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Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

The structural racism that my family faces because of the fact that I am married to a non-citizen SE Asian is a big reason I don't relocate my family back to the US. And this is a bipartisan issue. The issues discussed in the article there or that I have experienced have very little to do with one party alone.

The US built its industrial base on the backs first of slaves then of the freed slaves, poor immigrants (particularly from China) and dispossessed Latinos whose land claims were not recognized post-annexation. Until we understand that racism in the US is a tool of classism and we address the underlying economic injustices, there will be no social justice. But there is no political party willing to take that on and no real hope for the foreseeable future.

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All these things never have happened in SE Asia correct? I mean it’s not like the largest country in that region didn’t have a caste system with a huge population of untouchables with no mobility.

Poverty in terms of insecurity in food, water, housing etc has been increasing as India has been liberalizing, and that's a problem.

I love how people come up with racist justifications for structural racism. Classy.....

My wife's country (Indonesia) also had a caste system and some parts still do, but even poor people have better security in access to food and shelter than poor people do in the US. The economic problems are not so deep.

A quick Google search says Indonesia has around 3 million permanent homeless people vs about 500k in the US. 40 million people in Indonesia don’t have access to clean water. Half the population doesn’t even have access to sewer systems for waste.

But evicting homeless people camping on someones land is very very difficult without paying them off. You either have to pay the police to pay them off or you have to pay them to leave directly.

Water is an issue. But then it is an issue in much of the US too (Flint for example).

Could you quantify the number of poor Americans who do not have access to clean water in the US, and provide some support to the idea that it is due to racism?

My understanding is that the Flint situation is due to mismanagement, which was done after a certain political party created laws to remove elected leadership from indebted municipalities (most of the indebted municipalities were controlled by the opposing party).

Which is to say that the Flint situation got a lot of press because it was rare, and that the motivations were likely political rather than racial. As such, in isolation it is not good evidence for your arguement. It would be appreciated if you could provide some statistcs.

“Everyone else is doing it” is a terrible argument. Individuals are not averages of the nations or regions they come from — an Asian in the USA is not one third Indian, one third Chinese, and one third Other; an Indian is not 16% Dalit.

Even though I don’t know of any history of SE Asian slaves in the USA, I can easily believe that a specific individual Indian with dark skin and Muslim religion might find America unwelcoming both on religious and racial grounds — if that person was rich enough to even try to move to America, I’m going to guess they’re probably not one of the untouchables. Other people’s pain doesn’t invalidate theirs; it only becomes hypocrisy if they turn a blind eye to it after experiencing it, and I have no evidence of that here.

But it's not an argument - it's giving context. The USA is not uniquely guilty of all the injustices in the world, and refusing to go along with this narrative should not be framed as an attack.

The US is uniquely guilty of a particular kind of racism used to build a particular kind of economy. Racism in Europe is different than it is in the US. Racism in SE Asia is different than it is in the US. In the US, racism is solely about economic exploitation of working classes by a small group of mostly white (though with some token individuals from other groups) executive/investor class and it has always been this.

Europe's industrialization was built on the back of religious divisions rather than racial ones for example, which makes the problems somewhat different.

> Europe's industrialization was built on the back of religious divisions rather than racial ones for example

Is this something you just casually throw out, or do you have some data showing that... countries with greater religious divisions industrialized faster?

In any case, "built on the back of" seems overstating things. Find some sin in the past, and claim that it is the source of all the success of a country, for which it must feel eternally guilty. That there are similar, successful countries without this sin, or unsuccessful ones that share it, are details best ignored. E.g. slavery was widespread in Africa and the Ottoman Empire, with wildly different outcomes than in the US, and imperialism certainly wasn't unique to Europe or the US.

Sure.

The process as spelled out by a number of thinkers including Sir Thomas More (who was observing some of these things first-hand) and Hilaire Belloc (who was basing his thoughts on such sources as More) was that the Industrial Revolution in Britain (and hence the world since it started there) can be traced back to the way the confiscation of the monasteries lead to spending up the enclosure of the commons. Basically while the Catholic Church had an effect of spreading out power a bit more away from the state, consolidating this in the hands of the state and in the hands of landlords meant that the landlords were much more powerful and therefore pushed peasants off their land in order to raise more profitable goods such as sheep.

The result was a large number of destitute peasants who ended up in the city unable to support themselves. Some of these were shipped en masse to the New World. Others were given destitute wages in the early textile mills.

The same process starts much later in France where you have a parallel confiscation of the monasteries under an effort of secularization following the French Revolution. Although the Reformation fizzled in France for various reasons, the same political pattern of state seizure of Church lands did happen just as it did elsewhere in Europe and this lead to the same destitute masses forced to the cities.

This process closely parallels the way the Andrew Johnson administration pushed freed slaves into the wage labor system thus revving up the industrialization of the North which was jump-started by the civil war.

Jesus, your obsession with data... Just read history...

The history lessons that I grew up with told me that my country was great, and that everything which was bad in the world was the fault of some other nation. Asking for data is one way to get past that.

The US is probably the most accepting country in the world when it comes to interracial marriages - certainly depends on the area within you move to also.

What "helps" in such a situation is to move to a foreign country (rather then staying in your native environment) since there one doesn't understand all the little messages, cues and things people throw at you - so maybe that's what might actually explain part of what you experience.

But when it comes to marriages across national borders things have been pretty bad since 1996 in the eyes of the law.

The stats I’ve seen make the USA seem entirely average in that regard.

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