As the poorer, darker people move in to a neighborhood the middle class moves out. If they can afford it, they go to Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey, Florida or California. Those who stay in Brooklyn move southward towards the Atlantic Ocean, yielding more and more of the borough's north and center to poorer blacks. As a few black families move onto a block, the remaining whites fear they will be 'overrun' and the value of their property will decline. Seeing the downhill slide of the neighborhood in the first black face that moves in, they are apt to sell their houses for less than they are worth and complete the self-fulfilling prophecy of declining property values. Others move because they would rather 'live with their own kind. A neighborhood gradually becomes poorer, and the pockets of middle class life amid the poverty diminish in size and number, until another whole section of Brooklyn has deteriorated.
The poverty brings with it crime, as it always does. A middle class neighborhood with its attractive targets, bordering on a poor one will attract criminals, and the margin between the poor and crime-ridden neighborhood and the sate, middleclass one will gradually shift. The poverty and crime advances, crushing everything in its patn. The middle class liberal knows poverty breeds crime, but he remembers his own poor-but-honest background and begins to associate the crime with the black race. Of course he is quick to point out that "not all blacks are bad. There are good and bad blacks just as there are good and bad in all races." Security and safety are certainly minimal requirements for the good life, so the increasing crime, coupled with decreasing police protection caused by the budget crunch, sends the middle class whites packing.
There are sections of the city which can match any slum in the world for terrible conditions. Bush-wick--block after block of burned-out buildings and garbage-filled empty lots--looks like a city bombed to rubble in World War Two. East New York, Oceanhill-Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other ghettoes are a dark stain on the pages of our society. How can such deprivation exist among general affluence?
Much of the northern half of Brooklyn is turning into Bushwicks. The white neighborhoods in the south half--Midwood, Flatlands, Brighton Beach, Mill Basin, Canarsie, Bay Ridge--look north and fear, because the poverty seems to be creeping ever closer. And for many of these people there's nowhere left to run. They're willing to make their stand, as they put it, because somebody has to. The older people especially, with fixed incomes and meager lives, lock themselves in at night to avoid becoming victims and tremble at approaching footsteps in the day--they have no place to run to. They're ready to die, if they can die in Brooklyn.
THE PROBLEMS of Brooklyn are the problems of all the older cities in this nation, all the northeastern industrial cities. Brooklyn's problems have come to a head sooner, and involve more people than those of other cities, so they're harder to cope with. Even if the borough, and New York City itself, had the most capable, honest and dedicated leaders, it would probably founder helpless before such massive social forces. And Brooklyn doesn't have such selfless and creative leadership: it is a machine city, and the Democratic organization hands out political plums for services rendered.
New York has a new mayor now, and he means well, but it remains to be seen if Uncle Ed can cope with the city's problems all by himself. The borough of Brooklyn can't be saved by people in Washington, or Albany, or even Manhattan; it has to save itself at the grass roots level, through community organizations and the spirit of self-help. That spark of life just doesn't seem to be present anymore.
They say that when a civilization is in its death throes, the crazies come out. The last few years, the crazies have come out in Brooklyn. Stories of octogenarians raped, beaten and killed by prepubescent hoods are now commmonplace. Stories of whole blocks of buildings set afire by arsonists, forcing hundreds of families into the street, are a dime a dozen. It takes a really terrifying crime to shake up any Brookiyners nowadays. It takes a David Berkowitz.
David Berkowitz, a nice Jewish boy, the son of Sam, got his kicks by killing young people out on dates with his Bulldog revolver. Except for the last killing, all the murders occurred in Queens and Brooklyn, and had whole neighborhoods terrified, whole groups of young women positive they were next, whole squads of vigilantes ready to kill anyone fitting the scanty description of the killer. Berkowitz held a gun to the city.
But there were other crazies in 1977. The people who looted during the power blackout, for example. Good liberals justified the looting by pointing out that these people were 'hungry,' and were expressing 'racial rage.' Except for the fact that the looters took televisions, stereos and couches, not food, and the fact that T.V. news cameras clearly showed not rage but actual gaiety on the faces of the looters, this theory holds up. Of course, right knees jerked as rapidly as the left ones, as some observers claimed that the looters stole because they were human jackals, amoral animals, the scum of the earth. Newsweek quoted one woman as saying the looters were "coming across Bushwick Avenue like buffalos."
About two months ago five men armed with hatchets attacked an ambulance waiting at a red light in Eastern Brooklyn. The driver sped off unharmed and the night swallowed up the assailants as rapidly as it had made them appear. No reason was given for the incident.
White backlash, neoconservatism, a national move to the right. It's all the same pnenomenon, and it boils down to fear and disillusionment in white urban America. Liberal reformers, and the society that has gone along with the ideas and plans of the liberals, see crime and poverty and continued racial tension despite all their efforts in the '50s and '60s to create the Good Society. The renewed interest in ethnicity to distract from the issue of race and class, the stiffening resistance to affirmative action (or reverse discrimination, depending on your viewpoint), the call for more law and order, the idea that the federal government tried to do too much too quickly in the '60s and must pull back now, the white flight to suburbia, all fit together into one unhappy picture. Understanding Brooklyn, where the battleground is big, the players easy to spot and the conflict starting early, helps one to understand how the foul weed of neoconservatism flourishes in soil once overgrown with liberal begonias.