The sad irony of this story is that often those blacks who moved into predominantly white neighborhoods did so because they were actually ‘running’ from the black neighborhoods they lived in. They wanted a better life. You could call it ‘black flight’. The problem is that the ghetto often followed them.
In the mid 80s, there was one black family in our coastal Massachusetts town. I went to school with the kids. They heard the N word quite often but they had white friends and were never beaten up by whites. I know a guy here in Missouri who went to school in East St Louis for a few years in the mid 80s and was the only white kid. Ran for his life every day and got beat up quite often. The black teachers were almost as bad as the kids.
Their teenage kids seek out friends who "look like them", and invite them to the neighborhood.
In many cases it wasn’t the people who moved to the neighborhood, it was the friends and relatives they brought with them that were the problem. Saw that myself. The Black family that moved in down the street was a nice middle class family, but sadly they had a number of friends from the hood that weren’t. And they became an issue real fast. The family tried to jettison some of them, but a few were family members. We moved pretty soon after their arrival. The block went down hill fast.
” The problem is that the ghetto often followed them.”
It always follows them.