Falling apart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution expanded on Trump’s assertion that John Lewis’s congressional district is “in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)” a few days ago.
The Democrat’s district includes parts of Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton counties – and most of the city of Atlanta – as well as Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur and Morrow. The district has several of Atlanta’s most prominent gems, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the King Center and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And it has the bulk of Georgia’s higher education institutions: Emory University, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Georgia Tech and Georgia State University are all in the 5th Congressional District. It is also where many of the state’s Fortune 500 companies are based, including Coca Cola Co., Southern Co. and Delta Air Lines.
Um. Er. So not really in such horrible shape then. Not actually falling apart then. Kind of the opposite. Five colleges and universities, and CocaCola, and Delta, and the CDC.
Ah yes but does it have any Trump Towers?
It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters that his supporters believe it. Because Trump has said it, many people (millions/!!) we believe it’s a fact. For (too)many people, this will be the first they have ever heard of John Lewis and they will now “know” these “facts” about him and his district.
Hi. I’m a long-time lurker (since, maybe 2014?), first-time poster.
I’m actually from the Morrow/Ellenwood area of Clayton County. I live and grew up in Ellenwood; went to and graduated from high school in Morrow. Since 2011 or so, the Georgia Republicans redistricted my area to be a part of John Lewis’ district: my area used to be a part of David Scott’s (another black Democratic Representative) 13th district up until then.
Even the black folks in the metro area like looking down on Clayton County: they like claiming we’re “ghetto” and that the more Republican, whiter parts of the metro area are “better” and have more to offer. We’ve always been Democratic, even when it was white-dominated. Morrow, I think, still has an old white mayor. We’re the place that was where Gone with the Wind was supposed to have taken place. A major state highway and part of US 19/41 here is called Tara Boulevard. Our county seat, Jonesboro, where Tara Blvd. runs through, has some Confederate stuff, but it’s very, very downplayed compared to most other parts of the state that like to hype it up. We have hit into hard times ever since the airlines fallout from 9/11, but we’re barely coming back up now. We lost the only Target in our county area to the ubiquitous Wal-Marts and various dollar stores in our area, and some Asian farmers market is moving into the lot to take its place. The rapper Wakka Flocka is from Riverdale, another place that gets trashed as “ghetto,” but is actually where most of our major county medical/hospital base is. Hines Ward is from Forest Park, where Fort Gillem is; he used to play basketball with my brothers and their Lao friends back in the day.
It’s mostly a black area now, but it used to be a place where you could see the Ku Klux Klan back in the late ’80s, when my family moved here from Atlanta. My family moved to Atlanta from Nebraska and from Nigeria to go to school. My parents survived the Biafran War in the ’60s as teens and young adults, then came here to study on student visas. They ended up getting green cards from the Reagan Administration and stayed. My older brothers were 4 and 5 when they came to the States in ’80; I was born in Atlanta in ’84. My mother got her Bachelor’s from Georgia State; my father got his Master’s from what is now Clark Atlanta University.
It’s funny how race and class works. My brothers were bullied by other black kids in Southwest Atlanta when they first came here for being “African Booty Scratchers” and the teachers did nothing because they secretly agreed with them (I guess that’s the part the Trumpettes would call “crime-ridden” and “failing,” even though even that place is doing better than it used to), and then, when we all moved to Morrow, and the mostly-then-white working class folks treat us a lot better, but then, my older brother might run into teachers trying to apologize for the Old South or try to punish him for having a smart mouth. Then, I go attend the same elementary, middle and high school seven years later, after the Olympics came and gone, and the teachers and students are now mostly black, some Vietnamese, and I get teachers who are mostly indifferent and are just there to collect a pay check. The white women teachers are there to help me out, to try to catch me when I fall… I still remember my senior English teacher telling me that semi-colons are too advanced for my classmates, and that, there was a light at the end of the tunnel for me, I need to keep on going: she helped me graduate. We spent Tuesday, 9/11, almost every class I had after 9 am, mostly watching the news unfolding on TV. 9/11 happened in my senior year.
My high school valedictorian was a Vietnamese immigrant girl who was in some of my classes; my salutorian was a black girl I once knew back in elementary school. My high school gets bad ratings online, and we have a bad graduation rate (like… 40-50% of us graduate? I forget), but we still get folks who end up attending Harvard or some other big schools. Jonesboro High School has one of the best Debate Teams in the whole country.
Right now, I’m a career postal worker, but I’ve been home for three months now, waiting on whether or not I’ll end up qualifying for disability based on my anxiety attacks. My anxiety may be the reason I never finished college: a lot of my mom’s Nigerian friends’ kids that I grew up with all went to college and graduated. My distant cousin’s about to finish her Master’s at UGA (University of Georgia) in Public Administration, same thing my dad’s Master’s was in, and her mom is a CNA and an American from Houston and her dad’s a mechanic. My cousin got to take a picture with John Lewis on his 75th birthday that ended up on CNN. And…
Oh, yeah! CNN’s down here. About 15 miles from my house, in fact. “Falling apart.” “Crime-ridden.”
Oh, yeah, and there’s our budding tech industry, and film, and our big music scene, as well as the former Album 88…
…Pretty much, I jokingly credit the Walking Dead for why our Republican leadership got their “Religious Freedom” bill vetoed by our usually-crony-happy governor Nathan Deal.
(Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness-kind of writing I’m doing here, but I’m trying to avoid rambling too much. Also, it’s been more than a year since I’ve posted anything anywhere. Sorry.)
I like to read news and blogs, and I play a lot of video games, mostly JRPGs. I hated Gamergate, I still have some Facebook friends I haven’t unfriended yet who were pro-that, including one who flamed my post about Anita Sarkessian…
Mainly, I’m amazed that a man who wants to be President just insulted a major US city, and his insults are based on nothing else but that we have a lot of black people here. Never mind that these black people are highly educated, and that we have a lot of money, and many celebrities live down here, too, but we’re black, so it must be “crime-ridden” and “falling apart” or whatever. A lot of people like Tyler Perry (I do not like his movies) came from nothing and found the usually-mythical American Dream here, but that counts for nothing for people like Trump because they don’t vote Republican and they believe in giving back to the community, and they’re black. Trump asked black people what we had to lose by voting for him, and people in Atlanta interviewed by the New York Times could not relate to that at all. As far as I can tell, Black Lives Matter gets a lot of respect down here, and the police for the most part cooperate with their protests, and they work for us, not against us. A lot of the black folks who look askance at Clayton County are my black coworkers and managers in the Post Office: many of them are black vets — they were in the military, and then, they moved on to the Post Office to prepare for reitirement, pretty much. Some served in Desert Storm; one of my supervisors claimed he was Special Forces; one of my managers used to be a Colonel in the Marines, a woman. All of these people have all the right to say that they served their country, and the VA controversy was a personal thing for many of them here, but they’re black and not Republican, so, whoops, they don’t count. Atlanta is one of the few places in the country where you can be black and/or gay and have a good future, and Trump doesn’t understand that. And somehow, he’s supposedly going to be president.
John Lewis basically proved himself right. And I’m proud that he’s my Rep.
Much as millions know that Calcutta is a city with nothing but grinding poverty and people lying half dead in gutters until a certain nun* and her subordinate nuns picked them up and took them in. People who live in Calcutta know the story is much more complex and hate the vision of their city as somehow “broken” and needing the nuns to “fix” it. It is said often enough that it becomes true to those who have never been there. Truth is much less important than perceived truth.
*I cannot refer to this celibate, childless woman who interfered in other women’s reproductive decisions based on her own warped moral code as “mother”. She has done nothing to deserve the title; besides, I already use that term to refer to my own mother, the only woman to whom it rightly belongs..
Hi Gobgob. Thank you for that. And now that you’ve broken the ice, keep commenting!