How black people still need to outwit racists in rural America
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Yeah this Forsyth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
We were looking for a house and were welcomed with opened arms by the builder, I can still go to pick up my son from a teen group where no one knows me and ask any random person have they seen my son and they know exactly who I'm talking about. But I've never felt the least bit of hostility and my son made friends quickly. He's dating a White girl - if he wants to date anyone in his school he doesn't have too much of a choice - and I've met her parents and they are perfectly supportive of it.
I've never experienced anything that I could perceive as racist here and neither has my family. There is probably still some of the old guard around but the county has bern growing fast, and probably is drowning out the old guard.
But studies have also shown that income mobility regardless of race is statistically rare.
I've heard a lot of classist comments from both White people (calling people "red necks" and "trailer trash") and upper income black people ("I don't want to live in a majority Black neighborhood around "them people")
But if you're of the wrong race, that clearly can't be your fault, and you can't "fix" it.
That split in how we think about class and race may be the underlying mechanism as to why we can't talk about both class and race at the same time.
You'd certainly be in the minority. I've seen worse in far more "progressive" areas of the country.
I hope people don't read your comment and assume your experience is anywhere near typical.
Also, adding context is not invalidating.
On that note, sure my son's girlfriend's parent seemed okay with her dating a Black kid. But when he dropped her off to our house for the first time, coming into our neighborhood of new houses where on the entry way it says "houses starting at $X" where $X denotes that we were probably upper income, and from my sons mannerism and speech you could tell that he grew up in the "right part of town".
Would he be okay if my son was the same kid but we lived in a poorer part of town? Probably not.
I know racist remarks were quite casual in the pre-Boomer generation, but they don't seem that way now, but I wouldn't know because I'm not around it.
I assume it is a lot better than the 80s, but I could never know. Of course I want to believe that racism is only a rarity today and limited to offshoots of society, and I assume many others want to believe that too.
It literally takes driving 20 minutes out of the walled neighborhoods and into poor parts of any city to dissuade yourself of this. Rural racism should surprise people even less because the people are fighting over limited resources in those areas. You don't even have to go that far. One of my friends (minority) had a story about how he woke up one day in his apartment and some dude was crawling through the window and he had to beat him off with a bat to get him out. These are the same kind of apartments that people live in six to a room (that's what illegal immigration looks like). Growing up in public schools, there were lots of kids like this and stories like this, and it sure as hell is not something that happens in neighborhoods with nice cars parked out front. How people have gone 20 or 30 years without seeing this is strange.
That it could be surprising to people in this day and age (and it's not because it's not obvious, it's because people aren't looking or don't really care), is the biggest problem there is.
When I was 18, I had lived a mostly sheltered middle class life and then moved to South Dallas for six months for church work. The things you saw that weren't 10 miles from every rich kid's doorstep were appalling, it at times was like living in a different country. Regular murders, people walking around with their guts hanging out in plastic bags because they got stabbed, schools that had barbed wire and metal detectors.
You don't have to do much to educate yourself on it, there is no excuse.
It is a major problem if entire groups of people can live such abstracted lives that they aren't aware this is going on. I struggle to believe that people really aren't aware of this and instead it requires constant discussion on well to do websites yet it never changes. Sometimes it comes off as tragedy porn.
I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town.
Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here.
Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that.
Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.
[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.)
But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.
Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.
If you don't include that as "welfare and benefits of the poor" I don't know what you would include. I guess you're right in the sense that only a small portions of ones taxes go to pay people who never worked and never plan on working.
I double checked and you are right that most of SS and medicare go to retired people. They probably aren't considered "poor". Do you know of any unbiased (or low biased) place that counts what percentage of the budget goes to poor people (food stamps, housing projects, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) ?
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...
These are things where eligibility is determined primarily based on some criteria that try to determine need rather than based on having paid into the system to fund it.
Social Security is essentially a government run pension. Unemployment and disability benefits are effectively government run insurance programs. The size of payment you receive and your eligibility is based on how much you paid into the system. Medicare is kind of halfway between health insurance and a pension because the premiums are subsidized if you paid into the system earlier in life. Low income people do generally get slightly better payouts proportionally to what they pay in so you could argue that some portion of these programs is a welfare benefit for the poor, but low income people also tend to die earlier, so some have also argued that they are a net transfer from low to high income people.
Some other things I've heard that have reinforced this:
Democracy in Chains: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-ch...
When the Welfare People Come: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29633687-when-the-welfar...
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52444.Sundown_Towns?ac=1...
The wealthy whites condoned and fought the Civil War. The poor didn't own slaves. They were probably racist and bigoted, but it was the kind of behavior learned form their masters.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people with the "correct" views gloat in their correctness and do nothing to actually fix racism or inequality (they are the benefactors of this inequality). I used to attend a small baptist church. One of my dad's friends loved to make off color jokes. That same man is friends with and has done more for illegal immigrants and minorities than some of the most progressive rich folk ever have. They'd probably tar and feather him and make a big show about how good they were for doing it.
School districts are a great example. Rich kids go to nice private cools and their parents often live in communities that don't pay taxes that support public schools. I've met good upstanding Republicans and rabid Obama supporters who do this, and somehow don't see the contradiction.
how? pretty sure in the US everyone pays property tax (directly or indirectly), some of which is used to fund the school system. you can't just opt out of paying into that system at all.
Zuckerberg grew up in Dobb's Ferry, which is just outside of New York City's limits. He ended up at a private high school with an endowment of 1.15 billion. Now he's worth 70 billion. Not to pick on him (just an example), but there are many ways the elites segregate themselves.
Median incomes in Highland Park are lower than Detroit and the school system there basically failed a few years ago.
I think there's probably a pretty good argument to be made about how schools are funded. Just pointing out that not all properties are inside of large cities isn't it.
Yes, they do have their own public schools, but that's ignoring how isolated and segregated those schools are that tax base is from the rest of the community.
In the 2015-2016 school year, HPISD had a student population of 7,171 people, of whom 2,114 were at Highland Park High School. The areas from which HPISD draws, Highland Park and University Park, have a reputation for being affluent, predominantly white areas. The numbers show that although the student body used to be almost 99% white, by 2015 a lower 86.5% of the District was white. The next biggest sections are a 6% Asian population and a 5% Hispanic population. In terms of affluence, it is true that 0.0% of the District's students are economically disadvantaged. The rate of violent or criminal incidents at every single campus in the District in 2015-2016 was 0.0%
Dobb's isn't that bad, but its demographics and income is still well above many nearby areas. Go through the Dobb's high site and count dark skinned people. It's an 80% majority community with a family income well over nearby areas.
Something I didn't know is that when the US government ended racial segregation in privately owned businesses they did so not on any sort of human rights or equality basis. Rather they argued that businesses being able to deny black clients service has a depressing effect on the economy, and is thus something the federal government can regulate under the Commerce Clause.
Today there's still people who think that was a bad call not because it ended segregation, but because it gave the government precedent to regulate other things via the Commerce Clause.
1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-more-perfect...
It should be scrapped entirely and redebated every 50 years.
There’s an entire amendment devoted to preventing the quartering of troops. It had never been incorporated and is pretty much meaningless.
The second Amendment has been so twisted and misinterpreted it ought to be repealed outright and replaced with what it was intended to convey — the right of states to have their National Guards.
The Three Fifths Compromise.
The process of impeachment is broken such that if the Senate is split 50/50 the Vice President is unimpeachable.
There is no process of removing Supreme Court Justices. The Constitution only provides they serve during good behavior, no provision for senility or incapacitation.
"The Consitution: A Biography" and "The Failure of the Founding Fathers" are two excellent sources for understanding the shortcomings and history of the document.
So arguing that it's a terrible document without a lot of stretching is basically arguing that states are far too small, and a giant central government is necessary.
This is incredibly sad to read. I wish this government would take a zero-tolerance to racism (like they do with 'terroism'), but we seem to be regressing lately.
I don't think I could do what he's doing: staying in a place where he so frequently encounters threats of violence. But I'm glad he's doing it.
I know that sounds like a noble idea, but I'm not sure it would be a very good idea. For one, it's unconstitutional and limits free speech. Two, who gets to interpret what racist speech is? Under a law like this, I could easily people getting arrested and imprisoned for a joke that was misinterpreted, or interpreted by an overly sensitive person. It could easily be used to silence political opposition in bad faith. There's lots of ways it can be abused.
One truth I've learned in studying US history is you will never fully eradicate racist remarks. Tribalism is human nature, and racism in the US is older than the US. The best you can do it remove it from the legal system.
One final thought. For those of you who favor banning all firearms, consider the usefulness of them in this story.
I don't really appreciate the stereotype that people here are more racist and backwards than in other parts of the country. It actually seems to me that in many ways we have superior race relations down here. The amount of blacks living here is much higher than it is in other parts of the country. Most days when I walk to work I don't see any white people at all. You notice that when there are race riots and events of racial tension they never occur in the south?
I think the fear that a black person would have some sort of wild racist encounter down here is misplaced.
I live in Harrison, AR - in fact, I just moved back here after spending five years in Charlottesville, VA.
You're far more likely to be harassed for having a Hillary sticker on the back of your car than for the color of your skin.
Oddly, I read not long ago that the most segregated schools in America are in New York city.
EDIT: The given title is too long to fit the 80 character limit. And I suck at picking new titles. Sorry.