Joseph Farah reviews Jack Cashill's book on 'white flight' realities – 'Untenable'
Longtime WND columnist and author Jack Cashill is a lot like me. We can reminisce about the Jersey Shore, those "Wildwood Days" growing up, or comparing Newark and Paterson for hours on end. We're kindred spirits, raised by different mothers and fathers in a not-so-different universe at approximately the same time and place.But I think I only met him once or twice – in Kansas City.
You see, Jack and I were cut out of the same cloth, so to speak.
We were both raised New Jersey boys and never got over the experience – the good, the bad and the ugly.
I've admired Jack much over the years. I wish I had told him that more often. I think I will after just having read his latest exquisite book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities." This a very serious book – in fact the first of its kind – on the subject of "white flight" written from the perspective of those forced to flee.
Yes, I suppose some white people left cities because of racism – probably a distinct minority. Others, like the Cashill family, left with regret because they loved Newark.
"By the end of the 1960s," Cashill recalls, "the state had razed many of our homes, mine included. A lethal riot had scorched the neighborhood. My friends and their families had scattered to the winds, and a twenty-foot-deep trench as wide as a tennis court forever severed the north end of Pigs (short for Pigtails Alley) from the south. To the degree anyone beyond our world noticed, it was to scold us for our own displacement."
Cashill took his title from this exchange:
"I asked one lifelong friend, a loyal Democrat, why he and his widowed mother finally left our block in the early 1970s, twenty years after the first African American families moved in. He searched for a minute for the right set of words and then simply said, 'It became untenable.' When I asked what 'untenable' meant, he answered, 'When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that's untenable.'"
What more is there to say.
"There is no understanding what really happened to Newark and other troubled cities without knowing a little about the white ethnics who inhabited those cities and their attachment to the neighborhoods they lived in," writes Cashill. "Almost to a person, they or their kin came to America for the very quality now sadly absent into many cities: freedom, security, the rule of law, opportunity."
Again, Cashill points out some timely common sense.
"Of course, too, white ethnics were not the only ones to 'flee,'" hel writes. "Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians left the cities for much the same reasons urban whites did, but only whites were shamed for leaving, thus the word 'white' is in the book's title."
Do you want to read a truthful telling about the continuing epic horror story of our once-great cities? You will get it in Cashill's book, his 17th, by the way.
For me, "Untenable" rings a familiar bell. I came from Paterson, New Jersey. All of my relatives on my father's side did. They stayed there most of their lives – it was familiar, it had great Syrian food, but the terror rousted them. All their kids left Paterson in one generation.
Cashill has written a great book. I could speak to it more personally, but I haven't. It hurts too much to relive it. But not for Cashill. As always, he's an honest truth teller.
As our major cities and neighborhoods continue to burn and fester with heightening crime, drugs and homelessness, this book represents an important lesson – from one generation to another.
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