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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?
My comment doesn't really address your question, and is more about the weird bubble that Americans seem to live in. The white people who live in all the apartment buildings near me make me think of The Wire more than any non-white racial group I've encountered in the country.
In my midsized Canadian hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, we don't really see a lot of direct racial segregation, so poor people are just whoever was here 100 years ago and gradually got dragged down to the bottom rungs of the ladder. The kinds of behaviours that people tend to apply to poor black people in the US so obviously apply to mostly white people in Canada because our cities don't seem to have a group of people who were herded in to specific areas and then continually oppressed with real estate and zoning. (Very much with the exception of indigenous Canadians who were royally screwed and herded in to small areas and continually screwed with by locals the government). I'm not an expert, but our "bad parts of town" tend to just be the old industrial areas that got wiped out thanks to globalization, rather than an area with any kind of racial homogeneity beyond "generic white Canadian"
I feel (I don't have good data to base this off of) that many of the Americanisms like racial segregation, long term outcomes of segregation, or your strange healthcare system are like water to fishes; it's impossible to see that you're wet and that there might be a world outside. This makes a lot of racial politics that get exported from the US feel strange here.
Why does my perspective matter? Hmm... I think there is a tendency for conversations about race to want to make sweeping claims about people with the DNA for darker skin, when my experiences in my hometown, and bigger and smaller cities in Canada are so tilted away from the idea that a single genetic population displays meaningful differences.
Also, I want to push back a bit on the idea that any meaningful universal things about people with dark skin can be acquired by looking at the population of black people in the US... but also, I don't want this to come across as pandering anti-racism or something...
For what it's worth, I (the OP) am Canadian as well and live within an hour of Hamilton (not the Greater Toronto Area, though). And also for what it's worth, I definitely do notice in my home city a racial difference in the sort of behavior I mentioned. It's probably not as stark as might be observed in the US, but it's certainly obvious to me.
Ok that's fair :) I think I'm confusing the magnitude. There are no other racial tendencies I do see, just not as stark as the US.
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