Lima, Ohio: A portrait of not getting by in the Rust Belt

[memphis]

The first paragraph has the answer.

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Poor people should move to where the jobs are.  And don't give me the BS line that people are too poor to move.

And where might those jobs be? Should the poor pack up and move to San Francisco?

[memphis]

It's still amazing to me how people in Ohio think that a quarter black population constitutes some sort of negro ghetto. A quarter black here is a mass affluent McMansion suburb.

[memphis]

It's still amazing to me how people in Ohio think that a quarter black population constitutes some sort of negro ghetto. A quarter black here is a mass affluent McMansion suburb.

People in Ohio (people in general actually) don't think about towns as "a quarter black." They think "there's way more black people than what I normally see" and connect that to run down, urban environments. I would hope most of them don't think one is a cause of the other, but they probably do.

Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that people are doing statistics in their head as they judge which neighborhoods are nice and which aren't. We all compare things to what we are accustomed to, and it's just that my own experience would lead me to see a town like Lima and think "Gosh, there certainly are a lot of white people here." Over the summer, I went to Six Flags in Saint Louis and I had that exact reaction. I wouldn't say it bothered me, but it was very noticeable and a little bit shocking. Except for some churches and their accompanying private schools, you'd be very hard pressed to find any public space like that here.

[memphis]

Six Flags in StLouis is the whitest place in the entire area (except for some of the expensive enclaves in the west county...Chesterfield, Clayton...others).  Do black people go to amusement parks at anywhere near the same rate crackers do?

(did you enjoy the Screamin Eagle, Tom's Twister and the Highland Fling?...I've been to that Six Flags like 30 times....good times)

Unfortunately, it's the closest amusement park to Memphis, so I've been several times as well. It's pretty fun. We used to have a small one, Libertyland, here, but it closed about 10 years ago. It opened for America's bicentennial, and, so had a Colonial America theme. It was good enough for my childhood, but it didn't really compare to a Six Flags or Duff Gardens or any of the big deal parks. There was never a shortage of blacks there, and white people like to cite the excessive numbers of them (as they do for any closed business) for the establishment's eventual demise. In any case, I have no doubt that Six Flags, especially over the summer when children are not in school, attracts white people from a very large radius. If you're bored, take a look at some Census demographic data from a few random rural counties within a few hours drive of St Louis. In rural Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Kentucky you'll find a lot of white people, which helps to explain the park's demographics. Standing in lines for rides, it's impossible to miss that Midwestern people are also a lot taller, blonder, and better educated than people in the South too. Thanks, Germany.