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Comment by Jochim | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of intriguing to me because, as a member of a western society, I think we place largely the same expectations on people to conform, the only difference is in how the enforcement is applied.

In many countries, cities, and neighbourhoods in "the west" if you aren't white you experience exactly the kind of insecurity you describe elsewhere. There are plenty of incidents where non-white residents are arrested while working on their own car, or entering their own home because a neighbour saw them and decided they did not or could not belong. There was a rather notable protest movement just last year that had it's roots in a group of people not being allowed to freely exist in the same way as the rest of society.

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I find this to be completely untrue. Anecdotally, my friends from South Sudan, who aren't white, tell me that the unsafest neighborhoods in my country are better than the safest in theirs.

This is the same sentiment that I get from most non-white foreigners.

Generally things are "better" here but that doesn't mean the problems don't exist. They might just be less severe or be expressed in a different manner. "Exactly" was probably the wrong word to use. The sentiment I'm arguing against is the idea that "these things don't happen here", which I find is typically an excuse to ignore or downplay the cases where it does happen.

>In many countries, cities, and neighbourhoods in "the west" if you aren't white you experience exactly the kind of insecurity you describe elsewhere. There are plenty of incidents where non-white residents are arrested while working on their own car, or entering their own home because a neighbour saw them and decided they did not or could not belong.

Does this go beyond anecdotes and are that quantifiable occurrences that are disproportionally happening in the west vs. other countries? Because I know of many contrary anecdotes of Non-European people, living very safely and without such concerns in western countries.

In my opinion I'd tend say that modern western societies are the most safe and welcoming societies for foreigners, were you face the least amount of discrimination as an outsider.

> In my opinion I'd tend say that modern western societies are the most safe and welcoming societies for foreigners, were you face the least amount of discrimination as an outsider.

I think it depends on so many factors that you shouldn't make a blanket statement in any direction. You can say both things on different areas of the same city.

My point wasn't that these things happen disproportionately in the west. It was that to imply, as the GP did, that these issues do not exist or are not problems in the west is both incorrect and damaging.

Corruption is a pretty good example. When it occurs non-western country it's called out and criticised but when speaking about western countries we dress it up in fancy clothes. In the U.S. it's "Lobbying", in the UK it's "Cronyism" or "Chumocracy". By redefining the terms, corruption becomes something that only happens elsewhere, in less "civilised" places, and not something that has to be dealt with at home.

Labour could be another, there's a huge lack of perspective in discussions around foreign labour standards where we will condemn the working conditions in China or India while ignoring the fact that these people are experiencing those conditions working in the factories of some of the wealthiest companies in the west.

Of this were a big problem in the west, we’d see a pause in immigration to the west.

People learn fast if things are not good. If you’re targeted, if you’re harassed.

I don’t mean people who have very little choice (their home countries are so bad they have to leave), but I mean middle class families who have alternatives. They still choose the west as a destination by choice.

I think this is a reasonable proxy indicating life isn’t bad for foreigners immigrating to the west. If it were bad, they’d choose to stay home or a neighboring country that has similar culture.

Also, regarding travel. Most people experience their travel to other countries as middle class visitors, not as lower class visitors. Take someone from a first world country who didn't go beyond high school who earns <$25,000 and put them in one of these places and see how far their skills take them.

I didn't intend to speak to the relative scale of the problems, merely that we shouldn't ignore that it's still a problem and we should still be trying to improve. My original wording wasn't great at conveying that.

> […] I think we place largely the same expectations on people to conform, the only difference is in how the enforcement is applied.

Yeonmi Park, a defector (escapee?) from North Korea, was surprised in what could and could not be said in the US when she went to university:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7CPqROtanA

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Yeon-mi

North Korean defectors are really fascinating. I just can't wrap my head around her claim that what I perceive as a kind of over the top righteousness on the campus of elite American universities is comparable to--let alone worse than--North Korea.

Her father was literally sentenced to a labor camp. How can that possibly compare to anything you'd run into at Columbia. Yeah, it's annoying that people wouldn't cut her a break with the pronoun stuff as she was learning english. But again, that's worse than North Korea?

One adjacent example of this is the case of Sirous Asgari, the Iranian scientist who refused to spy on Iran for America. What happened to him is really a disgrace and something one would think could not happen in America.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/the-man-who-re...

What about all the neighborhoods that are dangerous to white people? I white person has a higher chance of getting in serious danger in a majority black ghetto than a black person would in virtually any majority white neighborhood.

why do you refer to the black “ghetto” vs the white “neighborhood”?

To make my claim more specific (not all black neighborhoods are dangerous, just ghettos) and because a far larger proportion of primarily-black neighborhoods are ghettos than primarily-white neighborhoods (since there are far fewer black people and they're a disadvantaged demographic)

The difference is that a white person in a black neighbourhood will be put in danger by the criminal activity of private citizens. A black person in a white neighbourhood will be put in danger by an agent of the state who is purportedly responsible for dealing with criminality. The white person will have the backing of the state when seeking justice while the black person will be fighting the state.

In terms of the typical outcomes, in the first case those people are rightly considered criminals and will be held accountable if caught. In the second there is usually no accountability even though we know who carried out the action.

Nonsense. This is the narrative brought about by critical theory, but it is so far from true

The only people who feel this way are people who have been scared into it by reading too much of this garbage

In many cases things are worse locally and they move because of it. The targetting in America is generally with black people. You rarely hear about the east Indian family being pulled. You often hear about people going out of their way to support immigrants (at least in Canada).

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