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Comment by bookmarkable | Hacker News Reader

Pasco, just north of Tampa Bay, was an armpit for the last 50 years and now is a highly desirable area with many enclaves of new homes in the former pasture land. This sort of automated targeting is gross, but unsurprising, especially in a Deep South, backwoods county trying to clean up its image with newer, wealthier residents.

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That sounds about right. In another comment, I cited a story about how we closed public pools en masse when they were becoming integrated[1]. People would rather have no public goods at all than share them with people they look down on.

1. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...

Give me a break. I spent most of my life in this county and my family's been there for two generations prior. The "everything is racist" argument so poorly applies to the issues of these communities it's absolutely absurd. Come back when you find a different hammer.

That's very hand-wavy and dismissive. Could you please elaborate on your beliefs?

The comment I was replying to cites an article about public pools and racist behaviors from 60+ years ago in entirely different communities that borders on a non-sequitur to these issues of community policing and does so as a commentary to the suggestion that these areas are "cleaning up their Deep south, backwoods" image by behaving this way, senselessly pushing the idea that racism is the cause of this. Talk about hand-wavy.

Racism is a pervasive, if often invisible, force in American life. We've all learned over the past decade that racist policing is pervasive from New York to Texas. It would be odd if racism did not come up in the discussion.

60 years ago racism caused a class divide and people now wash their hands clean by being classists instead of racists.

Give ME a break! I am ALSO from Pasco County and you well know the KKK used to sponsor road clean up in Moon Lake - so don't give me any of that "everything is fine and there's no racism problem here"

_Used to_. KKK cleaning up a stretch of road in a rural area 30 years ago doesn't mean there's an inherently a racist police force, voted in by the county constituents, currently. That's tenuous at best. The existence of racists in a subset of an area does not mean that the entire area is racist.

Wait so is your problem that you don't understand when people say "place X is racist" they don't mean literally every single person in town is a racist?

It might be a class issue, not a race issue, or I'll concede it could be something else entirely. I don't know enough to say. But there is a parallel between the two stories that certainly bears consideration.

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