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Did the article answer the question of why black and white Americans don't live together? I didn't seem to see any theories besides saying that real estate agen

by wppick 10y ago

Did the article answer the question of why black and white Americans don't live together? I didn't seem to see any theories besides saying that real estate agents wouldn't show one black couple houses in the white neighborhoods. How does black American integration compare with Chinese American integration, and what can we learn from that? Is there a bigger, subconscious (possibly genetic) reason why black and whites don't live together? Or is it simply due to the the events of American history?

nostrademons 10y ago
(Half-Chinese here, with an immigrant parent on the Chinese side.) Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English. This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.
clock_tower 10y ago
Genetic? Cultural is more likely. American blacks are mostly descended from Ibo and Ibibo from Biafra -- the best peoples in Black Africa, the market-dominant minority of the whole Gold Coast, a dynamic, energetic, ambitious group -- but they came down with a case of redneck-ism in their long stay in the South, and middle- or upper-class whites don't live among rednecks any more than they live among blacks. You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.
Larrikin 10y ago
That article doesn't address other racial groups, but I found this article just as interesting since many of the reasons for white/black racial segregation in the US are pretty well studied. https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-white-flight-from-an-asian-ethnoburb-b550ba986cdb#.oz4ctlrv7 https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-whi... White flight happens the other way as well when there are "too many" Asians in a neighborhood.

by wppick 10y ago

nostrademons 10y ago

(Half-Chinese here, with an immigrant parent on the Chinese side.) Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English. This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.

clock_tower 10y ago

Genetic? Cultural is more likely. American blacks are mostly descended from Ibo and Ibibo from Biafra -- the best peoples in Black Africa, the market-dominant minority of the whole Gold Coast, a dynamic, energetic, ambitious group -- but they came down with a case of redneck-ism in their long stay in the South, and middle- or upper-class whites don't live among rednecks any more than they live among blacks. You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.

Larrikin 10y ago

That article doesn't address other racial groups, but I found this article just as interesting since many of the reasons for white/black racial segregation in the US are pretty well studied. https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-white-flight-from-an-asian-ethnoburb-b550ba986cdb#.oz4ctlrv7 https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-whi... White flight happens the other way as well when there are "too many" Asians in a neighborhood.