ZONING Makes Berkeley A RACIST Dump, While Posing As Progressive

A century ago or so the city of Berkeley, known as the most progressive, made decisive progress towards apartheid by introducing “Zoning Laws”. Those amounted to separate the housing of the masters from that of the slaves also known as servants, or “colored”. Namely much of the city was “zoned” for the wealthy as “single family homes”. At this point, in 2021, the zoning for “single family homes” is down to around 50%. I have heaped public scorn on this in Berkeley and adjoining city, and the pseudo “Democrats” are now becoming aware of the racist aspect of this policy… and that it is more progressive to change these racist laws than to talk about the supposed ongoing pain of slavery 146 years after it was outlawed all over the USA. If people are deranged psychos because of something that happened to an ancestor five generations ago, they need to see a shrink. However if a city perpetuates racist laws because it only focuses on hereditary culpability, something which does not exist, that’s an ongoing crime.

This statistics is from all over the San Francisco Bay Area, population eight million (roughly Switzerland in population, but with a bigger GDP). What this say is this: in area with zoning approaching nearly 100% as “single family homes”, there are basically NO “blacks”. It is all white with 20% “Asian”. Nota bene, the “blacks” had ancestors in the USA generally for at least two centuries (from the coming of slaves)… Whereas the “Asians” are typically fresh immigrants averaging one or two generations in the USA.

The USA is a racist country. How do I know this? Well, start with government documents asking you what your “race” is. Of course in a state like California where one can meet blonde “blacks” with green eyes and German-Jewish-Cherokee ancestry what race is would seem beyond challenging, but rather impossible. But the “one blood drop rule” comes to the rescue of hopeless observation: if one has, or seem to have, one African ancestor, one is “black”.

The Nazis were not as drastic: On 11 April 1933 the Nazi regime promulgated the First Supplementary Decree for the Execution of the Law of Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, colloquially known as the First Racial Definition. This implementing decree stipulated that a person would be regarded as a racial Jew for purposes of the law^[1] if he had one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent, i.e. if the ancestor was “of the Jewish faith.” So one could get away from the definition of being a Jew if none of one’s grandparent was considered to be of the Jewish faith. That enabled millions of Germans more or less descended from Jews to survive. 189,000 recognized as Jews served in the Wehrmacht, though (35,000 Jews were turned into “Honorary Aryan”, thanks to Hitler’s pen… such as the Marshall who invaded Norway for Hitler).

But in the USA, oh, no, no: if you had an African in your ancestry, you are a “black” and your ancestors are slaves and you deserve reparations. Never mind that Obama’s father was a Kenyan who was called to Harvard: that makes his daughters, who descend from slave masters also slaves who should ask for reparations from Harvard (presumably, in this crazy logic).

That people of color “live with the consequences“, and that those should be changed is valid when the institutionalized mentality is still in place… But claiming one’s ethnicity, per se, makes one a victim is sheer racism.

And using racism to fight racism is worse than barking up the wrong tree. For example, zoning laws, kept in place by so-called “Democrats” are sheer racism, apartheid… and need to be changed right away. They also constitute a MUCH GRAVER CONSPIRACY THAN “Q-ANON”. By orders of magnitude. So so-called “Democrats” should clean up their own racist conspiracies, instead of brandishing red herrings.. such as Q-Anon.

Talking instead about imaginary victims of enslavement three centuries ago is grotesque, when millions go homeless or without health care… from so-called “Democratic” policies. The somewhat disgusting city of Berkeley instituted ZONING “laws” a century ago.

They still have them, and thousands living in the world’s worst condition while hyper wealthy Pelosi pontificate, a mile away from the worst filth in the world (according to the United Nations, no less!)

When some individuals who are themselves racist, because they only view as “mattering”, peculiar skin colors, or ethnicities, or religions, come to whine they descend from “slaves” or descend from some some holocaust, and thus need to rule with a conspiracy of their own, they show the wrong way. Many of the slave descendants also descend from slave masters… Who in them are we going to trust and moan about, since they claim they are perfused and animated by the condition of these long dead ancestors? And many of the holocausted generations ago, had ancestors who just whined, whereas others fought. Personally I descend from neither slave or slave master… Yet I was visited by much greater trauma, as many in my family fought fascism and paid the ultimate price…

My young uncle, Daniel Dondey, a star geologist, and a pacifist progressive friendly to, and liked by, the rebels, was only 28 years old when some fanatical fascist(s) shot him in the head. He was like a big brother to me, the only one I had. Yes, I spent the rest of my life being traumatized by that tragedy. However, I harbor no hate, just a passion for understanding how to avoid such horror, and extreme dislike for behaviors promoting ignorance and violence. My uncle would have certainly agreed. I should say, he agrees, because he keeps on living in my head. He may have died, from the hate of others, but I keep on waging the war against hatred with an ardor I would certainly not have experienced otherwise.

The essence of racism is exclusion; on the basis of mostly imagined or superficial criterions, a group is identified and excluded… using alienation, also known as the “cancel culture”. Now the plutocrat propagandists have succeeded to persuade the bleating herd of self-described “progressives” and so-called “Democrats” that alienation is progress and media owned or financed by the world’s richest families, is its prophet! A new religion, that of the Golden Ass!

Patrice Ayme

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P/S1: Some reply I made to some pseudo-thinker, the type who reads in one minute what should take an hour, who had called me a racist, after seeing the title of “ENSLAVED BUT SAVED” (where I explained, from detailed evidence, that the 388,000 souls imported from the African slave trading system to North America slave owners would have been probably killed in Africa, because the continent was then operating at its ecological limit; that does not excuse that said slaves were not liberated right away; nor of course the enslavement of succeeding generations, soon to be millions…). So here is my reply to that vicious insulter:

You are extremely offensive to me by misinterpreting grotesquely what you call my diatribe like 100%. I did not ever insult you before, but you just insulted me. Insulting people by asserting they said what they did not say, especially when accusing them to be racist, is itself racist. Replacing someone’s correct discourse by outrageous lies and vicious racist statements is one of the pitfalls one should not fall into if one is for true progress.

Anyway, you are just an American, so you play holier than thou, insulting people, to pose as morally superior as to foster your racist agenda. I am an African, and Africans understand very well what I am saying, about US racism. Progressive Africans understand it particularly well (as one of the recent links I had in the essay showed) If you have “no mental space” to understand something, then, at least, do not attack people by associating them to racist Jim Crow and the like. Hurling racism at others is often the first sign of racism. In Africa, not mentioning the skin color of people comes with mother’s milk. In racist USA, skin color is a perverse religion, as with the religions of “origins”.

As I said, I started the “1619” idea, so I am aware of the problems of institutionalized perversity, and your assault, against someone you chose to misunderstand completely is a demonstration of it. And your ignorance of what “indentured servitude” consisted of is no excuse either. Like the haters from all over, you do not realize you make someone into a monster, just because of your own desire to do so, combined with historical ignorance.

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P/S2: [For non US readers, the symbol of the “Democratic” Party is the… ass! Hence my allusion to the “Golden Ass” instead of the “Golden Calf” found in the Bible’s Old Testament (And the Republicans, of which Lincoln was one, is the elephant…]

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For more background, Berkeleyside can be consulted:

In 1917, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Buchanan v. Warley decision that it was illegal for municipalities to use zoning for purposes of racial segregation. Yet because Berkeley’s zoning plan was not explicitly racial, the ruling did not stop Berkeley from being zoned for low-density in East Berkeley and high-density in the flats in order to maintain the racial and class order.

“The classic and explicit arguments for zoning were the need to ensure public safety and protect the health and the general welfare of the population,” wrote Hirt. However, “racial and class prejudices played a key part in the emerging zoning story, since it was minorities and the poor who were perceived as the greatest danger to property values in general and to single-family residential areas in particular.”

Zoning was not the only mechanism used by private interests to segregate the city for their benefit. Racially restrictive covenants, which were fundamental to the development of the zoning plan, and later redlining, shaped Berkeley to a large degree. In 1925 and 1926 the California Real Estate magazine praised the Berkeley Realty Board for its “service” to the “community at large” for its ability “to organize a district of some twenty blocks under the covenant plan as protection against invasion of Negroes and Asiatics.”

The vision of McDuffie and the real estate owners of East Berkeley was largely achieved. Through legal means, they created a plan for land use that reinforced the racial and class divisions from which they directly benefited. Unlike restrictive covenants and redlining, the zoning code remains today.

Tags: Zoning Laws