Christopher Donovan: New York City Begins (More Precipitous) Slide Detroit-ward

Christopher Donovan:  I learned a lot in my seven years of living in New York City.  It’s got allure for a reason.  For bright lights, big adventure and sheer cliffs of challenge, New York is unmatched.

It is also, for a White person, no place to make a home.  New York City is essentially a boiling cauldron of competing racial and ethnic groups, all of which scrap and tear for a share of the spoils.  The job of the mayor, his chief lawyer once told me, is to figure out “which ethnic group is mad at him that day and how to make them happy again”, or words to that effect.  The effect is an atmosphere thick with barely suppressed tension.  Every human interaction is fraught, suspicious, and pregnant with explosion.  It’s all very bad for the blood pressure.

From the mayor (and that chief lawyer I mentioned) on down, New York is Jewish territory.  A few white ethnic groups have some presence, chief among them Irish and Italian (though always as those specific ethnicities, and never just “white”).  Blacks and the Hispanic groups loom large.  But it has been a long, long time since WASPs like John Lindsay held sway (and power for him meant sucking up to minorities).

If, like me, your heritage is “undifferentiated, but mostly Anglo-Saxon, White”, you are operating in New York without an ethnic safety net.  You might find a niche, like Taki, provided you’re mind-bogglingly rich.  But even talented ad execs or white-shoe law firm partners are ultimately toiling in the vinyards of a city they’ll never be completely at home in and can barely afford.

The numbers are now official.  Whites are a minority in New York as both citizens and voters.  None of it points in a good direction for whites living there.

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