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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

Warning - opinionated rant. I might be completely wrong.

I don't think this is helpful.

The big problem isn't oppression. It's a problem, but it hasn't been the main one for a long time. The big problem is the poverty cycle.

White flight is another problem. Peer effects (black kids bullying black kids who "act white") is a problem. These are not racial oppression.

Prejudice and oppression (from teachers, employers, police) is still a problem, but it's not the big one. And pretending it is will encourage people to fight black poverty in ways that probably won't actually work very well.

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> The big problem isn't oppression. It's a problem, but it hasn't been the main one for a long time. The big problem is the poverty cycle.

The poverty cycle IS a part of the continuum of oppression for black people. Economic advancement has been denying and outright destroyed for these folks ever since being forcefully brought to the US as slaves.

> White flight is another problem. Peer effects (black kids bullying black kids who "act white") is a problem. These are not racial oppression.

White flight is entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. Peer effects are also entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. These have been studied in such great detail.

> Prejudice and oppression (from teachers, employers, police) is still a problem, but it's not the big one. And pretending it is will encourage people to fight black poverty in ways that probably won't actually work very well.

This is total nonsense and is entirely divorced from the reality of racial oppression in the United States, both in the past and today.

>> White flight is entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. [...] These have been studied in such great detail.

Does international research really support that middle class people leave areas where the crime levels go up only where crime is from people of a different colour?

Not American. I can tell you that the "white flight" efects in Sweden is at least hard to distinguish from flight from bad areas; I lived in a couple of those areas (Gottsunda and Akalla). The main differences were the food prices and the crime levels. Not close to the US ghettos -- yet.

I don't know about internationally, but in the US it is absolutely about race. White people simply do not feel comfortable living near a critical mass of black people, and are even less comfortable sending their kids to school with a critical mass of black people -- and that critical mass is low enough to cause significant racial segregation throughout the nation.

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