Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Great essay. Some of it made me smile only because it reminded me of the slights I faced as an Asian in the Midwest, such as being mistaken for the one other Asian in town, or having to come up with an opinion about the Vietnam war even though it happen far before I was born. But these to me were mostly harmless things that I learned to tolerate, though I completely understand why other Asians absolutely hate such slights. But being treated like an Oriental oddity is, as far as I can imagine, is much different than being seen as an aggressor.

Being attacked or harassed for racial (or any reason) is always unpleasant, but I've always found it easy to rationalize such experiences as outliers, as in, "Well, some people are just ignorant assholes". So I've found the things that happen at an everyday level to be far more deeply unsettling. I've been in a few countries where Asians are rare (yes, rarer than in Iowa) and while I hadn't been physically attacked, the experience of people just staring at me, everywhere, while I'm going for a walk or waiting in line at the grocery, was so unpleasant that I just found myself just not going out at all very much. Not as a conscious decision, but from a reluctance that built up subconsciously, and something that I only realized after I returned to the States.

It's not that egregious acts of harassment don't happen to minorities today. But when I think of why so few [insert minority group here] are in [insert role/geography here], I believe it's because of the undramatic but accumulated things that the OP mentions, all of which may sound like whining to people who, while genuinely disapproving of overt attacks, don't realize that lesser slights can be enough to create a dampening effects.

"people just staring at me, everywhere"

That happened to me (a white guy) in China. Not in Beijing or Shanghai, but in the "smaller" interior city of Zhengzhou (Zhengzhou has a population of 2.5 million). It was very unnerving at first but having my Chinese wife with me helped alleviate the anxiety.

Unfortunately I had the opposite experience. As a Chinese guy in the rural parts of Pennsylvania I was stared at a lot but felt fine when I was alone.

But when I was with my white wife, I noticed a lot more sneers and menacing looks.

> the experience of people just staring at me, everywhere, while I'm going for a walk or waiting in line at the grocery, was so unpleasant that I just found myself just not going out at all very much.

I've been in places where white people are very rare and I low-key enjoyed the attention. I find being ignored more disturbing. YMMV of course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I've been in places where white people are very rare and I low-key enjoyed the attention. I find being ignored more disturbing. YMMV of course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Except this is America, where black people aren't very rare. And the attention the author is talking about, more often than not, is negative.

When you were out and about in these places with, were you afraid of being stopped by the police?

Except this is America, where black people aren't very rare.

That depends where in America. There are plenty of place (some large cities - SF I'm looking at you) where black people are pretty rare. Or at least rare in the areas people frequent.

The funny part is I talk to the folks I know from the South and they have a TON more interactions with blacks than anyone from the Northeast or West Coast do.

> There are plenty of place (some large cities - SF I'm looking at you) where black people are pretty rare. Or at least rare in the areas people frequent.

I think it will be helpful here to specify what type of people you're talking about in the second sentence, otherwise you're implicitly excluding black people from the general term "people". I don't believe this was intentional, it just reads weird.

I meant people in the sense of everybody; humans. Places where the population at large frequents (downtown SF).

I called it out because the SF population is something like 10% black, but most are in black neighborhoods. People that don't live there rarely go to those neighborhoods.

It would be a very interesting project to trace down the facebook social graph to see what % of none-black has black friends/relatives in their direct connections.

I grew up in the town where James Meredith went to school. In that part of the country, about a fifty-fifty split is normal most places that aren't major cities - I can't guess why, but those tend to be as heavily polarized in the Old South as anywhere else. Outside the cities, and probably for the most part inside them as well, nobody of any skin color really seems to want to start trouble over it.

(We had a lot of that kind of trouble in the 1960s, maybe you know, and the strong impression I formed growing up is that while the results aren't perfectly satisfactory to anyone, the compromises are sufficiently so to everyone, and nobody finds the state of things upsetting enough to want to go beyond within-the-system incrementalism.)

Beyond that, and not to get at you personally, but nobody where I'm from thinks about "[having] interactions with blacks". That's a chilly, sociological way of looking at things, and it's hard to be chilly and sociological about people with whom you've spent your life cheek by jowl. It's just not the natural frame of mind.

On the other hand, since moving away from home and to a city whose black population is twice the size of its white, I've discovered the remarkable experience of being hectored on the subject of racial harmony by white people who choose, for reasons on which it would be invidious of me to speculate, to live where there are almost no black people at all.

I've never known a black person from anywhere to assume that, because I'm from Mississippi, I must be racist. I've known plenty of white people from places like New York and California to do exactly that. I don't really know what conclusion, if any, to draw from this, but I sure do find it curious.

This lines up exactly what I've heard from Southern friends.

Like you said, I've heard that despite the reputation and history of the South, there is a lot more racial integration in day to day life than most parts of America.

And yes, it irks me to no end to hear whites from big coastal cities (who rarely ever interact with blacks) shit all over the South (most of them who have never been there).

I've lived mostly in Memphis, TN metro area in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi dealing with lots of people. I corroborate that most of us don't care about your race in the least. More about treating people with respect and doing one's job well. Biases are usually residual ones operating unconsciously or barely there outside of straight racists. More likely to show up in negative situations where a person mentally assesses another to understand how it happens & assign blame to something.

As another comment said, though, the sides feel so strongly about that topic of race that bringing it up can have negative consequences in a big way for simplest opinion. They're more likely here to get irritated and dismiss you as an idiot than anything. Maybe shout counter-points at you. Both sides. You have to be in the black ghettos or deep, white, rural areas before it gets dangerous. Still more likely to intimidate you into leaving than hurt you but you take chances there.

Things only heated up recently with the BLM protests. They shut down the main Interstate and airport in Memphis recently. Pissed everyone off in a city with lots of white and black fans of 2nd Amendment. Anxiety & tension is high but no violence I think. A testament in itself, yeah? Hopefully the crap is over soon so race relations & traffic conditions go back to normal. Except I-240 where the speed is about the same. :)

Pretty good points, esp on incrementalism. That's an interesting way of phrasing it. Far as this...

"I've known plenty of white people from places like New York and California to do exactly that."

A lot of white racists think other people see the "obvious" that they see by default. Many were hesitant to say something until they had a few good times with me. Then, they'd drop it expecting me to nod or laugh. I'd just brush it off with a simple No or something instead of arguing with them. Pointless.

" I've discovered the remarkable experience of being hectored on the subject of racial harmony by white people who choose, for reasons on which it would be invidious of me to speculate, to live where there are almost no black people at all."

They trip me out, too. I get more confused the more they talk about "Black" perspectives as differences add up between their statements and those of Southern Blacks. Maybe I just haven't lived in as many hoods and mixed areas as them. Maybe. ;)

It's so they can pretend to not have any racial biases. "How can I be racist? I'm not like those people from the South."

All of my black friends who moved into Seattle from the South complain about liberal racism. It'd be funny if it weren't depressing.

> SF I'm looking at you

Map of races in SF: http://imgur.com/MwIcpSo

From http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/ (2010)

> When you were out and about in these places with, were you afraid of being stopped by the police?

Somewhat, yes. Foreigners in said country are frequently stopped by the police so they can extort you for bribes.

Are you trying to say that your experiences of being a foreigner in some other country are somehow comparable to his experiences as an American in America?

Oh no, how shocking to say being treated differently due to skin color is not just a problem in America

He was originally responding to a comment talking about:

> I've been in a few countries where Asians are rare (yes, rarer than in Iowa)

I think experiences of being a white american visiting a country where white people are rare are probably at least somewhat comparable to experiences of being an asian american visiting a country where asian people are rare?

So you enjoyed that attention of being stopped and extorted?

Of course not. But the person I replied to wasn't black in America, nor was he complaining about police harassment, mistreatment, employment discrimination, or anything of the sort.

It simply made him uncomfortable to be an outsider at whom people stared. Something for which I find it hard to fault the residents of Iowa or the other unnamed country.

> America, where black people aren't very rare

Actually, in a lot of places they kind of are: a little over 12% of the population, very much concentrated in the Old South states and a relative handful of cities almost all east of the Mississippi. (Six percent of San Francisco's population as of the 2010 census, if you're wondering.)

As of 2015, there were ~46million people who identify as black in America.

If you assume your figure of 12%, that means 1 in 10 people identifies as black. I would not consider that "very rare."

As of 2015, there are ~20 million Asians in America. It would be weird for me to agree with the statement that asians are "very rare."

http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/p...

The guy you are replying to specifically mentioned that a lot of that 12% are concentrated in the south, and thus in some places black people are very rare. such as Oregon, only ~2% Montana - ~0.6%

etc

> If you assume your figure of 12%, that means 1 in 10 people identifies as black.

Closer to 1 in 8, actually. But that's nationally -- the US is a big nation with lots of regional (both large- and small-scale) variation. Its under 7% for California (and SF is pretty close to the statewide ratio, though neighboring Oakland is close to 30%.)

America is a very big place, and incredibly diverse. This diversity expands to being both very diverse in places and completely mono-cultural in others. Some areas are heavily black, some areas are heavily Hispanic, some are enclaves of immigrants from any number of other places, and some are almost completely lily-white.

Anecdotally, growing up, there were a half-dozen Hispanic kids (who were my cousins, as my great-uncle had married in Arizona when he was in the Army), one (adopted) black child, and one other (adopted) Indian child. That was the sum total of the ethnic diversity in the entire thousand-person school district in one backwards corner of Maine. We had to rib on the French-Canadians and fall back on home-town stereotypes... There were actually more Asians around, because the Boston Chinese food restaurant cartels/mafia expanded northward. I never met anyone who was Jewish until I went to college.

It may be 12% overall, but it's obvious to anyone that downtown Seattle looks nothing like downtown Atlanta. My high school (small town in Georgia) was ~30% black. Which of course was fine with me. I had lots of black classmates from first grade on.

When I got to college in Chicago, though, I was surprised that for most of my fellow students' high schools, black people numbered in the single digits.

Great map for visualizing: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/

> Except this is America, where black people aren't very rare.

He was replying to an Asian American talking about his experiences outside America.

You might find it helpful to go back and read the grandparent first, then read the comment you're replying to again in its actual context.

I'm a white guy who used to have long hair and lived in the South of the US. I would often get the stares, and they were often from people trying to intimidate me or who felt threatened or disgusted by my hair. Apparently many of them thought it meant I was gay or transgendered (even though I dressed like every other male around me), which they felt was wrong, and gave them the right to look at me in ways or say things to me that they wouldn't have otherwise. I can totally understand how not enjoyable being stared at everywhere you go is. Heck, even celebrities don't like all the attention they receive just going about their business.

The way I see it is that race is but one of many reasons for getting stared at/being viewed as an outsider.

I remember driving across the US and stopping in Nevada at a gas station/cafe in the middle of nowhere. I walked in (white male) and got some very hard stares from the locals. Not comfortable at all.

Then I realized it wasn't because I was white (they were white too), it was probably the way I was dressed and the fact I didn't fit in. I was an outsider to them.

The only difference is that you can't change your race to blend in.

Even if people could, I don't think most people would, but for a few people who might be considered [some-color-race]-philes.

And, changing your personality to "fit in" is a lot harder than you might imagine.

I won't argue that it's dependent on situation. I grew up knowing just a handful of Asians until after college. Obviously I coped with being a rarity. I think the combination of being in a foreign country exacerbated the issue. As for being ignored, I guess I've since lived in big cities enough to just accept that as the norm :)

I've had the same experience, and enjoyed it the same way.

It's because, as a white person raised in a white-supremacist society, experience has not conditioned me to see attention as dangerous.

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