141–150 of 350 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you make an interesting observation about how communities are structured here, but there is also plenty of overt (though quiet) racism.
I would like to add there is racism everywhere. Midwestern folks are not the only guilty ones. Have you not watched the recent world series between Dodgers and Astros?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first thought is how we need to start developing a better working vocabulary around having racist attitudes. Like the big-R Racist is the white power asshole who wants to create a white ethnostate--that's one that's easy to spot, and most of us can say we're not that. The real pernicious damage to communities of color comes from the little-r racism that SO SO MANY people carry around totally unthinkingly. Like eve…
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Speaking as a Midwesterener, it was a valiant attempt to examine the Midwest without descending into contempt and cliches, but alas, it ultimately failed, and failed hard . Partial credit given for making it for a few paragraphs before descending into the usual trite analysis.
Speaking also as a Midwesterner, I would disagree. I was born and raised in Michigan, and have not really left much other than to couch hop and envy the lives of my friends who've moved out to the coast. I feel that the contempt the author descends into is self-inflicted, and may representative of the culture and authors midwestern upbringing. From what I've observed, midwesterners are brutally humble, almost to a fa…
It seems more like fake humblesness more then really being humble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formati…
If you remove race the issue is with poor/rich
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formati…
Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.
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…
I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formati…
Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe.
This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).
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…
How can I, as a random Texan, tell the difference between someone from Gramercy Park and someone from New Jersey? (The part of me that wants to watch the world burn would like to see the flames between Bostonians and New Yorkers.)
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.
Congrats on the move. I grew up in Champaign. I wanted to get out of there by the time I was 18, but now I get back at least once a year and have a new appreciation for the place. Go to Papa Dels pizza if you haven't been. Get the deep dish. It will change your life.