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What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly

• skylan_q 12y ago
  More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help Maybe instead of forcing segregation, or forcing integration, freedom of association could be tried?
  • moron4hire 12y ago
    Unfortunately, once communities start out segregated, they stay segregated.
    • itjustdontwork 12y ago
      Unfortunately Why is it unfortunate? No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community. Sure, they may say they would to save political face, or to look benevolent or "tolerant" and progressive, but deep down? No. The difference in crime rates and quality of life is just astounding. To prefer to live amongst more blacks is to prefer to be more at risk of having a violent (or other) crime committed against you and having your property values diminish greatly. Yes there are lots of bad white people out there but they're much less concentrated within the race.
      • moron4hire 12y ago
        I think you need to take a look at crime statistics again. They're income-based, not race-based. In the United States, poor often also means minority, but it's not race that makes inner cities violent. It's destitution, and the desperation it causes.
        • yummyfajitas 12y ago
          I'm not remotely defending his thesis (and my life choices contradict his claims pretty well) but you are simply wrong about the crime stats. To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers. However, there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_3_murder_offenders_by_age_sex_and_race_2012.xls http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c... http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... Further, international comparisons suggest you are wrong about American-style "destitution" causing crime. I know many professionals (I live in India) who are far more "destitute" than any poor American (at least in terms of goods and services they can afford). Strangely they don't turn to crime at anywhere near the rates Americans (of any race) do.
          • coldtea 12y ago
            >To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers. However, there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. Those whites don't have the same heritage of poverty, bad education and racism against them though. Nor are over-represented by a huge margin in incarceration rates. >Further, international comparisons suggest you are wrong about American-style "destitution" causing crime. I know many professionals (I live in India) who are far more "destitute" than any poor American (at least in terms of goods and services they can afford). Strangely they don't turn to crime at anywhere near the rates Americans (of any race) do. "American style" is not just about being poor / destitute and not being able to afford things. It's about the particular flavor of being that, in the context of the general societies attitude, prevalent climate, ways to deal with it, etc. So people in India being "far more destitute" doesn't mean they share the "American-style "destitution"".
      • eivarv 12y ago
        I don't know about you, but I'm inclined to think that there are some pretty big socio-economic issues at play here.
      • lotsofmangos 12y ago
        I spent quite a few years in a nearly all-white area when I was growing up. It was full of folk taking heroin and hitting each other with bottles. I never could understand where they could muster the energy for so much fighting given the amount of heroin they were on. Nearly everywhere I have lived since has both been a lot more culturally mixed and a hell of a lot less bat-shit psycho.
      • spopejoy 12y ago
        What's unfortunate is this attitude of "just face it, everybody stays away from (poor|black|stupid|ugly|martian) people, anybody who denies it is a hypocrite". Speak for yourself, own up to your prejudices, don't project them on others. I've lived in "half-black" (wtf?? more like just "black") neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and Oakland CA. I prefer it to lily-white neighborhoods. Got carjacked once, have bars on my windows currently, projects are nearby. There's also a vibrancy to the neighborhood, in the music, the clothes, the attitude, that is precious. There are cultural differences, if you talk to folks on the street it's best to be sensitive and aware of nuances of communication. The reward is fresh perspectives, genuine encounters with different people. It's just plain stimulating. And no Starbucks either. Sure, my ideal neighborhood would be less impacted by poverty, but I would slit my wrists if I lived in Park Slope or the Upper West Side.
      • coldtea 12y ago
        >No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community. Well, some do. In their right minds et all. And could not care less about such racist BS. Except if you mean that the black neighborhood is poorer and less developed, so they might prefer the richer one. Here's a well known example: [Johny Otis] grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where his father owned a neighborhood grocery store. Otis became well known for his choice to live his professional and personal life as a member of the African-American community. He wrote, "As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community. I think the problem here is that you confusing "who shares my personal preferences" with "in the right mind". The two concepts are radically different.
    • yummyfajitas 12y ago
      Not really true, at least if physics/chemistry intuition can be trusted. Absent a segregating force (e.g. dipole attraction, what causes oil to separate from water), one expects two fluids to eventually become well mixed. Conversely, if you mix two fluids which have a segregating force, you don't expect them to stay mixed. Intrinsic properties of the fluids drive the level of segregation - anything else is just temporary. But maybe I'm just a physicist overreaching beyond my field. Why do you believe initial condition is important? [edit: simulations posted elsewhere in the thread agree with this: http://ncase.me/polygons/ http://ncase.me/polygons/ ]
  • kingmanaz 12y ago
    Or maybe self-righteous Zionists like Einstein could try diversifying their own promised land before proscribing said diversity to others? As it stands, today Palestinian's are in camps, today Ethiopian Jews are deported, and all the while the past sins of the gentiles are ever decried on the airwaves.
    • eropple 12y ago
      I assume, before you posted this angry message, that you refreshed yourself on the differences between Labor Zionism and the right wing flavor in power in the state of Israel? And took into account that this was written in 1946? No? Okay then.
      • sirfapsalot 12y ago
        Nice "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
      • eropple 12y ago
        The poster of the dead comment that is a sibling to this one is totally invited to tell me how I committed a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. While he's at it, though, I really hope he's going to explain how I'm wrong, and not just blow his whistle, scream about fallacies, and say it's a five yard penalty, still second down.
• rogerallen 12y ago
  if you haven't seen this, there's even some math to explain how "today" came to be. http://ncase.me/polygons/ http://ncase.me/polygons/
  • swatow 12y ago
    Mathematical models can be used to argue for a wide range of viewpoints. You could also write a model where people have different innate preferences over the lifestyle they want to lead, and so self-sorting is an unambiguously good thing. I understand that everyone wants "math" to be on their side, but it's not really mathematics that is doing the work here, it's your assumptions.
    • moron4hire 12y ago
      Did you play with it at all? It's somewhat flawed--for example, boosting the "prejudice" level to > 85% often leads to diverse, if not stable, communities. But I think it demonstrates the concept well. If a community starts out segregated, it takes being actively displeased with the lack of diversity to get it to change, because people, without a reason to move, won't move.
      • swatow 12y ago
        No I didn't. My point was that when you expand or change the model, you open up a whole new range of possibilities. I'm not particularly interested in how the model is parametrized or what parameters lead to what result.
        • moron4hire 12y ago
          Again, the point was not the model, but the story.
          • swatow 12y ago
            If the point is the story, what purpose does the model/simulation serve? In this case, the best that the model does is prove that the story is internally consistent. It doesn't prove that the story has any relationship to reality, because there are hundreds of other stories about segregation that you could tell, each with their own model.
• itg 12y ago
  "More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help" I'm not so sure. I went to a very diverse and large high school in NJ and what ends up happening is self segregation. All the ethnic groups would mostly end up hanging out with their own types.
  • shaded2 12y ago
    That definately happens but is an underlying cause. I'm not sure what it is. I've lived in other countries where this natural segregation does not happen.
    • learc83 12y ago
      I'd be interested in hearing about what countries you're talking about and the percentages of total population that these integrated groups make up.
    • semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      There's a fascinating example in computational studies that partly explains this: if you have people of different groups moving around randomly on a lattice, even a very slight preference (51%/49%) for being next to people in the same group as oneself ends up leading to a self-segregated pattern. EDIT: see e.g http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation
  • LukeShu 12y ago
    I also went to a very diverse highschool (recently; class of 2012), and saw the same self-segregation. However, when I saw the census dotmap that was on here a while ago[1], it was obvious that even though the school district was diverse, each of the neighborhoods was clearly a "${race} neighborhood". I'm willing to believe that the self segregation in-school reflected the segregation outside of school; that more diverse schools and neighborhoods might solve this. [1]: http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html though it seems to be down now
  • learc83 12y ago
• revscat 12y ago
  I believe a greater benefit would occur were we to have more mixed race couples, and with it the offspring that would tend to be produced by those relationships.
  • cJ0th 12y ago
    absolutely. More generally you could say that people from different races need to have something in common to get along with each other. Or even more general: People need to have something in common to have a healthy relationship. I think the main problem is that most people lack a true passion for anything. Even many people of the same race don't get along well because they have no real interest in anything. If they don't even share the same race (i.e. have even more different properties), shit is about to get real. Based on that theory I would guess that you see less racism amongst hackers, musicians, athletes etc. Humans may have made great progress technologically. But having neat digital watches didn't help society as a whole to grow intellectually to the same extend.
  • anomalous 12y ago
    Although, this sort of integration was encouraged and took place in Brazil and the mixed-race Brazilian offspring of today still seemingly and disproportionately prefer to be categorized as 'white' based on year-to-year census results.
    • JetSpiegel 12y ago
      Stopping putting the race questions in the census would certainly help. Who cares about that? Just having that question is an implicit assumption that race matters.
  • leephillips 12y ago
    Or, as Sen. Bulworth says in the movie of the same name, "Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."
  • seekingtruth 12y ago
    So, literally genocide.
• FrankenPC 12y ago
  Yes. But, due to powerful cultural influences, humans will tend to want to group together for comfort purposes. Diversity implies fractured culture. Humans are loathe to fracture their sense of community through shared culture. I'm going with good, fair, and free mass education. All the way to college. If everyone gets the same level of education then no one will FEEL out of place in any culture as they will be aware of common cultural differences through education. Good education repairs a LOT of social ills.
• angrybits 12y ago
  An increase in diversity is a goal, it's not a course of action. We should be trying to root out whatever the underlying causes are that lead us to segregate ourselves into the groups that we end up in. Forced de-segregation (as in the case of bussing kids around in public school districts) is only temporary, as the people who want to be in their groups will take action to achieve that end. For whatever it is worth, I think income inequality (between rich and poor, all races) is probably the biggest inhibitor to this problem. Motivated-yet-poor people cannot easily break out of their groups, with no money for college and (alot of times) a criminal record preventing them from enlisting in the service. If you have resources you have choices, and the poor have very little in the way of choice. And the affluent who do have a choice will almost always make the choice to not live among those who have nothing to lose, whatever their color may be.
  • saraid216 12y ago
    > An increase in diversity is a goal, it's not a course of action. Yes, actually, it is. It's fine to say you disagree with the course of action because you believe it is immoral or ineffective, but it is absolutely a course of action. > We should be trying to root out whatever the underlying causes are that lead us to segregate ourselves into the groups that we end up in. One of these causes is "that's how it has always been". How would you propose to root out this one?
  • moskie 12y ago
    Why not both? I think we can work to address both the symptoms and the disease in tandem. Treat the symptom of segregation by implementing programs or initiatives that actively promote diversity. Also, root out the underlying cause by.... doing lots of various things over the course of generations to convince/teach people that racism is wrong. Treating the symptom helps alleviate the problems experienced by people of color who are alive today. Addressing the cause could take a long, long time.
• itjustdontwork 12y ago
  More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help Never heard the term "there goes the neighborhood"? America is segregated today not because of white people, as in fact black people are far more prejudiced and racist than white people (and there is mounds of evidence to support this). But rather because you have a town thats nice, and then black people start moving in and the neighborhood town or city quickly starts going south, fast, almost without fail. Why? Because blacks make up 12% of the US population but commit half of all murders and more than half of all robberies. It's really amazing when you look at the crime statistics out there, and the amazingly consistent correlation between the percentage of black people in a certain area, and how (un)safe and (un)pleasant that area is to live in. There will never be a unified "us" as long as a significant portion of black people continue to behave the way they do and force white people to flee to safer ground. Plain and simple. The only people who truly support that "diversity" baloney are either people who have never actually had to live with it, or have something to gain from it politically or financially. Abraham Lincoln supported black colonization for a good reason; unfortunately nobody likes to talk about that when they talk about him though. Obviously forced colonization is a stupid and immoral idea, but voluntary segregation is, unfortunately, what will end up being best for us until more black people start getting their act together. EDIT: Truth hurts I see. I guess it's much easier for most people to hide comments that offend them rather than responding with an intelligent counterpoint or pointing out where you think they're "wrong".
• protonfish 12y ago
  Forced integration is a terrible idea that is proven to not work. It is the equivalent of locking enemies in a room and hoping they work it all out peacefully.
• lexcorvus 12y ago
  More diversity…would certainly help It's far from certain. For example, Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam has (tentatively and, I think, somewhat reluctantly) suggested the opposite. Here's an interview he did for National Public Radio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12802663 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1280266... Money quote: Social scientist Robert Putnam, probably best known for his work "Bowling Alone," on the decline of civic engagement, wanted to know does diversity have an impact on our sense of community? His recent finding suggest that diversity might not make us stronger. In fact, it might just be the opposite. It might make us less inclined to participate in civic life, at least in the short term.
• scobar 12y ago
  I think Einstein's very next sentence, "He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias." is great advice. The faster we demonstrate to our younger generations that our erroneous tradition must be corrected, the faster the goals of more diversity and elimination of racial bias can be achieved.
• NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > More diversity If I were to ask, "what can a man of good will do to combat tornado calamities", would you respond with a "more air temperature homogeneity would certainly help"? We can't reasonably engineer or create "neighborhood diversity". There are some policies that have tried to accomplish this, and they fail miserably. The "diversity" ends up artificial and hollow, and does nothing for prejudice. In some cases it seems to amplify it. > the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us." There can never be an "us" when we're talking about the 300 million people in the United States. There can't even be an "us" if you're talking about the 8 million in New York City, or the 500,000 in Atlanta. Human beings are limited in their ability to form an "us", and it's in the low hundreds.
• seekingtruth 12y ago
  Show me a place on Earth where decreasing the ethnic/cultural homogeneity has improved community cohesion and rapport.
• laofmoonster 12y ago
  What do you make of this map, then? It shows scores on an Implicit Association Test, measuring subconscious racism by white people against black people. http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/12/Race-IAT-score-map_White6.jpg http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/12/R... There is a liberal-conservative correlation on the map, a but far stronger correlation is the racial makeup of the state. The "deep roots" of racism don't seem to go away with exposure. Other empirical data, such as Robert Putnam's work mentioned in another comment, suggest just the opposite.