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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've felt this, coming from a mediocre rural area in Greater Appalachia (where both the top and the bottom were white and the black people I knew were in similar circumstances to myself; they mostly lived in modest houses like my family did, not in trailers or mansions) to an old Southern port city. The racial inequality there was very in-your-face along with the juxtaposition of dilapidated shotgun shacks being all but adjacent to million dollar historic mansions. It was deeply jarring and remorse-inducing (as was witnessing the poverty of the Black Belt, a region depopulated by the Great Migrations and which is probably about as bad and forgotten about as native reservations or the worst that Appalachia has to offer).

By contrast, IMO successful integration happened mostly in the New South. It's still a little weird due to the fact that underclass blacks tend to live in inner city apartments while underclass whites tend to live in trailers out in the country but once you get above that level (and ignore the mostly white elite, which are as out of view to the middle as the underclass) you get working and middle class white and black people who interact and get along with each other well on a day to day basis and as /u/faceh puts it, there's more shared culture and experience papering things over than there is racial divide. We all want our kids to go to good schools and do well, we all want nice houses and fancy cars or trucks, we love Jesus (but are imperfect sinners), and want our football team of choice to win.

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