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Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and it doesn't happen as much as I perceive, to be fair) I don't agree with the law, but literally every race owns vehicles. Why complicate the issue with racism if there doesn't need to be any complication? Seems like a clear cut issue that people can unite over that instead is being made into a minority only issue for no reason.

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Because race is deeply entwined with culture, and culture is in everything.

Every culture owns cars, but not every subculture does things with cars that require you to do most of the work yourself in your driveway.

It’s like Ehrlichman’s famous quote: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.“

kind of a tricky topic. a lot of modifications people make to their vehicles are not legal to begin with (emissions, noise, "stancing"), and a lot of that is for legitimate safety reasons. especially with tunes, people know this and flash their ECU back to stock before going in for state emissions tests. but anyways, there is a subset of white people that also enjoy modding their cars or simply doing the routine maintenance themselves. there is certainly a stereotype about a certain kind of white person that has multiple non-functional cars rusting away on their front lawn.

all of this is not to say that that particular law at that particular place and time wasn't racially motivated.

You mean american culture.

There are an incredible number of topics that are deeply entwined with culture and issues of many kinds, that doesn't mean it's useful to turn a local law concerning garage mechanics into something about race. Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem? It seems obvious (to me, at least) that it wouldn't, so why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?

The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.

> Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem?

This is a strawman - nobody is asking for this!

> why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?

Let's look at literacy tests for voters. These are similar as you can absolutely construct a plausible argument for them that never mentions race at all - "We just want to make sure that people voting actually understand what they're voting for". And there were likely advocates for these laws who believed that! And literacy tests of course affected more than just African Americans. But - the near universal consensus among historians was that the primary intent was to suppress black votes.

Not discussing race when discussing voter literacy tests is avoiding the crux of the actual issue. If you only engage with voter tests on the "actually understand what they're voting for" level you're avoiding the much more important conversation of whether this law is passed in good faith.

> The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.

And therein lies the rub - how can it be solved in a way that benefits everyone? If there was a universal benefit solution for every problem politics would be easy! In the case of literacy tests there is no such solution - there was nothing that you could give the advocates for suppression policies that would make them happy that wouldn't come at the expense of minorities. In this case? Hard to say, but I really doubt there's an amicable solution.

It sounds like you are just angry at the mere mention of race.

Like we should just go through life pretending like race plays absolutely no factor in any law, human interaction, or bias unless someone says the "n" word or something.

Given our history as a country that seems INCREDIBLY foolish.

I don't intend to portray anger as I couldn't be farther from angry. I just think solutions are easier to find when you tackle problems directly rather than assume malice exists lurking in the shadows every time a situation presents itself. The world isn't angry, nor is it racist, nor is it violent. The world is full of complexity and misunderstanding far more than it's full of malice. If you go looking for malice with the assumption it exists all over the place, you'll have no trouble confirming your bias just as someone might believe rather emotionless writings portray anger if they go into a discussion believing anyone with differing values must only hold to those values emotionally.

"The world isn't angry, nor is it racist, nor is it violent"

...we clearly don't live in the same world.

look at any objective statistical trends worldwide and you'd likely come to the same conclusions I've come to.

violence trends down

life expectancy trends up

poverty and hunger trends down

child labor is in decline

leisure time is increasing

nuclear weaponry is on the decline

migration is trending up

I'm not sure which objective metrics I could look at would imply anything other than what I've concluded.

So because something is declining...that means it doesn't exist.

What a WONDERFUL world you live in!

Most of that subculture divide is on type of car rather than rather they work on it in the first place. Trust me, there are plenty of car clubs consisting 90% of white boomers showing off their pristine garage queen 1960s muscle cars who would also be inconvenienced by that law.

And there are lots of people who weren’t hippies who smoked marijuana. And voter intelligence tests affected people who weren’t minorities. But that doesn’t mean the laws in question were not passed with race in mind, at least for many of those pushing for them.

Are most people working on cars at their home doing it because they're wanting to do modifications most shops won't do, or because they're trying to save the few hundred dollars an hour in labor charges to do some things that take a few minutes of reading and an understanding of lefty-loosey righty-tighty?

A few of my friends and myself tend to do most of the maintenance on our cars and motorcycles by ourselves. If I had to pay for the labor in my car it would have been "totaled" a long time ago. But it still keeps running 20 years and nearly 200kmi with a new water pump, new timing belt, new main belt, new suspension, brake rotor and pad replacements, brake fluid flushes, EGR cleanout, oil pan resealing, power steering hose replacement, transmission fluid flushes, stereo replacement, power window motor replacements, and a few other things.

Most of these parts over the years have been relatively cheap, but getting a shop to do the change would have been expensive as hell. I shopped around to get the struts replaced recently. Most shops quoted me over $1k for the replacement. _Good_ replacement strut/coil/spring/mount assemblies were $60/ea from reputable sources online. So for a couple of hours of my own time, knowing how to unscrew and screw in some bolts properly (torqued to spec), and $240 in parts I had a new suspension. So taking the low end of ~$1k in estimates I got, I pretty much paid myself $380/hr to do the work.

And don't even get me started on motorcycle maintenance. If it were illegal for me to work on my own bike at home I probably wouldn't be able to afford the bike. Parts are stupid cheap but labor costs on motorcycles are astronomical considering its usually easier to work on a bike than a car.

Not everyone working on a car in their driveway are doing something shady or illegal.

If one drives down Alameda street in SF you'll see a lot of people trying to stave off a repair bill they can't afford with amateur shop night.

I get not having a neighbor who runs a covert or not-so-covert shop next door, but these laws are bludgeons written for selective enforcement.

Yeah, and IMO if someone is running an auto shop out of their garage it would be better to go after that with things like licensing or zone enforcement for using their house as a commercial property. The arguments for laws like banning repair of vehicles on residential properties seems like trying to make something that's already illegal extra illegal. Ding the people for illegal modifications or running an unlicensed/improperly zoned commercial operation, don't screw over the people just trying to save a few bucks by using their own labor.

The US has a long dark history of enacting laws that seem "fair" to those (whites) who sponsored it, but in reality are meant to target a specific minority population. Jim Crow is a major example. Many of the laws never particularly singled out blacks in the actual text, but things like poll taxes and literacy tests were used because of the disproprtionate impact they would have on that community.

>but literally every race owns vehicles.

Well, this isn't about owing vehicles though, but about a particular style of vehicles, with work done of them, and specific gatherings to showcase them etc.

Might as well ask "Why make the taco-fest about race, everybody eats". Sure, but those against the taco-fest in some place where predominantly latinos frequent it, more probably than not have racial issues against them gathering near them, and are not just against tacos in general...

I mean the parent comment spells it out "given the relatively high number of hispanics and black who work on their cars", and I think they are right. Those same residents wouldn't have an issue with a mostly-white gathering of rich classic car owners...

Take this article for example.

A white lady comes and sees a bunch of predominantly black and latino folks with a tradition of hanging out in a park and screwing around with their cars. And then says this:

> “You can’t tell me drugs aren’t being distributed over there,” she huffed. “The brazenness of it all just kills me!”

Yeah, it's a mystery why people are assuming there's some racism going on there.

I have no idea what happened in Sacramento. But it's not hard to imagine how a group of non-white folks who tended to work on their cars -- either for fun, or for purely financial reasons -- would view this. And then you add in things like this [1]

> As you might have picked up, the code has a bit of vagueness when defining "similar operations," something it briefly touches on in section 5.2.0.B of the Sacramento County Zoning Code.

and

> The code also prohibits individuals to perform repairs which use "tools not normally found in a residence"—another vague term which creates an elucidation of the law, placing it up for deliberation depending on the individual deciphering the legal code.

Vagueness is a weapon that cops use to fuck people. And it's intentionally written into laws for exactly that reason. If the last year didn't convince you that cops harass especially black folks at extremely high rates, nothing will. A report on Jalopnik [2] said that someone who got a $400 fine would have had to pay $700 to right the decision. Again, look at the correlation between ethnicity and having a spare $700.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/29205/repairing-your-car-in-yo...

[2] https://jalopnik.com/sacramento-county-says-its-illegal-to-w...

Dang, it feels like more and more people I know are no longer into fixing things themselves, it almost seems like it'll get to the point where things like hacksaws and ratchets might be included in that vagueness.

I know many people who have garages with an old fridge fridge, a car, and maybe an electric string trimmer that hasn't been touched in several years. If such a garage becomes the norm, just having a screwdriver might be against the law.

> Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race?

Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.

Are you saying that you think the people who pushed this law had no opinion whatsoever on the activity itself, but just wanted black and latino people to suffer through an arbitrary ban?

It seems much more reasonable to guess that neighbors were annoyed by the activity itself and passed a nimby law because they're selfish.

Not having thought of any explanations is not the same thing as there being no explanations... someone should ask the people living in the community how that law got support.

@toolz Speaking as someone who works on cars at a build level a lot I'm highly aware many motorsports are healthily cross cultural. I normally avoid discussion of gender, sexuality and race but in this case the overly vague Sacramento County law could be ignored on one street and strictly enforced on the next. You then get into zoning and class issues which are going to unfairly penalize certain people.

It's useful law to stop irresponsible people who are running engines and impact wrenches all day in a residential neighborhood but legally is a dangerous catch all that could ruin a lot of people's car hobbyist lives

While I agree that race has been discussed a lot in the past few years, especially on places like NPR or Sam Harris's podcast or in politics, the reality is: poor people are often minorities, and poor people have to do more of their own car repairs than rich people. In general, if laws are related to socioeconomic status, they are also related to race indirectly.

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