5 ms·

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.

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
    So what you're really saying is that it's about culture. And that class is very highly correlated to culture
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      Perhaps, I'm sure it's not a one size fits all type thing, but I would bet that humans (and all animals) are wired to create heuristics for things that could impact their safety, and for more advanced species, heuristics that could indicate something that could help them. And probably throw in some power or ego issues in there too, which might not have any other reason other than to pump up one's self worth.
colechristensen 9y ago
What you're missing is that growing up there simply _weren't_ people outside my community/culture. It was much less about systematic racism and much more about who chose to immigrate to specific regions in the late 19th century. What you're talking about are things that happened in larger cities, but that's not the whole world and that doesn't match the history of much of the midwest. The parent was right, if there is discrimination it's about culture not color. There were a few adopted children with heritage from different parts of the world and as far as I could ever tell, they were treated the same as anyone. The discrimination you did see to any degree was on a protestant/catholic split and whether you lived in a relatively richer part of town. I just didn't see racial hatred growing up. Actual racism was a foreign concept until I left. Something you saw on TV, not in real life. I'm aware that it isn't necessarily something I would have always seen... but I have seen racism since I left in a way that I definitely did not before.
- L_Rahman 9y ago
  The absence of other people outside your community was not an accident. Members of the government, of financial institutions and urban planning departments made deliberate choices to exclude certain types of people: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    Once again, you just don't have the context to be making that argument. One article is about the south and the other one is about racist policies in the 30's. In the 30's there were essentially no people to be racist against in my community. You're talking about urban planning departments, the concept is ludicrous in my home town which you could walk across in an hour surrounded by towns which you could walk across before finishing a sandwich.
    - 9y ago
Veelox 9y ago
I think you raise sever good points. The past did contain city planning that was racist and had redlining. Those are past problems that do need some form of correction and I would support correcting them if you have specific actionable ideas. I would like to point out that race isn't the only reason you couldn't afford college. Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?
- extra88 9y ago
  It's still common for people of color to not be shown properties that are shown to white people by landlords, real estate brokers, etc. Sometimes it's unequivocal (i.e. lying about what's available), sometimes it's softer, e.g. making assumptions about ability to pay, or "culture fit" (on behalf of the PoC or potential neighbors). > Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand? It sounds like you're describing need-blind admission. Few universities have the funding for that, they depend upon a certain percentage of students paying most or all of the tuition. Harvard, which has very strong financial aid and is officially a need-blind, still admits a high percentage of "legacies," who are much less likely to need a lot of financial aid. Courts have decided that it's legal for universities to consider race as one of the factors when deciding who to admit. After centuries of bias, you can't just say "anyone can apply" and expect better outcomes to just happen, it requires more active effort. That doesn't mean taking someone who is unqualified but of the pool of qualified people, you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
  - Veelox 9y ago
    I'm not sure how you made the jump from race-blind admission to need-blind... I agree that more would need to be done than just saying "anyone can apply" but I don't think that the University should be doing most of the work, I think that we should work in the communities that need help to improve education so that more people are encouraged to apply and those that apply are more qualified. >you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures. Please be careful how you say this, some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people." This gives the alt-right the opportunity to fan flames that should die.
Oxitendwe 9y ago
>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. Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.
irrational 9y ago
>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe. This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).
- free_everybody 9y ago
  Great point, but I don't think "directing our evolution towards not having communities" is a desirable goal. This would make people heavily reliant on the largest corporations and that power dynamic would probably turn out terribly for the common person.
stcredzero 9y ago
There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. According to Thomas Sowell, the norm when groups migrate, all throughout history, across cultures, all over the world, is for people to form highly homogeneous cultural communities. This seems to be borne out by history. http://a.co/fDK6vrZ http://a.co/fDK6vrZ When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. There is always latent tribalism and prejudice. It's hard to fully know this, unless you are a complete outsider -- a minority of one. Also, unless one has had such an experience, it's hard to know how Sisyphean a task it is to directly tell another about it. In fact, I'll even come out and say it's inadvisable. In teaching, one comes to realize that there are some lessons which are best learned indirectly. If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible. One of the lessons of history, is that shared interests that cut across ethnic groups are the most effective means of overcoming prejudice. This is why I see many of the Postmodernist and Social Construction viewpoints as fundamentally harmful, because they take the seductive half-right position and often declare discourse between groups to be inherently impossible, and so go on to cut off the best means we have of remedying the situation. Competition, commerce, and all forms of engaged interaction are the best remedies. It's isolation of one form or another that makes things worse. It's isolation that makes a subgroup vulnerable to oppression and exploitation.

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
  So what you're really saying is that it's about culture. And that class is very highly correlated to culture
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Perhaps, I'm sure it's not a one size fits all type thing, but I would bet that humans (and all animals) are wired to create heuristics for things that could impact their safety, and for more advanced species, heuristics that could indicate something that could help them. And probably throw in some power or ego issues in there too, which might not have any other reason other than to pump up one's self worth.

colechristensen 9y ago

What you're missing is that growing up there simply _weren't_ people outside my community/culture. It was much less about systematic racism and much more about who chose to immigrate to specific regions in the late 19th century. What you're talking about are things that happened in larger cities, but that's not the whole world and that doesn't match the history of much of the midwest. The parent was right, if there is discrimination it's about culture not color. There were a few adopted children with heritage from different parts of the world and as far as I could ever tell, they were treated the same as anyone. The discrimination you did see to any degree was on a protestant/catholic split and whether you lived in a relatively richer part of town. I just didn't see racial hatred growing up. Actual racism was a foreign concept until I left. Something you saw on TV, not in real life. I'm aware that it isn't necessarily something I would have always seen... but I have seen racism since I left in a way that I definitely did not before.

L_Rahman 9y ago
The absence of other people outside your community was not an accident. Members of the government, of financial institutions and urban planning departments made deliberate choices to exclude certain types of people: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
- colechristensen 9y ago
  Once again, you just don't have the context to be making that argument. One article is about the south and the other one is about racist policies in the 30's. In the 30's there were essentially no people to be racist against in my community. You're talking about urban planning departments, the concept is ludicrous in my home town which you could walk across in an hour surrounded by towns which you could walk across before finishing a sandwich.
  - 9y ago

Veelox 9y ago

I think you raise sever good points. The past did contain city planning that was racist and had redlining. Those are past problems that do need some form of correction and I would support correcting them if you have specific actionable ideas. I would like to point out that race isn't the only reason you couldn't afford college. Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?

extra88 9y ago
It's still common for people of color to not be shown properties that are shown to white people by landlords, real estate brokers, etc. Sometimes it's unequivocal (i.e. lying about what's available), sometimes it's softer, e.g. making assumptions about ability to pay, or "culture fit" (on behalf of the PoC or potential neighbors). > Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand? It sounds like you're describing need-blind admission. Few universities have the funding for that, they depend upon a certain percentage of students paying most or all of the tuition. Harvard, which has very strong financial aid and is officially a need-blind, still admits a high percentage of "legacies," who are much less likely to need a lot of financial aid. Courts have decided that it's legal for universities to consider race as one of the factors when deciding who to admit. After centuries of bias, you can't just say "anyone can apply" and expect better outcomes to just happen, it requires more active effort. That doesn't mean taking someone who is unqualified but of the pool of qualified people, you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
- Veelox 9y ago
  I'm not sure how you made the jump from race-blind admission to need-blind... I agree that more would need to be done than just saying "anyone can apply" but I don't think that the University should be doing most of the work, I think that we should work in the communities that need help to improve education so that more people are encouraged to apply and those that apply are more qualified. >you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures. Please be careful how you say this, some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people." This gives the alt-right the opportunity to fan flames that should die.

Oxitendwe 9y ago

>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. Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.

irrational 9y ago

>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe. This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).

free_everybody 9y ago
Great point, but I don't think "directing our evolution towards not having communities" is a desirable goal. This would make people heavily reliant on the largest corporations and that power dynamic would probably turn out terribly for the common person.

stcredzero 9y ago

There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. According to Thomas Sowell, the norm when groups migrate, all throughout history, across cultures, all over the world, is for people to form highly homogeneous cultural communities. This seems to be borne out by history. http://a.co/fDK6vrZ http://a.co/fDK6vrZ When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. There is always latent tribalism and prejudice. It's hard to fully know this, unless you are a complete outsider -- a minority of one. Also, unless one has had such an experience, it's hard to know how Sisyphean a task it is to directly tell another about it. In fact, I'll even come out and say it's inadvisable. In teaching, one comes to realize that there are some lessons which are best learned indirectly. If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible. One of the lessons of history, is that shared interests that cut across ethnic groups are the most effective means of overcoming prejudice. This is why I see many of the Postmodernist and Social Construction viewpoints as fundamentally harmful, because they take the seductive half-right position and often declare discourse between groups to be inherently impossible, and so go on to cut off the best means we have of remedying the situation. Competition, commerce, and all forms of engaged interaction are the best remedies. It's isolation of one form or another that makes things worse. It's isolation that makes a subgroup vulnerable to oppression and exploitation.