On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality
iasc-culture.org
iasc-culture.org
I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." This can be affected by where you live, where you work, where you go to church, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, what you do for fun, how you dress, even how you talk. Midwesterners are happy to accept someone who matches them in all these areas regardless of skin color. This is why you get backlash from them when you call them racist because the criteria they use is not skin color its all the other stuff.
Yet on the other hand, most PoC in the Midwest have a culture that is different on most of the above. So when a white Midwesterner doesn't treat a black Midwesterner that speaks, dresses, even walks differently as a part of the community is it racism? I would say no since it isn't about race but is about culture. But on the other hand, when most white people do this to most black people, it sure does start to look like it.
This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn't seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn't going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation.
For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It could be a purely rational economic calculation based on other people’s biases. It’s still the bread and butter of the system of racism.
Just like discrimination that branches on culture or class and only incidentally produces outcomes along racial lines.
Incorrect. More correct would be: the dominant modern left-wing view is that there exists now in much of the world, and has historically, a systematic structural power imbalances between groups identified as “races”, that this disproportionately harms some of those groups, and that this is bad thing.
That the confluence of all those things is the proper referent of the label “racism” rather than that label referring to racial bias which is a component of all that is far more controversial even within the left.
> For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It could be a purely rational economic calculation based on other people’s biases. It’s still the bread and butter of the system of racism.
Uh, yes, because it's a product of someone's racial biases, it's still a part of systemic racism even by the simpler and more common definition of racism, because its a product of racial biases within the social system.
I don’t like the conflation of terms either. But I see a lot of people talking past each other (“racism isn’t a big deal because most people aren’t racist anymore,” and “racism is a major problem in America because of structural inequality”). Parent got close to explaining how these statements are true at the same time, and I wanted to point it out.
There are vast piles of research showing that personal racial bias manifesting through discrimination, whether or not it is conscious/intentional, is pervasive in America.
Structural racism is real, but it is not independent of personal racism—it is produced by and perpetuates personal racism.
Besides this, the left-wing view is easily confused with the popular notion of racism, which is widely considered to be immoral, and I think often the proponents of this viewpoint abuse the confusion, deliberately accusing skeptics and dissenters of "racism" without being clear that they mean the probably-benign "systemic racism" instead of the clearly immoral "racism". Further, many of these proponents also tend to consider "questioning systemic racism theory" to be an act of (systemic) "racism" because it inhibits the consensus required to combat (systemic) "racism".
TL;DR I think the marketing was deliberately obfuscatory, and this has had a huge detrimental impact on our national racial.
My suggestion is that people stop being so damn concerned about their moral status and start caring more about actually fixing things.
A system with de facto separate and unequal schools is just as bad as a system with de jure separate and unequal schools. Whether that's the result of an emergent phenomenon or explicit planning has little effect on the people stuck in the system.
If someone's fragile moral ego gets in the way of an accurate description of the problem... well, that person's ego is the problem.
FWIW you see the same problem in flailing engineering projects.
This is silly. Moral status is a necessary component of political capital. The entire reason the progressive left stuck to their confusing "systemic racism" term is because it conveniently allows them to strip dissidents and critics of the political capital necessary to implement their fixes or even advance the national discourse. Of course, we could think wishfully about a world where politics were irrelevant (as I sometimes do), but that's not productive.
Why do you think there's a correlation between culture and race? Could it have something to do with people of color being explicitly excluded from white society as a matter of public policy until, like, 50 years ago?
My personal way of saying this is "we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist." Very often the most pragmatic choice in a situation also happens to be racist. Just own the racist things you do, and try to change the world for the better so you are no longer pushed into doing racist things.
Calling that racism is to potentially miss the root cause of much of this stuff, and it has to do with poverty. The poor of any ethnic group or race are treated badly.
That's confusing because you're using two different definitions of the word "racist" in the same sentence. At some point we should do everyone a favor and use two words when we mean two things.
The example about divesting from a neighborhood due to concerns about property value is spot-on. In a systematically racist society, it is rational to behave in ways that produce racist outcomes even one does not personally have racist beliefs. Racism ends up being perpetuated even if most people don't think of themselves as racists or believe they are doing anything to promote unfair racial outcomes.
There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formation of primarily white communities.
You mention people making distinctions based on where you go to work, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, how you dress, etc.. If I'm black and couldn't afford college for various reasons, I'm going to have a hard time getting a job that would allow me to buy the kind of car, dress in the clothes, send my kid to the schools, buy a house where the other people who had a _systematically_ easier go at life would.
My point is; When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.
What you're talking about are things that happened in larger cities, but that's not the whole world and that doesn't match the history of much of the midwest.
The parent was right, if there is discrimination it's about culture not color. There were a few adopted children with heritage from different parts of the world and as far as I could ever tell, they were treated the same as anyone.
The discrimination you did see to any degree was on a protestant/catholic split and whether you lived in a relatively richer part of town.
I just didn't see racial hatred growing up. Actual racism was a foreign concept until I left. Something you saw on TV, not in real life. I'm aware that it isn't necessarily something I would have always seen... but I have seen racism since I left in a way that I definitely did not before.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
One article is about the south and the other one is about racist policies in the 30's. In the 30's there were essentially no people to be racist against in my community.
You're talking about urban planning departments, the concept is ludicrous in my home town which you could walk across in an hour surrounded by towns which you could walk across before finishing a sandwich.
It wasn't accidental in many smaller towns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
I do expect that the Great Depression also contributed with small minority communities moving to cities.
The census count for "black" in my county in 1920 and 1900 was 5. Not 5%, 5. It was 99.97% white.
It's a fact that people seem to have quite some trouble with. Much of the midwest is nearly entirely white (and at that a pretty narrow subset of northern europeans) because only a small set of people had any interest in settling there.
I think the threat of race-based violence would have made this very difficult. One family, perhaps, but a little neighborhood? Not OK -- I'm thinking specifically about the Tulsa riots of 1921 and other racial violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...).
(Grew up in suburban Kansas and spent plenty of time hanging around towns like the fictional Gedanken.)
Iowa has a history of progressivism. For example in 1851 it was the second state to legalize interracial marriage. In 2009 it was the forth state to legalize same-sex marriage (and not through any change of the laws, the Iowa supreme court decided it was legal)
I know the culture I experienced was not pervasive in the whole midwest. I'm also not saying that there weren't bigots, but it was certainly very much different than a lot of other places in this country.
The white population was "down" to 98.9%
Cultural conditions created an environment that was welcoming to white people and hostile to PoC.
Look at the history the history of the KKK in my home state of Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Klan and tell me you don't see widespread organized racism in it's past.
We didn't see racial hatred growing up because our grandparents and their parents contributed to the conditions where there simply were not people of color. That and because subtle racial prejudices were more easily normalized by a distinct lack of larger communities of color.
I look at the emails I get from representatives in Indiana and I'm baffled by the issues they present: undocumented citizens, Islamic terrorism, etc... Communities in the midwest intentionally isolate themselves from people they perceive as "others". How is that anything other than racism?
I've lived in the midwest in a small farming town where virtually everyone, mostly only excluding my family, was directly descended from people that moved there from the same small part of what is now the Czech Republic at around the same time. It was incredibly homogeneous culturally.
What you're saying is true.
But it's also the case that some those homogenous, snow white communities worry about jihad, even though there aren't any Muslims within a hundred mile radius of their house.
And it's especially true that when these small, homogenous communities diversify -- due to refugee placement or just economic growth and sprawl -- the latent racism becomes not-so-latent.
When non-whites did migrate to the area they did so to cities to find work and they weren't always met warmly or treated fairly, but those cities were a world away from the culture and environment of my youth.
[This leads to a stereotypical kind of storyline where a biased individual gains a friend or family member of the given type (perhaps a child comes out as gay or so on), and once the issue becomes real and personal for them, changes their mind.]
Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe.
This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).
According to Thomas Sowell, the norm when groups migrate, all throughout history, across cultures, all over the world, is for people to form highly homogeneous cultural communities. This seems to be borne out by history.
When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism.
There is always latent tribalism and prejudice. It's hard to fully know this, unless you are a complete outsider -- a minority of one. Also, unless one has had such an experience, it's hard to know how Sisyphean a task it is to directly tell another about it. In fact, I'll even come out and say it's inadvisable. In teaching, one comes to realize that there are some lessons which are best learned indirectly.
If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.
One of the lessons of history, is that shared interests that cut across ethnic groups are the most effective means of overcoming prejudice. This is why I see many of the Postmodernist and Social Construction viewpoints as fundamentally harmful, because they take the seductive half-right position and often declare discourse between groups to be inherently impossible, and so go on to cut off the best means we have of remedying the situation. Competition, commerce, and all forms of engaged interaction are the best remedies. It's isolation of one form or another that makes things worse. It's isolation that makes a subgroup vulnerable to oppression and exploitation.
The past did contain city planning that was racist and had redlining. Those are past problems that do need some form of correction and I would support correcting them if you have specific actionable ideas.
I would like to point out that race isn't the only reason you couldn't afford college. Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?
> Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?
It sounds like you're describing need-blind admission. Few universities have the funding for that, they depend upon a certain percentage of students paying most or all of the tuition. Harvard, which has very strong financial aid and is officially a need-blind, still admits a high percentage of "legacies," who are much less likely to need a lot of financial aid.
Courts have decided that it's legal for universities to consider race as one of the factors when deciding who to admit. After centuries of bias, you can't just say "anyone can apply" and expect better outcomes to just happen, it requires more active effort. That doesn't mean taking someone who is unqualified but of the pool of qualified people, you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
I agree that more would need to be done than just saying "anyone can apply" but I don't think that the University should be doing most of the work, I think that we should work in the communities that need help to improve education so that more people are encouraged to apply and those that apply are more qualified.
>you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
Please be careful how you say this, some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people." This gives the alt-right the opportunity to fan flames that should die.
That was in response to you mentioning race blind aid. Need-blind admission helps combat the affordability problem that's more likely to affect people of color. If you're saying there shouldn't be scholarships exclusively for black people or some other group, I disagree but those make up a trivial amount of the aid available.
The biases baked into school systems are a bigger problem but there universities don't have a wait a generation for someone else. It's not about admitting unqualified students, universities shouldn't and I believe generally don't admit unqualified students (when they do, I suspect it's more for legacies than people of color). Part of what a university can do is recognize that a student who's the first in their family to go to college or who didn't go to a preparatory high school may not come in with knowledge and skills that will help them succeed; matters that are not taught in any classroom. There are white students with those needs as well and who should get such help, but they're less common.
> some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people."
Tough, sometimes that's the way it's going to look if all you're looking at it grades and standardized tests; that's the basis for a lawsuit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard. That group has twice the representation within Harvard than it does in the US but they're still suing because other students with lower scores are sometimes admitted instead of an Asian American applicant with higher scores.
Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.
The midwest is not a place where you really strike it rich. It's a place where you have a shot of having a good family arrangement. You can easily surround yourself with relatives, and other folks like you. You're rarely forced into considering other points of view. There's a really strong sense of "being in your place" there, in many ways. I think the folks with a genuine curiosity about the world end up leaving.
It was really interesting to me watch the debate and discussions surrounding the Amazon HQ2 when I was travelling through the midwest and the south. Folks from those areas really want the economic growth from a new HQ, and were quick to point out progressive changes that happened in their city. They would never talk about those progressive changes in a positive light if big tech were not moving to their neighborhood.
So, one solution to some of this is money and jobs. I was impressed at how quickly that opened people's minds there.
In a wider context you are probably correct, but it's worth pointing out that the urban areas in the South are pretty damn progressive.
The urban areas everywhere tend to be pretty progressive. The political and cultural distinctions between any given state's urban and rural areas are a lot more profound than the distinctions to be made based on West Coast, East Coast, South, or Midwest.
Yes, are all despised by their rural neighbors. And vice-versa. But the bias is bidirectional: Those in the cities look at the rural folks with just as much contempt and disgust as those folks in the country look at the cities. Perhaps more.
E.g. While Trump won the state of Nebraska, Hillary did win the counties of Douglas and Lancaster, the two counties that house the two largest cities in the state (Omaha 446K, Lincoln 280K).
From my outside perspective, this is bloody ridiculous. I live in a coastal metro, and routinely expect to encounter people from "cultures" more than a few towns over. Bostonians would laugh at you if you treat someone from Medford differently from someone from Milton. They'd nod if you treat Medford different from Malden, but that's because Medford is white-ethnic while Malden is black and Chinese -- they're just being racist and everyone knows it.
Let alone if you tried treating Medford different from Somerville! I mean, hell, what's next, holding up signs on the Common saying, "Californians go home"?
Worse, by my tastes, Bostonians are already a bunch of provincial chauvinists. I'm from New York. In New York, if you said that a Park Slope-er in Brooklyn just has a different culture from a native of Flushing, Queens, well, you're going to get somewhere between dirty looks and threats (I'm picking where my parents had me versus where my mother grew up). It's got too many ethnic and racial implications. Hell, you're expected to work every day with people commuting in from as "far away" as New Jersey, and we all know that New Jerseyians are degenerate douchebags with no culture, amirite?
(Yeah I grew up in New Jersey too.)
I mean, let alone talking about "where you go to church" in New York. If you can't cope with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Evangelicals, and Catholics (of various ethnicities each) living in the same neighborhood and each having their houses of worship within a few blocks of each-other, look, don't move to New York.
So the protestation that Midwesterners just have to draw ingroup/outgroup distinctions about your particular church, neighborhood, school district, and choice of automobile comes across as yuuuuge levels of special pleading to justify levels of xenophobia that we'd think of as the stuff of stand-up comedy.
How can I, as a random Texan, tell the difference between someone from Gramercy Park and someone from New Jersey? (The part of me that wants to watch the world burn would like to see the flames between Bostonians and New Yorkers.)
It's also worth contrasting that with my sister who has lived in Raleigh for almost 10 years now. They still call her a "Yankee".
Like, New Jerseyans think New Yorkers are snobby, New Yorkers think New Jerseyans are sleazy and uncultured, but you'd never, ever expect people to have a problem working or living together because of the difference. Everyone is so mixed-up that "stick to your own kind" becomes nearly impossible. Saying that we live in the same neighborhood and send our kids to the same school, say, but attend a different church, and so we're not really members of a common community, would just not make sense. If you tried that, you'd run out of "people like us" in about five minutes.
This is about 180 degrees from all of my experience with NYC and New Yorkers. I find New Yorkers to be extremely tribal, and many of them are also extremely efficient at identifying folks from other tribes who may kind of look like them (at least from an outsider point of view).
To be fair, much of this tribalism may not be based on things like race or religious/church affiliation -- as you mentioned, that would make living and working in NYC extremely difficult.
That said, things like career field, social status, and how you spend your free time seem to matter quite a bit.
As a simple example, take your random high SES resident of the Upper East Side and have them go into a grocery store in a low SES neighborhood (race doesn't matter) and strike up a casual conversation with the cashier. It will be extremely awkward, and everyone will be looking at them. Flip the script and have someone from that same low SES neighborhood go to a grocery store in the nicer parts of the Upper East Side and do the same -- this will also most likely be awkward with everyone looking at them.
The example above uses two fairly extreme examples, but this happens along much finer lines as well. Where did people go to undergrad/grad? Where do people shop? Where do they go out? What neigborhood/building do they live in? What do they do in their spare time? All of these things are hyper-efficient shibboleths in NYC that largely do not matter in a random small town in the Midwest -- that is, you probably didn't go to college (one of the two state Us if you did), you shop at the only store in town or the nearest store if there are more than one, etc.
I imagine if you looked into it, New Yorkers would be much more likely to hire a New Yorkers over a New Jerseyan with similar credentials.
Globally, yes, but these suburbs are different because many of these people have lived in the city. NYC has fantastic commuter transportation. People move to manhattan for a job, get married, have a kid, move to the suburbs, and continue to work in manhattan. Their children grow up going to the city on the weekends and move there when they graduate college. The manhattan population is 1.6m, but on any given weekday there are 4m people on the island. 750k people go through grand central every day (Westchester/Fairfield), Penn station another 300k (Long Island). The PATH has another 200k (New Jersey). This is all while excluding the drivers.
> I imagine this has influence on hiring.
I'm not sure how I could convince you, but I've lived here my entire life. There is absolutely no difference between people in the suburbs and in the city because they are the same people.
I assume by the italics you really think that part's ridiculous. But car culture here is very, very different than other parts of the US where public transportation or locality makes them unimportant.
It's one of only a few things I've found a lot of non-Midwesterns don't get. And honestly, it probably is pretty ridiculous.
But when housing is affordable, high-paying jobs are abundant, and schools overall are great; the car becomes the deciding factor, as the square footage of a mansion and a historic bungalow aren't really reflected in their prices differences.
I'd guess the Silverado. However, really the comparison between Silverado and F-150 really has to do with the color of your collar; not the color of your skin.
Also, Milton "ked" here. Of course I'd treat somebody from Milton differently, we share a whole unique culture which you clearly don't understand. You're the one being culturally ignorant: speaking of Milton and Medford as equivalent because of skin tone is the same as comparing a Sikh to Arab, cause you know, the funny hat and facial hair and stuff right?
My wife is from Milton. She has nothing but nasty things to say about its "whole unique culture" ;-).
Like the big-R Racist is the white power asshole who wants to create a white ethnostate--that's one that's easy to spot, and most of us can say we're not that.
The real pernicious damage to communities of color comes from the little-r racism that SO SO MANY people carry around totally unthinkingly. Like even my pretty progressive sister will spout off something like "well if they'd just work harder, or get a better job," when in reality there's a well-documented bias against hiring people with "black" names.
The big-R Racism is easy to defeat, because most of us see it as pretty noxious.
The little-r racism is so much tougher, because it's encoded into laws in innocent-seeming ways, it's encoded into algorithms in software (e.g. charging various rates by zip code, but zip code in many places ends up being a proxy for race, and who in this decade checked to make sure the assumptions you've encoded aren't just screwing over minorities), in a lot of unconscious biases (e.g. that AAVE is an uneducated form of english, not its own dialect).
How do you call people's attention to that little-r racist stuff?
Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one).
It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is.
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> Racism is very much a matter of intent.
No. Unconscious bias, which by definition does not include intent, can still be a form of racism.
I do agree that sometimes other forms of bias or prejudice is taken for racism. Many times it's a class issue; many richer people want to avoid poor people but if people of color are far more likely to be poor, they're more likely to be avoided.
I think there's little utility to this version of racism outside of discussions about sociology. In particular, there's no real way to show someone is not racist given this definition. So if someone was determined to be unconsciously racist, there's nothing really to do be done about it since there's no way to get a "clean bill of psyche".
The point is not to label people as racist, but thoughts, beliefs, and actions as racist.
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Of course, we don't have to go back in time at all to see this sort of thinking, but, for the sake of the example, I thought it worked better.
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Just because the people in these examples claim they aren't motivated by racism doesn't mean they aren't (at least partly) motivated by racism, maybe even unconsciously.
If I care about the suffering of my own race, but not those people over there because they're a different race - that's discrimination. That's my point about intent, the mother may feel she is just "indifferent" but the impact is certainly racist.
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I think you are defining racism so narrowly it only defines people who state "I'm superior to this race" where their actions alone can never be racist unless they say that.
I already replied to the tornado comment but weather can't hold beliefs, it's a non sequitur that doesn't support your argument.
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Let's say you have the "non-racist" slave owner. No matter what they personally believe about the equality of individual humans, they create a world where the people who come after will believe fundamentally different things about races.
You can't say, slavery IS wrong, but we are going to do it anyway because we are selfish. The act is racist, because the people who come after you will justify your decisions and cement a racial worldview that you contributed to.
I really hope you read this CNN article in full but here is a quote that I believe directly applies to your argument:
> "When some whites talk about racism, they think it's only personal -- what one person says or does to another. But many minorities and people who study race say racism can be impersonal, calculating, devoid of malice..."
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-racism-or-racial-b...
Lets flesh out the pricing algorithm example. Lets say a home security company want to provide per zip code prices. The inputs they use are population density, crime rate, and availability of installers. This will lead to black neighborhoods being charged higher rates (since they statistically have higher crime rates).
Even though they have instituted a policy systematically favors one racial group over another I don't think your little racism is the right term because at no point did they consider race. In fact, the world is so backwards that they would have to either purposefully overcharge white people or undercharge black people to not charge the two groups differently.
They are literally damned if they do and damned if they don't. Either way they are racist by a legitimate definition of the word.
The best solution I can think of is to try and make the world as race blind as possible while trying to improve disadvantaged communities. So we should remove names from the hiring process when people. Yet, your sister has a point, CoC need to develop a culture of education and hard work. Its a tough problem that needs help from everyone.
Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one).
It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is
There's nothing wrong with this, in fact it is probably the correct thing to do, but you can really quickly become that guy. Oh, there's Johnny again, acting like we're all a bunch of racists and we don't understand the daily struggles people have. You can get tuned out really quick, if it's presented in terms that compare one group to another, the implicit assumption that because you're not in that group, you've had it easy. When people feel confronted in that way and they know they haven't had it easy, they're less likely to care whether they are racist. That's the impression I get from the groundswell of support for someone like Trump. The small-racists aren't supporting him because they hate other people, they supporting him because he act like he cares about them and at least rhetorically will stand up for them.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the goal must be to stand up for all groups of people and to deny bigotry in all of its forms.
What I've seen in SF is a lot of tribes with very tight restrictions on being "one of us." What's more, is that this tribalism seems to be mostly pattern matching as opposed to being based on principles. Back in the day, musicians would at least pay lip service to judging fellow musicians on their music, as opposed to how they dressed. It's only after I came to SF, that I encountered musicians talking about how doing so was some kind of good idea.
Even the tech community has pockets of people who think like this. So now my key question, when it comes to evaluating people at the most fundamental level, is to ask, "Do they put principles before tribe or tribe before principles?" The former group tends to be a slim minority in SF, where the rarity is proportional to the trendiness. I guess that's just how it's always been, everywhere money and power are concentrated.
> I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us."
The genetic basis for delineating "races" is sketchy at best. The cultural aspects are as important as skin color to the definition of race, which is why either the first or second definition of "race" in any reasonable dictionary refers to all these things aside from "melanin content".
So at some point, segregating oneself from people who worship differently, go to different schools, play different sports, ... -- especially in communities where many of these divisions are inspired by geography distributions that were intentionally created along racial lines less than a century ago -- is more than just "unhappy coincidence".
But let's set that aside for a moment and take your assertion as fact.
> This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines.
Indeed. Sometimes, the consequences of aggregate social behavior are more important than individual intent. (Actually, I'd argue almost always.)
A community in which wealth is disproportionately divided along racial lines is a racist community, even if no one in that community harbors individual and purely racially motivated prejudice.
> Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this?
Teach people how to think dispassionately about systems.
I'm not sure that there is a way to fix this without switching from a "nominally typed" definition of racism to a "structurally typed" definition of racism.
Such a definition already exists. And by happy coincidence, the programming analogy works especially well because this notion is already called "structural racism".
> So it seems like it is an impossible situation.
At least for the current generation, for whom anything short of direct and violent prejudice on the basis of a few phenotypes is the only thinkable definition of racism, and for whom "racist" is a stinging moral and personal indict rather than a statement of fact about an emergent phenomenon that may or may not have anything to do with the content of any particular individual's character.
This is so well said, I think it deserves to be singled out
So many people get personally offended when one is discussing these matters.
In the Midwest, you have to make the decisions finer since most people around really are indistinguishable on the usual terms.
It's certainly not true in the suburbs around the mid-sized cities in the midwest. Or the smaller manufacturing towns in the rust belt.
It may be true in the more rural areas of Minnesota or Kansas, though.
This strikes me as unrealistic.
There's also a question of how much a culture influences a persons behavior. Multiculturalism in school and work pushes the idea that all cultures are made equal, yet different cultures are represented unevenly in our society. There has been a significant amount of racism against Asians and Jews, yet both groups have significantly higher average incomes and college attainment rates than other groups. Personally, I don't believe that's a coincidence, and is due to their cultures that emphasize self-discipline, self-improvement, and consideration for their fellow man. There are some cultures formed by chronic stress and poverty(white trash, ghetto cultures) that don't have those traits, and so their people don't make it as far in life. That's not because of racism, that's because of poverty and chronic stress.
I'm pretty sure it was the offspring of people who "don't like multiculturalism" who beat me up in middle school for being part of geek culture rather than the prevailing rural culture of my hometown.
I personally am a big fan of respecting others despite cultural differences.
Any ideology taken to a violent extreme is bad. There are people who are getting beaten up for believing there should be a southern border wall. Those people beating them up are in the wrong, but that doesn't mean their opinion is baseless, merely their method of expressing their opinion is wrong.
> I personally am a big fan of respecting others despite cultural differences.
Yet there are bounds to what is acceptable, is there not? If someone walked down the streets naked, would you not think they're crazy? If a man wanted to stone a gay person, or shun a woman for exposing her hair, would you not look at that person with disdain?
Given that there are bounds in variance for acceptable behavior, then why shouldn't there be regional differences in acceptable variance?
> If someone walked down the streets naked, would you not think they're crazy? If a man wanted to stone a gay person, or shun a woman for exposing her hair, would you not look at that person with disdain?
You are conflating laws with culture to make a strawman. GP specifically talked about black culture, not violent-religious-fundamentalist-nudist culture.
This is a slippery slope fallacy, saying any sort of action in one direction will lead to or promote violence. A lot can be accomplished without violence.
> You are conflating laws with culture to make a strawman.
No, I'm not. Those are laws because they are social norms that have been deemed unacceptable to break, thus are enforced. Regardless of whether or not you call the cops, you would still think they're crazy for walking around naked, because our cultural norms say that anyone walking around naked is crazy, not because they're breaking the law.
> GP specifically talked about black culture, not violent-religious-fundamentalism-nudist culture.
Where did I mention a violent-religious-fundamentalism-nudist culture? Be honest, would that _really_ be the first thing you think about when you see someone walking naked in the middle of the street?
By mentioning "stoning", "shunning", and "nudism" as "examples" of different cultures. That's absurd, as absurd as my joke combining the three.
Let me reword your hypotheticals. If someone walked down the street in a hijab, would you think they're "crazy"? If someone celebrated different holidays than you, prayed to different gods, or spoke a minority dialect of English, would you look at that person with disdain?
Because many people do. Many of the same ones who "don't like multiculturalism". And that's the racism that minorities encounter in this country, day in, day out.
And, regarding "slippery slope", consider that desire for cultural homogeneity has no history of correlation with violence in this country. [1] [2] [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_integration_in_the_Unit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_school_desegregati...
You're twisting my words in an attempt to delegitimize my statements. Those are real facets of different cultures, and acting like each doesn't happen somewhere in the world is disingenuous.
> if someone walked down the street in a hijab, would you think they're "crazy"? If someone celebrated different holidays than you, prayed to different gods, or spoke a minority dialect of English, would you look at that person with disdain?
There is a spectrum of responses. I personally wouldn't look at them with disdain, but I would also have no desire to interact with them. I don't understand why they would go to an area of the world with a fundamentally different worldview from themselves.
> You are living in a hole if you think that belief in anti-miscegenation (which, let's be honest, is really what "not liking multiculturalism" is) and violence have no history of correlation in this country.
First, you're conflating race and culture, which are very different things. Race is determined by genetics and ancestry and can't be changed, while culture is a way of life, and determines their view of right and wrong and how to interact socially.
Second, just because there is a history of extremism doesn't mean any opinion in that direction is ridiculous. Nazis killed millions and nearly took over the world. Does that mean Republicans, who are also right-wing, should be banned? There have been black extremists who have done terrorist acts in the name of equality. Does that mean racial inequality should just stop being considered? No!
I'm not saying that nonconformists should be rounded up and murdered, but I also don't think that having social standards or social pressures to conform are bad either. Like everything, it needs to be done in moderation.
You are right. There is generally a correlation between the two, and historically the line has been blurred. They are, however, significantly different things, and I always take care to differentiate the two. The idea that genetics and skin color determine superiority is racism, and is ignorant of the facts. A culture, though, determines basic things like family structure and the definition of right and wrong. Do we really want to argue that there is no right and wrong way to live life?
> Especially it is disingenuous to claim that racism is rare, yet that it alone, and not anti-multiculturalism, was responsible for white flight.
We weren't discussing white flight. I never made that claim.
Is the fact that cultures are represented unevenly in society the fault of the non-dominant cultures or the dominant culture?
Is poverty and chronic stress cause by culture or is it caused by racist systems?
It might be a cycle but if people weren't racists then it might be easier to break the cycle.
Personally, I love multiculturalism. Being a white guy growing up in an almost exclusively white area gets to be monotonous. Dealing with people from other cultures is a lot more fun than dealing with people like me.
Oh, I absolutely believe that the uneven distribution of certain races in those poverty cultures is due to historic racism. I'd have to be deluded to not believe that. When an entire race was suppressed just a couple generations ago, it makes absolute sense that that race would continue having an issue with poverty.
However, I don't think race is the issue anymore. I think the issues are culture and poverty, with poverty being the much more significant of the two.
Proof of this IMO is in the white trash culture. White people born and raised in poverty in a culture of hopelessness tend to have terrible college graduation rates, low average income, and high crime rates. There's no systemic racism keeping them down, yet they don't succeed.
> Is the fact that cultures are represented unevenly in society the fault of the non-dominant cultures or the dominant culture?
Jewish and Asian cultures are non-dominant, yet they succeed in our country. Dominance isn't the issue here, I don't think.
> Personally, I love multiculturalism... Dealing with people from other cultures is a lot more fun than dealing with people like me.
That's great! I don't have an issue that some places and people think like that. I just don't see why that kind of mentality needs to be brought to places that think differently. There are always acceptable limits of variance within a culture. Some cultures disallow women from showing their hair, others stone gay people. Neither of those aspects of a culture would be allowed here. Why shouldn't different regions of the country have different bounds for allowed cultural variance?
I am a foreigner and I lived in for my last year of high school in Virginia (I was the exchange student of the school).
I remember how people that said they were "atheist" were demonized (and chastised socially). These kids were smart, hard working, yet people would discriminate against them (socially), for not sharing the same religion.
I remember I had to say "I am agnostic", in order not to be chastised myself.
So, that "your culture is different", can extend to religion, ethnicity, last name, being vegan, etc.. etc... Lets call the spade a spade, it is a form tribalism and bigotry at the end of the day.
But I agree, racist attitudes are widespread.
Lots of times.
Maybe I have poor taste in casual acquaintances or something.
Here is the SPLC's interactive map of 'hate groups' in operation. Though the density seems, to my eyes, correlate strongly with population, there are still a fair few assholes out here.
An interactive 'hate map' seems to encourage this form of stereotyping. It's all about the branding. It works because there's always a kernel of truth in stereotypes (I'm sure there are true hate groups in Indiana), but that raises larger questions about stereotyping regions or races or religions or anything for that matter.
The two things I take away from looking at the map are 1) it's not just a southern thing (which I think is a misconception they're explicitly trying to correct) and 2) the hate group density correlates with population centers pretty well (which is often the case for maps of people).
You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about. Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.
They seemed to have taken a "hockey stick" turn in the past several years.
Yeah, if they screwed up 2 things, that's not good and they should fix it.
There's more than just those two things.
You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about.
There's already a lawsuit.
Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.
I've had pretty much the same thought, but my conclusion is that their definition of "right" has become essentially tribal, and that they feel justified in using their reputation as a partisan weapon, because in their minds, their ends justify those means.
My spouse's family in Wisconsin is more racist than my family in Indiana, disguising it somewhat by talking about "the chodnies" (derived from the Polish czarny). And my sister-in-law's husband puts the most obnoxious crap out on Facebook and Twitter. It isn't exactly "we're glad that black kid is dead", but rather "we support the police; hero hero, protect and serve, rah rah rah!" which is implicitly the same thing, when the cops seem to hardly ever kill any white people while they're out gunning down members of the community and their dogs.
There's a reason why Wisconsin instituted citizen review boards. "We investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of all wrongdoing" works great for the cops when everyone on the local force is racist, but not so much for minorities. The hand that Black Lives Matter claps against is racism in police forces, and racism-by-proxy by refusing to hold the cops accountable for it.
It isn't always orthodox color-based racism, either. It's more like identity-based tribalism. The different "black" cliques didn't always get along at my high school. For instance, one calls the other "stuck-up boujie", and the other responds "thugs and chickenheads". They would definitely use that unmentionable slur on each other. The Jews would often hang out together because they already knew each other from Saturday School, and anti-Semitism is still a thing in the Midwest. I'd occasionally hear about fights that started with racial slurs, but never actually saw one. One of my friends got called "chink" sometimes.
What I saw from where I sat was hostile enough, and I suspect it was probably worse in the places I was not.
Mainly, you hang out in your own groups, and avoid those that don't like you. That keeps your group somewhat homogenous, which may coincidentally make it look like your group is racist. And that might be true, but a lot of it is surrounding yourself with people who think and act like you, and not just people that look like you. In my groups, racism was not part of the group identity, and the racism that occurred elsewhere was simply ignored whenever possible. All that mattered was that it didn't happen among ourselves. If it happened to one of us elsewhere, that was awful and pitiable, but the best we could do was to not add to it. It's a sort of head-in-the-sand approach, which works for a lot of social problems in the Midwest. If you pretend it isn't happening, it's only a problem for the people it's happening to.
That would explain the slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, and segregation...
Travel helps. However, you can't count our annual mass migration down to the gulf coast for spring break because it's just a temporary transplant, and during it you're really only meeting other Midwesterners.
I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong.
No, of course not ... all of those are ridiculous statements, because the truth is that the only reason you would not want to live near someone else, is because you (not you personally, in the general sense) don't like that someone else.
Clamoring on about "maintaining your ethnic identity" is just a dogwhistle ... and masks the true underlying racist/xenophobic underpinnings of that person's mindset.
Probably because segregation leads poorer conditions for PoC.
>In 2015, 17.3% of blacks in Milwaukee were unemployed compared to 4.3% of whites, the report found. And many blacks in the city were earning much less than whites. According to the report, the median household income for blacks in Milwaukee was $25,600 compared to $62,600 for whites.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/news/economy/milwaukee-black...
>Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the Chicago area's employment rate is 47 percent for blacks, the lowest among the big cities, and 73 percent for whites, which is among the highest. Only Philadelphia comes close to that gap, with a 48 percent employment rate for blacks and 66 percent for whites.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-brookings-disconne...
One fact of history that’s often overlooked is that patronage has left an incredible legacy in places like Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc. For example, one of the finest collections of French Impressionism in the US is not in New York or San Francisco, but Philadelphia. The art museums in Pittsburgh are amazing, easily worth the (very affordable) trip out to see them.
We tend to define these cities by the decline of their industrial economic base, but we forget their history. The age of the industrialists started in about 1860. By 1900, Cleveland, Buffalo, Cincinatti, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Pittsburgh were among the 15 largest cities in the country (the top 15 also included Philadelphia and Baltimore—two cities which have phenomenal culture compared to what you’d expect based on their present economies). Cleveland, with its famous orchestra, was one of the ten largest US cities from 1890-1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Steal_(2009_fil...
Detroit (14), St. Louis (20), Pittsburgh (26), and Cincinnati (28) are all still in the top 30 metropolitan areas. Even Buffalo -- the smallest on your list -- is today the country's 50th largest MSA.
Detroit is twice as large as much hipper (and vastly more talked about) places like Austin (31) and Portland (25). St. Louis is quite a bit bigger than both of those, as well.
Anheuser-Busch did great things for St. Louis, presumably, because the executives at AB gave a shit about St. Louis. They lived there. Their kids went to school there.
That's not an assumption we can make about Belgian ownership.
Nor should you, AB has all but moved their brass to New York City because the Belgians didn't feel like flying to St. Louis anymore.
Just be aware, a slice of the deep dish is pretty much a meal by itself.
You probably shouldn't talk like that if you want it to stay that way...
Denver is a warning, not a template.
(I say this with partial sarcasm, obviously you can't fight change to some extent but being conscious of it and careful management to guide it's direction can prevent a lot of problems)
But in all seriousness: the town(s) do have their charm. And if you're bored, its only a hour drive to Chicago. The affordability was actually what attracted me as a student: I had a rather high standard of living for the money I was living on.
"Oblong man marries Normal woman."
[1] and now live a stone's throw away in Indiana near Purdue U
Humility is having a realistic view of your own abilities and worth while being OK with it. It's not a vacuum of self-worth or something. We have other words for that.
To illustrate, it's not humble for LeBron James to say he's bad at basketball. It would be humble for him to claim his ability while internalizing his limitations, both on the court and off.
So, to bring this back to Midwesterners, a Midwestern might say, "Yeah, I'm a great programmer, but it's not like I'm going to change the world through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility. Pass the green bean casserole, please."
Thanks for letting us know that some people think it's humble to be xenophobic. Funny thing: my in-laws are from the Midwest, and they've never spoken like this.
Jared Fogle (the Subway creep) went to my high school in Indiana, and if he showed up to a reunion after getting out of the pokey, he would not get the same reception as Roy Moore currently gets in Gadsden, Alabama. Fogle couldn't win an election for county roadkill remover, much less senator for the whole state.
We don't rag on other regions as a matter of course, but we do judge them by their perceived shortcomings, even if we don't call them out on it.
And Midwesterners are stereotyped. We're small-minded, prudish, unfashionable, uncultured, suspicious, avoidant, passive-aggressive, and boring. We drink pop and weak beer and eat fried cheese. Didn't you know?
For instance, it seems like when the Midwestern region comes up[0], people usual mean the upper midwest and especially the Lakes states, which is weird to me as someone who's lived in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, because down here we don't really mean to include Lakes states when we say "Midwestern". I mean, there's stuff there. Outdoors stuff. That's worth doing/seeing. That you can reach in less than one entire day of travel by car. Doesn't seem too Midwestern to me, or to have much to do with my experience of Midwesterness (I gather they'd disagree, which is my point). The Lakes states, including Minnesota and Michigan and at least the northern 1/3 of Illinois (and certainly anything East of Illinois) are a Western extension of the East from our perspective.
[0, EDIT] by which I mean when the region comes up in articles, or on the Internet generally.
There does seem to be a quiet arrogance about Midwesterners. Yeah, we're the most humble. Yeah, we're the best, we just won't tell you. ;)
It seems more like fake humblesness more then really being humble.
Our stereotype of ourselves: Rather close to the Midwesterners, minus the emphasis on agriculture. (Yes, we grow what we can where we can, but lack of water means that there isn't much. Agriculture doesn't dominate the way it does in the Midwest.) We say that we are self-reliant, independent, friendly (except maybe to outsiders), down to earth. We're fairly well educated, but we still have good common sense.
Seriously, though, at some point we have to group regions together. All American cities have more similarities than differences. Regions do share some commonalities.
I'm not sure what you expect from this piece. The author mentions that there are differences between the various cities in the region, contrasting Detroit with Cleveland. Should he have gone into more detail?
They are very different to us, but they are more like each other (and Ontario) than they are like the other places I have been. I can definitely see how outsiders might consider them to be indistinguishably similar without actually living in multiple regions of the Midwest.
I took the first option. As a child, I accepted without thinking that my small town, a city of 9,383 people, contained within it every possible human type; if I could not fit in here, I would not fit in anywhere. (“Fitting in” I defined as being occupied on Friday nights and, sooner or later, kissing a girl.) Every week that passed in which I did not meet these criteria—which was most of them—became a prophecy. Every perception, every idea, every opinion that I could not make immediately legible to my peers became proof of an almost metaphysical estrangement, an oceanic differentness that could not be changed and could not be borne. ... I knew that cities existed, but they were all surely just Michigan farm towns joined together n number of times, depending on population. Owing to a basically phlegmatic temperament, and the fear of hurting my parents, I made it to college without committing suicide; there, the thing solved itself. But I worry what would have happened—what does often happen—to the kid like me, but with worse test scores, bad parents, an unlocked gun cabinet.
This sounds like the general lament of an intelligent, intellectually curious person growing up than anything specific to the midwest. Of course ones ideas aren't understood, and if too many big words are used then one marks themselves as "talking funny". There are a great many under the 75th percentile after all.
The one thing I found missing from the present article was the nearly total absence of oppurtunity in all these rural midwestern towns. A whole lot of my peers put a trailer on Mom/Dads (or Grandma/Grandpa's) land, and eked lives somehow. I honestly don't know how. The poverty, the grinding hopelessness is endemic for the region. So yeah, there's nothing else to talk about, so you talk about the neighbors, or that strange kid at school who wear's the sweater with puff balls. And don't by any means be different lest you be gossiped about as well.
But in a larger city you'd encounter more kinds of people and feel less weird. You'd also be more likely to meet people who are actually relatable.
Drugs? Or some other invisible economy? I had the same impression of late-90s Vancouver. No real growth outside of real estate, but lots of people with piles of cash and a huge population who never seemed to work but still made rent each month. In BC pot brought in, by some estimates, more money than forestry and mining combined. Now it's purely real estate.
edit: I'm shocked I'm getting downvoted for this. For those unaware, globalization and outsourcing has undeniably had a massive, negative impact on the midwest: http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest...
I'm always impressed that foreigners (I'll call them that, since they tend to think the same of us) discount art from the heartland simply by being shocked it even exists.
Nobody carries on about Texas being flat and boring, yet it's only marginally less flat than Kansas.
While you probably have a point, this isn't a very professional or productive way of expressing your opinion.
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Is "This nerd doesn't know shit" really the kind of dialog that we want to promote on this site?
> born and raised in michigan, lived all over the state. I hope i die here.
That statement on its own communicates he likes Michigan, has no interest in moving.
> This nerd doesn't know shit
Adding this sentence modifies my interpretation of the first. This guy _loves_ Michigan. He feels strongly about his community and the contents of the article offend him. We can nitpick the insult on the end or the language he used, but I think what he had to say about Michigan was "putting himself out there" a little bit that makes it harder to do. It didn't feel like trolling to me, felt like a genuine dude with genuine things to say.
I didn't say he was trolling. In fact, I said "While you probably have a point," emphasizing the fact that there may be a substantive post within the comment.
However, it says in the Hacker News Guidelines[1], "Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." His comment contained too much snark and not enough civility to be a productive post. If those kinds of comments are left to multiply, this site may lose its capacity for substantive, nuanced discussion of topics that many people disagree with.
You really think this adds "a lot of context and information" to his message? You must be joking. It's a knee-jerk reply consisting of two short sentences, not even properly capitalized.
> This nerd doesn't know shit
> felt like a genuine dude with genuine things to say.
I think you're pulling my leg now.
Having 50% midwestern life and 50% east coast, i size up the people first before i say im from (midwest state) or (eastern state).
Also, rent a car with same-state plates when you move into a new house from out of state. Most of your neighbors will make assumptions about you if the state plate is different. Once you get cars registered put on the new plates and return the rental.
Where are the new neighbors from?
"New York" "Montana" "Florida" "Massachusetts" "Iowa" "Utah" "California"
Pushy,outdoorsy,poor or old, liberal, farmers, Mormon, nutty
"Midwestern" - It's a term used by the media. They tell us it includes Oklahoma and North Dakota (which are insanely different?). It's supposed to include Chicago, Milwaukee, Omaha, and Topeka?
Half of the West coast thinks "midwest" includes the South?
They need a new term....badly.
I'll just say this, being a minority, I was shocked at how much contempt people had towards middle-easterners and black people. On numerous occasions people have said they've been "dirtying up the neighborhoods which is why they moved to another burb... they need to take better care of their lawns, etc". Out of all the companies that I've worked in the midwest, I've ever had a co-worker that was a black software engineer. People are put down in unfortunate ways. it's really fucking hard to climb up the corporate ladder than either coasts
Pay is crap.. people have been clamoring that the midwest is going to be the next silicon alley.
There's a reason why Chicago was the only major city to drop in population the last couple of years. There aren't that many interesting projects happening, it's not conducive to start-ups. i've had more arguments in the midwest with people that think tesla is a POS company for not following the rules. there's a lot of people averse to change.
The only black software engineer I’ve worked with (as in, on my team and writes code) since moving was the guy I hired. And I live in Seattle and I’ve worked at Microsoft. It’s a big shock moving from Indiana, where I’d had several black coworkers over the years. So I’ll see your Midwestern Rednecks anecdote, and raise you a Coastal Snobs Shocked That Midwest Has Internet.
i've had more arguments in the midwest with people that think tesla is a POS company for not following the rules.
Buncha rubes, not going gaga over an unprofitable company getting Federal subsidies so that rich people can buy new toys. So you’re saying you absolutley lack the ability to fathom why someone might not share your enthusiasm?
|So you’re saying you absolutley lack the ability to fathom why someone might not share your enthusiasm?
Also I can empathize why people are against Tesla, it's just the general mindset in the midwest when it comes to new technologies. There's no wrong or right it's just the way life is out there.
Also I can empathize why people are against Tesla, it's just the general mindset in the midwest when it comes to new technologies.
More than just the politics are conservative. :-)
But seriously, you stay inside if at all possible. Cars often don’t start, and as a consequence businesses don’t open. If you must go somewhere in the car, dress like you’ll be walking. If you don’t, and your breaks, you can die. OTOH, that’s Indiana. Whitehorse, Yukon, they probably shrug their shoulders with a “feels like it might be warming up, eh?” And sub-zero F temps didn’t stop from playing outside as kids. We just didn’t stay out long. Cover every exposed body part, layer on the insulation, won’t kill you right away. Hell, I’ve gone on a nice, brisk training run when it’s -10F. Again, don’t skimp on the clothing, file a flight plan with the spouse/SO/roommate (these days I just carry a phone), tell your friends later about your epic run this morning.
Though extreme cold can probably kill you faster than extreme heat, like anything else if you just use some sense and respect the fact that you can die in such conditions, you’ll be fine.
You warm up your car 20 minutes before leaving. You throw on your layers that are reserved for the negative double digits (flannel jeans, extra thick wool socks, fur hats, massive scarf, thick mittens), check that the emergency kit and blankets are still in the back seat, and head out into the world and go about your day. In the city it isn't all that big of a deal, but it could mean danger if you get stranded in the countryside.
One of my favorite things about the super cold is how warm the house parties and social gatherings can get. It's so cold that you can't be outside for more than a few minutes at a time, so it really feels like an accomplishment when you make it to a friends house or a blizzard happy hour (that is, if it isnt too cold for snow).
Also the blue skies are amazing. The sundogs can be downright surreal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog
I'm pretty sure Hacker News has a rule about lying.
That is, in contrast, what I love about the Midwest. The other day, I was snaking around the line barriers at the airport security, even though it was empty. At the end, there was a man and his young son waiting for me. He explained somewhat embarrassed that his son had wanted to walk under the guide ropes, which they did, but then they waited because he didn’t want to cut me in line. Being from DC, where people treat trying to merge as a personal insult, that made my day.
I would say it has more to do with the Illinois rather than the city itself. People are leaving Illinois, not just Chicago. Also, the startup culture is different in Chicago but to say there there aren't that many interesting projects happening is entirely subjective. Also, startups aren't the only companies doing interesting work as well. There is a ton of interesting work in the finance sector. There are also a bunch of very interesting startups such as Uptake and Tempus.
>Pay is crap.. people have been clamoring that the midwest is going to be the next silicon alley.
Cost of living is also significantly lower as well.
Especially outside of Chicago. Literally any midwest 'burb. Most of us have no problem driving 30 minutes to work. That vastly opens up the options, even working in a city.
I agree.. and I'd probably recommend any friends who were planning on moving to Chicago to focus on that area as there are a ton of really good financial companies.
People are averse to change that might negatively their impact livelihood, such as taxi drivers not being great Uber fans. Since most of the innovations in recent years have meant less jobs and worse condition for the area, it is understandable they might have such a position.
Welcome to any "nice" suburb on the east coast for that matter.
Also it sounds like you moved to the Chicago area. Large metropolitan areas are generally their own culture bubbles (and resented by the rest of the state/region but that's a different discussion).
I'm really sorry you had such a polarizing experience.
But just to give an anecdote of my own, in a much smaller midwest hub, over five years and two jobs I've worked with:
- A young woman from Russia
- An African American (29% of the population, a hair under Chicago's)
- An Indian (this isn't extremely uncommon, though)
- A Malaysian
- Multiple women over 50
All these people were/are great developers. Most of them worked above me.
Your experience was completely unlike my own. I'd hate for it to be so hastily packaged together as one.
I agree that the pay and number of opportunities aren't that amazing here, though. I've been fighting that for a long time.
It's because it's a shithole. Expensive, but salaries are midwest-grade; weather sucks almost year-round; the government is as corrupt as a two headed snake; one of the most segregated cities in the world; and has a huge violent crime problem.
I hope you're not comparing it to San Francisco where I'm 1.2x as likely to be jumped with a deadly weapon, 1.3x as likely to have my house broken into, 2.3x as likely to have my phone stolen and 2.2x as likely to have my car stolen.
And the best part is the worst neighborhoods in SFBA aren't even in San Francisco, and it's still scary as shit.
Let me know when they finish cleaning all the human shit out of the escalators on the train.
It's not a place to live if you want SFBA weather patterns, that's true.
I watches with less amusement as the evangelical right wing stuff eventually made its way into their thinking and churches as well.
I thought Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor was a nice exploration of the demise of the midwest "culture".
Here's a hint: there is no Midwest. That should be obvious; it's roughly twice as far from Oklahoma City to St. Louis as from London to Paris.
If you want to read about the past of the central part of the US, can I suggest a brilliant writer who isn't mentioned in the article: Walter Prescott Webb. See The Great Plains or The Frontier.
I live in Wisconsin, and it is a divided state. There is heavy racial segregation, plus strong red/blue and city/rural divisions. That makes it pretty hard to identify a single unifying culture.
Perhaps all the Midwest lacks is branding.
Also lots of tech jobs at Target and Best Buy, and firms like UnitedHealth Group, General Mills, and Cargill.
Housing prices on the Minneapolis side of the river are much better than the St. Paul side. Sadly, living on the opposite side of the river from your job is just horrible.
The vast majority were white, a small number of Native Americans (we all called them Indians back then) and just one black family. The black family's father was elected mayor, he was popular.
There was some racism, not as much as people seem to think. IMHO, I've seen more racism in bigger cities.
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/27/10825534/which-states-in-midwe...
Huh that's an interesting way of saying that...
> a person might explain these tropes of featurelessness by pointing out the similarities imposed across the Midwestern landscape by capitalism.
Oh. That's why. Trash article.