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On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being willing to work together is a low bar for discrimination. A lower bar would be more likely to hire someone with equivalent credentials. I imagine if you looked into it, New Yorkers would be much more likely to hire a New Yorkers over a New Jerseyan with similar credentials.

I sincerely doubt that. New Jersey is just a suburb of NY along with Westchester, Nassau, and Fairfield, CT.

I know what New Jersey is :). But there are large cultural differences between urbanites and suburbanites. And I imagine this has influence on hiring.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#312
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but calling him out on his language is significantly less interesting than the thing the parent said. If your quote was the only thing he said you'd be right. I think the quote added a lot of context and information his message though. > born and raised in michigan, lived all over the state. I hope i die here. That statement on its own communicates he likes Michigan, has no interest in moving.…

> We can nitpick the insult on the end or the language he used, but I think what he had to say about Michigan was "putting himself out there" a little bit that makes it harder to do. I didn't say he was trolling. In fact, I said "While you probably have a point," emphasizing the fact that there may be a substantive post within the comment. However, it says in the Hacker News Guidelines[1], "Don't be snarky. Comments…

[deleted]

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist That's confusing because you're using two different definitions of the word "racist" in the same sentence. At some point we should do everyone a favor and use two words when we mean two things.

They’re the same word describing different things. Many white people are aghast at being accused of doing something racist because it implies that they themselves are racist. It shouldn’t, and it hampers the conversation to imply it does (the same logic can be applied to sexism and most other isms as well). Not saying there aren’t racists out there (lol tiki torches), but most people don’t fall into that category.

Right, so like the parent said, it would be better if people didn't coopt an existing word to mean something else. Especially when "something else" is often merely "disagreeing with someone".

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with that, and folks from those areas probably take more grief from their neighbors than what we deal with.

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.

An often overlooked aspect of inter-group conflict: it's often made out to be unidirectional but it rarely is.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. My personal way of saying this is "we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist." Very often the most pragmatic choice in a situation also happens to be racist. Just own the racist things you do, and try to change the world for the better so you are no longer pushed into doing racist things.

> we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist That's confusing because you're using two different definitions of the word "racist" in the same sentence. At some point we should do everyone a favor and use two words when we mean two things.

I'd say instead that a PoC can be negatively affected by racism that isn't the result of a racist act by someone else. This is why it's so easy for people who don't experience it to minimize or otherwise feel that racism is less of a problem than it actually is. We don't feel like racists and we (probably correctly) assume that others are mostly like us. And so if we and most others like us aren't being racist, racism must not be much of a problem.

Aside from the property values example someone else listed, here's another one. If a well-off community decides to impose a tax on their residents to help fund the local schools, that doesn't feel racist. Everyone is just trying to ensure a quality education for their children. But what that does is allow the underfunded public school system to remain underfunded. If everyone's children were receiving substandard educations, there would be more pressure on the state to fix the situation for everyone in the state. But when only the poor communities are underfunded thanks to the wealthier communities kicking in those extra funds, you end up with those poor, primarily PoC students having lower-quality schools.

In that way, overt racism from previous eras created a status quo that, through non-overt racism, gets perpetuated going forward.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I am sure is true for some places, but not all. The census count for "black" in my county in 1920 and 1900 was 5. Not 5%, 5. It was 99.97% white. It's a fact that people seem to have quite some trouble with. Much of the midwest is nearly entirely white (and at that a pretty narrow subset of northern europeans) because only a small set of people had any interest in settling there.

What about 1990?

What is objectionable about the above comment?

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist That's confusing because you're using two different definitions of the word "racist" in the same sentence. At some point we should do everyone a favor and use two words when we mean two things.

I'd say instead that a PoC can be negatively affected by racism that isn't the result of a racist act by someone else. This is why it's so easy for people who don't experience it to minimize or otherwise feel that racism is less of a problem than it actually is. We don't feel like racists and we (probably correctly) assume that others are mostly like us. And so if we and most others like us aren't being racist, racis…

> ...a PoC can be negatively affected by racism...

> ...that isn't the result of a racist act...

Here, again, the words "racism" and "racist" mean two different things. I'm not sure why there's so much hesitance to just call the different things by different names.

Also, nobody has minimized anything. I don't think clarity in communication promotes injustice or ignorance. On the contrary, actually.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say instead that a PoC can be negatively affected by racism that isn't the result of a racist act by someone else. This is why it's so easy for people who don't experience it to minimize or otherwise feel that racism is less of a problem than it actually is. We don't feel like racists and we (probably correctly) assume that others are mostly like us. And so if we and most others like us aren't being racist, racis…

> ...a PoC can be negatively affected by racism... > ...that isn't the result of a racist act... Here, again, the words "racism" and "racist" mean two different things. I'm not sure why there's so much hesitance to just call the different things by different names. Also, nobody has minimized anything. I don't think clarity in communication promotes injustice or ignorance. On the contrary, actually.

No, they don't mean two different things any more than food means two separate things when describing broccoli and ice cream. It's a broad term that covers many more nuanced concepts. I was attempting to cover the difference between overt racism and systemic racism. There's your two separate terms but both are absolutely forms of racism and to say that systemic racism isn't is just an attempt to rid it of the stigma that rightly gets associated with the term racism.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I am sure is true for some places, but not all. The census count for "black" in my county in 1920 and 1900 was 5. Not 5%, 5. It was 99.97% white. It's a fact that people seem to have quite some trouble with. Much of the midwest is nearly entirely white (and at that a pretty narrow subset of northern europeans) because only a small set of people had any interest in settling there.

But, thought experiment: Suppose that 5 to 10 black families decided to relocate to Gedanken, Kan. (pop. 2000) in 1920? I think the threat of race-based violence would have made this very difficult. One family, perhaps, but a little neighborhood? Not OK -- I'm thinking specifically about the Tulsa riots of 1921 and other racial violence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr... ). (Grew up in…

This exact situation happened around 1850 in Iowa, a small group of free black families settled in Fayette County. I wish I could find more than a passing reference to pass on what I've read.

Iowa has a history of progressivism. For example in 1851 it was the second state to legalize interracial marriage. In 2009 it was the forth state to legalize same-sex marriage (and not through any change of the laws, the Iowa supreme court decided it was legal)

I know the culture I experienced was not pervasive in the whole midwest. I'm also not saying that there weren't bigots, but it was certainly very much different than a lot of other places in this country.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

> The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Incorrect. More correct would be: the dominant modern left-wing view is that there exists now in much of the world, and has historically, a systematic structural power imbalances between groups identified as “races”, that this disproportionately harms some of those groups, and that this is bad thing. That the conflu…

The point is, structural disadvantages are perpetuated and worsened by people and behaviors that are not specifically discriminatory or hateful themselves. Of course the mechanism is usually related to discriminatory or hateful views held by someone at some point.

I don’t like the conflation of terms either. But I see a lot of people talking past each other (“racism isn’t a big deal because most people aren’t racist anymore,” and “racism is a major problem in America because of structural inequality”). Parent got close to explaining how these statements are true at the same time, and I wanted to point it out.

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