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What you're missing is that growing up there simply _weren't_ people outside my community/culture. It was much less about systematic racism and much more about who chose to immigrate to specific regions in the late 19th century.

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.

The absence of other people outside your community was not an accident. Members of the government, of financial institutions and urban planning departments made deliberate choices to exclude certain types of people:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...

Once again, you just don't have the context to be making that argument.

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 can be an interesting exercise to look at the census demographics for a county between 1900 and now. My home county had more black residents in 1920 than in 1990.

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.

Which I am sure is true for some places, but not all.

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.

What about 1990?

10.

The white population was "down" to 98.9%

What is objectionable about the above comment?

But, thought experiment: Suppose that 5 to 10 black families decided to relocate to Gedanken, Kan. (pop. 2000) in 1920?

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.)

This exact situation happened around 1850 in Iowa, a small group of free black families settled in Fayette County. I wish I could find more than a passing reference to pass on what I've read.

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.

I can relate to this, but at the same time I think the lack of diversity does foster a lot of sort of abstract dislike and discrimination, especially combined with religion and the media. The two examples I have in mind are Middle Easterners and homosexuality. In lots of the midwest you won't find anyone openly admitting to be either, and only negative stereotypes or feelings.

[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.]

My point is that there is a reason there weren't people outside of your community/culture. Looks at maps used for redlining https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/37.510/-9... and tell me you don't see a concentration of them in the midwest. These policies were effective during a timeline that would strongly influence and limit the diversity you saw growing up.

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?

Redlining is a characteristic of cities. I'm not talking about cities, I didn't grow up anywhere near one. People keep beating this racism topic and can't seem to fathom something which shouldn't be surprising – there was very little desire for migration to rural upper midwestern farming communities outside of European immigrants from farming communities of similar climate.

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.

You are not comprehending the facts behind what the poster is saying. There are large parts of the midwest that were settled almost exclusively by communities of central and eastern European settlers in the late 19th century. These communities are culturally homogeneous because it was virgin agricultural country before these groups of immigrants settled there. No one else has ever tried to move into these areas, largely because it isn't that attractive to anyone but members of these communities. Most people that live there today are direct descendants of the original immigrants. There was no redlining, racism, etc -- that would kind of require that someone other than these people ever lived in these communities.

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.

Well, I think both sides of this conversation talk past each other a bit.

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.

And the point that was originally being made was that it wasn't racism so much as just normal xenophobia, a sense of somebody from an external culture popping in. See also city-slickers, carpetbaggers, etc.

>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside?

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).

Great point, but I don't think "directing our evolution towards not having communities" is a desirable goal. This would make people heavily reliant on the largest corporations and that power dynamic would probably turn out terribly for the common person.

There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S.

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.

http://a.co/fDK6vrZ

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.

I think you raise sever good points.

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?

It's still common for people of color to not be shown properties that are shown to white people by landlords, real estate brokers, etc. Sometimes it's unequivocal (i.e. lying about what's available), sometimes it's softer, e.g. making assumptions about ability to pay, or "culture fit" (on behalf of the PoC or potential neighbors).

> 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'm not sure how you made the jump from race-blind admission to need-blind...

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.

> I'm not sure how you made the jump from race-blind admission to need-blind...

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.

If you remove race the issue is with poor/rich

It's always been about socioeconomic classes, but the best proxy for it is race (or how you look...). If there were something more obvious, such as giant face tattoos or being obese and wearing mismatched/sloppy clothing, then we could use that too to infer which socioeconomic classes they are in and how they are likely to act.

People tend to be quite capable of judging someone else's social class at a glance, though, or at least after a few words have been spoken. Racial cues are a pretty small part of it.

So what you're really saying is that it's about culture. And that class is very highly correlated to culture

Perhaps, I'm sure it's not a one size fits all type thing, but I would bet that humans (and all animals) are wired to create heuristics for things that could impact their safety, and for more advanced species, heuristics that could indicate something that could help them. And probably throw in some power or ego issues in there too, which might not have any other reason other than to pump up one's self worth.

>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.

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.