11 ms·

How much of this is just selection bias? I’m a white male who probably pattern matches the same way. A few months ago I was traveling and as a completely innoce

• sulam 8y ago
  I am a sample of one. And I've had a few bad experiences too, sometimes involving things like late payment (in my case because I was genuinely unable to pay). I've noticed a bit of a pattern: your landlord could be sued for discrimination if someone could show a pattern of enforcing the rules on protected individuals and not on others. If a paper trail is being created, it's not surprising to find that rules are rules. But as an example, I was homeless at one point and should have been arrested for shop-lifting (food) and the cop gave me a break. If I'd been black in that part of the city, I guarantee I would have been in jail. In other cases, I've had multiple examples of people listening to me and not listening to more-qualified women in the same meeting, often if I simply repeat what they said 30s later.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • wallace_f 8y ago
    It can go both ways. I am being stalked and experiencing a pattern of targeted harassment, assault (both attempted and succeeded) and other crime. It's left me in dire straits. I just recently saw on the news a woman talking about this happening to women, saying: "women experience harassment and assault and are unable to continue their careers and have been driven from their homes." While that's exactly what has happened to me, I dont find any advocates. Especially on the news. In fact, people assume these things cant happen to white, nerdy guys. It's really overwhelming. It must have obviously been even more hopeless for people when these kinds of things happened to people within a society of not just targeted hate, but institutionalized prejudice as well. It's good that's changed for the better for those people. But here I am and I'm not really sure what the best way to get help is.
    • wallace_f 8y ago
      Who in God's name would downvote this? It went from several + to 0.
      • Kye 8y ago
        Probably people who don't believe men can experience these things allied with people who believe men can experience them but see it as un-manning them. Humans are weird. Have an upvote.
    • sizzle 8y ago
      Please consult with authorities and record all instances of stalking/harassment. Protect yourself by all legal means possible and educate yourself on self defense strategies that can protect your life and keep you out of jail. Post on the subreddit r/legaladvice for some actionable advice. Sorry you are going through this, I hope our justice system can help you.
      • wallace_f 8y ago
        If anyone has connections to media or any civil rights groups and is interested in my story I will add a way to contact me in my profile. I had to move across the world and a couple weeks after arrival, people started telling me there was a man who was claiming to be my father that was looking for me (his description was very far from my father's). That was not an isolated incident. There's a very long list of unjust and crazy things happening to me. Everyone asks, what would be the motive? This is why for so long I didnt recognize this was happening to me. Because there was no rational reason for it to. It's hard to explain, but starting when I was a minor, I experienced a series of outrageous injustices from wealthy individuals. I think the motives developed out of these liabilities and it grew from there into a collection of people, ideas, and institutions which had wronged me. I'm guessing. Some events may be entirely unrelated to each other. But even a literal nazi like Richard Spencer went, what, years before someone punched him? It would be extroardinarily strange that without motive or liability for anyone to have this much obsession with what a normal person. I dont have many friends and most people dont want to associate with Thomas Paines, let alone someone with lifetime bullying problems without even an apparent virtuous cause or source of prejudice. And unfortunately, a lot of people are inclined to think that if such negativity afflicts you then you must have done something to deserve it. Once I started publishing my self-recordings of aggresses the attacks basically went from common occurences to zero. Suggesting some orchestration, or an extroardinary coincidence. I'm fearful of seeking help because it could potentially instigate an escalated retaliatory response. What else to do? Living my life on the run is obviously just a dead end. I'm lucky to have the physical and mental capability to survive thus far both physically and financially, but in both senses I'm already pushing the limits.
• pm90 8y ago
  Just because you don't experience it (or experience the opposite) doesn't mean the advantages don't exist. The effects of these privileges can be observed across the aggregate of social groups; I don't think you should be dismissing them just because you personally have been unlucky enough to not take advantage of them. But wait... what really happened in your situation? * the threat of eviction was rescinded after you paid back * you paid it back with cashiers checks... how were you able to get those so quickly? So, in a story where you tried to demonstrate the lack of advantages of being a white male, you basically demonstrated the opposite.
  • briandear 8y ago
    How hard is it to get a cashiers check? Can you prove the threat of eviction is not also recinded when someone non-white-male pays the rent? If you don’t have the money, obviously that’s harder, but do we have any data that non-white-males who pay the rent a day late get evicted more frequently than others? Landlords don’t care about any color other than on-time-green.
    • eseehausen 8y ago
      > Landlords don’t care about any color other than on-time-green. This is obviously not a universal truth (and there have been many well-known cases of individual and systemic housing discrimination in the USA). Here's a Wikipedia bit that has more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_(United_States)#Ethnic_and_racial_minority_housing_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_(United...
    • skywhopper 8y ago
      You are very very naive if you believe that it's not very common that landlords do care, very much, about color.
  • bluedino 8y ago
    Only white males can have money in the bank and get a cashiers check?
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• chrismcb 8y ago
  Not knowing where you are, but generally it is difficult to evict people. They are probably using scare tactics to get you to pay. I find it unlikely they would be able to evict you for paying a day late. Unless you know the landlord personally, I'm sure this was all just automatic, and it quotient matter who you were, they would have done the same thing
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    Many landlording books and courses recommend posting the 3-day notice-to-quit immediately when the rent is due. It's probably 10-20% asserting/protecting the landlord's rights under the law and 80-90% "training the tenants to hold up their end of the contract as they signed it."
    • joejerryronnie 8y ago
      It is commonly understood in property management that you absolutely cannot appear to give breaks on paying the rent late, otherwise your tenants will prioritize making their car payment, cell phone payment, credit card payment, etc before paying rent. Obviously, if you have a long term renter who has always shown responsibility in the past, property managers will make exceptions.
    • nilkn 8y ago
      Wouldn't it be more normal to post a "pay or quit" notice? The significance of this is the landlord is legally obligated to drop eviction proceedings if you pay within 3 days. I don't think jumping straight to an unconditional notice to quit is normal or even legal in many states. Indeed, many states require repeated violations before a landlord is allowed to post an unconditional notice: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-laws-unconditional-quit-terminations.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-laws-unconditi... I happen to be in Texas where any degree of nonpayment of rent, no matter how minor, innocent, or unintentional, can be used to justify an unconditional notice. But a "pay or quit" notice would have still been a less aggressive option available to them that would have achieved the same goal unless they had some ulterior motive (e.g., decide whether to proceed based on my skin color when I walked into the office with the cashier's check).
• delinka 8y ago
  "...usually reserved for someone they want out no matter what." And I'd suggest they make the decision when you arrive in person. Before that, I read your anecdote as having taken place all online without in-person contact. I'd further surmise that the entire process was automated. The wrong person walks in that following day with the same cashier's check and it's 'thanks for the payment, we're proceeding with the eviction.'
  • nilkn 8y ago
    It’s possible, but where’s the evidence of that? It sort of seems like you’re trying to suggest my experience doesn’t “count” because it could have been even worse. Is the above really what most people picture when they hear “white privilege”? I don’t think it is. To be clear I’m not questioning the existence of white privilege, but rather its magnitude or extent. This wasn’t automated, at least not entirely — the notice was signed and hand delivered to my partner at home while I was at work, who then almost cried thinking we were going to be kicked out.
    • wpietri 8y ago
      Asking for proof of white privilege in a single instance where we don't have all the facts is to misunderstand the topic. Shitty things happen to people all the time. But for historical reasons, they happen at different rates to different groups of people. That's how our country started; e.g., only well-off white men could vote. We are slowly reducing that. Maybe in another hundred years we'll have it all sorted. Your experience counts because it's your experience. But it doesn't say beans about privilege as a system. Your attitude, does, though. You're shocked and angry that a minor slip-up might end up with you out on the street. That's great! You're correct that it's unjust. But there are an awful lot of people for whom that isn't a surprise at all. They expect injustice, because they have experienced a lot more of it.
      • wpietri 8y ago
        A followup: I just came across a study of the extent to which Americans radically underestimate black/white economic difference: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-fair-is-american-society https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-fair-is-american-... A particularly striking example is around perceptions of wealth. In asking about wealth, they ask how much the average black household has if for every $100 the average white household has. The average answer was $85; the reality, $5. It's easy to think white privilege doesn't exist if one focuses, as here, only on the white experience. But both currently and historically, there are huge differences that aren't much talked about. For those up for a read, I recommend Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-American/dp/0743294483 https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ... It covered a lot of history I was unaware of.
• skywhopper 8y ago
  So you've now experienced something that lots of people who don't look like you experience far more than you do. The fact that you had a bad thing happen to you once doesn't mean you aren't privileged in 99% of your interactions.
• lngnmn1 8y ago
  There is no such concept as 'privilege' in biology or biological ecosystems. To exclude humans from these models would border and idiocy (which does not stop some liberal arts majors to force the meme). As the saying goes, according to the nature of this Universe, contradictions do not exist (the Universe is an one single unfolding process, so it does not step on itself) and if we stumbled upon a contradiction we have to check our premises - at least one of them is wrong. The proper premises are that the concept of equality does not applicable to biological entities, which are unique by definition of biological evolution. Equality is applicable only to abstract entities such as numbers and, perhaps, atoms (given that location in a coordinate system differs). When one begins from right premises and right principles one does not have any difficulties with reality. Yes, there is no such thing as equality and never will be, no matter what liberal arts majors would argue. Biology dominates memes.
• mdorazio 8y ago
  FWIW, the same thing happened to me (had been paying consistently on time for two years and forgot to pay before going on a short vacation). It's just a standard practice thing for landlords to do for a variety of reasons, especially in places where it's difficult to evict people.