A hallmark of being high on pot is that you think the things you say and do are brilliant, creative, exceptional, wonderful, and usually very funny. Maybe it is a contact high from the pot bill in Hartford, but something has affected the mental capacities of the DesegretateCT group.
Immediately, the very name, “desegregate” is wrong headed. They cannot show any segregation in Connecticut. As is so typical of so-called progressives, they make stuff up as they go along. “If I say there is segregation, there is segregation” says Sara Bronin, the founder. She is clearly related to Humpty-Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland, who defined words as he saw fit. Instead, consider that there is a full geographic distribution of all ethnic groups in Connecticut.
For background, the government of the city of New York keeps an “ethnographic” map of the city. One would know this as an “Italian section”, a “Chinese section”, etc. There are some 140 different ethnicities and nationalities clustered in every part of New York City. So, there are places in Manhattan where Brazilians have clustered. There are places in Queens where there are Bangladeshis, and for Sikhs, and for Koreans, and for Nigerians and for Cambodians. The list goes on. These clusters persist, but they change over time. Are they forced to live in these places? Are they “segregated?” No, they are not, except in the pot-soaked brain of Sara Bronin.
Spread out over a larger area, Connecticut is in a similar situation because what pot-head Sara Bronin believes is segregation is instead normal human behavior in building communities. You will find Portugese, Pakistani, Albanian, Polish, Russian communities and many others that go well beyond the coarse and dishonest portrayal depicted by Sara Bronin. She relies on the misleading maps that show the preponderance of three groups: White, Black, and Hispanic. That’s it, that is as deep as she dare go if she is going to make any kind of case for discrimination.
Moreover, she assumes a simple one to one correspondence between poverty and her imagined segregation along racial lines. Someone needs to explain to her, if she is ever not high on pot, that the Nigerian communities in America economically outperform white Americans, and others. She also needs to know that black secretaries are paid more than white secretaries. The number of black politicians voted for by white voters is a whole other discussion. Politicians? Local government? Planning and Zoning? Does any of this come together in Bronin’s pot-soaked brain? Not a chance.
Plus, DesegregateCT fails to engage in a clear discussion of the relationships between racial discrimination and income. The problem is that what she calls racial discrimination is economic discrimination. Did the co-founder of BLM get kicked out of the “all white” (don’t forget the “white hispanics!”) neighborhood where she bought a $1.4 million home? Of course not. If you can afford the home, and can maintain it properly, you are welcome to the community.
DesegrateCT’s problem is that if they cannot correctly diagnose the housing issues in Connecticut, they will only come up with wrong solutions which will make the situation worse.
As a case study, the city of Stamford is offered as a counter-example to Sara Bronin’s delusions. Walk the streets, Sara, go to the doors. Look at the names on the mailboxes. You will find people of all persuasions living next to each other. This didn’t happen overnight. This did not happen because of 30-8g. The city is a complex mixture of some people building additions, taking boarders, small construction projects that combine multi-family units and single family units on the same street without ruining the character of the neighborhood. This has all been done without the benefit of DesegregateCT’s proposals. Your ideas suck. Go home, and keep getting high with your husband.