I recently wrote an article about what it was like for elderly white citizens, but particularly women, to be left behind in a formerly all-white neighborhood that had turned predominately black by 1980. In short, the experience was harrowing. It included harassment, burglary, robbery, home invasion, physical assault, and sexual violence. Most on the Left would prefer to forget about that saga. They prefer to remember an image of Martin Luther King Jr. walking arm-in-arm with fellow protesters through the streets of Selma as emblematic of the period.

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However, Michelle Obama is not shy about educating us on just how it was for her growing up on the south side of Chicago. Here is an excerpt of her response to a question about it:

[U]nbeknownst to us we grew up in the period as I write of called white flight that as families like ours, upstanding families like ours, you know, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better as we moved in white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented and I always stop there when I talk about this out in the world because you know I want to remind white folks that y’all were coming running from us you know because this family with all the values that you read about you were running from us and you still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in the families in Pilsen the families that are coming from other places to try to do better but because we can so easily wash over who we really were because of the color of our skin, you know because of the texture of our hair you know that’s what divides countries artificially artificial things that don’t even touch on the values that people bring to life and so yeah I feel a sense of injustice and you know this when you are young, you know people are running from you , you know, and you can see it, you can see it all of a sudden because we grew up with friends of all races when we first moved in….

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Well, she has me pegged correctly. I would be running too from someone like Michelle if she assailed me only once with a self-serving tirade like that.

The best response to Michelle’s version of history is to look at the crime statistics of that period. I will focus on the black-versus-white homicide rate since 1960 (see Figure 1). The white homicide rate is the green line that reaches its peak in 1980, with seven homicides per 100,000. The black homicide rate is the orange line that peaks at more than five times the white homicide rate. It was no hyperbole when commentators at the time observed that young blacks had a better chance of surviving in the jungles of Vietnam with the Viet Cong shooting at them than on the streets of Chicago, Detroit, or you name it.

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Figure 1: ChatGPT-generated using BJS (also here) and Pew Research data.

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It was not until black imprisonment rates climbed sufficiently that the black homicide rate came down (see Figure 2). Note that the declining percentage of young black males in the population could have been a contributing factor too.

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Figure 2: ChatGPT-generated using BJS data.

It is nice that Michelle has it all figured out. White people were running from her because of her black skin and texture of her hair, and now they are fawning over her because of her insightful wisdom. At least that is the case with her newfound friends on Martha’s Vineyard and former President George W. Bush.

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Image generated by ChatGPT.