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Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense".

Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it. What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism. And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolchildren-a-poverty-of-words.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolch... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-quantity-is-crucial-to-language-skills-study-finds.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-q... [4] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-every-home-and-then-some/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-ev...

hurbledr 10y ago
> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools. You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society. I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
- devinhelton 10y ago
  Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools. Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom. In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing. none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation. In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.
  - hurbledr 10y ago
    >Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school. So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?

hurbledr 10y ago

> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools. You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society. I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.

devinhelton 10y ago
Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools. Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom. In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing. none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation. In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.
- hurbledr 10y ago
  >Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school. So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?