile radius of my front yard, I can see everything that has gone right and wrong in America. To the west, Selma which produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is now a blighted wasteland and powerhouse of civil rights tourism. To the southeast, Tuskegee which produced George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Airmen, which is now also a blighted wasteland. To the east, Auburn which is a thriving little college town, and which unlike Tuskegee and Selma remains overwhelmingly White. To the north, we have Birmingham, which is a deindustrialized blighted wasteland, and which is surrounded by the prosperous Over the Mountain suburbs like Mountain Brook and Hoover.

The public school system is a joke. Integration was a failure. A half century has passed and racial gaps in test scores have yet to disappear. The black crime rate is significantly higher than the White crime. Every year it seems like Birmingham moves south and Montgomery moves north in order to avoid the clusterfuck in housing and education that was created as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. How much does it cost keep rebuilding entire cities in different counties?

We are living through a disaster on so many levels: among other things, the collapse of the family, the rise in drug abuse, the mechanization of agriculture and deindustrialization have combined to produce this blighted and demoralized landscape. If you drive through large swathes of the South, you will find people left behind in towns that have ceased to have any economic purpose.

Where I am from, we have inherited a population that was brought here as slaves to pick cotton on 19th century plantations. There are no more plantations though. No one picks cotton. Slavery has been dead for over 150 years now. There was some industry here, but now much of that has been shipped off overseas. We have your usual low-wage service jobs in the local Wal-Mart or McDonald’s.

What about all the progress we have made as a country? I think of the tattooed single White woman who dropped out of high school with three kids by three different daddies who is living in a trailer and is on meth or prescription drugs. She doesn’t have a husband. She doesn’t have a positive sense of ethnic or cultural identity. She is in poor health, mentally and physically. She is a burden to her family.

What does this hypothetical tattooed White woman living in a flyover country small town have? She has more freedom and equality than any of her predecessors. She has a smartphone. And yet, look at where that has gotten her. In many ways, she is worse off than her great-grandmother.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
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68 Comments

  1. A really incisive article that tugs at my heartstrings. Donald Trump couldn’t make America great again all by himself. I hope he at least corrects the course of Lady America which is heading on a collision course with the proverbial iceberg

    • Trump doesn’t have the stones to save ‘Murrica from itself. Until people accept reality – all brown countries are poor, they will keep chasing their tails.

      • I don’t know if Mr. Trump ‘does not have the stones to save ‘Murrica from itself, but, I absolutely agree with you that any one man has limits, and, if we are to get out of this mess, we, are all of us, going to have to get down to some hard shoveling.

        Thank you for your comment.

  2. I first noticed this on trips to Upstate New York and New England as a little boy in the ’80s.

    It’s a race to the bottom.

    • Coincidentally, Pat Buchanan did very well in his Presidential campaigns in New Hampshire, and it was New Hampshire that pretty much saved the day for Trump after Cruz stole Iowa through voter fraud and dirty tricks.

  3. A lot of these Great Lakes towns were the first to go in part by all the blacks who showed up there and turned your expensive Union Workforce into a total squander. Micheal Moore’s “Roger and Me” lays all the blame for Flint’s downfall on GM, but if you watch with a keen eye you can see much of Flint’s downfall is from it’s black population. Why on earth did GM choose to leave in the first place? Maybe the black workforce was a big drag on quality and productiveness?

    • There are impersonal forces at work too.

      A robotic welding machine is vastly better than a human, no matter how skilled the welder is.

      Far safer, far cheaper.

      It’s bad news on many levels as it deskills so many.

      But in general blacks are total drag.

      • I guess the robot doesn’t come to work hammered, doesn’t mess with female co-workers, doesn’t need workers’ comp insurance, and doesn’t sue you for discrimination for any adverse employment activity no matter how well deserved it is.

      • You are not going to want illiterate or semi-literate Blacks and/or Mexicans running multi-million dollar equipment.

    • Putting large numbers of women into the industrial workforce in the 1970’s hastened the departure of industry. Women don’t have the physical ability for industrial labor, they get hurt, and then go on sick leave, and run up the medical bills, and other related benefit bills. Then there were the 300 pound Black mammies waddling around aimlessly, and White women doing anything, and I mean anything, to get out of work.

      The industrial corporations knew that Blacks & women were a big drag on productivity—study after study, consultant after consultant had proved it.

      Then with Blacks and Hispanics, you have a big illiteracy and innumeracy problem too!

      • When I first hired out with my company, the only gals we had, worked in the office. The shop floor was all stag, and highly productive. We set production records regularly. When we got gals in, that all went away. We ended up working overtime and weekends. Departments that remained all male, remained productive.

        • As you know, Mr. Owen – everytime The South is forcet to follow the hypothesises of The New England culture, reality takes a hit.

          All I can think to say is … secession.

          • I imagine true Southern gentlemen would find the idea of their lovely wives working outside the home to be repellent, no?

          • Yes, Mr. Kleinfeld, but, we have to repress it, as it is difficult to get by without two incomes, today.

            But, yes, in the heart, you are dead on.

            Be well!

    • I don’t like Micheal Moore but he’s not entirely wrong. Now maybe Blacks ruined the industry but the constant blame on the unions is complete lie. The reason the unions asked for so much money is Roger and his henchmen were looting GM by the bushel baskets full of money while not putting anything into the companies products or enhancing quality. The unions saw this and determined that if the management didn’t care about the company then they better get some of that right now while they could and they did. Management ran the company. That’s what they were paid large salaries to do. They have no right to blame the workers for anything. They could have fired the whole lot of them. The reason they buckled under to the unions is they wanted to keep stuffing their pockets with cash and they did. GM’s management, like a lot of Americas management suck, and are greedy to get all they can out of a company while caring little for the long term profitability of the company.

      This just like another post where they blamed Southerners for the mess this country is in when we had little control over the country. This is exactly same as the workers at GM. They had exactly zero control over operations of the company. The problems were obvious. Ross Perot bought into GM and went snooping around. He readily saw the problems and caused all kinds of grief for the shit heads in charge. They just paid him off, like the union, so he would go away and they could continue looting the company.

      I for one have had it with the elites screwing up everything in the country and then blaming the peons.

      • Those American 4 cylinder cars were crap that broke after 5 years. The Japanese built cars for consumers in poor countries that expected to invest in something that would last for 20 years. Noticed a whole bunch of rust spots on one of those new Dodge Challengers the other day following it through the car wash, see a lot of other cars much older that don’t have this issue yet so still doesn’t look like the US makers have got their acts together. Had lots of little electrical issues with a 2004 Ford product, sold it and got an Ohio made Honda.

  4. Ditto for St. Louis. I work in affluent Clayton, drive through even more affluent Ladue and in minutes. literally just a few miles drive, can be in bombed out, Detroit like North St. Louis, North County trending that way, or East. St. Louis. And as you know from your wife’s family. most of the middle class to upper middle class white folks who aren’t necessary affluent have fled to St. Charles County to recreate what their forebears had in North St. Louis and later North County. Politically, St. Louis City and County voted Trump and St. Charles County and the rest of Missouri outside KC and college town Columbia voted for Trump in huge numbers.

  5. I really appreciate the suggestions made by the people here who’ve recommended certain parts of Dixie that are still White-friendly. Such places are getting fewer and further apart. Even my beloved New Hampshire is now filling up with spics. Towns in the Granite State that used to have textile mills and factories that employed local White Yankees are now being taken over by hordes of useless brown people from Lord knows where. Immigration is supposed to benefit not only the immigrant but the host country as well. Such is no longer the case.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/451ac7847a980169231f4a69213a6cfe09e9109043c9bd3a47951e7e999fba0d.jpg stop.

    • Dear Mr. Kleinfeld,
      If you want to live North, in a beautiful area, with no minorities to speak of – move to far Northeastern New York and or Vermont.
      If you can stand the snow and the fact that folks ain’t all that friendly, you will like it. It’s a beautiful landscape, with a great history, and it’s very very White.

    • Remember when Derry, Salem, Manchester, and Plastow were White and peaceful?

      Now, at least before I moved away two years or so ago, it looked more like Puerto Rico than anything else.

  6. Mr. Wallace, that is a very good description of the negative aspects of that region. It also fits other regions here as well, even the one without the black population.

    Our modern culture has failed. It will be a slow process, but Alt-South must offer that woman’s kids an alternative and at the same time, make the alternative appealing to the kids of the successful families.

  7. Have you read any of his minority based pieces? It strikes me as a the white man’s apologia to the agency-less underclass. I was hoping for a right wing critique of his seeming pathological empathy.

  8. That sounds much like parts of Southern Indiana. Living in a rural area, I agree that much of the jobs that are left are low paying Wal-Mart and McDonald’s type gigs. Factories slowly closing. Trailer parks and meth arrests in the paper almost weekly.
    Mr. Wallace’s comment about “the mechanization of agriculture” is an often overlooked but critical aspect of the destruction of the Southland and the southern Midwest. I think a return to agrarianism and self-reliant homesteads is the answer, but I am in the minority on that.
    https://putnamlibertynotes.wordpress.com/

    • Mr. Putnam – I have lived in 13 states, and everywhere outside of major cities is a graveyard to the corruption of the politicians and the general asininity of the New England Government – which seeks to protect every other man in the world, except those it is sworn to protect.

      The biggest part of ‘the destruction of the Southland, has not been mechanization, but the burgeoning welfare state.

      When I was a kid, you could drive through rural North Carolina and it was doing well – both with industry and agriculture.

      And many of these places were hamlets composed of hard-working negroes, who did everything for themselves, and who workt closely with White farmers – both middling and plantation size.

      Today, many of those communities are either gone, or fit into the description Mr. Griffin so aptly gives – week after week,

      When some of my fellow congregants have complained to me about the divisiveness and war within the culture, as it plays down on TV, I say, ‘if Trump cannot get it done, it will soon be off to rifles and nooses, instead’, because many millions of us have had it with the neverending crap of a government that preys upon us, and tries to control us, instead of staying our of our way.’

      • “general asininity of the New England Government – which seeks to protect every other man in the world, except those it is sworn to protect.”

        In so few words you sum up what is wrong with this nation…

        • No, as usual, even though I like the south as I’m living in it, it is not all the Yankees fault. We all are to blame for this mess. And we all need to get behind our president to fix it.

          • Father,
            Though I usually shake my finger at The New England government, as being the basis for Southern abuse, I have said, and I will say it again –

            Almost all of this is The South’s fault.

            We have lost our balls.

            We know better than this, and we know how to fight, it’s just we have been mentally gelded by The New England Government/Jewish alliance in such a way that we won’t task up for ourselves anymore.

            I am behind president Trump with all my heart, yet, I yearn for north Carolina to be free of ‘The United States of America’

            This America ain’t my America – not by a long shot.

          • “…Almost all of this is The South’s fault…”

            In response to your and Fr. John+ ‘s post. You people are full of it. The South has not run this country for a long time. The South has very little political or societal control over the nation. We’re beginning to after a long hiatus but it’s far from a sure thing and if some drastic things are not done about immigration and illegal voting the country is sunk. The South was probably the only section of the country that kept us from running off the rails a LONG time ago. Without us the country would be starving in the streets like the Venezuelans.

          • Dear Sam,
            Thank you for your reply. And how right you are : for not only has The South NOT been running this country for a very long time, it has not even been our country, for about that length of time, neither.

            We are vassals of The New England Government.

            As to the country being sunk, I agree with you : it is; and the sooner folks realize it, the sooner we can start again and make it right.

            The New England Government is way past reform. Reform is impossible, as Michael Tubbs of The Florida League of The South is fond to say.

            As to Southerners starving without Northerners, I think that’s not your best angle on that particular argument to make.

            Have a good evening!

          • Just as in personal culpability, national and regional culpability is a reality. If you say you have no sin then the sin remains in you. And you are no better off than an unregenerate Jew…or the state of Israel. Take your pick.

          • Did you see the news about the three officials wanting to remove the clause in the North Carolina state constitution that would at least allow you to talk about secession? Which I think is a marvelous thing. There is hope. Pray and act.

          • No, Father, I did not. Yet, if it’s any consolation to you, I regularly work for the secession of the state, not the least of which I talk about it with many of my fellow countrymen, in this part of the state.

            I’ll look for those 3 officials and see what support I can get them.

            Thank you!

          • And, yes, I will pray, just as I have done for years – that my fellow Tarheels reach down and rediscover their balls.

            A man, to be a truly good man, must have The Holy Ghost in him, but, that said, he cannot be a man, lest he knows where to find his balls.

        • Thank you for your kind words, Spartan.

          I am a Southern Nationalist, Tarheel Confederate, Traditional Southerner, or whatever else you might call me, because I belief the disrespect we, North Carolina – The South, have been repeatedly shown is tatamount to a blood feud.

          Maybe many of my fellow Southerners don’t mind what has been done been done to us, but, I damn well mind for them.

          God bless you and don’t give in – wherever your home country is.

    • But if agrarianism andliving in independent self sustaining communities are what we need, then let’s go back to the 19 century.

      We don’t need every gadget and toy in the universe, if we lose our souls thereby.

      • Yes, Father – let’s go right back to the 19th century.

        To hell with the 20th century, and double to hell with the 21st.

        I praise President Trump for rescinding the freak bathroom law, today.

          • ‘We don’t need every gadget and toy in the universe, if we lose our souls thereby.’

            Father, Satan moves more through technology than anything else, these days.

            People are so obssesst by distractionalism, that, maybe 15 years ago, I came to refer to the central goals and unwritten dogma of this time in history as ‘The Religion of Elsewhere’.

            We need to get back to the process orientation of honest labour and talking to each other – as this great Southern Comedian will tell you…

      • That concept is basically what Michael Bunker, author of the excellent book “Surviving Off Off-Grid” advocates for. While he does not make a big deal of it, Bunker appears to be a mild Kinist.

  9. You cover the Poor White woman on welfare living in a trailer with her three children.

    I would love to see your take on the tragic case of Kenneth Suttner. He was a seventeen year old Dairy Queen worker who committed suicide after weeks (or months) of vicious bullying from his manager a 21 year old heifer named Harley Branham. He had recently graduated (or dropped out of ) high school, because he had been bullied there. Coworkers who testified to Branham’s vicious treatment said Suttner would go out into the parking lot and cry. He finally went home and shot himself.

    I heard two pompous Anti-Trump idiots on a talk show talking about Suttner. They felt that Branham being charged with facilitating Suttner’s suicide was too draconian, because “why didn’t he just quit and get another job?” Mind you, this was minutes after they were disparaging Trump’s job program, describing it as “welfare to the workers.” They also sneered about nationalism and griped about their state legislature’s bathroom bill worried that football teams won’t come there. I guess little girls or young women eventually getting raped by guys in drags is a small price to pay for football. Oh yeah, and these two are pushing for renewing hostilities with Russia.

    There was a time when an unsure, awkward, socially-challenged teen like Suttner could walk out the door and into another low-status job. He could have opted to take a dishwashing he could just do his job and be left alone. He could work there until he grew out of his puppy fat and his acne cleared and he acquired some confidence from being self-supporting. Maybe he could have acquired some training at a better-paying job that still involved interacting with people as little as possible.

    Today, someone like Suttner would be barred, just like Blacks have been, because none of them “speak the language of the kitchen,” which is Spanish Suttner could not just tell Branham to go fuck herself and walk across the street to Taco Bell or McDonalds, because all those jobs were already filled by other low-status Whites. As a young, childless White male, Suttner could not get pregnant and qualify for SNAP benefits, etc.

    He could have gone into the military, I presume. That would be the next suggestion these two bozos would have advanced. The military has no problems recruiting these days, because as one young male acquaintance of mine who joined the army told me, “I joined, because the economy is brutal.” We have what amounts to an economic draft. But Suttner was overweight and maybe had other impediments.

    To me, Suttner is the Poster Boy for why Working Class Whites overwhelmingly voted for Trump. His plan for so-called “welfare for workers.” Yeah, I know it flies in the face of these two idiot’s God-given right to Chinese slave labor, but there it is.

    • Kenneth Suttner- RIP.

      I hope those morons are replaced or lose their show…..That is what you have to love about those sanctimonious, open border/mass immigration Libertarians. They are so high and mighty….Until they are on the ass end of the globalist/immigrationist boot.

      • It was a radio talk show in Texas. I don’t remember the channel, I was channel surfing and heard those remarks. I listened for about fifteen minutes getting more torqued by the minute and then I had to shut if off. Wouldn’t be too cool to blow my top and threaten to blow up the station.

        All I know is two smug know-it-all “libertarians” who have absolutely no common sense or empathy. Open borders because no one has a right to a job. The NFL should have a right to dictate to states to let men into the little girls room. Why can’t the states put principle over what’s in vogue and tell the NFL that they don’t have to come? If every state told the NFL to go pound sand, they’d quit that nonsense.

        I never heard before such sneering at nationalism. If these guys get arrested with some drugs in Cancun, do they really think they are going to get help from the Mexican consulate or are they going to call the American embassy. And they have the same mindless hostility to Russia that you’d expect from some one of low intellect. Keeping the jobs American is welfare that we can’t afford, but we can afford WWIII with Russia. Dumbasses.

        • Funny how they always advocate for this insanity….Until it effects them, right, then it has “gone too far”.

          They are sneering at something they do not understand nor value yet has given them the means for their existence. Those who remove a pillar in their culture/nation they soon understand why it existed to begin with.

          They are useless idiots, jews can not get over the Tsar had just cause for doing what he did as did Putin who kicked out the internationalists from Russia, they are never happy nor are the useful idiots who want us to go to war because “they are “mean to gays””.

  10. GOP has been false front since 1980s. Starting with NAFTA GATT from the federal reserve deindustrialization to third world inferior wages enrich the middleman by doing nothing.

    • I don’t blame the industrialists for moving manufacturing out of ‘Murrica. If offered a half brown workforce with diversity quotas to ensure stupid ones get hired OR an all Asian high IQ workforce from Japan, South Korea or China, which would you pick?

      • Trump already taking control of the federal reserve the power to coin money,regulate the value,and foreign coin,and fix the standard of weights and measures.

        • Is this some kind of magic? End the Fed and pennies rain from heaven? Government policy doesn’t matter if your country is brown.

          Trump has cut off funding for family planning in ‘Murrica and globally. Without those controls in place, the non-White population will explode. The only immigration he talks about these days is Islam. Taken together it means he is appealing to the Religious Right, which is a strategy Republicans have been perusing for decades.

          So I don’t see any reversal of the Third Worldening of ‘Murrica. People just aren’t facing up to reality. All Brown Countries Are Poor.

          • If you ended the Fed in Africa, would Africa suddenly become rich? Africa has half the world’s most productive farmland and half the world’s natural resources, and yet without international aid money Africa would starve.

            There are now more Africans than Chinese.

      • Mr Jackson,

        True enough, though those same Oriental nations which you praise have protective trade-tariffs which the United States currently lacks.

        J.P.

  11. ‘What does this hypothetical tattooed White woman living in a flyover
    country small town have? She has more freedom and equality than any of
    her predecessors. She has a smartphone. And yet, look at where that has
    gotten her. In many ways, she is worse off than her great-grandmother.’

    The Enlightenment (The New England Liberal culture) made the ruination of women their #1 goal, after they ‘freed’ our Negroes.

    In my lifetime I have seen just how far, under the aegis of ‘equality’ & ‘opportunity’ the mannification of woman has gone.

    I’m sorry for the young men, because it’s harder and harder to find feminine women who want to love someone other than their life ambitions.

    I first started to get mifft about this in the 1990s – and one way was how constantly women, on TV, were always portrayed as the heroes, and martial combatants, and figures of authority.

    I finally told my wife, then girlfriend, that I was not going to watch any more of her favourite programs that misportrayed the sexes, and encouraged confusion.

    Of course, at the time, I had no idea who controlled Hollywood, and what they were up to.

    Those were the last years before the internet explosion, and most of us were still completely in the dark about who was doing what, in this country.

    • And I’ll say this, too – I had the good fortune to be raised by a fulltime mama, and know that i was loved, and that someone was ALWAYS there for me, until I got right ready to really walk on my own two legs.

      Few boys have that gift anymore – and I thank The New England Liberal culture, their alliance with The Jewish community, and ‘Free-Trade’ for that.

  12. The Southern Monopoly must rise again…

    And if you don’t believe real sugar is a superior performance enhancement “drug” to the genocidal “sugar” poison we consume now then that “white genocide” meme is a diabolical diversion.

  13. It feels like Trump will be viewed by future generations as someone who set things in motion but was also far too moderate. Automation is going to be a real challenge for anyone who wants to create jobs, so I don’t think a thriving economy is going to placate voters. At some point, real talk is going to become mainstream again and we’re going to see a real reaction to the legacy the baby boomer generation left us with. Maybe by Trump’s second term those barriers will be broken.

  14. I live in a town in southern Illinois that is about 97 to 98 percent white, I wouldn’t say that it is thriving, but to me it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as some of the places I hear about on here are. I seems alright to me, but maybe I’m just used to it.

  15. That awkward moment when a journalistic report from supposedly his own country reads like an excerpt from an anthropological monograph. That’s multiple American nations for you. Still, good reporting.

  16. Youngstown was Jim Traficant’s congressional district. I used to watch C SPAN just to see Traficant’s populist speeches where he he wore leisure suits and a bad toupee. Traficant was a kind of Proto Trump.

    • I really liked Jim Traficant. He really cared about his constituents. He stood up to the Jews to the extent of going to Israel and proving they had the wrong guy when one of his voters was said to have been a death camp guard. It’s not entirely possible that he was killed just for standing up to the Jews. His death was highly suspicious. I mean who runs their tractor and then gets out in front of the tractor in between it and a building while the tractor is in gear and moving????? I have a tractor and it’s hard to get off the thing much less get in front of it while it’s moving.

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