Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit: I'm not arguing that there's no more anti-gay violence, just that the social context has changed radically. The aftermath of the recent incident in Fort Worth will be interesting to follow in this respect.
Once gays are accepted into the mainstream, there will be other, oppressed, even more niche minority group.
This is the nature of our pyramid-like society. There will always be oppressor and oppressed.
Sure, we still have problems with racism and sexism, and groups like transpeople and undocumented Mexican laborers are sometimes treated despicably by our society and its institutions, and we never managed to ratify the ERA, and various groups are still stigmatized and held back from various positions of power, so we shouldn’t stop the fight for justice and equality, especially equality under the law, but you can’t wave away all of the progress we’ve made with “Times hasn’t changed much.... This is the nature of our pyramid-like society.” That kind of defeatist attitude is not just sloppy reasoning but also damn poor public policy.
Shit, we have a black president, a female secretary of state and speaker of the house, numerous high-level officials and corporate execs and prominent ministers, etc. who are openly gay, a soon-to-be Latina supreme court justice, etc. Times have most definitely changed, and the changes run deep.
That said, as a homo I found the Onion's article Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years all-too-disappointingly funny. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28491
It's easy to imagine this applying to age. If an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old share an apartment, it's probably because the 18-year-old is willing to be quiet after 10 PM, not smoke pot in the house, etc. Or because the 40-year-old is tolerant of late night noise and weed. However, the 18- or 40-year-old doesn't see it that way; to him, that 22-year age difference has surprisingly little impact on behavior.
However, the this-is-compatible-with-racism viewpoint can be disproven by either a) assigning people random roommates (no, not random roommates who all got roughly the same SAT scores, want to live in the same state, etc.), or b) seeing if there's a selection process that affects whether people pick roommates of one ethnicity based on how closely they stereotypically match the behaviors of another.
For example, during the election I saw CNN blabbing about each candidate's popularity among white women voters or black voters or this or that, and I just turned it off. The whole problem is that people treat these as relevant and appropriate categories. The statistics should be completely uninteresting, in a color-blind world.
But what would discourage such shallow thinking, is a media that sets a good example. If newscasters' generalizations are closer to the best interests of voters (e.g. "popularity among people in <profession>"), it may have a positive effect on attitudes in society.
Even when all the candidates are white males, black people tend to vote for the white male that supports affirmative action and civil rights over the white male who does not.
Telling stories about black vs white candidates/voters are too profitable to passed up.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Oh well, Captain Obvious saves the day once more.
As an alum, I really want to believe that the self-segregation is a net win, but this article suggests that that may not be the case...
I have a problem with your argument though, how does encouraging segregation reduce domestic strife? You're assuming that simply being with another group would immediately cause hostilities. Even if it does remove strife, college is only 4 years! It hardly seems worth it to avoid some discomfort you will likely face more and more in the future.
Even sharing an apartment with people you don't get on with can be a problem in terms of generating conflict. Roommate stress (especially for introverted conflict-avoidant people like me) is only a negative thing in the context of being a serious student. It's an essential thing to avoid.
Your experience of the world appears to be very limited. If I had to guess, I'd guess you'd never lived anywhere poor.
Given the pretty heavy strain placed on you academically, it's in the school's best interest to reduce stress anywhere else in your life that they can.
Admissions takes great pains to make sure the school itself is diverse (50/50 guy-girl ratio at a tech school, for example), and so your interactions with other students are guaranteed to force you to work through any diversity-related issues you may have coming in.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's true as well. For a minority group, Asian-Americans can be surprisingly racist.
Especially against each other. Nothing like telling your Korean friend how much you enjoy visiting Japan and watching Miyazaki and Juzo Itami's movies to stir up some good old-fashioned hatred. "They raped my grandmother. They're not human. They don't have souls." And then you have to pretend to like Oldboy to calm them down.
We can't discard the importance of random samples just because we want the world to correspond to our existing mindsets. Take the same stupid college kids, plant them in the middle of Detroit and see what happens to their levels of "prejudice".
I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on HN. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.
One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.
It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.
One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking.
So to me, the astounding thing about today is that people still regard "race" categories at all. I agree that the trend line in the United States is for people to get along better in general, but we still have painfully far to go to get the categories out of our brains and meet new individuals as individuals.