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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 16, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone have a good sense of how African Americans living in smaller towns compare culturally to those in large cities, or how they compare to their non-black neighbors in town? I'm thinking more along the lines of places that are 5-20k population and aren't super close to a metro area such that the metro's culture seeps into the town by osmosis. I also have in mind places that aren't the deep South, so, where the black population in the town may only be 5-10%.

By culture, I mean the sort of behavior that, in my opinion, drives segregation in cities and makes predominantly black neighborhoods less desirable places to live. I'll give a few examples that I hope outlines roughly what I'm talking about. For instance, a general sense that they don't need to follow the tacit expectations of society in regards to dress, politeness, language, obeying what seem like trivial rules, and dozens of little things like that; the glorification of criminality; a disinterest in the traditional family unit (e.g., no real sense that they're "expected" to settle down with a wife and kids; having children and more or less abandoning them and not seeing that as particularly shameful); an intense culture of honor, where slights by strangers must be met with a verbal or physical altercation.

Now, even though this is The Motte and I shouldn't have to, I'll go ahead and state the obvious: those things apply to a lot of white people, and they apply not the slightest bit to a lot of black people, even in the cities. Still, I hope it's not controversial that there are average cultural differences between the races in the US, even if just as the result of a cascade of historical misfortunes that are in some sense no fault of their own.

I feel like I have a good sense of what small town white people are like, but I feel like small town black people in the non-South is a complete blind spot for me, culturally. Like, I almost can't picture it.

Has anyone lived in small towns outside the south like this? How did the culture of whites and blacks in town differ, if at all?

First and obviously, just to do the ritual throat-clearing before we all inevitably get called "racist", there are all sorts of differences between individuals and communities, Not All Black People etc. but I may have a bit of insight.

I went to HS in a small rural midwestern town, about 35k population. My graduating class was under fifty people, and there were only a dozen or so black kids in our school. Frankly, they really didn't stick out in culture, accent or behavior at all. None were athletic either, which was a big disappointment to our basketball coach, who had to play people like me. To the teenaged me, they clocked as completely normal small town midwesterners, with black skin.

In contrast, there was another smaller town maybe twenty miles away that for historical reasons had a small but cohesive and very poor black community. A few hundred people out of twenty thousand or so. But they all lived in the same part of town, in small section 8 apartment buildings, very squalid, high crime, etc. All the dysfunction we associate with underclass areas, be they trailer parks, reservations, ghettos or barrios. It's where you had to go to buy weed, but it was sketchy as shit. We would play their schools in sports quite regularly, so we got a sense of the school. The black kids there were far more in touch with wider black culture, spoke with a slight southern accent and all the latest slang, wore fashions wildly out of place with the Amish chic of the area and were generally much more stereotypically part of black culture. Their school was also much more socially segregated than ours, possibly because there weren't enough black people in our school to form their own subculture.

To answer your question in the most unsatisfying way possible: It depends very much on the individuals, the history, the social class etc. I do think there's a critical mass that any minority can hit that results in a distinct subculture. I think the main reason the black kids in my school were better integrated is that there weren't enough of them to form their own clique. When there's ten other black kids and two of them are your younger siblings, you're gonna need a wider friend group and dating pool.