Hacker News Reader

> Now, is that really a case of racial discrimination? Maybe, for some reason, black people are more likely to give cab drivers a hard time? Even if it not related to skin color directly, such as which neighborhood one is at.

The author didn't say it was racial discrimination. The author said that is something he has experienced.

To the point or racial discrimination, if cab drivers make the connection that picking up black passengers will lead to a negative experience, they might conclude that all black passengers should be avoided. That is racial discrimination.

*

I remember 2 years ago being out at night with a coworker (who is not from the US) in Chicago trying to hail a cab, and several empty cabs drove on by. When she went to hail one, the first one she hailed stopped, and I quickly got in with her.

She was surprised that no cabs would stop for me. I told her "Welcome to America. This is what racism is like."

Sounds more like sexism to me ...

Because of course it has to be one or the other, because politics.

More realistically it's likely a mixture of racism and sexism (and possibly, depending on dress style and expectations classism as well), entirely possibly to different degrees on the part of different drivers who didn't stop - and also on the part of the driver who did stop for the white woman stood near the black man.

From the article:

"Even in Canada, I felt more comfortable than I do in Silicon Valley."

Now is this a function of Canadians being less racist, or black people in Canada being different than (the "average") African Americans? Or in other words, do African Americans have a distinct culture? My suspicion is a combination of both, with the former being a result of the latter, and the latter likely having the ultimate root cause being slavery. As a Canadian, in Canada black people are just people whose skin is black, for the most part there's nothing otherwise particularly unique about them, and if there is generally they are immigrants from a wide variety of countries, so there's not a single unique culture, but many.

I think the ultimate "blame" for this unfortunate situation rests mostly with white people, but if we ever want to fix it, it's going to take both sides to acknowledge real differences in our cultures, and consider working on changing any that might be a barrier to a more harmonious future.

Black Canadians tend to act a lot more like other Canadians. The difference is probably that many(most?) of the Black people in Canada, at least that I've met, are either immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. Most in the U.S. seem to be the descendants of enslaved people.

I suspect that the Black Canadians fit in better because they decided to be part of Canadian culture, then moved; or are the children of people who also made the conscious decision to become a Canadian. For the majority, I think they came to Canada to be Canadians.

In the U.S, most black people are from the post-emancipation culture, which on top of never consciously deciding to go to America, also endured segregation and significant racial violence in many decades following emancipation. This has led to an understandably very different culture.

It seems to me like a few decades ago there was more interest in integrating the post-emancipation culture with the two or three other distinct cultures in the U.S. That's where you got all the "ebony and ivory living in harmony" stuff. One of the outcomes of that is, when there is a cultural question, and there can only be one answer, one of the two will always have to adopt the other's answer. Fewer different answers to a question is good for cultural integration, but it makes people feel as though they've been hijacked or gentrified.

As for the consequences belonging to "white people". All of the people who did anything which contributed to this are dead. The enslaved africans of the trans-atlantic slave trade were largely slaves taken in local wars by warlords. I don't blame contemporary coastal African societies for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so I won't blame contemporary American society for it either. We can deal the consequences on the basis of individual effect.

Ya, pretty much agree.

> when there is a cultural question, and there can only be one answer, one of the two will always have to adopt the other's answer.

Are there really this many differences where we must only adopt one?

> You can find neighborhoods that are almost entirely "black", next to "white" neighborhoods. What gives?

A considerable amount of private violence, durable contractual arrangements (including the ones that set the ground for modern HOAs), and deliberate government policy went into creating durable racial segregation in housing in the US; plus, the economic system tends to make poverty generational and correlated with race, and there are lots of factors leading to wealth segregation in housing, which -- because of wealth/race correlation -- reinforces racial segregation.

Looking into "redlining" is a good place to start.

> You can find neighborhoods that are almost entirely "black", next to "white" neighborhoods. What gives? I've never really understood why that is. Why is hip-hop associated with black people, but not rock?

I really don't think you want people on HN to try to explain de facto segregation and the history of race in American music to you -- you should really look for reading material by academics on these subjects.

Comments like this are lazy, dismissive, and self-righteous. Please try to add something to the discussion, especially if you're a PoC - we certainly need healthy discussion.

What exactly was dismissive and/or self-righteous about the comment? A question like "Why is hip-hop associated with black people, but not rock?" is 1) absurdly broad, and 2) beyond the obvious parts, so full of nuance that doing it justice in a single HN comment is impossible.

I would also like to add that it's discouraging that someone who is evidently a white American is so ignorant about these things. Not having at least a cursory understanding of "why do black people like hip hop more than rock?" and "why are neighborhoods still racially segregated?" means you probably aren't capable of engaging in any healthy discussion about race in the US.

I disagree. These are incredibly complicated issues and no single HN comment could possibly do an incredibly broad and vague question like "why are some neighborhoods black neighborhoods?" or "why does hip-hop exist?" justice -- especially given that this community is not primarily made of qualified experts in the area. Telling the commenter they should really be looking for expert opinions on these topics is hardly dismissive and self-righteous.

> Now, is that really a case of racial discrimination?

Let's just break it down into whether it's discriminative thinking, or perhaps just reduce the thinking down to whether that single proposition might likely be a logical fallacy or not.

"Person A of set X is the only one I have ever interacted with, with the properties of said interaction being Y."

Well...how many people of set X have you met? Two? A dozen? One hundred? That number matters. If the cab driver had met two previous people of set X prior to A - why did he choose to say it at that time? Intuition tells me that it's because the cab driver had expected that all future people of set X would have properties Y, and is voicing his expectation. If the number had been 100, then he was voicing an observation.

But, even if the number had been 100, and he was voicing an observation, then where did that assignment of property Y come from? With the property Y being, "positive," suggests all-or-nothing thinking...e.g. that interactions can either be positive or negative, rather than gradations and interactions in between. Typically this kind of, "all or nothing," thinking is considered fallacious.

Just because some kind of fallacious thinking may have occurred, does not mean that the cab driver was necessarily thinking discriminatorily. It's possible that in the world somewhere, there is a cab driver who happened to pick up only the worst, nastiest people of a type X, greater than 1,000 of them, representing all different subcategories of X from his point of view, from all over the world, for his entire career up until that very day when he for the first time, encountered a positive interaction, amazingly. But the simpler explanation is that he was just discriminating.

Here in New York many, if not most, of the cab drivers are first generation migrants from India and Asia where (believe it or not) they are virulently racist against blacks. I can't tell you how many times a foreign cab driver has made spontaneous, openly racist, disparaging comments about black people (I'm white).

> Maybe, for some reason, black people are more likely to give cab drivers a hard time? Even if it not related to skin color directly, such as which neighborhood one is at.

You're getting really close to sounding racist, and some would say you already are.

Why would there be a reason black people would give cab drivers a harder time than other skin colors? There isn't any good reason.

As for neighborhood differences, that's a problem of racism (segregation) too.

> Why would there be a reason black people would give cab drivers a harder time than other skin colors? There isn't any good reason.

This is clearly happening, based on the anecdote of cab drivers avoiding picking up black people as well as telling the OP he is the first black person who they had a positive experience with. Some stereotypes are based in reality, and it isn't racist to acknowledge this.

Might it be related to: https://www.google.com/#q=black+tipping

Your slew of Google searches included this article:

http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/chrpubs/88/

That has to be one of the worst abstracts I've ever read. I have no idea whether or not black people tip less having read the abstract.

"Might it be related to: https://www.google.com/#q=black+tipping"

When I first read this I thought of

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

and it took me a moment to recover!

(but read http://modernfarmer.com/2013/09/cow-tipping-myth-or-bullcrap... for a refutation)

Right... why use a throwaway if it's so true?

The statement, "Some stereotypes are based in reality," is very ambiguous. Hard to falsify what you're saying there.

What the above parent wrote is, "there's no good reason for black people to give cab drivers a hard time." This implies that, given that there's not a good reason, it is not likely true.

So, what do you think the reason would be that black people would unanimously give this cab driver a hard time, except for this one guy? Based upon your above proposition, you may also want to explain why your explanation is not racist.

The some stereotypes are based in reality comment was meant to indicate that the fact is there are real differences between the average behaviors of different groups of people. So when shown clear evidence that groups behave differently, it isn't racist to point out that groups behave differently. It would be great if we could have a discussion about real differences in how groups of people act without being called racist.

I could definitely believe that black people are less likely to tip (or avoid paying altogether), as black people are poorer (on average). Black people are also much more likely to commit violent crime (on average). Note that cab drivers are likely to not be white (on average), at least in my experience. I did some research and it appears to be common for cab drivers to avoid picking up black passengers - this is pretty strong evidence that cab drivers have had negative experiences with black passengers.

It is racist for cab drivers to avoid picking up black passengers, but we shouldn't pretend that they don't have a reason for it.

>As for neighborhood differences, that's a problem of racism (segregation) too.

But that isn't the cabbies problem to solve. Its perfectly reasonable for a cab driver to try to avoid high-crime areas that are much more dangerous even if he doesn't have one racist bone in his body.