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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

You are ignoring the key part of what he said. Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians?

Sure, fear of crime was one of the mechanisms of white flight, but American fear of crime has a big racial component to it. Historically, America has kept black people poor, confined them to poor neighborhoods, and then blamed blackness for the high crime rates that go with poverty and desperation.

This game continues today. Donald Trump recently tweeted something with totally made up statistics blaming black people for murders of whites:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-abou...

It wasn't just wrong and it wasn't just racist. It was literally neo-nazi propaganda.

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I think the reason these threads about suburbs explode is because people who grew up in suburbs that have never had restrictive covenants and have nothing whatsoever to do with racism feel personally attacked. Plus as another commenter said, not everyone wants to live in a concrete jungle. So if someone wants to have a back yard and not hear constant traffic noise, let them.

I can understand why they'd feel that way, but a request to acknowledge the actual facts of history is not actually a personal attack. It's frustrating when people take it that way, as it makes the discussion about white people's feelings, thus reinforcing the notion that the white person's narrative is and should be the dominant one.

You're still assuming race where none is given when you describe suburban feelings as "white people's feelings". It's unhelpful to the cause of racial equality and righting past wrongs to talk about the "white person's narrative" as if that's what I'm doing here. My narrative isn't white, black, brown, red, yellow, green, purple, or rainbow; it's just mine. So let's just talk about people as people and their lives as they want to describe them, rather than in terms of racial narratives.

Suburbs are broadly white. Many of them were established to be explicitly white. Some older, inner suburbs, which have become more diverse, are now experiencing white flight of their own. Suburban feelings tend to be white people's feelings. It's a generalization, but as a white guy who when to school in the 'burbs, I'm comfortable with that.

> My narrative isn't white, black, brown, red, yellow, green, purple, or rainbow; it's just mine.

If you narrative is American, race is an inescapable part of that. Saying your narrative has no race is basically to say that it's white. We white people can talk as if race doesn't exist because we have made whiteness the default, the perspective, the unmarked case. But non-white people in America don't talk like that.

If you're looking for an expanded version of how this works, search for critiques of "I don't see race", which has been thoroughly examined and found wanting.

I don't find this narrative compelling. People naturally mention the things that make them different from those around them. White people living in Taiwan might talk about being white in Taiwan. White nerds in a white neighborhood talk about being nerds more than being white. This has nothing to do with racial domination.

If White Man's Burden motivates you to make the world better then so be it, but I find the idea incredibly divisive and at the height of hubris.

Well, running with the nerd example, non-nerds never talk about being non-nerds while the ostracize the nerds. They can treat nerds as weird and other and never think of themselves as a particular thing other than "normal". They don't have to think about that because they dominate the dialog and become the unmarked case.

That's why, e.g., people on the autism spectrum recently came up with the term "neurotypical", so that they could try to create an equal footing in the discourse. In that construction, aspies and neurotypicals are just different kinds of people, both equally "normal".

Casting what I'm saying as "White Man's Burden" is either incredibly ignorant or a dick move, and I can't tell which. But to be clear, I'm up to the opposite.

The whole "White Man's Burden" [1] shtick rests upon the notion that white people are better, and therefore should help the benighted dark peoples. I, on the other hand, think races are fundamentally equal, and it's only an accident of history that leaves me with more privilege. I'm thus using it here to educate white people ignorant of the US's long history of ingrained racial prejudice.

Non-white people need no education on the topic. In the same way that nerds are forced to understand what nerdiness means to non-nerds, non-white people are forced to understand white notions of race, even as most white people see themselves as typical, average, default, "normal" and so never think about the topic in any depth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden

This is probably one of the most insightful threads i've read on hacker news in the entire year of 2015. Reasonable and positive discourse explaining racial disparity and discrimination. At the same time, expressing the poignancy of the topic without woe is me tripe. Job well done sir... Job well done.

So are you saying higher crime rates in those areas is caused by poor people or black people? Because you're not saying that there isn't more crime where black people live...

I am saying higher crime rates in those areas are caused by endemic structural and personal white racism.

>Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians?

Late to the party but I think Jews were also usually excluded.

I wonder if the guy is stupidly ignorant or willfully ignorant. He has said some really despicable things.

The scary part is that he has gained a large following of people who think he's just saying "what everyone's thinking". There are many, many people in the U.S. who hear what he says, and then think, "Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm living in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum.

""Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm live in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum."

This happens on the other side of the fence, and no one bats an eye about it. In fact, they call it democracy, or something like that.

Snarkiness aside, if these people agree with him, then that is their vote. Really, we can't have democracy if we don't call it democracy when people vote the way we don't like them to. It's the same as free-speech: we can't suddenly abandon it if we don't like what's being said.

Right, but this conflation comes up with most political arguments and I think it's a straw man. I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to follow Trump, but it's also true that people are free to hate certain types of people. That doesn't mean it isn't scary.

Populism does have both right and left forms (and others besides), but that doesn't mean that it isn't inimical to democracy. It is not hard to find historical examples of populists who have used the vote to seize power. Democracy is a lot more than voting, and it's certainly more than having one last free vote for a populist who ends free voting.

There's also a particularly ugly history of populists stirring up racial hatred as a means to power, which I think is especially dangerous.

I don't think Trump is really in either of those categories. He's optimized for feeling confident and saying things that (some) people want to hear.

It's not that he's lying, because he doesn't even know what the truth is. I also think he doesn't know that he doesn't know that. In this regard, I think of him as like a sophisticated bot: he doesn't track input in terms of true or false facts, but in terms of word-strings to say that are useful for his particular purposes. Any belief necessary to sound convincing is generated from the word strings.

My grandfather was a master salesman and as best I can tell, this was his basic approach to managing reality.

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