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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

One terribly insidious aspect to racism in America is how invisible it is to white people. We are so segregated that most white people will not learn about black people's experiences with racism organically. It's only through articles like this and cell phone footage of violent police interactions that we become aware of this cruel alternative reality so many people live in. The disconnect exists within city-limits, but so much more so across regional divides.

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The disconnect isn't just between Black and White it's between the poor and not poor. You'd be surprised if you heard the conversations between some upper middle class Blacks and if you didn't know what color they were, you would think they were some of the most racist White people in the world. (I'm Black).

Your comments in this thread are fascinating and I'd love to hear your take on something. In the upper middle class, largely liberal society that I'm part of, I sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling from how people talk about racism. They believe in racial equality and tolerance, which is great. But something uglier seems mixed in too. To me it feels like a class prejudice that wants to see the poor as beneath them, and racism is the perfect ground to stake that claim on because it's so objectively vicious. So on the one hand there's a sincere wish to be tolerant and accepting, but on the other hand there's this dark side: we want to see the poor as bad (racist), because if they're bad then we're good, they deserve to be poor and we deserve to be rich. Upper classes have always seen themselves as more virtuous in this way. They just define their virtue differently now. The new definition is arguably better because racism really is bad, but it's also convenient, and since there's not much wish to look at other things that are also bad, it doesn't seem to me to come out of a true feeling for equality. It is more like a reshuffling of the social pecking order (not the top layers, of course, just the bottom ones). When I hear people talk about uncouth racists, it's easy to imagine that in past times they would have been talking about how bad the poor smell and how crude their manners were. It feels like the distinction is still on that level, only the language has shifted. I'm sensitive to this because I grew up poor, and when I hear the unempathetic and even brutal way that many seemingly nice people talk about their inferiors, I shrink away internally. It's easy to imagine that they're talking about me too, even though I belong to their class now.

I came from a middle class neighborhood, but I have been around poorer minorities and become more aware of the issues that poorer Whites have.

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.

What do you mean "welfare and other benefits of the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars"? According to a quick Google search [1] social security and unemployment makes up about 33% of the budget and Medicare makes up about 27%. Meanwhile military is "only" 15%

[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. The amount you get out has some relation with how much you put in when you worked (it may not be perfectly linear, perhaps favors poorer people, I don't know). Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans. So I would not consider any of these programs to constitute "welfare and benefits of the poor".

> Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age.

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.

> who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security.

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.

> Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans

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.) ?

All the links I see seem to be around 9% of the budget goes to "safety net" programs.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...

I see.. Thank you for the information. I will have to rethink my take on the US division of taxes

Things that I would qualify as welfare and benefits for the poor would be things like TANF, SNAP, Section 8, CHIP, Medicaid, etc.

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.

Racism has always been a means to an end for the rich (upper upper class aka .01% aka ruling class or whatever you want to call it) in America and elsewhere. It has always been a way to control the masses, especially the poor by dividing them and turning them on each other. It has always been perpetrated from the top down by people who know better. The people at the top count on everyone else being either disinterested (because it doesn't affect them) or too stupid to realize this or learn from history. They count on people being too stupid to see that in a racially divided society, they can never advance or have power that threatens the upper upper class. Part of this control is pretending that racism stems from the poor and uneducated, that it rises out of ignorance rather than willful planning. I suspect the upper middle class is simply trying to imitate the upper upper class in these cases.

You are absolutely right about that. I was brought up that racism was for poor white trash and anyone who is racist shouldn't be associated with. Of course I live my life that way, so all the people who I interact with aren't racist. Honestly, even people on the street I talk with don't say things like that. The last time someone said something like that was some old bumpkin in a truck at a gas station said something about Michelle Obama several years ago.

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.

Yeah, another element is that we don't even associate with other white people from different cultural or class backgrounds regularly. And people who have "controversial opinions" will be careful to keep their thoughts to themselves if there is any doubt about where the other people in the room stand. (Of course, things are different in the pseudonymous World Wide Web.) As a resident of a large, midwestern city, I can tell you that the suburbs are chock full of racists who know better than to let on to anyone who isn't "one of them." And that means more than having pale skin.

I think such rose-colored beliefs are dangerous and cause major harm so I do not want to nor do I believe them.

You should believe what data tells you and not what I say or what any newspaper says. I was just having a conversation.

No, it's invisible to people who don't try to educate themselves, who segregate themselves from the poor.

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.

But if you aren't aware of a problem, you have no way to know there is something you need to learn. If only everyone knew what they didn't know. I guess that's why we need more articles like this.

Entirely true, but not sure how distanced you have to get from regular day to day society that it isn't obvious.

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.

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