Gary, Indiana’s Infrastructure Is An Allegory of Internal Biases

About 15 years ago Indiana’s Gary was funded to reboot America’s relationship with A&M culture. They were awarded defense contracts, robotics facilities, and cyber security training sessions for it’s Black community.

The workforce was made up now low income Gary residents that hadn’t seen any manufacturer support since the implementation of NAFTA. NAFTA would be the death blow for many Black American communities, resulting many of their jobs being sent to Canada and Mexico.

Once those those jobs left in the 1990s you had an empoverished community, with tons of science, math, and engineering skills now on welfare. With high skills and chronic unemployment, this would result in systemic depression, shrouded in drugs, crime, empty procreation.

The Promise

The goal was to train the youth and upskill the adults who still had high scoring in math and science into these new infrastructure based careers. By training in highschool they’d have a bottomless source of worker’s and improve the economic value of the neighborhood. Think CTE on steroids. The program would expand after COVID-19 but, became a victim of career coveting by the higher income communties within Gary and the neighboring Chicago. Its interesting how you can barely find any news on this event.

Read – https://events.in.gov/event/iedc-united-states-steel-announces-major-modernization-and-asset-revitalization-in-gary-indiana

Press release (redacted from the City of Gary Website)

In 2018, the City of Gary, Indiana, accelerated several innovative urban renewal, technology, and infrastructure projects to combat systemic blight and layout a foundation for digital and economic transformation. Many of these initiatives laid the groundwork for large-scale developments active today.

Read – https://statescoop.com/smart-technology-benefits-gary-indiana-mayor-karen-freeman-wilson/

Read – https://indianapolisrecorder.com/gary-union-station-tech-investment/

But once the announcement of these jobs became public, those six figures jobs drew the attention of Gary’s neighboring community, Chicago. Suddenly swarms of EdD and Social Working degree workers started applying and getting jobs that required mass technical and computer skills, skills they know damn well they didn’t have. It’s the bread crumbing as to why Gary might be in the mess today, and the behaviors of those within the Black community, or collaborations with saboteurs beyond the community that have resulted in a complete breakdown in infrastructure management or response.

Before STEM there Was A&M

America’s technical infrastructure was started by Black America’s students who would be the legacy known as A&M. A&M stood for Agriculture and Mechanics. Before “computers,” anything having to do with complex machinery was classified as mechanics, making any career around those jobs highly innovative and unknown to most of people in America, even White America.

The A&M university structure took the knowledge from before slavery, during slavery, and the military. Those skills would end up formalized into training to became engineers that would build most of the south’s infrastructure and America’s mechanical food production. Eventually when those jobs started make too much money, those workers would be phased out for White workers, who wouldn’t have the knowledge to continuously innovate but, become “facilitators” for most of those jobs, leaving a few Black engineers as underpaid “contractors.”

Many of those phased out workers would end up either going back to the military and assist with launching infrastructure like the Post Office, Army Corps of Engineers, and assist with city/transportation infrastructure in the Northern parts of America. The others would take their talents to the West and build up entire cities for Black communities, only to be gentrified out, and relocated over and over until they landed up hill or down hill in California, etc.

The Failure

Back to Gary, about 15 years ago, when they chose Indiana to bring back it’s manufacturing might, Chicago residents decided they wanted those jobs. We’re not talking White people but Black people. And in typical behavior from Chicago’s bougie sector aka “Chicago people“, they saw Indiana as too poor to deserve six figure jobs. So as usual they came with loud mouths and low skills, that resulted in the program collapsing and destroyed within a few years.

They failed to keep up the reports needed for funding and now those six figures recipient’s highlight would be all about sending emails about lunch and meetings. Look if you got wrongly skilled Black people in a job making six figures and the most exciting part of the day is spending 3 hours about debating meeting time and what’s for lunch, fire they asses. Because as usual there are Black people who do know how to do their jobs that would do anything for their community, not perpetual wage theft we keep seeing from the recently fired employee brigade.

Anyways, they didn’t just destroy their programs built to reboot economic stability, they destroyed community morale with tons of fake criticism and no real experience to actually fix their own gripes. That toxic input ended up putting those same workers in a position to get fired, till no one was left but the Chicago transplants working for the last decade. So with six figure jobs, with no technical skills, and the sector ended up with a bunch of glorified personal assistants. Just pictures a workforce now littered with a bunch of Law Roaches and Kanye West’s messing up the culture with unethical behavior, stolen work credit, negative critiques because ” naw, I juss don’t get it.”

Gary’s Fault Line

Eventually, the program got tired of spending all this money for people talking shit about stuff with no results and dissolved the initiaitve. So those jobs that were cut during DOGE weren’t the people who built the system that is now fledgling Gary’s 3 weeks with no power at the time of this post, it was the group afterwards. This is what happens when you castrate a community’s ability to fix its own problems and then judge them for the inability. And I’m certain the presumption of bringing in Black people from anywhere would pacify the notion of inclusion. But this was one case, the locals input shouldn’t have been erased. At this point it doesn’t matter about NIPSCO, NABISCO or any corporation, if the company management isn’t first intercepted by the response package of the State FEMA, the City of Gary, and the overall national security of potential infrastructure threats, what’s really going on? There is, and has been a process that is some reason not being followed. Are their hands tied? Something is off. Flint and Baltimore water failures all over.

Shit Show All Around

And just like, what happened down south where Whites saw all that money and ignored the civic duty to monitor their infrastructure (before computers btw). And Internal greed and economic dismissiveness by these half ass educated that turn their noses up in the Black community against other Blacks, is why Gary is in this mess. And to be honest it’s not just Gary. It’s Flint, it’s the West Side of Chicago, I could go on regarding that region of America.

Any area that the descendants of A&M graduates ended up generationally unemployed, frozen out, end up having excellent math and science skills, prolific writing abilities but barely get hired because of the loudest mouths in the community seem to be a slick trick to placate and “please equity.”

Perpetual career coveting and failed payment for services by other Black people is why we see our qualified pushed out. We really don’t have an ecosystem that prevents that type of dysfunction from overthrowing what is needed versus who is needed worthy to do a job, you know, important factors. Those people who could do the work, are kept out of the workforce, and then sneered, perpetuating criminal/welfare stigma.