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I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don't understand what this author describes as "Midwestern history is a study in

by Veelox 9y ago

I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don't understand what this author describes as "Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine." I would go as far as to say that racial is the wrong word to describe what happens in the Midwest. I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." This can be affected by where you live, where you work, where you go to church, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, what you do for fun, how you dress, even how you talk. Midwesterners are happy to accept someone who matches them in all these areas regardless of skin color. This is why you get backlash from them when you call them racist because the criteria they use is not skin color its all the other stuff. Yet on the other hand, most PoC in the Midwest have a culture that is different on most of the above. So when a white Midwesterner doesn't treat a black Midwesterner that speaks, dresses, even walks differently as a part of the community is it racism? I would say no since it isn't about race but is about culture. But on the other hand, when most white people do this to most black people, it sure does start to look like it. This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines. Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation.

Frondo 9y ago
My first thought is how we need to start developing a better working vocabulary around having racist attitudes. Like the big-R Racist is the white power asshole who wants to create a white ethnostate--that's one that's easy to spot, and most of us can say we're not that. The real pernicious damage to communities of color comes from the little-r racism that SO SO MANY people carry around totally unthinkingly. Like even my pretty progressive sister will spout off something like "well if they'd just work harder, or get a better job," when in reality there's a well-documented bias against hiring people with "black" names. The big-R Racism is easy to defeat, because most of us see it as pretty noxious. The little-r racism is so much tougher, because it's encoded into laws in innocent-seeming ways, it's encoded into algorithms in software (e.g. charging various rates by zip code, but zip code in many places ends up being a proxy for race, and who in this decade checked to make sure the assumptions you've encoded aren't just screwing over minorities), in a lot of unconscious biases (e.g. that AAVE is an uneducated form of english, not its own dialect). How do you call people's attention to that little-r racist stuff? Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one). It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It's the term itself. You can differentiate between Racism and racism, but as soon as you call someone a racist, you've labeled them as an evil bigot. Racism is bigotry, but bigotry exists in tons of forms. It's hard to recount the absurd, prejudiced attitudes even intelligent and moral people will have about things like nationality, religion, programming languages...etc. Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one). It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is There's nothing wrong with this, in fact it is probably the correct thing to do, but you can really quickly become that guy. Oh, there's Johnny again, acting like we're all a bunch of racists and we don't understand the daily struggles people have. You can get tuned out really quick, if it's presented in terms that compare one group to another, the implicit assumption that because you're not in that group, you've had it easy. When people feel confronted in that way and they know they haven't had it easy, they're less likely to care whether they are racist. That's the impression I get from the groundswell of support for someone like Trump. The small-racists aren't supporting him because they hate other people, they supporting him because he act like he cares about them and at least rhetorically will stand up for them. I guess what I'm saying is, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the goal must be to stand up for all groups of people and to deny bigotry in all of its forms.
- Veelox 9y ago
  I think you are on the right track to try to develop a better vocabulary about racist attitudes. But it needs to be more nuanced than the Racism/racism distinction you draw. Lets flesh out the pricing algorithm example. Lets say a home security company want to provide per zip code prices. The inputs they use are population density, crime rate, and availability of installers. This will lead to black neighborhoods being charged higher rates (since they statistically have higher crime rates). Even though they have instituted a policy systematically favors one racial group over another I don't think your little racism is the right term because at no point did they consider race. In fact, the world is so backwards that they would have to either purposefully overcharge white people or undercharge black people to not charge the two groups differently. They are literally damned if they do and damned if they don't. Either way they are racist by a legitimate definition of the word. The best solution I can think of is to try and make the world as race blind as possible while trying to improve disadvantaged communities. So we should remove names from the hiring process when people. Yet, your sister has a point, CoC need to develop a culture of education and hard work. Its a tough problem that needs help from everyone.
maxerickson 9y ago
I think you make an interesting observation about how communities are structured here, but there is also plenty of overt (though quiet) racism.
- dba7dba 9y ago
  I would like to add there is racism everywhere. Midwestern folks are not the only guilty ones. Have you not watched the recent world series between Dodgers and Astros?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    No, I've pretty much never watched baseball. But I agree, racist attitudes are widespread.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Racism (or, racial bias) is a tendency of human nature. It is not dependent on where one lives or one's own racial heritage.
- Veelox 9y ago
  What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Uh, people privately making derogatory remarks based on race? Lots of times. Maybe I have poor taste in casual acquaintances or something.
    - tn_ 9y ago
      Yep.. I've lived on both coasts as well as Chicago and it's much easier from my personal experience to run into people making idiotic racist remarks in the midwest. Now granted, there are racist people everywhere but the frequency was much higher.
  - 9y ago
jdonaldson 9y ago
I'm an ex-midwesterner living in Seattle. The midwest is not a place where you really strike it rich. It's a place where you have a shot of having a good family arrangement. You can easily surround yourself with relatives, and other folks like you. You're rarely forced into considering other points of view. There's a really strong sense of "being in your place" there, in many ways. I think the folks with a genuine curiosity about the world end up leaving. It was really interesting to me watch the debate and discussions surrounding the Amazon HQ2 when I was travelling through the midwest and the south. Folks from those areas really want the economic growth from a new HQ, and were quick to point out progressive changes that happened in their city. They would never talk about those progressive changes in a positive light if big tech were not moving to their neighborhood. So, one solution to some of this is money and jobs. I was impressed at how quickly that opened people's minds there.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Folks from those areas really want the economic growth from a new HQ, and were quick to point out progressive changes that happened in their city. They would never talk about those progressive changes in a positive light if big tech were not moving to their neighborhood. In a wider context you are probably correct, but it's worth pointing out that the urban areas in the South are pretty damn progressive.
  - jdonaldson 9y ago
    I would agree with that, and folks from those areas probably take more grief from their neighbors than what we deal with.
    - jackhack 9y ago
      Chapel Hill, NC... Atlanta, GA... Austin, TX... New York City,NY Yes, are all despised by their rural neighbors. And vice-versa. But the bias is bidirectional: Those in the cities look at the rural folks with just as much contempt and disgust as those folks in the country look at the cities. Perhaps more.
evanlivingston 9y ago
I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formation of primarily white communities. You mention people making distinctions based on where you go to work, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, how you dress, etc.. If I'm black and couldn't afford college for various reasons, I'm going to have a hard time getting a job that would allow me to buy the kind of car, dress in the clothes, send my kid to the schools, buy a house where the other people who had a _systematically_ easier go at life would. My point is; When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.
- wolco 9y ago
  If you remove race the issue is with poor/rich
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    It's always been about socioeconomic classes, but the best proxy for it is race (or how you look...). If there were something more obvious, such as giant face tattoos or being obese and wearing mismatched/sloppy clothing, then we could use that too to infer which socioeconomic classes they are in and how they are likely to act.
    - jabretti 9y ago
      People tend to be quite capable of judging someone else's social class at a glance, though, or at least after a few words have been spoken. Racial cues are a pretty small part of it.
    - Zarath 9y ago
throwawayjava 9y ago
(It's worth noting that, while this sort of thing comes up a lot in the context of the midwest, the midwest isn't special in this regard.) > I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." The genetic basis for delineating "races" is sketchy at best. The cultural aspects are as important as skin color to the definition of race, which is why either the first or second definition of "race" in any reasonable dictionary refers to all these things aside from "melanin content". So at some point, segregating oneself from people who worship differently, go to different schools, play different sports, ... -- especially in communities where many of these divisions are inspired by geography distributions that were intentionally created along racial lines less than a century ago -- is more than just "unhappy coincidence". But let's set that aside for a moment and take your assertion as fact. > This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines. Indeed. Sometimes, the consequences of aggregate social behavior are more important than individual intent. (Actually, I'd argue almost always.) A community in which wealth is disproportionately divided along racial lines is a racist community, even if no one in that community harbors individual and purely racially motivated prejudice. > Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? Teach people how to think dispassionately about systems. I'm not sure that there is a way to fix this without switching from a "nominally typed" definition of racism to a "structurally typed" definition of racism. Such a definition already exists. And by happy coincidence, the programming analogy works especially well because this notion is already called "structural racism". > So it seems like it is an impossible situation. At least for the current generation, for whom anything short of direct and violent prejudice on the basis of a few phenotypes is the only thinkable definition of racism, and for whom "racist" is a stinging moral and personal indict rather than a statement of fact about an emergent phenomenon that may or may not have anything to do with the content of any particular individual's character.
- mcguire 9y ago
  All human communities like to define themselves in terms of in-groups and out-groups. All of them, including this one. In the Midwest, you have to make the decisions finer since most people around really are indistinguishable on the usual terms.
deleted 9y ago
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TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
As a Midwesterner, this is incredibly accurate. I personally don't like multiculturalism, and I don't know of many people in my area that do. In my opinion and experience, multiculturalism in society makes a sense of community very difficult if not impossible to create. Having standard methods of communication, standard social and moral norms, and standard goals and beliefs makes empathizing with my neighbor so much easier than it is in big cities. There's also a question of how much a culture influences a persons behavior. Multiculturalism in school and work pushes the idea that all cultures are made equal, yet different cultures are represented unevenly in our society. There has been a significant amount of racism against Asians and Jews, yet both groups have significantly higher average incomes and college attainment rates than other groups. Personally, I don't believe that's a coincidence, and is due to their cultures that emphasize self-discipline, self-improvement, and consideration for their fellow man. There are some cultures formed by chronic stress and poverty(white trash, ghetto cultures) that don't have those traits, and so their people don't make it as far in life. That's not because of racism, that's because of poverty and chronic stress.
- jccalhoun 9y ago
  This is a question of which came first the chicken or the egg? Is the fact that cultures are represented unevenly in society the fault of the non-dominant cultures or the dominant culture? Is poverty and chronic stress cause by culture or is it caused by racist systems? It might be a cycle but if people weren't racists then it might be easier to break the cycle. Personally, I love multiculturalism. Being a white guy growing up in an almost exclusively white area gets to be monotonous. Dealing with people from other cultures is a lot more fun than dealing with people like me.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Add me on the list that loves multiculturalism. It is so much more interesting and I find a desire for anything else hard to understand. What I am most curious about is why something a cherish so strongly others dislike.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation. From my outside perspective, this is bloody ridiculous. I live in a coastal metro, and routinely expect to encounter people from "cultures" more than a few towns over. Bostonians would laugh at you if you treat someone from Medford differently from someone from Milton. They'd nod if you treat Medford different from Malden, but that's because Medford is white-ethnic while Malden is black and Chinese -- they're just being racist and everyone knows it. Let alone if you tried treating Medford different from Somerville! I mean, hell, what's next, holding up signs on the Common saying, "Californians go home"? Worse, by my tastes, Bostonians are already a bunch of provincial chauvinists. I'm from New York. In New York, if you said that a Park Slope-er in Brooklyn just has a different culture from a native of Flushing, Queens, well, you're going to get somewhere between dirty looks and threats (I'm picking where my parents had me versus where my mother grew up). It's got too many ethnic and racial implications. Hell, you're expected to work every day with people commuting in from as "far away" as New Jersey, and we all know that New Jerseyians are degenerate douchebags with no culture, amirite? (Yeah I grew up in New Jersey too.) I mean, let alone talking about "where you go to church" in New York. If you can't cope with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Evangelicals, and Catholics (of various ethnicities each) living in the same neighborhood and each having their houses of worship within a few blocks of each-other, look, don't move to New York. So the protestation that Midwesterners just have to draw ingroup/outgroup distinctions about your particular church, neighborhood, school district, and choice of automobile comes across as yuuuuge levels of special pleading to justify levels of xenophobia that we'd think of as the stuff of stand-up comedy.
- mcguire 9y ago
  So, you are arguing that New Yorkers don't make a distinction between themselves and not-New Yorkers? I've never lived in New York; what about all those sitcom references to the differences between Manhattenites and Brooklyners? Or the Bronx? How can I, as a random Texan, tell the difference between someone from Gramercy Park and someone from New Jersey? (The part of me that wants to watch the world burn would like to see the flames between Bostonians and New Yorkers.)
gilbetron 9y ago
Yeah, I describe this as "exotic-ism", many midwesterners don't really like different things from them, except in a tourist sort of way. However, I think that even if someone in their town is the same as them except for skin color, they'll still treat that person a little different. It's a stretch to say they are colorblind except for cultural differences.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  What you're describing generally fits under the umbrella of xenophobia. You can qualify it as "cultural xenophobia" if you want to distinguish from dislike of aliens in particular.
  - gilbetron 9y ago
    Very true! Phobia always seems a more intense emotion than what the people exhibit, but it is technically correct.
closeparen 9y ago
The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It could be a purely rational economic calculation based on other people’s biases. It’s still the bread and butter of the system of racism. Just like discrimination that branches on culture or class and only incidentally produces outcomes along racial lines.
- Oxitendwe 9y ago
  Or, to put it a different way, "You don't actually need to be racist in order to be racist."
  - twblalock 9y ago
    I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but that's correct under the explanation of racism given by the parent comment (which is not merely the left-wing view, but the consensus academic view). The example about divesting from a neighborhood due to concerns about property value is spot-on. In a systematically racist society, it is rational to behave in ways that produce racist outcomes even one does not personally have racist beliefs. Racism ends up being perpetuated even if most people don't think of themselves as racists or believe they are doing anything to promote unfair racial outcomes.
    - Oxitendwe 9y ago
      The Catholic Church called, they want their original sin back.
      - sctb 9y ago
        Could you please post civilly and substantively here, or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pc86 9y ago
How about not treating people differently based on which community they come from?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  This will never happen en masse. Humans are tribal animals, and naturally form us-vs-them mentalities when under the slightest amount of stress.
- asddddd 9y ago
  In other words: treat your friends the same as strangers, or at least choose them completely randomly to avoid bias. This strikes me as unrealistic.
  - pc86 9y ago
    I said nothing about friendship or lack thereof. I never said treat everyone like your friends. I said don't treat people differently because they come from a different community. Whether that's their race, religion, citizenship, income, what neighborhood they grew up in or whether or not they were born on one side of the river or the other.
centicosm 9y ago
There are interesting agent-based models that explore segregation based on the relatively innocuous idea that people have a tendency to want at least some portion of their neighbors to be similar to themselves (across some dimension). In those models, segregated populations are found to occur with frequency far exceeding what one might think would emerge without explicit intent. http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/ http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg...
Oxitendwe 9y ago
>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong.
- grasshopperpurp 9y ago
  >I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong. Probably because segregation leads poorer conditions for PoC. >In 2015, 17.3% of blacks in Milwaukee were unemployed compared to 4.3% of whites, the report found. And many blacks in the city were earning much less than whites. According to the report, the median household income for blacks in Milwaukee was $25,600 compared to $62,600 for whites. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/news/economy/milwaukee-blacks-inequality/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/news/economy/milwaukee-black... >Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the Chicago area's employment rate is 47 percent for blacks, the lowest among the big cities, and 73 percent for whites, which is among the highest. Only Philadelphia comes close to that gap, with a 48 percent employment rate for blacks and 66 percent for whites. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-brookings-disconnected-youth-report-0525-biz-20160524-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-brookings-disconne...
- CodeCube 9y ago
  Why does living next to someone else destroy an ethnic identity? Does a chinese family moving into an italian neighborhood all of a sudden mean that no one can open an italian restaurant? If there is a German festival one weekend, does that mean they can't have a Scottish highland festival the next weekend in the same venue? Does a Russian family moving in next door mean that I have to start drinking Vodka instead of Rum? No, of course not ... all of those are ridiculous statements, because the truth is that the only reason you would not want to live near someone else, is because you (not you personally, in the general sense) don't like that someone else. Clamoring on about "maintaining your ethnic identity" is just a dogwhistle ... and masks the true underlying racist/xenophobic underpinnings of that person's mindset.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 9y ago
>Yet on the other hand, most PoC in the Midwest have a culture that is different on most of the above. So when a white Midwesterner doesn't treat a black Midwesterner that speaks, dresses, even walks differently as a part of the community is it racism? I would say no since it isn't about race but is about culture. That would explain the slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, and segregation...
- repstosw 9y ago
  I think this discussion is geared a lot more towards the Upper Midwest, not the South as a whole. As many are saying, the climate of discrimination is very different between the two.
supernumerary 9y ago
I grew up in South Africa from 87-92, I have lived in Detroit since 2011. In terms of this being an impossible situation, I think truth and reconciliation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commi...) might be one way of addressing the racial segregation that persists here. (https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html). At the very least I was surprised and glad to see a comment about the racism that the article elucidates at the top here on HN.
stcredzero 9y ago
I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." What I've seen in SF is a lot of tribes with very tight restrictions on being "one of us." What's more, is that this tribalism seems to be mostly pattern matching as opposed to being based on principles. Back in the day, musicians would at least pay lip service to judging fellow musicians on their music, as opposed to how they dressed. It's only after I came to SF, that I encountered musicians talking about how doing so was some kind of good idea. Even the tech community has pockets of people who think like this. So now my key question, when it comes to evaluating people at the most fundamental level, is to ask, "Do they put principles before tribe or tribe before principles?" The former group tends to be a slim minority in SF, where the rarity is proportional to the trendiness. I guess that's just how it's always been, everywhere money and power are concentrated.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Wow. As someone still in the Midwest, this is a really clear explanation of what I see going on all around me (and that I try to fight within myself). Travel helps. However, you can't count our annual mass migration down to the gulf coast for spring break because it's just a temporary transplant, and during it you're really only meeting other Midwesterners.
ejnulls 9y ago
How is this any different than employers prioritizing hiring from Ivy League schools? Those schools are mostly made up of upper class kids, who are...mostly white. So then Silicon Valley is just as racist as the Midwest by your own standards, no?

by Veelox 9y ago

Frondo 9y ago

My first thought is how we need to start developing a better working vocabulary around having racist attitudes. Like the big-R Racist is the white power asshole who wants to create a white ethnostate--that's one that's easy to spot, and most of us can say we're not that. The real pernicious damage to communities of color comes from the little-r racism that SO SO MANY people carry around totally unthinkingly. Like even my pretty progressive sister will spout off something like "well if they'd just work harder, or get a better job," when in reality there's a well-documented bias against hiring people with "black" names. The big-R Racism is easy to defeat, because most of us see it as pretty noxious. The little-r racism is so much tougher, because it's encoded into laws in innocent-seeming ways, it's encoded into algorithms in software (e.g. charging various rates by zip code, but zip code in many places ends up being a proxy for race, and who in this decade checked to make sure the assumptions you've encoded aren't just screwing over minorities), in a lot of unconscious biases (e.g. that AAVE is an uneducated form of english, not its own dialect). How do you call people's attention to that little-r racist stuff? Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one). It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
It's the term itself. You can differentiate between Racism and racism, but as soon as you call someone a racist, you've labeled them as an evil bigot. Racism is bigotry, but bigotry exists in tons of forms. It's hard to recount the absurd, prejudiced attitudes even intelligent and moral people will have about things like nationality, religion, programming languages...etc. Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one). It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is There's nothing wrong with this, in fact it is probably the correct thing to do, but you can really quickly become that guy. Oh, there's Johnny again, acting like we're all a bunch of racists and we don't understand the daily struggles people have. You can get tuned out really quick, if it's presented in terms that compare one group to another, the implicit assumption that because you're not in that group, you've had it easy. When people feel confronted in that way and they know they haven't had it easy, they're less likely to care whether they are racist. That's the impression I get from the groundswell of support for someone like Trump. The small-racists aren't supporting him because they hate other people, they supporting him because he act like he cares about them and at least rhetorically will stand up for them. I guess what I'm saying is, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the goal must be to stand up for all groups of people and to deny bigotry in all of its forms.
Veelox 9y ago
I think you are on the right track to try to develop a better vocabulary about racist attitudes. But it needs to be more nuanced than the Racism/racism distinction you draw. Lets flesh out the pricing algorithm example. Lets say a home security company want to provide per zip code prices. The inputs they use are population density, crime rate, and availability of installers. This will lead to black neighborhoods being charged higher rates (since they statistically have higher crime rates). Even though they have instituted a policy systematically favors one racial group over another I don't think your little racism is the right term because at no point did they consider race. In fact, the world is so backwards that they would have to either purposefully overcharge white people or undercharge black people to not charge the two groups differently. They are literally damned if they do and damned if they don't. Either way they are racist by a legitimate definition of the word. The best solution I can think of is to try and make the world as race blind as possible while trying to improve disadvantaged communities. So we should remove names from the hiring process when people. Yet, your sister has a point, CoC need to develop a culture of education and hard work. Its a tough problem that needs help from everyone.

maxerickson 9y ago

I think you make an interesting observation about how communities are structured here, but there is also plenty of overt (though quiet) racism.

dba7dba 9y ago
I would like to add there is racism everywhere. Midwestern folks are not the only guilty ones. Have you not watched the recent world series between Dodgers and Astros?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  No, I've pretty much never watched baseball. But I agree, racist attitudes are widespread.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Racism (or, racial bias) is a tendency of human nature. It is not dependent on where one lives or one's own racial heritage.
Veelox 9y ago
What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Uh, people privately making derogatory remarks based on race? Lots of times. Maybe I have poor taste in casual acquaintances or something.
  - tn_ 9y ago
    Yep.. I've lived on both coasts as well as Chicago and it's much easier from my personal experience to run into people making idiotic racist remarks in the midwest. Now granted, there are racist people everywhere but the frequency was much higher.
- 9y ago

jdonaldson 9y ago

I'm an ex-midwesterner living in Seattle. The midwest is not a place where you really strike it rich. It's a place where you have a shot of having a good family arrangement. You can easily surround yourself with relatives, and other folks like you. You're rarely forced into considering other points of view. There's a really strong sense of "being in your place" there, in many ways. I think the folks with a genuine curiosity about the world end up leaving. It was really interesting to me watch the debate and discussions surrounding the Amazon HQ2 when I was travelling through the midwest and the south. Folks from those areas really want the economic growth from a new HQ, and were quick to point out progressive changes that happened in their city. They would never talk about those progressive changes in a positive light if big tech were not moving to their neighborhood. So, one solution to some of this is money and jobs. I was impressed at how quickly that opened people's minds there.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Folks from those areas really want the economic growth from a new HQ, and were quick to point out progressive changes that happened in their city. They would never talk about those progressive changes in a positive light if big tech were not moving to their neighborhood. In a wider context you are probably correct, but it's worth pointing out that the urban areas in the South are pretty damn progressive.
- jdonaldson 9y ago
  I would agree with that, and folks from those areas probably take more grief from their neighbors than what we deal with.
  - jackhack 9y ago
    Chapel Hill, NC... Atlanta, GA... Austin, TX... New York City,NY Yes, are all despised by their rural neighbors. And vice-versa. But the bias is bidirectional: Those in the cities look at the rural folks with just as much contempt and disgust as those folks in the country look at the cities. Perhaps more.

evanlivingston 9y ago

I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formation of primarily white communities. You mention people making distinctions based on where you go to work, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, how you dress, etc.. If I'm black and couldn't afford college for various reasons, I'm going to have a hard time getting a job that would allow me to buy the kind of car, dress in the clothes, send my kid to the schools, buy a house where the other people who had a _systematically_ easier go at life would. My point is; When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.

wolco 9y ago
If you remove race the issue is with poor/rich
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  It's always been about socioeconomic classes, but the best proxy for it is race (or how you look...). If there were something more obvious, such as giant face tattoos or being obese and wearing mismatched/sloppy clothing, then we could use that too to infer which socioeconomic classes they are in and how they are likely to act.
  - jabretti 9y ago
    People tend to be quite capable of judging someone else's social class at a glance, though, or at least after a few words have been spoken. Racial cues are a pretty small part of it.
  - Zarath 9y ago

throwawayjava 9y ago

(It's worth noting that, while this sort of thing comes up a lot in the context of the midwest, the midwest isn't special in this regard.) > I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." The genetic basis for delineating "races" is sketchy at best. The cultural aspects are as important as skin color to the definition of race, which is why either the first or second definition of "race" in any reasonable dictionary refers to all these things aside from "melanin content". So at some point, segregating oneself from people who worship differently, go to different schools, play different sports, ... -- especially in communities where many of these divisions are inspired by geography distributions that were intentionally created along racial lines less than a century ago -- is more than just "unhappy coincidence". But let's set that aside for a moment and take your assertion as fact. > This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines. Indeed. Sometimes, the consequences of aggregate social behavior are more important than individual intent. (Actually, I'd argue almost always.) A community in which wealth is disproportionately divided along racial lines is a racist community, even if no one in that community harbors individual and purely racially motivated prejudice. > Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? Teach people how to think dispassionately about systems. I'm not sure that there is a way to fix this without switching from a "nominally typed" definition of racism to a "structurally typed" definition of racism. Such a definition already exists. And by happy coincidence, the programming analogy works especially well because this notion is already called "structural racism". > So it seems like it is an impossible situation. At least for the current generation, for whom anything short of direct and violent prejudice on the basis of a few phenotypes is the only thinkable definition of racism, and for whom "racist" is a stinging moral and personal indict rather than a statement of fact about an emergent phenomenon that may or may not have anything to do with the content of any particular individual's character.

mcguire 9y ago
All human communities like to define themselves in terms of in-groups and out-groups. All of them, including this one. In the Midwest, you have to make the decisions finer since most people around really are indistinguishable on the usual terms.

deleted 9y ago

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TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

As a Midwesterner, this is incredibly accurate. I personally don't like multiculturalism, and I don't know of many people in my area that do. In my opinion and experience, multiculturalism in society makes a sense of community very difficult if not impossible to create. Having standard methods of communication, standard social and moral norms, and standard goals and beliefs makes empathizing with my neighbor so much easier than it is in big cities. There's also a question of how much a culture influences a persons behavior. Multiculturalism in school and work pushes the idea that all cultures are made equal, yet different cultures are represented unevenly in our society. There has been a significant amount of racism against Asians and Jews, yet both groups have significantly higher average incomes and college attainment rates than other groups. Personally, I don't believe that's a coincidence, and is due to their cultures that emphasize self-discipline, self-improvement, and consideration for their fellow man. There are some cultures formed by chronic stress and poverty(white trash, ghetto cultures) that don't have those traits, and so their people don't make it as far in life. That's not because of racism, that's because of poverty and chronic stress.

jccalhoun 9y ago
This is a question of which came first the chicken or the egg? Is the fact that cultures are represented unevenly in society the fault of the non-dominant cultures or the dominant culture? Is poverty and chronic stress cause by culture or is it caused by racist systems? It might be a cycle but if people weren't racists then it might be easier to break the cycle. Personally, I love multiculturalism. Being a white guy growing up in an almost exclusively white area gets to be monotonous. Dealing with people from other cultures is a lot more fun than dealing with people like me.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Add me on the list that loves multiculturalism. It is so much more interesting and I find a desire for anything else hard to understand. What I am most curious about is why something a cherish so strongly others dislike.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation. From my outside perspective, this is bloody ridiculous. I live in a coastal metro, and routinely expect to encounter people from "cultures" more than a few towns over. Bostonians would laugh at you if you treat someone from Medford differently from someone from Milton. They'd nod if you treat Medford different from Malden, but that's because Medford is white-ethnic while Malden is black and Chinese -- they're just being racist and everyone knows it. Let alone if you tried treating Medford different from Somerville! I mean, hell, what's next, holding up signs on the Common saying, "Californians go home"? Worse, by my tastes, Bostonians are already a bunch of provincial chauvinists. I'm from New York. In New York, if you said that a Park Slope-er in Brooklyn just has a different culture from a native of Flushing, Queens, well, you're going to get somewhere between dirty looks and threats (I'm picking where my parents had me versus where my mother grew up). It's got too many ethnic and racial implications. Hell, you're expected to work every day with people commuting in from as "far away" as New Jersey, and we all know that New Jerseyians are degenerate douchebags with no culture, amirite? (Yeah I grew up in New Jersey too.) I mean, let alone talking about "where you go to church" in New York. If you can't cope with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Evangelicals, and Catholics (of various ethnicities each) living in the same neighborhood and each having their houses of worship within a few blocks of each-other, look, don't move to New York. So the protestation that Midwesterners just have to draw ingroup/outgroup distinctions about your particular church, neighborhood, school district, and choice of automobile comes across as yuuuuge levels of special pleading to justify levels of xenophobia that we'd think of as the stuff of stand-up comedy.

mcguire 9y ago
So, you are arguing that New Yorkers don't make a distinction between themselves and not-New Yorkers? I've never lived in New York; what about all those sitcom references to the differences between Manhattenites and Brooklyners? Or the Bronx? How can I, as a random Texan, tell the difference between someone from Gramercy Park and someone from New Jersey? (The part of me that wants to watch the world burn would like to see the flames between Bostonians and New Yorkers.)

gilbetron 9y ago

Yeah, I describe this as "exotic-ism", many midwesterners don't really like different things from them, except in a tourist sort of way. However, I think that even if someone in their town is the same as them except for skin color, they'll still treat that person a little different. It's a stretch to say they are colorblind except for cultural differences.

humanrebar 9y ago
What you're describing generally fits under the umbrella of xenophobia. You can qualify it as "cultural xenophobia" if you want to distinguish from dislike of aliens in particular.
- gilbetron 9y ago
  Very true! Phobia always seems a more intense emotion than what the people exhibit, but it is technically correct.

closeparen 9y ago

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It could be a purely rational economic calculation based on other people’s biases. It’s still the bread and butter of the system of racism. Just like discrimination that branches on culture or class and only incidentally produces outcomes along racial lines.

Oxitendwe 9y ago
Or, to put it a different way, "You don't actually need to be racist in order to be racist."
- twblalock 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but that's correct under the explanation of racism given by the parent comment (which is not merely the left-wing view, but the consensus academic view). The example about divesting from a neighborhood due to concerns about property value is spot-on. In a systematically racist society, it is rational to behave in ways that produce racist outcomes even one does not personally have racist beliefs. Racism ends up being perpetuated even if most people don't think of themselves as racists or believe they are doing anything to promote unfair racial outcomes.
  - Oxitendwe 9y ago
    The Catholic Church called, they want their original sin back.
    - sctb 9y ago
      Could you please post civilly and substantively here, or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pc86 9y ago

How about not treating people differently based on which community they come from?

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
This will never happen en masse. Humans are tribal animals, and naturally form us-vs-them mentalities when under the slightest amount of stress.
asddddd 9y ago
In other words: treat your friends the same as strangers, or at least choose them completely randomly to avoid bias. This strikes me as unrealistic.
- pc86 9y ago
  I said nothing about friendship or lack thereof. I never said treat everyone like your friends. I said don't treat people differently because they come from a different community. Whether that's their race, religion, citizenship, income, what neighborhood they grew up in or whether or not they were born on one side of the river or the other.

centicosm 9y ago

There are interesting agent-based models that explore segregation based on the relatively innocuous idea that people have a tendency to want at least some portion of their neighbors to be similar to themselves (across some dimension). In those models, segregated populations are found to occur with frequency far exceeding what one might think would emerge without explicit intent. http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/ http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg...

Oxitendwe 9y ago

>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong.

grasshopperpurp 9y ago
>I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong. Probably because segregation leads poorer conditions for PoC. >In 2015, 17.3% of blacks in Milwaukee were unemployed compared to 4.3% of whites, the report found. And many blacks in the city were earning much less than whites. According to the report, the median household income for blacks in Milwaukee was $25,600 compared to $62,600 for whites. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/news/economy/milwaukee-blacks-inequality/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/news/economy/milwaukee-black... >Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the Chicago area's employment rate is 47 percent for blacks, the lowest among the big cities, and 73 percent for whites, which is among the highest. Only Philadelphia comes close to that gap, with a 48 percent employment rate for blacks and 66 percent for whites. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-brookings-disconnected-youth-report-0525-biz-20160524-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-brookings-disconne...
CodeCube 9y ago
Why does living next to someone else destroy an ethnic identity? Does a chinese family moving into an italian neighborhood all of a sudden mean that no one can open an italian restaurant? If there is a German festival one weekend, does that mean they can't have a Scottish highland festival the next weekend in the same venue? Does a Russian family moving in next door mean that I have to start drinking Vodka instead of Rum? No, of course not ... all of those are ridiculous statements, because the truth is that the only reason you would not want to live near someone else, is because you (not you personally, in the general sense) don't like that someone else. Clamoring on about "maintaining your ethnic identity" is just a dogwhistle ... and masks the true underlying racist/xenophobic underpinnings of that person's mindset.

deleted 9y ago

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coldtea 9y ago

>Yet on the other hand, most PoC in the Midwest have a culture that is different on most of the above. So when a white Midwesterner doesn't treat a black Midwesterner that speaks, dresses, even walks differently as a part of the community is it racism? I would say no since it isn't about race but is about culture. That would explain the slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, and segregation...

repstosw 9y ago
I think this discussion is geared a lot more towards the Upper Midwest, not the South as a whole. As many are saying, the climate of discrimination is very different between the two.

supernumerary 9y ago

I grew up in South Africa from 87-92, I have lived in Detroit since 2011. In terms of this being an impossible situation, I think truth and reconciliation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commi...) might be one way of addressing the racial segregation that persists here. (https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html). At the very least I was surprised and glad to see a comment about the racism that the article elucidates at the top here on HN.

stcredzero 9y ago

I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." What I've seen in SF is a lot of tribes with very tight restrictions on being "one of us." What's more, is that this tribalism seems to be mostly pattern matching as opposed to being based on principles. Back in the day, musicians would at least pay lip service to judging fellow musicians on their music, as opposed to how they dressed. It's only after I came to SF, that I encountered musicians talking about how doing so was some kind of good idea. Even the tech community has pockets of people who think like this. So now my key question, when it comes to evaluating people at the most fundamental level, is to ask, "Do they put principles before tribe or tribe before principles?" The former group tends to be a slim minority in SF, where the rarity is proportional to the trendiness. I guess that's just how it's always been, everywhere money and power are concentrated.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

Wow. As someone still in the Midwest, this is a really clear explanation of what I see going on all around me (and that I try to fight within myself). Travel helps. However, you can't count our annual mass migration down to the gulf coast for spring break because it's just a temporary transplant, and during it you're really only meeting other Midwesterners.

ejnulls 9y ago

How is this any different than employers prioritizing hiring from Ivy League schools? Those schools are mostly made up of upper class kids, who are...mostly white. So then Silicon Valley is just as racist as the Midwest by your own standards, no?