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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34550 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"?

Breaking the consistent association between Race and Class. I hold the occasionally popular Materialist view on racism, that where Race does not intersect with economic class and competition there is no racism despite visual differences in race.* Where individuals of one race are always in a superior or a subordinate role, resentment and oppression build up.

I grew up in a well off rural-exurban area. Vastly white, but with a good sprinkling of Asians and a few Blacks and Hispanics. There was relatively little racism in any serious way. People were, of course, holding bad attitudes or making bad jokes, but there wasn't tension. Most of the Black kids I knew growing up were just as middle class as the white or Asian kids. I'd imagine most of the really rich people I knew were white, and that I knew few poor Asians, if I counted it up. But it wasn't predictable enough to worry about. Humans are bad at percentages, a slight change in likelihood won't really create dangerous stereotypes, it takes serious hit-you-in-the-face obviousness.

Then I moved to NYC, and for the first time I felt racial tension. And the reason to me was obvious. At home the odds of any given waitress/janitor/bus driver/cop/criminal being White were overwhelmingly high, and their odds of being Black/Hispanic/Asian was low enough as to be essentially even with the odds of any passerby or customer being whatever race. In NYC, in so many places, the customers were overwhelmingly White and Asian while the staff were overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. The men walking to Wall Street jobs were overwhelmingly white, the bums laying on the street begging them for change were overwhelmingly Black. The cops were largely white, the criminals largely black.

The difference might be subtle, just a few percentage points in reality, but it changes the feel significantly. The association of Black=poor=service industry poisons people. Atlanta is known for having a large Black middle and upper class. So that's where I would see the difference.

*And, necessarily, eventually no race at all thanks to assimilation. The amalgamation of the varied European immigrants into a more or less heterogenous "white" category in America resulted over time from a lack of economic discrimination between Italians, WASPs, Irish, Germans, etc. Jews being the major notable exception.

I think it happens for a few reasons.

  1. Car cities naturally separate out a lot of the interactions with the poors. So you just don’t see them.

  2. Superstar cities have huge filters for intelligence

  3. A lot of middle class left. So you only have the poors with free housing and the gap between them and the superstars is a lot more than middle class people elsewhere.

So big cities still have some 90 average IQ blacks but then wall st has 140 average IQ autistics. Much different than elsewhere where weaker filters in middle class Houston would nudge out lower IQ blacks and select for a little higher and the white populations superstars are gone.

I'll throw in a couple other theories:

-- Small predominantly white towns like mine simply never produce a predictive effect for being white. If I'm in, say, Japan I can figure that another white person is going to have more in common with me than the average person on the street. Hell, in Japan if I saw a Black guy in a Phillies hat we definitely have a ton in common by the Local average. At the PA farm show, shared skin color isn't predictive of anything in common at all, above the average of attendees. I've commented before on a similar phenomenon in my own life; due to high school class selection and selective college attendance, for a long time I was statistically more likely to have a lot in common with a random Asian kid my own age than a random white kid.

-- Southern towns benefit from a heritage of formal segregation. Segregation was morally bad and reflected negative attitudes, but it produced local Black elites and leaders in a way you didn't see in the North. This relates to the theory that the primary victims of affirmative action are Black communities. The talented tenth, the natural leaders, are plucked out of the projects and sent to Harvard and given make work diversity jobs at law firms and investment banks. This prevents them from going to HBCUs or starting businesses in their home neighborhoods.

Hell, in Japan if I saw a Black guy in a Phillies hat we definitely have a ton in common by the Local average.

Extremely salient point here.

Southern towns benefit from a heritage of formal segregation. Segregation was morally bad and reflected negative attitudes, but it produced local Black elites and leaders in a way you didn't see in the North.

Also here, and these are like inverses of each other but making the same argument.

When faced with an extremely conformist/homogeneous overculture, your choices are to adapt to conform as closely as you can and try not to stand out much... or carve out a subculture for yourself with others who share some degree of similarity to you and separate your identity as a group from the overculture.

Right now in the U.S., the overculture is the left-liberal cathedral.

For the post-civil war South, the overculture would have been 'white' culture, and enforced segregation prevented most blacks from assimilating, so as you say their only option was to form parallel institutions with black leaders arising to positions of prominence within that subculture.

And for better or worse, now the overculture not only allows assimilation, but it actively plucks the best and brightest of the undercultures so the undercultures are robbed of possible leaders and innovators.

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