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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

This analysis would be tremendously racist in America.

It's plenty 'racist' here in the UK (at least under the left-wing redefinition of the word racist as any mention of race at all). Chicken shops and jerk chicken are associated with the African-Caribbean population.

All he's done with his analysis is used two thinly disguised proxy variables to hide his true hypothesis, which may very well be a good hypothesis but is unpalatable to discuss in public.

The author of the piece should add a times series on violent crime and shootings. These should decrease with time if the area is "up and coming"...

They might spike while gentrification is ongoing, especially in the early stages. My hypothesis for this statement is that more affluent people are: 1. More likely to be robbed (ie: they have items that others want), and 2. More likely to report crimes against them to the police. (ie: They trust the authorities, and they might need police reports to file insurance claims (affluent people are more likely to insure their property))

This may be true for non-violent crime.

For violent crime, there is a direct correlation with black Londoners.

"In London in 2006, 75% of the victims of gun crime and 79% of the suspects were "from the African/Caribbean community."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_K...

This does not solely reflect lower socioeconomic standing as Pakistani + Bangladeshi communities have higher levels of poverty, and similarly poor areas of cities in Wales and Scotland do not have the same proportionate level of gun crime that occurs in London.

http://www.poverty.org.uk/06/index.shtml

> at least under the left-wing redefinition of the word racist as any mention of race at all

The overcautious avoidance of race as a subject does exist, but is nothing to do with left/right in my experience. I associate it with people who don't live in mixed areas, they tend to be more awkward about mentioning race and certainly aren't more left wing on average.

Even under your redefinition of racist, the article isn't racist. The author doesn't make any mention of race at all. Anybody correlating food and drink with a skin colour is projecting their own racist connotations.

I don't think it would be.

Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters. But that's actually what happens with gentrification. Diverse neighbourhoods get plowed over with rich white people.

Using race in an analysis doesn't make it racist. OP saying they wouldn't want to live in the places with fried chicken, in the context above (KFC->black people) would be.

I'd say the piece itself rides the line. It has a sarcastic tone throughout the piece, more of a "let's find out where the gentrification is" than "let's go live there".

Here's to hoping that you're just trolling. Your reply injects very specific racial and socio-economic biases as if they were already assumed and understood. Which, in this context, is basically racism.

How can you accuse parent of injecting biases, when the parent was reacting to the claim of racism?

I spent one sentence (the middle one) out of the three sentences in my reply explaining why I thought it could be (please note, "could be", as in, I did not say it was, as in, I did not accuse) interpreted as such. My reasoning was perfectly explicit and plain.

Because the parent comment stated "Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters" as if it were a matter of fact. The blog post makes no mention of skin colour at all (that I can see) and the racial connotations are entirely those of the parent - hence injecting racial bias.

Ask a black person if that sounds racist to them. Or does that not matter?

Doesn't matter. A particular group doesn't get to define racism for the rest of the population.

That's empirically false. "Racism" is whatever speech will convince enough people to call you "racist", and one person in twenty is more than enough to do it.

Whats empirically false changes person to person and culture to culture as demonstrated by your arbitrary definition of racism. I do not define Racism as actions other find racist.

I'm not interested in a debate about the meaning of truth - replace empirical correctness with everyday practicality and my point stands. You're free to define the term "racism" however you want to. However, you might regret ignoring your personal and cultural context if you care about not getting called racist.

Have their opinions ever really mattered to the "majority?" Any clear thinking person looking at history (both distant and recent) would conclude mostly no.

The neighborhoods gentrying in Chicago right now aren't Black > White. They're Latino/Mixed > White/Mixed. There's no friend chicken places to go out of business. If anything craft friend chicken is popular now and entering the gentrified neighborhoods.

A more rational metric would be payday loan stores, laundromats, budget cell phone stores, etc.

"the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters"

Unless I missed something in the article (please feel free to chew me out if I missed it...) you have just completely put words in the author's mouth. I have no idea where you got that correlation from, but I don't see it anywhere in the blog post.

Here [0] is an analysis from America.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/OGDWGbN.png

Walmarts can be 3-10x the size of Whole Foods - that's not quite fair...

I daresay there are aspects of both income distribution and other factors that favor or disfavor big box stores generally. No, a Walmarts footprint probably doesn't work for San Francisco proper but that doesn't really explain the relative lack of Walmarts in the Silicon Valley sprawl compared to the East Bay.

...and then you go to Dallas where you typically have a Walmart in walking distance of a Whole Foods or Central Market.

I'm not from America - care to explain?

Because Koreans make great fried chicken.

That wasn't the original stereotype he was describing, but koreans DO make great fried chicken. I'll take BonChon over KFC any day.

Stereotype of African Americans is that they eat a lot of fried chicken so essentially this report would imply it is African Americans that make for a bad neighborhood.

I think you mean black people

No African American is perfectly fine.

The first sentence of the article begins "Whilst searching for a flat in London..."

I'm pretty sure that African American is not perfectly fine in this particular context.

I'm not an American, but I believe they are referring to the racist meme that associates fried chicken to Americans of non-white ethnicities.

This differs from the UK where fried chicken is more associated with the lower classes than a particular race.

And also coffee shops are associated to white people.

Wait. I must not have gotten the memo. I hate coffee and love fried chicken.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/80400530/pdf/DBri...

>white American adults drink about three times as much coffee as blacks.

White people with taste often have the same tastes as black people. 'Twas ever thus.

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. We are talking about stereotypes here, and this is clearly a stereotype that's around - see the "hipster in coffee bar" "memes" in which portrayed people are exclusively white.

As Shaq says, "black people don't drink coffee"

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/shaquille-o-...

Africans and Jamaicans do in Canada, all those hipster coffee shops where they hand make each cup and charge $6/cup are full of Caribbean and Somalian diaspora. All the weed cafes run by Jamaicans all serve Blue Mountain coffee too and the rasta behind the counter will go on endlessly about it's health benefits if you ask them.

The fried chicken stereotype exists for blacks, not non-whites. It's a popular southern food, and the origin of the stereotype goes back to the time of slavery. Chickens were one of the few animals slaves were allowed to raise on their own and the dish was easy and cheap to make.

I've never really understood the nature of this stereotype - who doesn't at least like fried chicken? It's like saying, 'You know the Mexicans, they just love ice cream.' Of course they do, it's ice cream.

Symbols don't make sense without context.

If you paint a swastika on a synagogue people will be upset, but not because they dislike shapes with 90 degree angles. If you say that black people love fried chicken people will be upset, but not because liking fried is unique to black people or inherently bad. It's mostly because it's a stereotype associated with a period in US history when it was socially acceptable for a white mob to lynch a black man for being rude.

This stereotype, ironically, is mostly upheld by lower income white people who stereotypically consume large quantities of ... fried chicken.

Exactly. I hadn't even thought of this as being racist until I started reading comments here- in London especially, KFC ripoffs aren't a race thing, they're a class thing. I'm reasonably sensitive to people being racist, but given that this article is about London, I'm finding it hard to see the racism.

It's racist anywhere.

The vast majority of restaurants serving chicken nuggets, which is what was tracked, are burger joints, not chicken shacks. Author knows exactly what he's doing.

This analysis is tremendously racist. period.

No you make it racist. To the clearheaded its just reality.

He's literally using fried chicken as an extremely thinly veiled way of measuring the number of black people in an area.

This is a good article on why "fried chicken" when paired with other things can be racist. [1] Since "up and coming" is basically code for gentrifying, it shouldn't be that hard to see why this is actually racist.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/heres-wh...

He's literally not. Your article says that fried chicken is racist because people keep assuming that black people eat fried chicken. And here you are assuming that when someone says "fried chicken" they actually mean "black people". You're doing exactly what the article you linked is condemning.

Yup. This is the kind of person you run into of among gen-x gen-y and millennial neo-hipsters. Calling others racist while connecting dots that really just reveals their own bias. Same kind of person that claims 'systemic' racism everywhere when really they themselves treat or refer to minorities as needing special coddling. Immediately when someone uses 'gentrifying' in a conversation you find they are the racist when you start boiling them down. They are the worst kind because they think they are some protector class of minorities but they are just full of themselves and like to keep token friends but as soon as they earn a dollar are just as apt to move in our out of a neighborhood. In other words they don't want to believe what's both in front of and behind their own eyes.

Your argument falls down because this is in the UK, where fried chicken doesn't have racial connotations. He's using it to measure the number of working class people.

A less suggestive alternative might be to replace fried chicken with Chinese take-out.

Not quite sure if that's sarcasm...

In the US I would try to figure out whatever the region's blue collar / working poor's food choices might be. Usually it's big label fast food franchises but there are locality-specific ones. In the southeast where I am, barbecue places are rather common and eaten frequently yet absent from a lot of affluent communities even though it's a traditional food that's eaten across socioeconomic barriers.

Wasn't meant as sarcasm, but maybe my experience is colored by living in NYC. Chinese take-outs are common in poorer neighborhoods there. It's not difficult to find blocks that have more than one.

Interestingly enough, the most popular item on Chinese take-out menus (General Tso's Chicken) is fried chicken with sugary glaze. If you combine the most popular American Chinese dishes which are fried chicken (Sesame Chicken, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Orange Chicken) into one group then you could consider American Chinese food basically just fried chicken shops.

[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/data-reveals-most-...

There is a trend across the US mall food courts of Chinese quickserve shops evolving into pairs of such along side "Cajun" shops selling essentially the same food.

But still, American "fried chicken" really implies "on the bone"

Only if you think of it that way...

I don't think someone could legitimately be offended by this.

Context is everything. If this were featured in a US publication, the innuendo would certainly be strong.

Then people would be making mountains of molehills and Obama's speech on outrage culture would apply.

Sure, people might get mad, but there wouldn't be any justification for it.

This analysis would be perceived by hyper-sensitive Liberals as racist, even if it had validity to its claim.

And in the next breath they would lament the lack of "real conversations" we're having in the country.

Racism can manifest itself in ways that can be measured, thus hypothesis can be formed and tested for validity.

"conversations", the most Orwellian word of our time. Real meaning: "we talk, you listen"

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