Comment by kwamenum86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kwamenum86 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a problem for sure. There is so much in this story I could comment on but I will just say that children definitely get an idea of what they are "supposed" to be from several different sources- parents, television, teachers, peers, etc. When you are young there is a sort of penalty for being different or unusual and children often end up gravitating toward some role at least some of the time. I think certain ethnic groups "over-achieve" and others "under-achieve" because of this pressure- they are just being who they are "supposed" to be. This is my verbose way of blaming the whole thing on peer and societal pressures.

People (adults and children alike) are not really equipped to resist societal pressure. We have a lot of things we are supposed to do- graduate high school/college, get married (maybe even to someone of our own race), have children, get a good job, shower everyday, wear "cool clothes", get good/bad grades, act black, act white and we often suffer societal consequences if we don't "behave"... I think the HN community, being more counter-culturalist/entrepreneurial than average can definitely see where I am coming from on this.

I intuitively like the idea of the "supposed" but atleast in the west there seems to be a way of counteracting these pressures. It seems to me that "white" children can choose from a variety of roles: nerdy, athletic, artistic etc and although there are penalties associated with each role there are rewards as well and each role is deemed valid by society. However, the article seems to suggest a homogeneous "black" identity, which leaves no room for accepted rebellion. Perhaps, some folks living in USA can confirm if my hypothesis is connected to reality.

When I moved from Canada to the U.S., I was surprised how segregated the country still is. It's not legally enforced, of course. It's just that there are black parts of town and white parts of town.

So although I've lived in both Pittsburgh and Boston for a total of 16 years now, including grad school where I was very social, I haven't had much of a chance to have African American friends because I've met almost no African Americans.

I would note that I think Pittsburgh and Boston are both more segregated than the average American city -- Boston famously so.

For some reason, I've heard the exact same thing from residents of Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, etc.

So does "average" exclude major (maybe East Coast) U.S. cities? Should I look at cities of smaller scale... say Oxnard, CA? Which criteria should one consider when deciding a city is "normally" segregated? Just want to know how things are different in the average American city with a significant number of ethnic minorities.

I would say that's pretty accurate. The spectrum of acceptable black "social personalities" seems to be smaller than for whites, at least in the high school years.

It is in part do to the fact that whites comprise a much larger portion of the population (70+%) in most areas, but also they don't necessarily (need to) express themselves as "white" as their defining social trait, so they may choose something else as the major one.

This "idea of what they are supposed to be" is at the heart of psychological transaction/script analysis, which takes it to the extreme that people get this "script" describing how they should lead their life from their parents and will do almost anything to follow it, no matter how self-destructive, i.e. someone who gets told by their father "you'll end up in prison" will not only become a criminal, but will also let himself get caught so he can fulfill the script.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysis

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