Once again, I ask

Who exactly are the racists?

(This was supposed to appear on Friday, but thanks to the Saudi DoS attack, it had to wait until today) 

Danny Westneat is a Seattle Times columnist. Needless to say, he is a liberal. Or maybe he is a ‘progressive’, I sure as hell can’t tell the difference. You can read my previous rants about Westneat here.

In Friday’s Westneat column, Danny interviews a couple members of Seattle’s “African American’ community about one of the city’s longest standing, majority-black neighborhoods being “Invaded” (yes, they actually use that word) by white folks and how these community members feel about it.

While you really need to read the whole insulting piece, here are some quotes:

Stephens, 59, a retired school counselor, says he feels like the Indians after the settlers showed up.

“I don’t know how to put this politely, but we black folks feel like we’re being invaded,” he said. “You are coming in and taking over. We feel lost. We feel it’s inevitable the area’s going to become all white.”

The retired reverend of Mount Zion Baptist Church, Samuel McKinney, is the bluntest. He said the old Central District, poor as it was, didn’t need fixing up. As soon as money started to pour in, he knew blacks would be pushed out.

“Urban renewal always means Negro removal,” he said. He added the term “gentrification” means “return of the gentry” — a privileged class that insists on setting the rules.

I called Stephens later and asked: Have we given up on Martin Luther King’s dream that we all live side by side?

For now, he said. It’s a dream deferred. Whites have so much power and money they try to take over everything. And blacks have so little power and money they get overrun.

“We aren’t ready for integration,” Stephens concluded. “Neither of us.”

When the Analog Wife and I first moved into Seattle about nine years ago from the south end of the county, she found a house in the Central District that she absolutely loved for a rental rate that was well within our price range.

We missed getting it by about 30 minutes. We instead settled on the more ‘asian-centric’ (as Westneat would put it) Beacon Hill neighborhood.

I’m guess I can count myself as lucky that I never became “An Invader”