Be aware that when people say things like this they often do so to feel virtuous themselves like only they are so enlightened that only they even consider being friendly to non white people.
The idea that people in the Midwest (which has a population of over 65 million people similar to France and the UK) are only friendly to white people is pretty crazy.
Most people in most places are basically friendly. However. Even just being recognize you as 'other' can get old, like being asked "where are you from" or riding the bus in Chicago and having to answer questions about my ethnicity from whoever was feeling tipsy enough to ask them.
Here's one story of folks being un-friendly: I was at a public event, basically a version of a county fair with my wife's family somewhere in the rural midwest. There's a stage with small-name bands performing, food vendors, and a small carnival-ride section. As the sun sets we lose track of her parents, and as we're looking for them I also got separated from my wife. I felt like the crowd was also slowly changing and like I was starting to attract attention in the form of unfriendly looks. I find my wife and try to express this, but her face clearly says it's all in my head and why am I talking about anything other than how we can find her parents. Just then a physically imposed man walks up, plants himself firmly in front of me, and asks in the least friendly way possible, "how's it going brother?" I answer him in unaccented neutral native-born american english (don't remember what i said, but likely something like "good how you doin"), and my wife is like, "ok you're right, we have to find my parents and leave."
So just to be clear - I can't know what might have been, but I strongly suspect that having grown up here and being a native speaker made that evening simpler. And again, I'm someone who many people look at and just process as "white" so I can easily take my experiences as a shallow sample from the tip of the iceberg.
And that kind of "unfriendly" experience is something that happens more often if i leave coastal metropolitan areas.
And I'm not too fond of rural attitudes on race anywhere - if the rural west coast is somehow different, I'd love to hear your contrasting anecdotes. I know on the east coast it's certainly not the case.
Chicago, infamous MAGA country.
Where the city buses are ruled by white supremacists harassing all innocent people who look different from them!
In a city that is only 31.7% non-Hispanic white, they have a lot of work to do!
Edit: wording
"Where are you from?"
"Cleveland Heights."
"No, but like, where are you from?"
implying that this brown individual must surely have wound up from some far flung corner of the world, and that they couldn't have possibly been a native born person.
What of it? If you have some characteristic that is unusual (within a group such as local community) people will notice and be curious.
That is basic human nature, not lack of friendliness or malice.
In her case, she used the exact same vocabulary but it was much more obvious she didn't mean to imply that they weren't native born because she herself was not native. Context is important in conversation, but there is such a thing as regional mannerisms. On the west coast my vocabulary was certainly brought up for being just a tinge different.
It's rarely out of malice. But that doesn't really matter. If you get asked it enough, you will start to feel like you don't belong.
As an aside, I have a last name with an unusual spelling. Literally everyone who sees it asks how it is pronounced, followed by where it is from. It is just a fact of life.
By asking the question, people clearly want to know more. Sure, they might be asking the wrong question, but the reality is, they are trying to include you.
If people didn't want you to belong, they would just make the assumption on their own and not ask (and probably avoid talking to you altogether).
As an LGBT guy, I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination, and someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up and the South is perfectly open and tolerant. It gets tiring.
I grew up in the south in a super backwards small town and now live in a really forward town in the south. It’s a big place and there’s a lot of great places.
Stereotypes are based on common behavior but don’t apply to everyone here or every part of the south.
“The south” ranges from Virginia to Texas. Maybe you lived everywhere and experienced discrimination everywhere.
For me, I grew up in a down of a 1000 people and live just a few hours away in a town with maybe one of the most diverse cultures (including LGBT) in the country.
If I said that because I experienced discrimination in my shitkicker little town that the entire south was similar, that would be wrong, and not very helpful to anyone trying to understand the south.
I suppose you can avoid absolutes and generalizations if you want to help others. But you definitely aren’t obligated to help anyone.
But generalizations jump out at me and annoy me because I’ve frequently encountered jerks saying something about perverts or crime stats and then just fall back on that they were just honestly relating their experience. But there is a difference between my experience and me saying that my experience applies to others. Especially if not backed by data and a suitable generalization.
I guarantee you apply this kind of radical stance against all generalization in a very selective way. Do you get upset if someone says that Russia is a repressive country? Or that California is expensive?
Even if I were to give my entire life story, you can always feign offense, claiming "city A 20 miles away from city B is totally different, you can't generalize an entire county!" At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with, and even then, isn't it unfair for me to represent the entirety of their person with a single selective moment of their life?
There must be some sort of logical block that prevents people from understanding the nuance in these comments, and rushing to defend against absolutes that no one implied existed. I blame a lack of understanding of statistics and probability.
The experience you described doesn’t seem to me that it justifies saying the south is worse or better than other regions.
The reason why you see people jump in the defend the south is that you are making a general statement about an entire region.
Here’s what I mean. Someone said that midwesterners are nice to people if they are white. Downthread you share that part of the reason you left the south is because of discrimination you experienced and I think you were pointing out that it was odd that people jumped in to defend the south.
It seems reasonable that people would try to more accurately describe the south and share their experiences as well.
Saying people are triggered seems to belittle their input. If I want more input I don’t call you triggered for feeling compelled to share info.
This is totally different if you think that there actually is some higher level of discrimination in the south or midwest or wherever. But I don’t think your anecdote isn’t really that helpful for tarring or exonerating a region. Despite how true or honest it may be.
If I'm actually making general statements, I would say that big cities in the South are more gay friendly, though they're still impacted by state politics and as you enter the suburbs and especially rural areas you encounter much more bias. Two hours north of Atlanta is much worse than two hours north of San Francisco. If push came to shove, I'd feel more welcomed in Atlanta ITP than in many parts of the Central Valley; but I'm also not particularly interested in grading on a curve. But everyone's mileage will vary, and all the tradeoffs involved are complicated and will differ between different people and even in the same person at different times in their life.
These subtleties are lost, though, because my comment wasn't intended to provide a comprehensive overview of life as an LGBT person in the South, but to counter someone who was writing off someone else's experience as merely a way to feel virtuous about their self instead of anything real. It's a common response to many negative experiences from marginalized groups, so I see it as perfectly natural that I drew on my own experiences to call it out.
This is usually interpreted as a statement about the russian government, which is an abstract entity, unlike "the midwest" which is interpreted as referring to the people living there which is not.
> At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with
This paradox is the subject of "statistics" which resolves this problem with ideas of "representative" samples. I think the issue here is that most people would consider a sample size big enough to represent an area as big as the midwest would exceed the lifetime of any individual, such that no one could prove anything from their own experiences alone.
Of note, LA is measured as being more segregated than Houston.
Surprised?
someone is always happy to butt in to say ... the South is perfectly open and tolerant
> when people say things like this they often do so to feel virtuous themselves
You're laundering his comment into some abstract statement about how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization that people who say that they experienced X are making things up.
The idea that people in the Midwest (which has a population of over 65 million people similar to France and the UK) are only friendly to white people is pretty crazy.
> how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization
generalisation in original post:
people are friendly, as long as you look like them
when people say things like this they *often* do so to feel virtuous
But it's not just that - "generalisation", or specifically "bad" generalisation takes a particular form, otherwise how do you distinguish it from a metaphor? The way the first characterises a specific area based on personal experience, versus the second which talks of "people" in general based on some personal judgment makes them different kinds of statement: the first as an objective account, the second an explicitly subjective opinion.
> that people who say that they experienced X are making things up
No, he said they "do so to feel virtuous themselves" i.e. their motivation, they didn't say anything about the actual truth of the statement. They did not say anything to suggest that they are "making things up".
Given you just accused jacobriis of saying this, I now have to wonder about your original statement: "someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up" - did they specifically say that, or was that your interpretation?
I'm sure you're not. But "the South" is diverse. Atlanta has a very large LGBT community (both in absolute terms and as a percentage) and culture that is completely different from areas just an hour away. It's very possible that you and the people you are talking to had completely different experiences.
Both of you are almost certainly overgeneralizing your experiences when you say "the South".
People who live in the South get upset that the country likes to pretend that the rest of the country outside a few urban centers is any different. That is, if you had left the South for the rural or suburban Midwest or most of Pennsylvania, you'd likely have had a similar experience.
>exurban Atlanta
Exurban Atlanta is not Atlanta. That's like saying the Jersey Shore is Manhattan.
And where did I do that? I am actually quite happy to generalize, but the only thing I've said in the comment you were replying to is that I experienced discrimination in the South. A simple factual statement that says nothing in general about the South, aside from the fact that at least one person experienced discrimination there. You're inventing statements in your head ("he's saying every last person in the South is homophobic!") and attributing them to me, based off of... nothing.
All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region. To take an extreme example, if someone said they had left the Middle East because the people around them were homophobic, you wouldn't be jumping in to defend the region because Beirut has a comparatively bustling gay scene right now.
ETA: And, on further thought, if we're going to be stridently anti-generalization, you're generalizing about Atlanta. Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Just because you want to present a rosy picture doesn't mean you can generalize and say that every place in Atlanta is a beautiful utopia for LGBT residents.
Any reasonable person who reads will infer that "the South" is that thing that is discriminatory in general. If you instead meant something else you worded it very poorly.
I honestly have a hard time believing that you don't understand how the sentence "I left X because of Y." implies that X is Y.
"I left my marriage because of domestic violence." It's entirely possible to construct a meaning where your spouse wasn't the one beating you, but that's the logical inference.
If you didn't intend to generalize that the South is discriminatory overall then why didn't you just say: I left my hometown because of discrimination? What additional meaning does "the South" add to that if you really just mean:
"I left my home town because of discrimination. My hometown happens to be in the South, but I don't think the South at large is any more or less discriminatory than any other region."
>All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region.
Sure. I don't think you can based on the experience of having lived in one tiny area of that region.
>Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.
Exurban is one step away from farmland. The differences between Cumming and say the area around Little Five Points is much greater than the difference between that same area of Atlanta and San Francisco.
1) That I'm confusing the Deep South and the Midwest
or
2) That I'm commenting on a tendency of people to discount people's individual experiences because they don't like the idea that a particular region treats different people worse than other regions
At the risk of feeding the trolls -- I grew up in the midwest. I can tell you that I both experienced racism myself and saw a lot of it in my high school both in students and from my classmate's parents. Of course everyone isn't racist, and most folks are friendly and accepting. But comments like this downplay the experience that many people in these places do have. In my experience, it takes a relatively small number of racist people and a whole bunch of folks who don't call that shit out to make it less comfortable for someone who isn't white in their day to day lives.
P: "Of course everyone isn't racist, and most folks are friendly and accepting."
If these statements are equivalent, you have my apologies. English is not my native language. I think I will have to study for 10 lifetimes to understand.
"Some people are friendly only if you look like them" would be a more defensible claim. Probably that is true everywhere on earth.
But, the text of the original statement is about the behavior of Midwestern people [1] generally towards non white people generally.
[1] Not all Midwestern people are white in any case. Nebraska: 86%, Ohio: 82%, Illinois: 71.5%
They're generalizing from different ends: one is saying that there are _some_ people who are not friendly if you're not white; the other is saying that _most_ people are friendly. The implication is that there is a subset of the populace that is unfriendly, and a subset that is friendly. Both comments say basically the same thing.
should be
"What you will find is that most people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)."
So you are correct in noting the statements are not equivalent.
By leaving out the word ‘most’ for whatever reason (typo, bias, etc.), the communication efficiency of the comment was reduced. Good catch.
People also so kindly forget that the midwest experienced white flight like nowhere else. That sentiment is still in living memory among the older generation.
I can't believe the backlash here - surely generalizing ALL OF MIDWEST to be racist is the wrong thing to do?
The small towns of PA (hey! loved that someone put this here) can be just as racist as the small towns of Colorado but somehow this doesn't extend to the small towns of California.
I say this as someone who has not lived everywhere but has lived in places where the common question (and yes, each town/city I lived in had a common question/conversation about my race)ranges from:
Are you black?
Are you jewish?
Are you honduran?
Are you armenian?
Are you [some subgroup of..] indian
Only in Japan, so far, am I - told - that I am American. Its amazing.
Exposure matters. Certainly there are a smattering of places in the midwest where things are progressive. That being said, they are not as well known and compared to my life in SF/LA/DC (still kinda conservative)/NY, the amount you're allowed to live and let live varies.
I'm more likely to hear some random comment about where I do or do not belong or some idiotic belief I have to disabuse about who I am in the Midwest and South.
I would say it's hard to take what you've said seriously having personally known people who have left the midwest specifically due to the discrimination they faced.
Except I do have to have to take it seriously because it's a toxic attitude that belittles the struggles that people face due to discrimination by attempting to minimize their experiences.
/s
Have you considered that their experiences may actually be true?
Racism isn’t some binary flag where an entire region is or isn’t racist. People can have racist experiences without meaning everyone is shitty or even that someone is likely to have a bad time.
Note this doesn’t mean people who are the subject of racism are racists. I read GP’s comment as meaning that making an overly broad statement that people in the Midwest are friendly to only whites is not accurate or useful.
How much of the midwest, where, for how long; what did they witness firsthand? what did they hear?
It's a stretch to assume so much without projecting your own assumptions about the midwest.
> Have you considered that their experiences may actually be true?
We don't have experiences, we have conclusions. and without knowledge of the experiences that inform them, it's hard to judge their truth. There's also the issue of what "the midwest is unfriendly to non-white people" means; taken to either absolute is crazy: "any racism in the midwest means the midwest is racist", "any tolerance in the midwest means the midwest isn't racist". Clearly, the statement needs qualification to be useful, it's not a matter of "true or false" without clear thresholds.
Source: my family.
Years ago I moved back to CA from the Midwest, leaving a very-well paid job to be unemployed, because of it.