On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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.

Once, when visiting my father's extended family in Missouri, an older man killed the dinner conversation stone dead by suggesting that the police should have just killed that ------ Rodney King. That remains the most racist thing I have ever personally witnessed.

My spouse's family in Wisconsin is more racist than my family in Indiana, disguising it somewhat by talking about "the chodnies" (derived from the Polish czarny). And my sister-in-law's husband puts the most obnoxious crap out on Facebook and Twitter. It isn't exactly "we're glad that black kid is dead", but rather "we support the police; hero hero, protect and serve, rah rah rah!" which is implicitly the same thing, when the cops seem to hardly ever kill any white people while they're out gunning down members of the community and their dogs.

There's a reason why Wisconsin instituted citizen review boards. "We investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of all wrongdoing" works great for the cops when everyone on the local force is racist, but not so much for minorities. The hand that Black Lives Matter claps against is racism in police forces, and racism-by-proxy by refusing to hold the cops accountable for it.

It isn't always orthodox color-based racism, either. It's more like identity-based tribalism. The different "black" cliques didn't always get along at my high school. For instance, one calls the other "stuck-up boujie", and the other responds "thugs and chickenheads". They would definitely use that unmentionable slur on each other. The Jews would often hang out together because they already knew each other from Saturday School, and anti-Semitism is still a thing in the Midwest. I'd occasionally hear about fights that started with racial slurs, but never actually saw one. One of my friends got called "chink" sometimes.

What I saw from where I sat was hostile enough, and I suspect it was probably worse in the places I was not.

Mainly, you hang out in your own groups, and avoid those that don't like you. That keeps your group somewhat homogenous, which may coincidentally make it look like your group is racist. And that might be true, but a lot of it is surrounding yourself with people who think and act like you, and not just people that look like you. In my groups, racism was not part of the group identity, and the racism that occurred elsewhere was simply ignored whenever possible. All that mattered was that it didn't happen among ourselves. If it happened to one of us elsewhere, that was awful and pitiable, but the best we could do was to not add to it. It's a sort of head-in-the-sand approach, which works for a lot of social problems in the Midwest. If you pretend it isn't happening, it's only a problem for the people it's happening to.

This will never happen en masse. Humans are tribal animals, and naturally form us-vs-them mentalities when under the slightest amount of stress.

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.

Say you're a nice, white mother in the 1950s, and the subject of desegregation comes up. You have no problem with black people, but you don't think the disruption would be good for your daughter's educational experience, so you favor maintaining segregation. You can say, 'I'm not racist. I'm just thinking of my daughter,' but guess what? The Poc negatively impacted by your stance don't give two shits, and they shouldn't. It's racist.

Of course, we don't have to go back in time at all to see this sort of thinking, but, for the sake of the example, I thought it worked better.