Comment by arthurwellesley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurwellesley | Hacker News Reader

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arthurwellesley

I'm no stormfronter. I grew up progressive, went to progressive schools, I've volunteered in inner city neighborhoods mentoring kids and fixing up houses. I live in a neighborhood that's mostly middle class black, I play pick up football with kids from the projects, and I even have the cliched black roommate.

I studied the issue of urban decay because I spent a lot of time living near and walking through these neighborhoods. I read dozens of books and articles to try and figure out what happened. The interpretation above is the best I can do.

If you find stormfront repugnant (as I do), then don't put yourself in a position where the stormfronters are on the side of truth and you are on the side of falsehood. Otherwise you will be giving good people, who would otherwise be reasonable progressives, incentive to ally themselves with the stormfronter crowd. Recognizing the role of blacks in the destruction of Detroit's white neighbhorhoods should be viewed the same way as viewing the role of whites in the 1906 destruction of Atlanta's black neighborhoods. You can recognize and speak the truth about 1906 Atlanta without being racist against whites, and you can speak the truth about Detroit without being racist against blacks.

I would simply object that the division of blame along black/white lines is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. I'm sure that people of every different skin tone have had a role in Detroit's decline, I just don't see the point in trying to figure out which skin tones are to more blame for what, any more than I would think it sensible to partition blame according to how much bread people ate, as if to set the bread-eaters against the rest.

Or to put my point more succinctly, a person's skin color doesn't tell us anything about them, and we shouldn't treat it as if it does. But I realize that the fundamental attribution error is deeply engrained.

I don't think it should be about blame at all. It's about identifying causes, so you can fix stuff and prevent it from happening again.

You can't blame any individual black or white person for what happened, unless he was personally involved in it. But you can identify what happened in specific communities and sub-communities in order to understand the processes at work. If you don't want to do that because some communities happen to be dominated by certain skin colors, you'll never understand exactly what happened.

And let's face it, in the US, skin color matters. It might not be right, but for cultural and social reasons, many people do tend to hang out with people of the same skin color, however silly that may be.

I don't think anyone was claiming that skin tone mattered. Imagine you have a structure supported by two pillars, where one is painted red and the other green and weaknesses in one pillar will make the whole structure fall apart.

No one gives a damn that the pillars are different color. However, it is not politically correct to point out that there are structural weaknesses in the green pillar that need fixing simply because they are different color, so the problem is not addressed.

The pillars could be interpreted as two different communities. What make a pillar weak or strong could be social inequalities, culture, social cohesion, unemployment, etc... Political correctness in the last 40 years has made it impossible to discuss these things in public.

Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.

> Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.

Would that that were true. In your example, one could instead identify the cracks or other structural problems and focus on those, rather than which pillar had more of them.

Otherwise, one gets left with the impression that the color is what made the pillar weak, rather than the cracked foundations. Focusing on the color of the pillar is an unnecessary and harmful distraction.

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