Systemic racism alters wildlife genetic diversity [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Systemic racism alters wildlife genetic diversity [pdf]

rlearley.people.ua.edu

4 pointsbaremetal3 comments

Far too much is made of redlining. There are other much more significant things that have held the black community back in recent decades, like too little focus on education and fatherless/broken homes, that get much too little attention because they don't offer a convenient scapegoat. These things have not been imposed on the black community, any more than they would have been imposed on other relatively impoverished and discriminated against groups living in America.

Until these much more salient and impactful issues are dealt with - and they can only be dealt with by the black community itself - poor outcomes, and apparently harm to wildlife genetic diversity, will continue.

You're totally off topic.

> too little focus on education

> and they can only be dealt with by the black community itself

In part this is a side effect of how schools (and their extracurriculars) are funded in the US. As well as voluntary segregation following the elimination of legal segregation.

> fatherless/broken homes

And for some subset of these homes this is a result of targeted criminal statutes at the state and federal levels. E.g. crack versus cocaine, marijuana versus opiods.

Sure, communities need to look to their own health. But as I stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760078

"it's a lot easier to cast away bad coping mechanisms when major sources of stress disappear. Asking people to cast away bad coping mechanisms and to develop good habits before removing the stress is basically asking them to be superheroes."

Edit to add: If people think they are going to be chopped down if they succeed, they are much less likely to try at all. There's a long history of the majority population and government allowing, or even encouraging, the chopping down of successful black people and communities.

"However, the consistency of the direction of effects across disparate taxa suggest that systemic racism alters the demography of urban wildlife populations in ways that generally limit population sizes and negatively affect their chances of persistence. Our results thus support the idea that limited capacity to support large, well-connected wildlife populations reduces access to nature"

Crowding, cars, and way too much cement? I recall when working in a relatively large city that certain residential areas had very little green space, while others were similar to the suburbs.

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