Altered headline aside: yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh; speaking as someone with a bit over a decade of experience with Missouri, if I was anything other than white or Asian I'dn't touch anywhere in it besides St. Louis and Kansas City. And even then, I'd still not touch it if I had to.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but from my experience: the average culture of the state is apathetic at best to things that'd be considered unthinkable to your average person in the vast majority of other states, (incidents involving children openly joking about lynching the only black student in the institution, solely referring to them with slurs as the teachers smiled, listening and doing nothing come to mind; for other minorities, like LGBT, it was a bit worse.) and at worst, encouraged somewhat.
There are a few things that contribute to this, I believe. Primarily, the state is incredibly isolated from the rest of the States. There's no real way for other cultures to reach citizens in the State, because it's not a State with a particular pull. States like New York, California, Texas and Washington all have reasons for your average immigrant to go, yet the state of Missouri is fairly void of reasons. There's no particular industry that excels in it, and few people would think it's particularly a "Cultural Mecca," which results in a lack of people coming in. Despite this, there's a very strong sense of pride you'll see in some, quite like nationalism but pointed directly at the State, which leads to a general dislike of foreigners.
The land itself contributes in a different way. There's very little in it for youths and adults to do within. You have agriculture, the bar scene and . . . that's more or less it. It is incredibly void of anything resembling something of interest. There are fields and shantytowns all about, and the majority of cities within look as if they haven't changed a bit since the 1970s minus a bit of rust and wear - trailer parks without wheels. Arkansas doesn't look a far amount different. Even amongst my (quite liberal for the area) group of friends at the time, you could see resentment build as they saw the interests of other groups getting served, whilst their own almost entirely (from their perspective) ignored.
I appreciate the real experience in your post. But going into prejudicial generalization of your own (edit: that was before it was edited) helps nothing and is sure to create a flamewar. It may not be as bad as the prejudices discussed in the article, but it's bad enough to give us nothing but scorched earth, so it breaks the site guidelines. If you'd take those to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it. This one, for example: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
it's sad that someone with real experience and open prejudices/honest thoughts shared about Missouri gets down voted. The Guardian is a UK 'champagne socialist' news organization that devotes a lot of column inches/pixels to appraisals of other societies and is highly opinionated. I read it often, not necessarily a criticism.
I'd like to explore north st louis with Ed Pilkington and see his reaction to the residents of that areas feelings towards him..
An aside about "opinionated", because something I did a while ago gave me a different perspective.
As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was.
I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.)
Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House).
My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
That's Fox's slight of hand. They appear fairly good most of the time, and as far as what they publish they're generally not too bad when it comes to being crazy, for that you go to Breitbart. However Fox's real sin is their television station, watch Fox & Friends or any of the others and its Coney Island.
Fox news the website has been making news on other sites in recent months. The website itself had a right lean but was far far more moderate than the tv channel it was based off. There have been recently been far more hard right posts and people have taken note of the changes making it more like the commentary on the tv channel.
It's much better, yes, because you moved the needle much further into personal experience and away from what I referred to as prejudicial generalization. That's the direction we all need to try to go.
I know it's not always clear in moderation comments, but the reason we emphasize this is not so much about right or wrong, as about the effects on discussion of certain kinds of comments compared to others—so it's both more empirical and less divisive than it looks. It's hard for a community this large and uncohesive to agree about large things like right and wrong, but a bit easier to find some shared interest in the kind of site HN should be. That's the hope anyway.
I would hope calling cruel bigots in Missouri or anywhere else "some of the worst of humanity" is not divisive.
> In 2014, a group of 15 white schoolgirls blacked up their faces for a game of football. A few months previously, as riots blazed in Ferguson after the police shooting of Michael Brown, a group of Sullivan residents, Wehmeyer’s neighbour among them, staged a KKK march through town.
In as much as his comment makes an observation from his own experience that is congruent with the thrust of the article: the American South continues to be flush with cruel, unabashed racists, I'm not sure why it is being censored. Does it cross the line to say in plain language what the article says circuitously?
He was referring to the original. Hence the comment on "some of the worst of humanity," a bit of wording I used in the original post, not the edited one.
Dang posting a polite comment, to which the author responded positively by editing his post, is censoring?
Excessive generalization is the problem, by the way. It's important to be careful to criticize a particular behavior without criticizing everyone in the region.
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or "inconvenient" (wikipedia)
Yes, and it effected the desired result: the speech was altered.
I'd tend to agree. I spent two years in KCMO even there found the stark black/white racism to be blatant (I'm white and I lived just east of Troost, actually really enjoyed it). I've left for a variety of reasons, aside from the weird race relations.
For those not in the know, Troost is the major divide between the black and white regions of the city. Interestingly, these divisions seem to exist all over urban America: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html
Vi Hart and Nicki Case's Parable of the Polygons provides a model that suggests why segregation occurs even when people are willing to accept some diversity. http://ncase.me/polygons/
Yes, but the model does more to confuse than explain the problem of American racial segregation. For one, it suggests that blacks share an equal responsibility for segregation as whites. It suggests that whites and blacks are both free actors with equal power and self-determination. Neither of these are true in America, of course. Whites started out with a huge surplus of power and control over blacks, and the Civil Rights Era was the struggle of blacks for equality. Today, there continues to be a huge imbalance of power which can be observed in the wealth gap.
If one studies the history of the failed campaigns to desegregate America's schools, it's apparent that segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences.
I feel strongly that this model does far more harm than good as a tool to understand American racial dynamics.
Of course, all models are wrong in as much as they simplify reality, but my opinion is that this model is not even useful _for understand the dynamics of American segregation_. It's interesting and probably has other legitimate applications in understanding real-life social phenomena, high school lunchroom seating segregated into jocks, geeks, stoners, and goths perhaps. But it's very misleading as a metaphor to describe American housing segregation.
>For one, it suggests that blacks share an equal responsibility for segregation as whites. //
The model on that page does nothing of the sort. You, or others, may do that in response to viewing it.
The model simply shows how individual tendency towards segregation causes macroscopic segregation and that if there are also elements that will choose diversity, in the model, then segregation can be greatly reduced.
>segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences //
I was looking at school information recently in the UK [1]. The statistics strongly suggested ethnic minority groups choosing schooling based in part on race and that the choice they're making is for greater segregation.
>"The data, which was processed by Professor Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol and analysed by Demos, exclusively for the Demos Integration Hub, show that children from Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Caribbean communities are particularly likely to attend schools with a disproportionate level of other students sharing their ethnic background." [ibid] //
Maybe you're right about USAmerica and that there are no non-white racists there. But it's clear to me that segregationist doesn't, ironically, split along racial lines.
I’m in a long-running Sunshine Law suit with a Missouri government agency, their Department of Health and Senior Services, over a simple request for what is essentially a big genealogy spreadsheet of the names of local dead people, some from 100+ years ago. It’s a very boring request, as these things tend to go.
But I have been shocked at the number of people from Missouri who have actively responded to news of the suit on social media not on the merits of the request whatsoever, but by saying that I shouldn’t win because I’m “not from there” and therefore this is “none of my business”, or that I’m “some California coastal liberal elite” (practically an exact quote), or that it doesn’t matter that many other states routinely make this data freely available (including Oklahoma, right next door) because “well, that has nothing to do with Missouri”, and so on. At least one of these people has a giant Confederate flag as her primary Facebook banner image. Some of these people have open-to-the-world Facebook posts about family involvement in white nationalist groups, discussions of the “Seth Rich cover-up” and how Obama will be indicted any day now, and use of language that would indicate close familiarity with alt-right fever swamps.
I'm originally from a state like that and living in a bit more enlightened one. I have very mixed feelings about the prevailing mindset/attittude in my home state, those similar to the people you saw on Facebook. Those people are my family members, friends' parents, and even teachers. It's somewhere between anger, pity, and disgust.
You have to understand that these people are unhappy (mostly due to economic reasons) and are being spoonfed media bullshit all the time. Some of them are legitimately hateful, but a lot are just not very bright and have terrible bullshit filters. It doesn't help that the South's culture is pretty generally reviled elsewhere in the US and that they get brain-drained pretty bad.
>But I have been shocked at the number of people from Missouri who have actively responded to news of the suit on social media not on the merits of the request whatsoever, but by saying that I shouldn’t win because I’m “not from there” and therefore this is “none of my business”, or that I’m “some California coastal liberal elite” (practically an exact quote),
As impersonal as it may be I don't blame them for being distrusting by default of outsiders from the coasts. Look what happened to Colorado.
I think it depends which side of the fence you were on before we passed amendment 64. CO has always been a purple state, I get the feeling you consider yourself red/conservative/etc and are noticing the red:blue ratio swing against you.
I cannot say I share your concerns for a number of reasons. Locally, as in at the city level, we fight the old guard regularly just to pass enough taxes to keep our infrastructure from crumbling entirely. We have to fight the old guard just to have enough taxes to keep the street lights on in the summer, to put our police officers in cars newer than a decade old.
The new folks, us young folks, don't have a problem with a lot of these, we see the value in our police officers having modern vehicles, in our streets and storm water systems being maintained (and avoiding costly lawsuits in the latter case), in the value for my community safety and other people's families to have lights on in neighborhood past 6 PM during the summer for Pete's sake. We're the ones at the city hall meetings fighting grandma, and her racism, and her NIMBYism, and her staunch refusal to pay for any of the public services she takes advantage of. So I struggle to see what politics have been changed for the worse.
Oh, Oh, and after a few record breaking years for wild fires, guess if it was the old guard (who wants to bust up the state forests and lands for fracking) or the new guard (who are generally more conservationist) who voted we shouldn't allocate more budget to fire fighting@. Gosh, that certainly will not bite us after a dry winter when the US forest service predicted an even worst wild fire season this year. Oh no how the budget will suffer and the old guard will make it seem like this was completely unavoidable and unpredictable. @edit: at the state level
I take a personal ire with your baseless comment since I live in what's historically been known as the hate capital of the west; located right here in friendly Colorado. So, in my opinion, if the KKK and some of these rather bigoted church congregations have their ideals and their politics dragged out into the light of society and can't survive it good riddance.
So please, please tell me what politics the Californians (and somehow I hear; Elite West Coast Liberals in there, if not Libruls) have brought us that made our state oh so terrible over these past few years.
If it was so terrible before people like you showed up then why did you chose to show up here?
You see yourself the same way 16th century missionaries saw themselves, you think you're civilizing the barbarians but you're destroying someone else's way of life.
You are conflating high taxes and high government involvement in everyday life with a high quality of life and that's simply not the case. It might have been the case where you came from but it's not the case where you went.
They might not be the greatest at articulating it but the people who disagree with you are disagreeing with you because they have a fundamentally different view of the responsibility of government and the individual to each other (on the local level or otherwise).
You need to learn to think in terms of value. Does X increase quality of life enough per dollar to be worth it. If you don't learn to think about value you'll eventually run out of other people's money.
It's probably the politics that led to the roughly 50% rise in cost of living across the state in the last decade.
There is little comfort to be had when you're losing your home and car because someone tells you that at least the homeless shelters and public transit are much better now.
They hate you, because they see you as a giant economic jackboot stepping on the face of the poor forever.
I had never heard of sundown towns before this article and plan to read the book they link to in the article [1]. One silver lining of the last year or so for me, personally, has been a sort of awakening to the real issues that have persisted in the shadows of the US for marginalized populations. There has always been some level of awareness, but the very concrete and contemporary stories that seem to be pouring out currently have forced me to reconcile that much of the US population doesn't live within my progressive, city living bubble, and just how much worse things are in some places. I don't think I'm alone here.
Some other things I've heard that have reinforced this:
The progressive bubbles are still rife with racism, it's just not as obvious. Think of stop and frisk, school district segregation, gentrification, modern day redlining, etc. "Progressive" people often still hold subtly racist views. The kind of thing you see black people point - say like in "Get Out" and "Insecure" - is completely common place, where well-meaning liberal people perpetuate racist systems.
Poor whites don't have any more power than poor minorities. Was watching a pbs doc about the rise of the klan in North Carolina. One of the big attractions was that the wealthy whites looked down on the poor whites, and by joining the klan they could at least be above someone else.
The wealthy whites condoned and fought the Civil War. The poor didn't own slaves. They were probably racist and bigoted, but it was the kind of behavior learned form their masters.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people with the "correct" views gloat in their correctness and do nothing to actually fix racism or inequality (they are the benefactors of this inequality). I used to attend a small baptist church. One of my dad's friends loved to make off color jokes. That same man is friends with and has done more for illegal immigrants and minorities than some of the most progressive rich folk ever have. They'd probably tar and feather him and make a big show about how good they were for doing it.
School districts are a great example. Rich kids go to nice private cools and their parents often live in communities that don't pay taxes that support public schools. I've met good upstanding Republicans and rabid Obama supporters who do this, and somehow don't see the contradiction.
> parents often live in communities that don't pay taxes that support public schools
how? pretty sure in the US everyone pays property tax (directly or indirectly), some of which is used to fund the school system. you can't just opt out of paying into that system at all.
Highland Park is a city within a city that pays no taxes to DISD.
Zuckerberg grew up in Dobb's Ferry, which is just outside of New York City's limits. He ended up at a private high school with an endowment of 1.15 billion. Now he's worth 70 billion. Not to pick on him (just an example), but there are many ways the elites segregate themselves.
Median incomes in Highland Park are lower than Detroit and the school system there basically failed a few years ago.
I think there's probably a pretty good argument to be made about how schools are funded. Just pointing out that not all properties are inside of large cities isn't it.
Yes, they do have their own public schools, but that's ignoring how isolated and segregated those schools are that tax base is from the rest of the community.
In the 2015-2016 school year, HPISD had a student population of 7,171 people, of whom 2,114 were at Highland Park High School. The areas from which HPISD draws, Highland Park and University Park, have a reputation for being affluent, predominantly white areas. The numbers show that although the student body used to be almost 99% white, by 2015 a lower 86.5% of the District was white. The next biggest sections are a 6% Asian population and a 5% Hispanic population. In terms of affluence, it is true that 0.0% of the District's students are economically disadvantaged. The rate of violent or criminal incidents at every single campus in the District in 2015-2016 was 0.0%
Dobb's isn't that bad, but its demographics and income is still well above many nearby areas. Go through the Dobb's high site and count dark skinned people. It's an 80% majority community with a family income well over nearby areas.
> “I prayed that she’d look white, and she does,” he says. “She will be safe.”
This is incredibly sad to read. I wish this government would take a zero-tolerance to racism (like they do with 'terroism'), but we seem to be regressing lately.
They did that with terrorism, i.e. the Patriot Act. But that usually only applies to terrorism that isn't based on white supremacy, since white supremacists are useful to the state. See the recent collusion of police in CA with neo-nazis.
No way. But you wouldn't even have to pass new laws. If we aggressively enforced laws that are on the books already, things would be much better. But our laws aren't self-executing, and often the people most in need of legal protection are least able to obtain it. Lawyers aren't cheap.
It's more about setting the tone. If top figures in the government and legislature take an inclusive stance and stamp out any racists issues, populous tend to pick up on that vibe.
We haven't gotten that far given that yesterday's front page article on the US version of the Guardian was something about California highway patrol/local police working with Nazi groups to prosecute anti-fascists who fought with Nazis at a white nationalist rally and the prosecutor defending the act of not going after the Nazis who used knives to attack the anti-fascists, making the older Rage Against the Machine lyrics still ring true "Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-pol...
>I wish this government would take a zero-tolerance to racism
I know that sounds like a noble idea, but I'm not sure it would be a very good idea. For one, it's unconstitutional and limits free speech. Two, who gets to interpret what racist speech is? Under a law like this, I could easily people getting arrested and imprisoned for a joke that was misinterpreted, or interpreted by an overly sensitive person. It could easily be used to silence political opposition in bad faith. There's lots of ways it can be abused.
One truth I've learned in studying US history is you will never fully eradicate racist remarks. Tribalism is human nature, and racism in the US is older than the US. The best you can do it remove it from the legal system.
One final thought. For those of you who favor banning all firearms, consider the usefulness of them in this story.
There's a great and relevant Radiolab episode published just a few days ago. It discusses the Commerce Clause of the constitution[1].
Something I didn't know is that when the US government ended racial segregation in privately owned businesses they did so not on any sort of human rights or equality basis. Rather they argued that businesses being able to deny black clients service has a depressing effect on the economy, and is thus something the federal government can regulate under the Commerce Clause.
Today there's still people who think that was a bad call not because it ended segregation, but because it gave the government precedent to regulate other things via the Commerce Clause.
The US Constitution is basically obsolete and terrible and you can't run a decent society without stretching it quite a bit. It does not deserve the veneration it receives.
Veneration based on historical precedence is a fundamental weakness. It reduces the document to no more than a talisman. Powerless, ineffectual, and clung to out of comfort.
It should be scrapped entirely and redebated every 50 years.
I can't imagine a more horrific scenario than a constitutional convention. The day that happens is the day America dies. Ok, probably a few days later when they decide to throw out the current ratification rules out and just rewrite everything. A bunch of un-elected idiots rewriting the constitution. I hope they use a new name. Calling that new country USA will be confusing. Regardless, I will not stick around here for that. Third time around is bound to be an even bigger disaster than the first two.
There’s an entire amendment devoted to preventing the quartering of troops. It had never been incorporated and is pretty much meaningless.
The second Amendment has been so twisted and misinterpreted it ought to be repealed outright and replaced with what it was intended to convey — the right of states to have their National Guards.
The Three Fifths Compromise.
The process of impeachment is broken such that if the Senate is split 50/50 the Vice President is unimpeachable.
There is no process of removing Supreme Court Justices. The Constitution only provides they serve during good behavior, no provision for senility or incapacitation.
"The Consitution: A Biography" and "The Failure of the Founding Fathers" are two excellent sources for understanding the shortcomings and history of the document.
The Constitution mostly restricts the federal government, and gives a lot more leeway to the states (though obviously the Bill of Rights places limits on the states, as well).
So arguing that it's a terrible document without a lot of stretching is basically arguing that states are far too small, and a giant central government is necessary.
One terribly insidious aspect to racism in America is how invisible it is to white people. We are so segregated that most white people will not learn about black people's experiences with racism organically. It's only through articles like this and cell phone footage of violent police interactions that we become aware of this cruel alternative reality so many people live in. The disconnect exists within city-limits, but so much more so across regional divides.
You are absolutely right about that. I was brought up that racism was for poor white trash and anyone who is racist shouldn't be associated with. Of course I live my life that way, so all the people who I interact with aren't racist. Honestly, even people on the street I talk with don't say things like that. The last time someone said something like that was some old bumpkin in a truck at a gas station said something about Michelle Obama several years ago.
I know racist remarks were quite casual in the pre-Boomer generation, but they don't seem that way now, but I wouldn't know because I'm not around it.
I assume it is a lot better than the 80s, but I could never know. Of course I want to believe that racism is only a rarity today and limited to offshoots of society, and I assume many others want to believe that too.
Yeah, another element is that we don't even associate with other white people from different cultural or class backgrounds regularly. And people who have "controversial opinions" will be careful to keep their thoughts to themselves if there is any doubt about where the other people in the room stand. (Of course, things are different in the pseudonymous World Wide Web.) As a resident of a large, midwestern city, I can tell you that the suburbs are chock full of racists who know better than to let on to anyone who isn't "one of them." And that means more than having pale skin.
No, it's invisible to people who don't try to educate themselves, who segregate themselves from the poor.
It literally takes driving 20 minutes out of the walled neighborhoods and into poor parts of any city to dissuade yourself of this. Rural racism should surprise people even less because the people are fighting over limited resources in those areas. You don't even have to go that far. One of my friends (minority) had a story about how he woke up one day in his apartment and some dude was crawling through the window and he had to beat him off with a bat to get him out. These are the same kind of apartments that people live in six to a room (that's what illegal immigration looks like). Growing up in public schools, there were lots of kids like this and stories like this, and it sure as hell is not something that happens in neighborhoods with nice cars parked out front. How people have gone 20 or 30 years without seeing this is strange.
That it could be surprising to people in this day and age (and it's not because it's not obvious, it's because people aren't looking or don't really care), is the biggest problem there is.
When I was 18, I had lived a mostly sheltered middle class life and then moved to South Dallas for six months for church work. The things you saw that weren't 10 miles from every rich kid's doorstep were appalling, it at times was like living in a different country. Regular murders, people walking around with their guts hanging out in plastic bags because they got stabbed, schools that had barbed wire and metal detectors.
You don't have to do much to educate yourself on it, there is no excuse.
But if you aren't aware of a problem, you have no way to know there is something you need to learn. If only everyone knew what they didn't know. I guess that's why we need more articles like this.
Entirely true, but not sure how distanced you have to get from regular day to day society that it isn't obvious.
It is a major problem if entire groups of people can live such abstracted lives that they aren't aware this is going on. I struggle to believe that people really aren't aware of this and instead it requires constant discussion on well to do websites yet it never changes. Sometimes it comes off as tragedy porn.
The disconnect isn't just between Black and White it's between the poor and not poor. You'd be surprised if you heard the conversations between some upper middle class Blacks and if you didn't know what color they were, you would think they were some of the most racist White people in the world. (I'm Black).
Your comments in this thread are fascinating and I'd love to hear your take on something. In the upper middle class, largely liberal society that I'm part of, I sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling from how people talk about racism. They believe in racial equality and tolerance, which is great. But something uglier seems mixed in too. To me it feels like a class prejudice that wants to see the poor as beneath them, and racism is the perfect ground to stake that claim on because it's so objectively vicious. So on the one hand there's a sincere wish to be tolerant and accepting, but on the other hand there's this dark side: we want to see the poor as bad (racist), because if they're bad then we're good, they deserve to be poor and we deserve to be rich. Upper classes have always seen themselves as more virtuous in this way. They just define their virtue differently now. The new definition is arguably better because racism really is bad, but it's also convenient, and since there's not much wish to look at other things that are also bad, it doesn't seem to me to come out of a true feeling for equality. It is more like a reshuffling of the social pecking order (not the top layers, of course, just the bottom ones). When I hear people talk about uncouth racists, it's easy to imagine that in past times they would have been talking about how bad the poor smell and how crude their manners were. It feels like the distinction is still on that level, only the language has shifted. I'm sensitive to this because I grew up poor, and when I hear the unempathetic and even brutal way that many seemingly nice people talk about their inferiors, I shrink away internally. It's easy to imagine that they're talking about me too, even though I belong to their class now.
I came from a middle class neighborhood, but I have been around poorer minorities and become more aware of the issues that poorer Whites have.
I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town.
Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here.
Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that.
Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.
What do you mean "welfare and other benefits of the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars"? According to a quick Google search [1] social security and unemployment makes up about 33% of the budget and Medicare makes up about 27%. Meanwhile military is "only" 15%
Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. The amount you get out has some relation with how much you put in when you worked (it may not be perfectly linear, perhaps favors poorer people, I don't know). Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans. So I would not consider any of these programs to constitute "welfare and benefits of the poor".
> Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age.
Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.)
But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.
> who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security.
Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.
> Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans
If you don't include that as "welfare and benefits of the poor" I don't know what you would include. I guess you're right in the sense that only a small portions of ones taxes go to pay people who never worked and never plan on working.
I double checked and you are right that most of SS and medicare go to retired people. They probably aren't considered "poor". Do you know of any unbiased (or low biased) place that counts what percentage of the budget goes to poor people (food stamps, housing projects, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) ?
Things that I would qualify as welfare and benefits for the poor would be things like TANF, SNAP, Section 8, CHIP, Medicaid, etc.
These are things where eligibility is determined primarily based on some criteria that try to determine need rather than based on having paid into the system to fund it.
Social Security is essentially a government run pension. Unemployment and disability benefits are effectively government run insurance programs. The size of payment you receive and your eligibility is based on how much you paid into the system. Medicare is kind of halfway between health insurance and a pension because the premiums are subsidized if you paid into the system earlier in life. Low income people do generally get slightly better payouts proportionally to what they pay in so you could argue that some portion of these programs is a welfare benefit for the poor, but low income people also tend to die earlier, so some have also argued that they are a net transfer from low to high income people.
Racism has always been a means to an end for the rich (upper upper class aka .01% aka ruling class or whatever you want to call it) in America and elsewhere. It has always been a way to control the masses, especially the poor by dividing them and turning them on each other. It has always been perpetrated from the top down by people who know better. The people at the top count on everyone else being either disinterested (because it doesn't affect them) or too stupid to realize this or learn from history. They count on people being too stupid to see that in a racially divided society, they can never advance or have power that threatens the upper upper class. Part of this control is pretending that racism stems from the poor and uneducated, that it rises out of ignorance rather than willful planning. I suspect the upper middle class is simply trying to imitate the upper upper class in these cases.
We were looking for a house and were welcomed with opened arms by the builder, I can still go to pick up my son from a teen group where no one knows me and ask any random person have they seen my son and they know exactly who I'm talking about. But I've never felt the least bit of hostility and my son made friends quickly. He's dating a White girl - if he wants to date anyone in his school he doesn't have too much of a choice - and I've met her parents and they are perfectly supportive of it.
I've never experienced anything that I could perceive as racist here and neither has my family. There is probably still some of the old guard around but the county has bern growing fast, and probably is drowning out the old guard.
Is it an exception or do we mix racism with classicism? No I don't believe that racism is dead but do believe classicism is worse. Studies show that minorities have a harder time getting jobs, apartments, and are stopped more often by the police.
But studies have also shown that income mobility regardless of race is statistically rare.
I've heard a lot of classist comments from both White people (calling people "red necks" and "trailer trash") and upper income black people ("I don't want to live in a majority Black neighborhood around "them people")
In my experience as an American, it’s basically impossible for most Americans to talk about race and class problems at the same time. It seems as if for most people they exist in a zero-sum relationship; either everything wrong is because race(ism) or everything wrong is because class(ism). It’s not only exasperating, but seems to have stalemated progress on a societal level for generations.
This may be because Americans believe that class mobility is high (even though it isn't as high as it once was). But if class mobility is high, then if you're lower class, well, that's kind of your own fault. Go fix it. Move up.
But if you're of the wrong race, that clearly can't be your fault, and you can't "fix" it.
That split in how we think about class and race may be the underlying mechanism as to why we can't talk about both class and race at the same time.
That's great to hear! Thanks for posting! Nice to know that things are getting better in some places -- probably a lot of places. Not to suggest that we should ignore the problems that still exist, of course.
Your anecdotes as a white man are not more valuable than his as a black man. This isn't the first time you've whitesplained to a minority on HN how their lived experience is invalid.
I don't mean to come off pessimistic either, I think we are doing better about it. My poor experiences have been distasteful, but not definitive of all my experiences. There will always be bad apples and such...
Forsyth County is a lot of things, but "progressive" it's not - not in the liberal since. I would say it's more typical Republican than what I consider "populist".
On that note, sure my son's girlfriend's parent seemed okay with her dating a Black kid. But when he dropped her off to our house for the first time, coming into our neighborhood of new houses where on the entry way it says "houses starting at $X" where $X denotes that we were probably upper income, and from my sons mannerism and speech you could tell that he grew up in the "right part of town".
Would he be okay if my son was the same kid but we lived in a poorer part of town? Probably not.
No it's definitely both. But, while there are a lot of studies showing discriminitstion, to a point, depending on what part of the country you are in, how well connected you are, status (not necessarily income) and how well you can "fit in", it can be less of an issue.
Where I come from in the UK there isn't a lot of racism (that I am aware of) but I do see huge similarities in the way that classes treat each other to the way races treat each other in the US.
It's interesting how the msm only reports on situations like these when the victims are non-White. Here is an example of what Whites go through to outwit racists in rural South Africa : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMOmQJCtTek
I'm a white guy that prefers not to travel through the inner city, because of what might happen to me there. Let's stop pretending that this is a one-way street.
> They took to heart several recommendations gleaned from the conversation, including that they should bypass Harrison, an Arkansas town with a long history of KKK activity.
I live in Harrison, AR - in fact, I just moved back here after spending five years in Charlottesville, VA.
You're far more likely to be harassed for having a Hillary sticker on the back of your car than for the color of your skin.
I live in Atlanta and have lived in the American south all of my life.
I don't really appreciate the stereotype that people here are more racist and backwards than in other parts of the country. It actually seems to me that in many ways we have superior race relations down here. The amount of blacks living here is much higher than it is in other parts of the country. Most days when I walk to work I don't see any white people at all. You notice that when there are race riots and events of racial tension they never occur in the south?
I think the fear that a black person would have some sort of wild racist encounter down here is misplaced.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadEDIT: The given title is too long to fit the 80 character limit. And I suck at picking new titles. Sorry.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but from my experience: the average culture of the state is apathetic at best to things that'd be considered unthinkable to your average person in the vast majority of other states, (incidents involving children openly joking about lynching the only black student in the institution, solely referring to them with slurs as the teachers smiled, listening and doing nothing come to mind; for other minorities, like LGBT, it was a bit worse.) and at worst, encouraged somewhat.
There are a few things that contribute to this, I believe. Primarily, the state is incredibly isolated from the rest of the States. There's no real way for other cultures to reach citizens in the State, because it's not a State with a particular pull. States like New York, California, Texas and Washington all have reasons for your average immigrant to go, yet the state of Missouri is fairly void of reasons. There's no particular industry that excels in it, and few people would think it's particularly a "Cultural Mecca," which results in a lack of people coming in. Despite this, there's a very strong sense of pride you'll see in some, quite like nationalism but pointed directly at the State, which leads to a general dislike of foreigners.
The land itself contributes in a different way. There's very little in it for youths and adults to do within. You have agriculture, the bar scene and . . . that's more or less it. It is incredibly void of anything resembling something of interest. There are fields and shantytowns all about, and the majority of cities within look as if they haven't changed a bit since the 1970s minus a bit of rust and wear - trailer parks without wheels. Arkansas doesn't look a far amount different. Even amongst my (quite liberal for the area) group of friends at the time, you could see resentment build as they saw the interests of other groups getting served, whilst their own almost entirely (from their perspective) ignored.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does the edit fix the problem?
As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was.
I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.)
Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House).
My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
I know it's not always clear in moderation comments, but the reason we emphasize this is not so much about right or wrong, as about the effects on discussion of certain kinds of comments compared to others—so it's both more empirical and less divisive than it looks. It's hard for a community this large and uncohesive to agree about large things like right and wrong, but a bit easier to find some shared interest in the kind of site HN should be. That's the hope anyway.
> In 2014, a group of 15 white schoolgirls blacked up their faces for a game of football. A few months previously, as riots blazed in Ferguson after the police shooting of Michael Brown, a group of Sullivan residents, Wehmeyer’s neighbour among them, staged a KKK march through town.
In as much as his comment makes an observation from his own experience that is congruent with the thrust of the article: the American South continues to be flush with cruel, unabashed racists, I'm not sure why it is being censored. Does it cross the line to say in plain language what the article says circuitously?
Excessive generalization is the problem, by the way. It's important to be careful to criticize a particular behavior without criticizing everyone in the region.
Yes, and it effected the desired result: the speech was altered.
For those not in the know, Troost is the major divide between the black and white regions of the city. Interestingly, these divisions seem to exist all over urban America: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html
If one studies the history of the failed campaigns to desegregate America's schools, it's apparent that segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences.
I feel strongly that this model does far more harm than good as a tool to understand American racial dynamics.
The model on that page does nothing of the sort. You, or others, may do that in response to viewing it.
The model simply shows how individual tendency towards segregation causes macroscopic segregation and that if there are also elements that will choose diversity, in the model, then segregation can be greatly reduced.
>segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences //
I was looking at school information recently in the UK [1]. The statistics strongly suggested ethnic minority groups choosing schooling based in part on race and that the choice they're making is for greater segregation.
>"The data, which was processed by Professor Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol and analysed by Demos, exclusively for the Demos Integration Hub, show that children from Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Caribbean communities are particularly likely to attend schools with a disproportionate level of other students sharing their ethnic background." [ibid] //
Maybe you're right about USAmerica and that there are no non-white racists there. But it's clear to me that segregationist doesn't, ironically, split along racial lines.
[1] https://www.demos.co.uk/press-release/61-of-ethnic-minority-...
But I have been shocked at the number of people from Missouri who have actively responded to news of the suit on social media not on the merits of the request whatsoever, but by saying that I shouldn’t win because I’m “not from there” and therefore this is “none of my business”, or that I’m “some California coastal liberal elite” (practically an exact quote), or that it doesn’t matter that many other states routinely make this data freely available (including Oklahoma, right next door) because “well, that has nothing to do with Missouri”, and so on. At least one of these people has a giant Confederate flag as her primary Facebook banner image. Some of these people have open-to-the-world Facebook posts about family involvement in white nationalist groups, discussions of the “Seth Rich cover-up” and how Obama will be indicted any day now, and use of language that would indicate close familiarity with alt-right fever swamps.
It’s been...enlightening.
You have to understand that these people are unhappy (mostly due to economic reasons) and are being spoonfed media bullshit all the time. Some of them are legitimately hateful, but a lot are just not very bright and have terrible bullshit filters. It doesn't help that the South's culture is pretty generally reviled elsewhere in the US and that they get brain-drained pretty bad.
As impersonal as it may be I don't blame them for being distrusting by default of outsiders from the coasts. Look what happened to Colorado.
I cannot say I share your concerns for a number of reasons. Locally, as in at the city level, we fight the old guard regularly just to pass enough taxes to keep our infrastructure from crumbling entirely. We have to fight the old guard just to have enough taxes to keep the street lights on in the summer, to put our police officers in cars newer than a decade old.
The new folks, us young folks, don't have a problem with a lot of these, we see the value in our police officers having modern vehicles, in our streets and storm water systems being maintained (and avoiding costly lawsuits in the latter case), in the value for my community safety and other people's families to have lights on in neighborhood past 6 PM during the summer for Pete's sake. We're the ones at the city hall meetings fighting grandma, and her racism, and her NIMBYism, and her staunch refusal to pay for any of the public services she takes advantage of. So I struggle to see what politics have been changed for the worse.
Oh, Oh, and after a few record breaking years for wild fires, guess if it was the old guard (who wants to bust up the state forests and lands for fracking) or the new guard (who are generally more conservationist) who voted we shouldn't allocate more budget to fire fighting@. Gosh, that certainly will not bite us after a dry winter when the US forest service predicted an even worst wild fire season this year. Oh no how the budget will suffer and the old guard will make it seem like this was completely unavoidable and unpredictable. @edit: at the state level
I take a personal ire with your baseless comment since I live in what's historically been known as the hate capital of the west; located right here in friendly Colorado. So, in my opinion, if the KKK and some of these rather bigoted church congregations have their ideals and their politics dragged out into the light of society and can't survive it good riddance.
So please, please tell me what politics the Californians (and somehow I hear; Elite West Coast Liberals in there, if not Libruls) have brought us that made our state oh so terrible over these past few years.
You see yourself the same way 16th century missionaries saw themselves, you think you're civilizing the barbarians but you're destroying someone else's way of life.
You are conflating high taxes and high government involvement in everyday life with a high quality of life and that's simply not the case. It might have been the case where you came from but it's not the case where you went.
They might not be the greatest at articulating it but the people who disagree with you are disagreeing with you because they have a fundamentally different view of the responsibility of government and the individual to each other (on the local level or otherwise).
You need to learn to think in terms of value. Does X increase quality of life enough per dollar to be worth it. If you don't learn to think about value you'll eventually run out of other people's money.
There is little comfort to be had when you're losing your home and car because someone tells you that at least the homeless shelters and public transit are much better now.
They hate you, because they see you as a giant economic jackboot stepping on the face of the poor forever.
Some other things I've heard that have reinforced this:
Democracy in Chains: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-ch...
When the Welfare People Come: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29633687-when-the-welfar...
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52444.Sundown_Towns?ac=1...
The wealthy whites condoned and fought the Civil War. The poor didn't own slaves. They were probably racist and bigoted, but it was the kind of behavior learned form their masters.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people with the "correct" views gloat in their correctness and do nothing to actually fix racism or inequality (they are the benefactors of this inequality). I used to attend a small baptist church. One of my dad's friends loved to make off color jokes. That same man is friends with and has done more for illegal immigrants and minorities than some of the most progressive rich folk ever have. They'd probably tar and feather him and make a big show about how good they were for doing it.
School districts are a great example. Rich kids go to nice private cools and their parents often live in communities that don't pay taxes that support public schools. I've met good upstanding Republicans and rabid Obama supporters who do this, and somehow don't see the contradiction.
how? pretty sure in the US everyone pays property tax (directly or indirectly), some of which is used to fund the school system. you can't just opt out of paying into that system at all.
Zuckerberg grew up in Dobb's Ferry, which is just outside of New York City's limits. He ended up at a private high school with an endowment of 1.15 billion. Now he's worth 70 billion. Not to pick on him (just an example), but there are many ways the elites segregate themselves.
https://www.dfsd.org/
http://www.hipark.org/
Median incomes in Highland Park are lower than Detroit and the school system there basically failed a few years ago.
I think there's probably a pretty good argument to be made about how schools are funded. Just pointing out that not all properties are inside of large cities isn't it.
Yes, they do have their own public schools, but that's ignoring how isolated and segregated those schools are that tax base is from the rest of the community.
In the 2015-2016 school year, HPISD had a student population of 7,171 people, of whom 2,114 were at Highland Park High School. The areas from which HPISD draws, Highland Park and University Park, have a reputation for being affluent, predominantly white areas. The numbers show that although the student body used to be almost 99% white, by 2015 a lower 86.5% of the District was white. The next biggest sections are a 6% Asian population and a 5% Hispanic population. In terms of affluence, it is true that 0.0% of the District's students are economically disadvantaged. The rate of violent or criminal incidents at every single campus in the District in 2015-2016 was 0.0%
Dobb's isn't that bad, but its demographics and income is still well above many nearby areas. Go through the Dobb's high site and count dark skinned people. It's an 80% majority community with a family income well over nearby areas.
This is incredibly sad to read. I wish this government would take a zero-tolerance to racism (like they do with 'terroism'), but we seem to be regressing lately.
I don't think I could do what he's doing: staying in a place where he so frequently encounters threats of violence. But I'm glad he's doing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know that sounds like a noble idea, but I'm not sure it would be a very good idea. For one, it's unconstitutional and limits free speech. Two, who gets to interpret what racist speech is? Under a law like this, I could easily people getting arrested and imprisoned for a joke that was misinterpreted, or interpreted by an overly sensitive person. It could easily be used to silence political opposition in bad faith. There's lots of ways it can be abused.
One truth I've learned in studying US history is you will never fully eradicate racist remarks. Tribalism is human nature, and racism in the US is older than the US. The best you can do it remove it from the legal system.
One final thought. For those of you who favor banning all firearms, consider the usefulness of them in this story.
Something I didn't know is that when the US government ended racial segregation in privately owned businesses they did so not on any sort of human rights or equality basis. Rather they argued that businesses being able to deny black clients service has a depressing effect on the economy, and is thus something the federal government can regulate under the Commerce Clause.
Today there's still people who think that was a bad call not because it ended segregation, but because it gave the government precedent to regulate other things via the Commerce Clause.
1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-more-perfect...
It should be scrapped entirely and redebated every 50 years.
[0]: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution
There’s an entire amendment devoted to preventing the quartering of troops. It had never been incorporated and is pretty much meaningless.
The second Amendment has been so twisted and misinterpreted it ought to be repealed outright and replaced with what it was intended to convey — the right of states to have their National Guards.
The Three Fifths Compromise.
The process of impeachment is broken such that if the Senate is split 50/50 the Vice President is unimpeachable.
There is no process of removing Supreme Court Justices. The Constitution only provides they serve during good behavior, no provision for senility or incapacitation.
"The Consitution: A Biography" and "The Failure of the Founding Fathers" are two excellent sources for understanding the shortcomings and history of the document.
So arguing that it's a terrible document without a lot of stretching is basically arguing that states are far too small, and a giant central government is necessary.
I know racist remarks were quite casual in the pre-Boomer generation, but they don't seem that way now, but I wouldn't know because I'm not around it.
I assume it is a lot better than the 80s, but I could never know. Of course I want to believe that racism is only a rarity today and limited to offshoots of society, and I assume many others want to believe that too.
It literally takes driving 20 minutes out of the walled neighborhoods and into poor parts of any city to dissuade yourself of this. Rural racism should surprise people even less because the people are fighting over limited resources in those areas. You don't even have to go that far. One of my friends (minority) had a story about how he woke up one day in his apartment and some dude was crawling through the window and he had to beat him off with a bat to get him out. These are the same kind of apartments that people live in six to a room (that's what illegal immigration looks like). Growing up in public schools, there were lots of kids like this and stories like this, and it sure as hell is not something that happens in neighborhoods with nice cars parked out front. How people have gone 20 or 30 years without seeing this is strange.
That it could be surprising to people in this day and age (and it's not because it's not obvious, it's because people aren't looking or don't really care), is the biggest problem there is.
When I was 18, I had lived a mostly sheltered middle class life and then moved to South Dallas for six months for church work. The things you saw that weren't 10 miles from every rich kid's doorstep were appalling, it at times was like living in a different country. Regular murders, people walking around with their guts hanging out in plastic bags because they got stabbed, schools that had barbed wire and metal detectors.
You don't have to do much to educate yourself on it, there is no excuse.
It is a major problem if entire groups of people can live such abstracted lives that they aren't aware this is going on. I struggle to believe that people really aren't aware of this and instead it requires constant discussion on well to do websites yet it never changes. Sometimes it comes off as tragedy porn.
I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town.
Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here.
Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that.
Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.
[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.)
But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.
Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.
If you don't include that as "welfare and benefits of the poor" I don't know what you would include. I guess you're right in the sense that only a small portions of ones taxes go to pay people who never worked and never plan on working.
I double checked and you are right that most of SS and medicare go to retired people. They probably aren't considered "poor". Do you know of any unbiased (or low biased) place that counts what percentage of the budget goes to poor people (food stamps, housing projects, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) ?
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...
These are things where eligibility is determined primarily based on some criteria that try to determine need rather than based on having paid into the system to fund it.
Social Security is essentially a government run pension. Unemployment and disability benefits are effectively government run insurance programs. The size of payment you receive and your eligibility is based on how much you paid into the system. Medicare is kind of halfway between health insurance and a pension because the premiums are subsidized if you paid into the system earlier in life. Low income people do generally get slightly better payouts proportionally to what they pay in so you could argue that some portion of these programs is a welfare benefit for the poor, but low income people also tend to die earlier, so some have also argued that they are a net transfer from low to high income people.
That's because it doesn't exist, at least not in a real material fashion. Just like the 70-cents on the dollar claim.
Yeah this Forsyth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
We were looking for a house and were welcomed with opened arms by the builder, I can still go to pick up my son from a teen group where no one knows me and ask any random person have they seen my son and they know exactly who I'm talking about. But I've never felt the least bit of hostility and my son made friends quickly. He's dating a White girl - if he wants to date anyone in his school he doesn't have too much of a choice - and I've met her parents and they are perfectly supportive of it.
I've never experienced anything that I could perceive as racist here and neither has my family. There is probably still some of the old guard around but the county has bern growing fast, and probably is drowning out the old guard.
But studies have also shown that income mobility regardless of race is statistically rare.
I've heard a lot of classist comments from both White people (calling people "red necks" and "trailer trash") and upper income black people ("I don't want to live in a majority Black neighborhood around "them people")
But if you're of the wrong race, that clearly can't be your fault, and you can't "fix" it.
That split in how we think about class and race may be the underlying mechanism as to why we can't talk about both class and race at the same time.
You'd certainly be in the minority. I've seen worse in far more "progressive" areas of the country.
I hope people don't read your comment and assume your experience is anywhere near typical.
Also, adding context is not invalidating.
On that note, sure my son's girlfriend's parent seemed okay with her dating a Black kid. But when he dropped her off to our house for the first time, coming into our neighborhood of new houses where on the entry way it says "houses starting at $X" where $X denotes that we were probably upper income, and from my sons mannerism and speech you could tell that he grew up in the "right part of town".
Would he be okay if my son was the same kid but we lived in a poorer part of town? Probably not.
Oddly, I read not long ago that the most segregated schools in America are in New York city.
I live in Harrison, AR - in fact, I just moved back here after spending five years in Charlottesville, VA.
You're far more likely to be harassed for having a Hillary sticker on the back of your car than for the color of your skin.
I don't really appreciate the stereotype that people here are more racist and backwards than in other parts of the country. It actually seems to me that in many ways we have superior race relations down here. The amount of blacks living here is much higher than it is in other parts of the country. Most days when I walk to work I don't see any white people at all. You notice that when there are race riots and events of racial tension they never occur in the south?
I think the fear that a black person would have some sort of wild racist encounter down here is misplaced.