Racism is sadly quite deep rooted in the US, also from all kinds of people in all kinds of directions. Even not that seldom the way some people fight racism turns out to be racist if you look at it from an external POV with a bit of distance.
I have lived, worked, and faced racism in 15 countries. Race is always an issue even in the most meritocratic multicultural societies (like Singapore).
People will always have a bias about your culture. Just ask any German how many people gave their best Hitler impression when traveling abroad.
What I think is new since about 2018 in the US is that perceived victimhood is rewarded. Not actual victimhood, but perceived victimhood.
"German" describes a nationality, not a race. Ask any American how many people -- including Germans -- give their best cowboy impression when traveling abroad.
It has always amazed me how many people in the US insist on categorizing other people into phenotypical races that we know cannot be justified by genetic research and are also incorrect for tracking ethnic origins and self-identity based conceptions. The explanation is that oppressed groups are often forced to take over inadequate and untenable conceptualizations to identify as a group and fight the oppression. However, at some point you would hope they also start revising those concepts. There was a short trend in this direction but it failed.
Hardly a uniquely American thing. Imagining or identifying racial and ethnic groupings based on superficial features, or just differences in language and clothing, seems a universal human tendency across cultures and time. If Americans seem more prone to referring to race (and I don't think that's true) it perhaps comes from both a history of immigration and multiculturalism, and a history of slavery and racial oppression.
I don't agree. It's one thing to claim that people are aware of "race", but that's not the issue being discussed here.
The issue being discussed is the degree of institutionalization that racism is embedded in US culture, to the point that unwittingly racist news stories are published in mainstream media, and once that's pointed out regular everyday people come at their defense supposedly for being something normal, totally unaware of actually proving and reinforcing the point.
For contrast, in some countries the editorial guidelines for mainstream news organizations even discourage referring the nationality of those involved in events, due to concerns those could be abused to further racist beliefs in any way.
You would have to give some examples. The Atlantic article about curtains refers to relative wealth and status, not to race. The wealthy white people in Brooklyn Heights, mentioned exactly once to accurately describe the demographics of that neighborhood, are used as examples of people who don't hang curtains on their windows (or don't close their curtains). According to the author that's a status display, nothing to do with race.
If you think American mainstream media don't have editorial guidelines that discourage mentioning race or nationality, you might want to look at those editorial guidelines, because American mainstream media -- such as The Atlantic -- most certainly do have guidelines. In fact they follow guidelines so cautious that people from Trump to Musk have accused the mainstream media of censorship and bias and "wokeness" because the media does leave off things like race and nationality and even relative social status, bending over backwards to appear fair.
Because I read the whole article, and didn't interpret the one usage of "white" as racist. That neighborhood is wealth, 75% white people, with median age 35. So "wealthy, young, white" describes the demographic. Nothing in the article refers to race in any way a reasonable person could construe as racist.
I am curious to know the opinion of those in the US about what I think of as the great American experiment. Namely the bringing together of people (races) from all-over the world in a society. From obviously troubled beginnings (slavery, a civil qwar, various political assassinations all the way into the 1900s), to the 50s, the civil right turmoil and eventual settlement. Attempt at making a mixing pot through to multiculturalism today. Has it worked? What to try next? Will a steady state be reached? What does that look like?
I'd say it's worked as expected in the areas where it's actually implemented. In most suburbs, there is a racial mix that's (probably, I don't know the exact metrics) close to the national demographic, and in those areas the culture is fairly homogenous. I grew up as a kid in the military and lived in multiple suburbs during and after my parents' service. The schools, neighborhoods, and local businesses all had what felt like a fair spread of various races, and I never observed any race-based hate. This was across portions of Mississippi, Oklahoma, Ohio, and California.
Heavily urban areas seem to shift toward race-oriented living areas, where I think there's a lot more animosity between races because a white person in a predominantly black area or a black person in Chinatown stands out more and generates concern that they aren't a part of the area's culture.
> How would it differ if the article were “crazy rich Asians” (a film) or “impoverished Eastern European Jews”?
It differs from the fact that in at least some places outside of the US those articles would not include any reference to race or even nationality of those involved, specially gratuituous ones like this.
Social status/class and race are closely related in the USA. But I didn't read "wealthy young white people" as an indication of obsession with race. Race and class aside, white Americans, Black Americans, Chinese Americans, etc. have different cultural traditions. Wealthy Americans have different habits and status markers than not-wealthy Americans. A wealthy white American has different habits and markers than a wealthy Black American. Just look at how Jay Z dresses compared to Elon Musk or Bill Gates. All wealthy but different kinds of status display.
> Just look at how Jay Z dresses compared to Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
What point were you hoping to convey? That different people dress differently? Because you could also compare how others dress, like Eminem and Obama, and what would your point be?
How Jay Z and Bill Gates dress has nothing to do with race per se, that was my point. It has to do with social status, social group, cultural background, and in the case of celebrities their public persona. We can maybe agree that Jay Z and Bill Gates both qualify as "wealthy," at least among Americans. Yet they don't have much in common in terms of cultural background. Skin color is one aspect of that but not the only or most important aspect.
The article in question mentions race and uses the word "white" exactly once. The sentence in question:
> The New York Times recently referred to the “obligatory uncurtained windows” of Brooklyn Heights, a rich enclave in New York City, and The Root pointed out that this seemed common among wealthy young white people living in gentrified urban areas.
Brooklyn Heights is 75.2 white people[1], with a median age of 35.3[2] (young, in other words). and the term "gentrified" applies. So describing Brooklyn Heights as a place with a lot of "wealthy young white people living in [a] gentrified urban area" seems factually correct. Pointing out the mostly white population doesn't make anything about the statement racist. Asking how it got so white, or the history of gentrification, may bring up questions about racial inequality in America. But the article is about curtains, not about race.
Finding out that not having curtains, or leaving them open, is more widespread among wealthy people of high status and security (the literal and only point of the article), then using Brooklyn Heights as an example of a place with lots of uncovered windows and also lots of wealthy young white people is just supporting evidence. If the authors wanted to present a more rigorous study of no curtains they should have looked at other neighborhoods with different demographics. They're talking about a fashion trend and status marker. They could have talked about $1,000 sneakers and probably landed on a very different demographic.
Reading the sentence above as racist seems a stretch. Using it to make some kind of sweeping generalization about American racism, and implying that America has some unique obsession with race you don't find in other countries is simply not borne out by research or experience. Xenophobia, which very often gets expressed in terms of race because skin color is such an obvious marker of difference, is a widespread human tendency, known since ancient times, everywhere. It's not something Americans invented or suffer from more than, say, Germans. In any case the article was about class and status, not about race, so reading racism into it says more about the people commenting in that vein that it does about the article or the authors.
“Man I’ve crunched all the numbers, and I just can’t figure out why stereotyping people might be annoying to them!”
If race wasn’t important to the article why mention it at all?
Where did the OP say the article was racist? (as opposed to just being rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc.)
I got the impression from your comments that you’re American. You also seem to think Americans don’t have weird and problematic opinions about race. I further noticed that you take pains to capitalize “Black” and lowercase “white” when describing a person’s race, a weird and problematic habit that only American leftists have. Can you elaborate on that?
Race was as important to the article as the location and the relative wealth and age of the place mentioned -- Brooklyn Heights. I guess they could have said they noticed the no curtains thing in some American urban area and left it at that, but as writers tend to do they added some detail to paint a picture: wealthy, gentrified urban, young, and white. For some of us just writing "Brooklyn Heights" would communicate all of that but just maybe the writers thought they might need to describe that neighborhood for readers not familiar with Brooklyn's demographics.
As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article. I didn't have any of those reactions and I'd be surprised if The Atlantic receives bags of mail complaining about the fluffy curtains article.
I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean. I've met lots of people, Americans and otherwise, who have opinions about race that don't match mine. I was just in Japan a couple of months ago, and as a non-Japanese I noticed I got treated differently. Weird and problematic? Those words didn't pop into my head but I know people who have found Japanese culture and what looks like endemic racism off-putting.
My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age, rather than another "problematic" or leftist habit. It's one of the accepted styles of writing, one that I learned a long time ago. You can find examples yourself, for example [1] and [2].
Speculating about someone's motivations, political associations, weirdness, problematic-ness, etc. when you know nothing about them comes across as rude and, if I can use the ugly word, problematic. You can find out from my HN profile that I was born in America but no longer live there -- not trying to hide my heritage.
By all means go on stereotyping and insulting Americans, and people you describe as "leftists." I'll steer clear of that kind of immature behavior.
> As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article
> I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean
I think it’s time to stop reading so much on the Internet when you seemingly can’t grapple with common, everyday words
> My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age
This is so subtly misleading I’m seriously impressed. That you intentionally miss the point while making it seem completely reasonable? Wow.
You know exactly why what you said isn’t true, but I bet the drive-by reader unfamiliar with the situation isn’t and would take this comment in stride. Your own articles point to this writing style as “a new change” which is driven explicitly by CRT advocates within the past few years. But your mention of “my age” and “a long time ago” is meant to carefully deflect away from that, and make it seem like a reasonable status quo that has nothing to do with politics!
“Hey, I’m just some normal dude with no agenda whatsoever, and this crazy guy is just commenting all this super mean stuff for no reason.” Never mind the fact that your posts are clearly biased a certain way, half of what you say is intentionally misleading (or even just wrong), and what I am saying is completely bog-standard for HN in terms of etiquette. The perfect gaslight!
You should come work for the government, you’d be right at home here.
I presented some facts about demographics, and my opinion about what the curtains article intended. You presented innuendo and speculation about my motives and personality, concluding I have a leftist agenda, so subtly deployed that I'm gaslighting here in public.
If I actually intended a veiled American leftist agenda in my choice of words I would have used African-American or BIPOC, don't you think? My use of "Black" to contrast with the article's use of "white," dashed off in a comment thread that will influence no one, must mean something, and I have to admire your determination to dig through the layers of obfuscation I cleverly laid on. I could try to dig up common usage from the '70s, when I learned to write in school, and when "Black" got capitalized and I got told by teachers (Americans, and leftists, no doubt) to write it that way. Or maybe I misremember -- that was decades ago, after all, and capitalization of words I rarely had occasion to write or think carefully about might have got mixed up in my head. These days someone with an actual leftist political agenda trolling HN comments would write BIPOC, but I don't want to spoil your conspiracy.
My children sometimes try to correct my usage so I don't use words I learned in my youth and embarrass myself, or offend someone, or trigger amateur semioticians I encounter online.
Here we are, with you accusing me of promoting a leftist agenda after I started arguing in this thread that the article about curtains doesn't use "white" in a racist sense, and that Americans aren't any more racist than anyone else. Kind of an odd way to argue what you accuse me of, but honestly you lost me a while back, and now you're just engaging in elder abuse.
Thanks for the analysis and careful parsing. I'll circle back to my original point: the article has nothing to do with race, it's about curtains (or lack of) as a class status display. The authors of the almost tongue-in-cheek article carelessly chose a neighborhood they could refer to as "white" so people like me could spread out on the internet with our leftist biased gaslighting in order to... I don't know, you lost me somewhere, I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I'm sure you can tell me.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted; especially during 2016 the liberal media used terms like “angry white men” and “uneducated whites” as both an insult and a dog whistle.
One of the things I enjoyed in Morocco (which is probably true in most places with traditional North African and Middle Eastern architecture, although don’t quote me) is how the relationship of private space to public space is entirely reversed from Western countries.
Instead of exterior windows showing the objects inside, the outside wall has essentially zero windows or decorations. Everything is interior facing and usually centers on a courtyard.
Interesting. I ride by the River Oaks community in Houston and this was one of the first things I noticed.
I mean, when this:
> Most people do still close their shades, but Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy—nearly 20 percent of the first group compared with just over 10 percent of the second.
is true, I mean, of course it makes sense. Folks with money don't need to break into your house, and your neighborhood is probably secured 24/7
Maybe. I lease an apartment with floor to ceiling windows. They have motorized shades so it's not 24/7 conspicuous exhibitionism. The curious bit is they built it with a floor to ceiling window in the master bathroom. Also, the construction people forgot to wire power to the shades so they're a hassle to charge.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadRef.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39114685
What I think is new since about 2018 in the US is that perceived victimhood is rewarded. Not actual victimhood, but perceived victimhood.
I don't agree. It's one thing to claim that people are aware of "race", but that's not the issue being discussed here.
The issue being discussed is the degree of institutionalization that racism is embedded in US culture, to the point that unwittingly racist news stories are published in mainstream media, and once that's pointed out regular everyday people come at their defense supposedly for being something normal, totally unaware of actually proving and reinforcing the point.
For contrast, in some countries the editorial guidelines for mainstream news organizations even discourage referring the nationality of those involved in events, due to concerns those could be abused to further racist beliefs in any way.
If you think American mainstream media don't have editorial guidelines that discourage mentioning race or nationality, you might want to look at those editorial guidelines, because American mainstream media -- such as The Atlantic -- most certainly do have guidelines. In fact they follow guidelines so cautious that people from Trump to Musk have accused the mainstream media of censorship and bias and "wokeness" because the media does leave off things like race and nationality and even relative social status, bending over backwards to appear fair.
How come you look at a reference to "wealthy white people" and still proclaim that?
Heavily urban areas seem to shift toward race-oriented living areas, where I think there's a lot more animosity between races because a white person in a predominantly black area or a black person in Chinatown stands out more and generates concern that they aren't a part of the area's culture.
It appears to be merely descriptive writing.
As maybe this phenomena is localized to American people who identify as white, young and wealthy.
How would it differ if the article were “crazy rich Asians” (a film) or “impoverished Eastern European Jews”?
It differs from the fact that in at least some places outside of the US those articles would not include any reference to race or even nationality of those involved, specially gratuituous ones like this.
What point were you hoping to convey? That different people dress differently? Because you could also compare how others dress, like Eminem and Obama, and what would your point be?
What's that to do with their skin color? They dress differently because one is a singer/pop-star, the other are tech nerds.
Eminem also dresses differently than Musk and Gates and they're all white.
People dress according to their profession and social status they want to flaunt, not based on skin color.
The article in question mentions race and uses the word "white" exactly once. The sentence in question:
> The New York Times recently referred to the “obligatory uncurtained windows” of Brooklyn Heights, a rich enclave in New York City, and The Root pointed out that this seemed common among wealthy young white people living in gentrified urban areas.
Brooklyn Heights is 75.2 white people[1], with a median age of 35.3[2] (young, in other words). and the term "gentrified" applies. So describing Brooklyn Heights as a place with a lot of "wealthy young white people living in [a] gentrified urban area" seems factually correct. Pointing out the mostly white population doesn't make anything about the statement racist. Asking how it got so white, or the history of gentrification, may bring up questions about racial inequality in America. But the article is about curtains, not about race.
Finding out that not having curtains, or leaving them open, is more widespread among wealthy people of high status and security (the literal and only point of the article), then using Brooklyn Heights as an example of a place with lots of uncovered windows and also lots of wealthy young white people is just supporting evidence. If the authors wanted to present a more rigorous study of no curtains they should have looked at other neighborhoods with different demographics. They're talking about a fashion trend and status marker. They could have talked about $1,000 sneakers and probably landed on a very different demographic.
Reading the sentence above as racist seems a stretch. Using it to make some kind of sweeping generalization about American racism, and implying that America has some unique obsession with race you don't find in other countries is simply not borne out by research or experience. Xenophobia, which very often gets expressed in terms of race because skin color is such an obvious marker of difference, is a widespread human tendency, known since ancient times, everywhere. It's not something Americans invented or suffer from more than, say, Germans. In any case the article was about class and status, not about race, so reading racism into it says more about the people commenting in that vein that it does about the article or the authors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Heights
[2] https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Brooklyn/Broo...
If race wasn’t important to the article why mention it at all?
Where did the OP say the article was racist? (as opposed to just being rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc.)
I got the impression from your comments that you’re American. You also seem to think Americans don’t have weird and problematic opinions about race. I further noticed that you take pains to capitalize “Black” and lowercase “white” when describing a person’s race, a weird and problematic habit that only American leftists have. Can you elaborate on that?
Race was as important to the article as the location and the relative wealth and age of the place mentioned -- Brooklyn Heights. I guess they could have said they noticed the no curtains thing in some American urban area and left it at that, but as writers tend to do they added some detail to paint a picture: wealthy, gentrified urban, young, and white. For some of us just writing "Brooklyn Heights" would communicate all of that but just maybe the writers thought they might need to describe that neighborhood for readers not familiar with Brooklyn's demographics.
As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article. I didn't have any of those reactions and I'd be surprised if The Atlantic receives bags of mail complaining about the fluffy curtains article.
I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean. I've met lots of people, Americans and otherwise, who have opinions about race that don't match mine. I was just in Japan a couple of months ago, and as a non-Japanese I noticed I got treated differently. Weird and problematic? Those words didn't pop into my head but I know people who have found Japanese culture and what looks like endemic racism off-putting.
My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age, rather than another "problematic" or leftist habit. It's one of the accepted styles of writing, one that I learned a long time ago. You can find examples yourself, for example [1] and [2].
Speculating about someone's motivations, political associations, weirdness, problematic-ness, etc. when you know nothing about them comes across as rude and, if I can use the ugly word, problematic. You can find out from my HN profile that I was born in America but no longer live there -- not trying to hide my heritage.
By all means go on stereotyping and insulting Americans, and people you describe as "leftists." I'll steer clear of that kind of immature behavior.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
[2] https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e...
> I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean
I think it’s time to stop reading so much on the Internet when you seemingly can’t grapple with common, everyday words
> My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age
This is so subtly misleading I’m seriously impressed. That you intentionally miss the point while making it seem completely reasonable? Wow.
You know exactly why what you said isn’t true, but I bet the drive-by reader unfamiliar with the situation isn’t and would take this comment in stride. Your own articles point to this writing style as “a new change” which is driven explicitly by CRT advocates within the past few years. But your mention of “my age” and “a long time ago” is meant to carefully deflect away from that, and make it seem like a reasonable status quo that has nothing to do with politics!
“Hey, I’m just some normal dude with no agenda whatsoever, and this crazy guy is just commenting all this super mean stuff for no reason.” Never mind the fact that your posts are clearly biased a certain way, half of what you say is intentionally misleading (or even just wrong), and what I am saying is completely bog-standard for HN in terms of etiquette. The perfect gaslight!
You should come work for the government, you’d be right at home here.
If I actually intended a veiled American leftist agenda in my choice of words I would have used African-American or BIPOC, don't you think? My use of "Black" to contrast with the article's use of "white," dashed off in a comment thread that will influence no one, must mean something, and I have to admire your determination to dig through the layers of obfuscation I cleverly laid on. I could try to dig up common usage from the '70s, when I learned to write in school, and when "Black" got capitalized and I got told by teachers (Americans, and leftists, no doubt) to write it that way. Or maybe I misremember -- that was decades ago, after all, and capitalization of words I rarely had occasion to write or think carefully about might have got mixed up in my head. These days someone with an actual leftist political agenda trolling HN comments would write BIPOC, but I don't want to spoil your conspiracy.
My children sometimes try to correct my usage so I don't use words I learned in my youth and embarrass myself, or offend someone, or trigger amateur semioticians I encounter online.
Here we are, with you accusing me of promoting a leftist agenda after I started arguing in this thread that the article about curtains doesn't use "white" in a racist sense, and that Americans aren't any more racist than anyone else. Kind of an odd way to argue what you accuse me of, but honestly you lost me a while back, and now you're just engaging in elder abuse.
Thanks for the analysis and careful parsing. I'll circle back to my original point: the article has nothing to do with race, it's about curtains (or lack of) as a class status display. The authors of the almost tongue-in-cheek article carelessly chose a neighborhood they could refer to as "white" so people like me could spread out on the internet with our leftist biased gaslighting in order to... I don't know, you lost me somewhere, I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I'm sure you can tell me.
What they really meant is nazi bigots every person should hate.
You have to understand the unwritten words when reading leftist media.
Instead of exterior windows showing the objects inside, the outside wall has essentially zero windows or decorations. Everything is interior facing and usually centers on a courtyard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riad_(architecture)
I mean, when this:
> Most people do still close their shades, but Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy—nearly 20 percent of the first group compared with just over 10 percent of the second.
is true, I mean, of course it makes sense. Folks with money don't need to break into your house, and your neighborhood is probably secured 24/7