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A particular area of a nearby metro region became the topic of a conversation I had with a coworker, who I know happens to lean quite liberally. As a matter of principle, I tend to find ways of communicating my political and ethical views that are difficult for liberals to spaz about. It's not that I avoid irritating people; rather, it's that I tend to offer zero rope by which to hang me. If I can't do that, I leave the conversation/s.

When it came to discussing this part of town (a predominantly impoverished and black neighborhood that has been in an economic and demographic free fall for decades), I simply said: "It's a bad part of town." I anticipated the possibility that this person might respond negatively, in a way similar to how woke idiots responded to the 'unjust blanket claims' of Trump when he insulted Haiti (calling it generally a 'shithole'). Surprisingly, this person agreed without the slightest sign of discomfort, and not even an indication she might have considered her agreement to imply her assent to something politically incorrect or racially insensitive. After this, I began to pay attention and noticed this more and more. Here we have a low SES black neighborhood filled with the so-called victims of white oppression, yet when I denigrate this place in a specifically-worded way, even the woke agree.

This got me thinking, what about this makes it acceptable to these people? When we say of some place, "It's a bad area", what do we mean? If it tends almost always not to offend liberals, but instead to refer to some objective fact/s, what are they? It cannot be that the area is bad because of its racial makeup. That would be offensive. It cannot be bad just because it is poor, because that fails to designate what we actually mean here (which is not that a bad area = a poor area). Instead, it has to refer to some level of danger that both sides of the political aisle accept is a fact of being in that area.

The liberal must implicitly accept that what makes this area bad is that it is unambiguously dangerous to be there - at least sufficiently more dangerous on average that it justifies being called 'bad' relative to other places. This is an interesting kind of peek into the mind of the liberal. In any case that the conservative person says this, we can be reasonably sure that he/she is using politically correct language to say less than he/she might prefer to. What's interesting is that this blanket statement is politically correct, because it doesn't offend even the most woke. The judgment that it is a bad area must refer to a danger level. Therefore it must refer to crime (we don't say an area is a bad area because it is challenging, side-scrolling Mario level). If it is a more dangerous area because of crime, and the area is predominantly black, then we also mean the area is bad because we understand it to stem from the threat of black violence.

So, even the liberal who acknowledges this judgment without blinking is really agreeing to a general distinction. The distinction is a subtle one. It becomes apparent only when we recognize that communities of poor whites are never referred to in the same way. We never hear someone - even the most smug, affluent, and woke idiots - refer to a poor white neighborhood as a 'bad area'. I challenge you to think of a time that you've ever heard someone refer to a rural hick town as a 'bad area'. It simply doesn't happen. I'm interested in what this language implies about people's actual beliefs.

Now, we might hear other complaints about the impoverished white neighborhood. We might hear people say, "That's a backward place", or, "...that's a redneck town." But neither of these specifies the same thing. These complaints don't act as warnings against going there, or that you would be in greater danger being there. They aren't things that are spoken to travelers or professional drivers to warn them to 'watch their ass' while being there. Instead, these complaints mean something like, "They don't agree with us there." Or, "those aren't your people." But never do you hear such broad claims made as "those are bad areas", to indicate the danger level we all agree exists in 'bad' black areas.

Our language, even between political opponents, agrees with this. And in a situation where the rubber meets the road, per se, such as when a business (with liabilities to its employees) has to discuss sending staff into such places, nobody can avoid the brute fact that we mean literal danger. Literal danger from predominantly black regions due to unambiguously higher rates of violent crime. Are such caveats ever discussed when a business has to send its employees to a 'redneck town'. Say, for example, do utilities companies ever require getting local police escorts to go into the 'hick town'. No. But they do this frequently in the 'bad areas'. And where are the liberal protestors chasing these police escorts, shouting things like, "You don't follow the power company into Hickville, USA!" There are no such complaints, because everyone knows what 'bad area' means. And when we don't think we stand to gain any internet points for speaking up, we find that nobody does. It's just accepted.

Suppose that someone had desired to protest this...oh, wait. Protesting this would mean white liberals would need to go to those 'bad' areas. And they don't. Because they know that these judgments are true, and their avoidance acts as confirmation.

So what is it that distinguishes the bad black area from the backward white area? The former becomes bad because it's dangerous. The latter area is sometimes treated like some vaguer kind of danger because it is culturally different. My question is, if both areas tend to be below the poverty line, why can't liberals attack such white areas for being actually violent? Well, because they prove not to be on average. Instead, we find that congregations of the respective races congregate for completely different reasons.

Why do impoverished white areas tend mostly to be rural and not urban? A simple answer is clear: because when white people get together with an urban philosophy, they don't form drug-addled impoverished slums. They make cities. The cities that become bad black areas were the products, originally, built by whites with a tendency to urbanize. Such whites have one value set, which probably involves entrepreneurship and wealth-seeking. Contrast this with poorer white rural communities.

Poor white communities are disadvantaged in terms of wealth (in relative terms), but this does not equate with poorer white folk desiring a change. The reason white people have enduring less-affluent communities is because they have an enduring value set that resists urbanization. There are many explanations. Lack of education. Skepticism about a variety of things. A value for privacy, for space, for land ownership, for a connection with nature, a love of farming or the inheritance of an agricultural tradition. There may be religious factors at play as well. None of this is meant to account for the issue of poverty or to explain it (this is not an economic argument).

The claim goes something more like this: poor white communities tend not to be 'bad' because most of these whites do not feel trapped. They possess the intelligence to grasp their own situation, and if things had been bad enough, they would adapt and change. The poorest whites in the industrial revolution did go to cities, and with the rise of unionization, better work conditions (and so on), whites found a way to establish a new equilibrium in a new metropolitan kind of habitat.

Why are poor white communities often clustered in rural settings, relative to bad black communities being urban? Because blacks cannot escape urban environments. Violence tends to be a response to a lack of all other means to adapt. What this suggests is that if the situation for blacks in urban environments is so adverse as to lead to gangland 'bad' areas, then they would leave and find other opportunities if they could not make ends meet there.

I am thinking now of the poorest white people I knew growing up. I was raised in a small, rural town of poor-ish white people. Even the worst off held jobs, made steady incomes and could afford to house themselves, buy groceries, basically lead a life. Were they living high off the hog? Absolutely not. But they did not require tax-funded welfare programs. Even the least educated of the men I knew there could secure jobs on farms, or in construction. I knew men that had begun as roofers and went on to start their own independent businesses. These were not smart men by comparison. There may have been plenty of room for the critical person to say, "This business would be X% more productive if he'd get his shit together." Regardless, that roofing-company owner went home each night to a home that he could keep lighted and heated, and a family that he could feed by the sweat of his brow.

Some of these people may have possessed no chance of escaping the hard life and 'making it' in the city (even if they'd wanted to). One thing that appears to distinguish these poor whites from poor blacks is a general self-consciousness of their situation, their lot and their place in the hierarchy. Whereas this white roofer would budget his money to make his life work out, his poor black counterparts in the city, supported by tax-payer funded welfare, would spend their money on extravagancies to present themselves to the world as something different than what they are. A fantasy of becoming professional athletes, rappers, or lottery winners, fueled by welfare, subsidized by even the income of the poor whites, all resulting in a generational cycle of failure to adapt to the actual world.

To be sure, there is no longer today any shortage of the lowest denominator of urban whites who are now mimicking this behavior. It's funny how if you make such ways of adapting available to people, you not only encourage those strategies, you actually create classes of people for those strategies. I'd be willing to wager that the class of poor whites we think of as city trash, or 'wiggers', those who seem to us to be like their black counterparts, didn't arrive on the scene until sometime after the welfare state became reality in the 1960s. Every so often, we'll see a news story about a poor white couple who committed murder or a robbery. This is almost never in small-town America. Typically, these individuals who look so freaked out and wired in their photos, are a product of hard drug addiction - finding their way into urban or metro environments like parasites, precisely because those environments and their social programs facilitate their survival.

Poor whites, for the most part, learn to adapt themselves, their values, their attitudes, and their strategies to the facts of life. That might mean a skeptical attitude toward 'city folk'. It might mean a 'backward' way of life. It might mean a higher religiosity and some behaviors that more educated and affluent people think of as 'regressive'. Whatever criticisms you'd issue, it must be acknowledged that this way of life represents a strategy. Even if it isn't fashionable or desirable for you. It might result in making country bumpkins.

But it never results in 'bad areas'.