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On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#331

Post by EADGBE »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #106
Veelox wrote: post #61

I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don't understand what this author describes as "Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine." I would go as far as to say that racial is the wrong word to describe what happens in the Midwest. I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." This can be affected by where…

>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation. From my outside perspecti…

> and choice of automobile comes across as yuuuuge levels of special pleading to justify levels of xenophobia that we'd think of as the stuff of stand-up comedy.

I assume by the italics you really think that part's ridiculous. But car culture here is very, very different than other parts of the US where public transportation or locality makes them unimportant.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#332

Post by EADGBE »

torstenvl wrote: post #154
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation. From my outside perspecti…

You can think something is ridiculous all you want, but that doesn't make it inaccurate. You feel it's all a proxy for racism? Fine. Tell me, then: between an F-150 and a Silverado, which one is the "white" truck?

I commented above about car culture here vs other parts of the US which tend to have better transportation or locality options. (Forget truck culture).

It's one of only a few things I've found a lot of non-Midwesterns don't get. And honestly, it probably is pretty ridiculous.

But when housing is affordable, high-paying jobs are abundant, and schools overall are great; the car becomes the deciding factor, as the square footage of a mansion and a historic bungalow aren't really reflected in their prices differences.

I'd guess the Silverado. However, really the comparison between Silverado and F-150 really has to do with the color of your collar; not the color of your skin.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#333

Post by lloyd-christmas »

JamesBarney wrote: post #311
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But there are large cultural differences between urbanites and suburbanites.

Globally, yes, but these suburbs are different because many of these people have lived in the city. NYC has fantastic commuter transportation. People move to manhattan for a job, get married, have a kid, move to the suburbs, and continue to work in manhattan. Their children grow up going to the city on the weekends and move there when they graduate college. The manhattan population is 1.6m, but on any given weekday there are 4m people on the island. 750k people go through grand central every day (Westchester/Fairfield), Penn station another 300k (Long Island). The PATH has another 200k (New Jersey). This is all while excluding the drivers.

> I imagine this has influence on hiring.

I'm not sure how I could convince you, but I've lived here my entire life. There is absolutely no difference between people in the suburbs and in the city because they are the same people.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#334

Post by EADGBE »

germinalphrase wrote: post #242
Veelox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?

A few weeks ago I was in a rural Minnesota bar watching the Packers only to hear some guy start making jokes about black female anatomy and picking cotton. He got some laughs and kept rolling from there. Jokes about menstruation/tampons/cotton picking fall pretty squarely in my "overt racism" bucket.

Something tells me the sexist part of the joke was going to come out regardless of the racist part of it.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#335

Post by weberc2 »

throwawayjava wrote: post #329
weberc2 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe you care about advancing the conversation when you respond with straw men and ad hominems. Of course, I'm used to it because I challenge positions like yours a lot. Still, the constant need to redirect these bad faith rebuttals is exhausting. To be clear, I don't care much for "my honor". Like I said, I care about making good outcomes politically tenable. As for conspiracy theories, that's litera…

> It's hard to believe you care about advancing the conversation when you respond with straw men and ad hominems You're right. Chalk it up to frustration in a different thread. My apologies. > As for conspiracy theories, that's literally what "systemic racism" is I mean, that's clearly hyperbolic, right? Systemic racism is a real thing -- see red lining or Jim Crow. We can at least agree that the concept is useful an…

> You're right. Chalk it up to frustration in a different thread. My apologies.

Thank you for the apology; I understand the cumulative frustration bit. Hopefully I wasn't the cause of the frustration in the other thread.

> Again, do you have an alternative word?

I would say "disparate outcomes that correlate with race" or some such. I don't object to "systemic racism" when it specifically means "disparate outcomes caused by racism" (e.g., redlining and jim crow); however, it's often used as a blanket term for any racial disparity whether or not there is evidence that it's actually part of the system and not simply the result of different choices made by different groups, or an artifact of documented historical oppression. In the latter case, its effect is to shut down any conversation about the actual cause of the disparity, because anyone who questions the systemic racism explanation is guilty of endorsing racism.

So if that's not a weasel word, it's something similarly nefarious and inhibitive of dialog.

I really think all parties (or at least those who aren't threatened by advancing the dialog) are better served by clear, meaningful terms, and I don't think that's what we have with "systemic racism". Insofar as it means what you say, then it's grossly and widely misused, which has the same effect as if the word were meaningless to begin with.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#336

Post by EADGBE »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #299
Veelox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?

The Midwest still has residential schools, using a token weekly class to claim it's not perpetuating the cultural genocide. Sadly, it's often better than the alternative, living through a brutal winter with a wood stove and no running water.

Yeah, HVAC and plumbing are just some fancy contraptions only the city folk get to have.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#337

Post by neolefty »

logfromblammo wrote: post #178
mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

Nice read! My wife and I just moved to Urbana/Champaign Illinois 4 months ago for my new job, and the Midwest really is different (from Arizona and California where we lived before). People are really nice, food is great, very inexpensive place to live, and there is real natural beauty here if you look for it. Anyways, we are delighted with this area.

Whenever we drive nearby, the spouse and I wonder if the people from Normal are really just a bunch of freaks, and they just named the city that as a ruse. Obviously, all the "normal" people must therefore live in Bloomington.

Normal! I grew up in Illinois too [1] and spent a few years in Oblong, population 1700. Its claim to fame was a newspaper headline,

"Oblong man marries Normal woman."

[1] and now live a stone's throw away in Indiana near Purdue U

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#338

Post by pnutjam »

lostapathy wrote: post #117
jccalhoun wrote: post #23

Flatness is mentioned five times. Not where I grew up and there are certainly days in the warm months when I struggle to ride my bicycle up hills that I wish all of the midwest was flat.

I'm from Kansas, I get so sick of hearing how flat it is here. Florida and Illinois are both much flatter, and oddly enough I hear how flat Kansas is from residents of both. Nobody carries on about Texas being flat and boring, yet it's only marginally less flat than Kansas.

Nobody carries on about Texas being flat and boring...Well then, you heard it here first. What's the worst thing about Texas? There's so much of it.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#339

Post by dragonwriter »

weberc2 wrote: post #330
dragonwriter wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what I've seen is based on tests of behavior toward others in scenarios where factors other than indicators race (skin tone in photos or illustrations, race-stereotypical names in case files, etc.) are identical. These are direct measures of bias that manifests in discrimination, bypassing any problems with the IAT.

Can you recall any identifying information about those studies that might make them easier to Google for? Of course, links are also appreciated!

Here's a 2015 NYTimes article with summaries of and links to a number of studies of this type:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-s...

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#340

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

[deleted] wrote: post #271
rhcom2 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't create the mother example but it's the same with the slaver holder. Even with a non-racist intent, supporting and participating in a racist system is still racist - no matter the justification or motivations. I think you are defining racism so narrowly it only defines people who state "I'm superior to this race" where their actions alone can never be racist unless they say that. I already replied to the torn…

[deleted]

You have to think about the effects of what you are saying.

Let's say you have the "non-racist" slave owner. No matter what they personally believe about the equality of individual humans, they create a world where the people who come after will believe fundamentally different things about races.

You can't say, slavery IS wrong, but we are going to do it anyway because we are selfish. The act is racist, because the people who come after you will justify your decisions and cement a racial worldview that you contributed to.

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