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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.

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.

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.]