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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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A few weeks ago I linked to a discussion in the NYT about affirmative action. The most popular NYT comments were at least weakly supportive of the conservative Supreme Court's coming affirmative action ban.

Here's an NYT story from a few days ago about black New Yorkers being priced out of the city. I'm bolding sentences of interest.

2nd most recommended comment (427 Recommend)

NYC has always been expensive. One thing that was touched on in the article is that families are fleeing the NYC school system. That deserves a closer look by the NYT. It’s not just white families, but also black families. The reforms made by DeBlasio made it impossible for parents to be sure their kids would get a good education. It’s now mostly a lottery system. It was supposed to be more equitable but now provides a path for no one.

4th most recommended comment (338 Recommend)

I can already hear the New York naysayers saying "How can black New Yorkers move to somewhere like Georgia where people are so racist??"

As a former New Yorker who grew up there but has since lived in Texas, southern California, and now small city Georgia, I loved seeing this article. Georgia is the first part of the country that I have lived where I actually see real community and friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception.

Others chime in with similar stories:

I’m a black woman from Texas but have lived in NYC for about the past decade. In my opinion, my home city in Texas was less racially (and socioeconomically) segregated than NYC. As someone else commented, middle/upper middle class black families were more of a norm rather than an exception where I am from in TX.

What does it take to achieve "friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception"? What are the success stories of positive race relations (including in a non-American context) that we can learn from? I'm interested in scientific data, commenter anecdote, and everything in between. Let's identify and replicate successes like these.

What does it take to achieve "friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception"

Maybe take a look at the military? I'm given to understand that the military has been very good at suppressing or eliminating race as a social divisor.

My own experience in the US Air Force also supports this, at least as far as friendly interactions between races being the norm.

Interestingly enough there was still a pretty high level of race separation in the career fields, with the career fields requiring lower test scores on the ASVAB seemingly having a higher proportion of black people (weapons troops, services (cooks, gym workers, etc), security forces, etc) vs the career fields requiring higher test scores seeming to have a higher proportion of white people (avionics, intelligence, linguist). Officers also tend to be higher proportion white/asian due to the college degree requirement.

Despite this separation the interactions between races in my time in were overall friendly, with more frequent interaction and joking about racial differences than what I have seen now in the general civilian population.

Is that actually true? My impression is that the military still has a fair amount of cliquishness which is often based on race, but that blacks and red tribe whites generally get along fairly well when ruled over by a third party that doesn’t specifically hate either of them and the military selects very strongly for task oriented sorts that are most interested in getting shit done.

The Veterans advocacy group at my company was once told that they didn't have enough diversity on their executive board. Their response was something to the effect of "What are you talking about? We've got both kinds of people, veterans and civilians."

That ruled over part might run into trouble in a peace time military, where the career oriented cya culture, rotation-based assignments and the political considerations of making it to general grade can lead to many of the same types of pointy-haired bosses supporting the current thing and leaving before their poor decisions come home to roost succeeding while task orienteds burn out or get up-or-outed.

Well the veterans I talked to were in under bush or early Obama, so less current thing bs.

It is absolutely true. Racism is virtually nonexistent in the military. Especially compared to academia and the kinds of NIMBY upper class blue communities who believe immigration is a good thing, so long as it doesn’t impact them.

Sexism is a different story.

Racism is virtually nonexistent in the military.

Depends on what you mean by that. If you mean there is very little actual race-hate, absolutely. But soldiers are some of the most inveterate users of racial slurs in a ball-busting way. So if your metric is "used a racial slur", then the military is hilariously racist. If we mean some deep-seated bigotry against other races, it's a rounding error.

One outlier I've observed is the attitudes of service members towards the populations of hostile nations they are occupying. The only person that I've heard IRL unironically discussing the merits of genocide, was an active duty service member pondering whether it might be morally correct to glass the middle east, due to the pervasiveness of human rights abuses he had witnessed while stationed there.

I suppose this is technically Jingoism rather than racism, but it definitely bled into his domestic views eg. immigration from Arabic countries.

That's not bigotry, that's just reality. It's one thing to hear stories, it's another to watch what goes on with your own eyes. I'd put it to you that anyone who had to do that job would come out hating whoever he thought were the people responsible. Part of this is just the dynamics of war, we have to dehumanize the opposition a bit to do our jobs. But the other is just that the middle east is so incredibly fucked up. And it's not one or two people, it's everyone. That's why some of us are a bit leery of bringing over people who have been socialized to beat women and rape anything that can be held down.

Well, it was virtually nonexistent in the military. The DEI crowd are doing their level best to pump those numbers up as high and fast as possible. The recent controversy over the recommended reading list for officers is one example that made it out of the filter bubble.

I don't have first hand knowledge - I'm a fatass with over-protective PMC parents who wouldn't have dreamed of letting me join up - but I've never talked to an active duty military person or recent-vintage vet who made a big deal out of race issues. And I recall reading various pieces, books, etc. that claim that the military is good at turning racially- and culturally-disparate people all into good little green automata. But YMMV, and of course first-hand knowledge would be appreciated if anyone wants to chime in.

And I recall reading various pieces, books, etc. that claim that the military is good at turning racially- and culturally-disparate people all into good little green automata. But YMMV, and of course first-hand knowledge would be appreciated if anyone wants to chime in.

I admittedly bristle at being characterized as "good little green automata", but overall, I'd say this is accurate. The infamous line from Full Metal Jacket about how there is no bigotry in the Marine Corps because Marines treat everyone as being equally worthless, was pretty on point. For my part I used to tell my new recruits that "you're here because the US DoD considers you expendable". "Ethnic Tension" in the military happens more between branches and specialties than between races. Army vs Navy, Air Wingers vs Ops guys, Ops guys vs Grunts, and so on.

Though sadly, there seems to have been some efforts to change this in recent years all in the name of "reform" and increasing "inclusiveness". As someone who came up through and subsequently participated in the pipeline I find that latter bit rather galling. A major component of forging individuals into a unit, and breeding esprit de corps is fostering a sense of exclusiveness. You gotta earn those stripes.

No offense was intended, Hlynka -it was a poor choice of words. Thanks for your input.

It's all good. ;) It's not like I was particularly offended or anything.

Everyone I’ve talked to who was enlisted says the military was basically a continuation of high school with all the cliquishness, and although you’re right that racial tension is usually not part of the story there’s often an implication that the blacks mostly flock together, as they do in civilian life(and often other ethnically distinctive groups common in the military, like Puerto Ricans, Cajuns, etc), and that unit based loyalties are strongest for combat troops and usually don’t quite supplant ethnic or personal cliquishness outside of the infantry and special forces.

I served in a multi-ethnic non-US country as a reservist in the infantry. I can't remember any racial cliquishness either in boot camp or my unit. Basically everyone's race was 'green' and they were largely mission orientated.

Bootcamp at the time was identical for reservists and regulars, so when I went through we had mostly regulars with a minority of reservists. All of the infantry guys (before going through corps specific training) were switched on, but I remember a lot of the other enlisted guys being absolute idiots. I think they actually assigned people that tested higher to combat corps (with the exception of technical corps such as signals or intelligence).

Wouldn't surprise me if this had downstream impacts on interracial cohesion.

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