More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help -- the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us." And yet, it's disappointing how segregated America still is today. One fairly in-depth study [1] offers an example of how "today" came to be. (This report is not about any current events, but rather a detailed account of city zoning over a few decades.)
For whatever it is worth, I think income inequality (between rich and poor, all races) is probably the biggest inhibitor to this problem. Motivated-yet-poor people cannot easily break out of their groups, with no money for college and (alot of times) a criminal record preventing them from enlisting in the service. If you have resources you have choices, and the poor have very little in the way of choice. And the affluent who do have a choice will almost always make the choice to not live among those who have nothing to lose, whatever their color may be.
Yes, actually, it is. It's fine to say you disagree with the course of action because you believe it is immoral or ineffective, but it is absolutely a course of action.
> We should be trying to root out whatever the underlying causes are that lead us to segregate ourselves into the groups that we end up in.
One of these causes is "that's how it has always been". How would you propose to root out this one?
Treating the symptom helps alleviate the problems experienced by people of color who are alive today. Addressing the cause could take a long, long time.
I'm not so sure. I went to a very diverse and large high school in NJ and what ends up happening is self segregation. All the ethnic groups would mostly end up hanging out with their own types.
EDIT: see e.g http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation
[1]: http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html though it seems to be down now
I don't know if there is a way to change this. The cultures are very different between white, black, and Hispanic. We even speak different dialects.
Unless you want to start forcing one culture to conform to another, de facto segregation is the likely outcome.
I grew up in Spokane, WA -- 87% white by demographic survey, 98% people who look white if all you know about race is what you learned in Social Studies in elementary school. :) But what I was dominantly taught about who 'my people' were came from Christianity -- Christ died for everyone. My tribe is humanity. I was not raised to think race was important, and I didn't. That upbringing is with me to this day. I didn't reflexively categorize people by race, and I still don't. It's not something I even notice unless attention is called to it somehow.
Other people from the region were raised differently. The inland pacific northwest is a region that white supremacists like, and we had them.
Growing up in a racial monoculture, you could wind up totally innocent and clueless (like me) or totally racist (like some people I knew of), and probably a lot of other things. It really depended on what you were taught.
The same can happen in diverse cultures, too.
When I moved to Seattle, there was a lot more racial diversity. It still didn't mean anything to me, but it clearly meant things to others, and some people made quite a big deal out of it. I had an amusing conversation with a fellow visiting from the UK about it:
Him: So . . . what is *with* your black people?
Me: Excuse me?
Him: Well, back home, we have black people, too.
But . . . they're just regular people.
All in all, I think it's not what you're exposed to. It's how you think about it. If you see race, or gender, or religion, or age, or profession, or interests, or lifestyle as what makes someone 'your people', you can't help but have loyalties and opinions about what it means to be in or out of that circle. It doesn't matter if you meet foreigners (by your definition) every day, or once or twice a lifetime.
Whether you think it is true or not, I see the USA as much more segregated than Europe, and so the culture differences are exacerbated between the races.
It's far from certain. For example, Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam has (tentatively and, I think, somewhat reluctantly) suggested the opposite. Here's an interview he did for National Public Radio:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1280266...
Money quote:
Social scientist Robert Putnam, probably best known for his work "Bowling Alone," on the decline of civic engagement, wanted to know does diversity have an impact on our sense of community? His recent finding suggest that diversity might not make us stronger. In fact, it might just be the opposite. It might make us less inclined to participate in civic life, at least in the short term.
If I were to ask, "what can a man of good will do to combat tornado calamities", would you respond with a "more air temperature homogeneity would certainly help"?
We can't reasonably engineer or create "neighborhood diversity". There are some policies that have tried to accomplish this, and they fail miserably. The "diversity" ends up artificial and hollow, and does nothing for prejudice. In some cases it seems to amplify it.
> the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us."
There can never be an "us" when we're talking about the 300 million people in the United States. There can't even be an "us" if you're talking about the 8 million in New York City, or the 500,000 in Atlanta.
Human beings are limited in their ability to form an "us", and it's in the low hundreds.
I'm going with good, fair, and free mass education. All the way to college. If everyone gets the same level of education then no one will FEEL out of place in any culture as they will be aware of common cultural differences through education.
Good education repairs a LOT of social ills.
Maybe instead of forcing segregation, or forcing integration, freedom of association could be tried?
Conversely, if you mix two fluids which have a segregating force, you don't expect them to stay mixed. Intrinsic properties of the fluids drive the level of segregation - anything else is just temporary.
But maybe I'm just a physicist overreaching beyond my field. Why do you believe initial condition is important?
[edit: simulations posted elsewhere in the thread agree with this: http://ncase.me/polygons/ ]
As it stands, today Palestinian's are in camps, today Ethiopian Jews are deported, and all the while the past sins of the gentiles are ever decried on the airwaves.
No?
Okay then.
While he's at it, though, I really hope he's going to explain how I'm wrong, and not just blow his whistle, scream about fallacies, and say it's a five yard penalty, still second down.
You could also write a model where people have different innate preferences over the lifestyle they want to lead, and so self-sorting is an unambiguously good thing.
I understand that everyone wants "math" to be on their side, but it's not really mathematics that is doing the work here, it's your assumptions.
What the model does demonstrate is that the set and distribution of viewpoints that will lead to desegrated neighbourhoods is far smaller than people tend to think. It is much easier to end up with segregation than most people would expect, even with predominantly mostly benign views in most of the population.
It demonstrates the consequences of a modeling different distributions of attitudes in a particular way.
>What the model does demonstrate is that the set and distribution of viewpoints that will lead to desegrated neighbourhoods is far smaller than people tend to think. It is much easier to end up with segregation than most people would expect, even with predominantly mostly benign views in most of the population.
It does not demonstrate this, because the parameters and details of the model have no relation to reality. In order for your claim to be true, there would have to be some mapping from real world conditions, to the parameters of the model.
All this model demonstrates is that for some parameters, individual preference for similarity of neighbors dominates over preference for diversity of the community. Which is (to me) obvious anyway.
One model in isolation can appear compelling, as some other posts in this thread indicate. But you can't view them in isolation, because all the model shows is that a simulation with certain properties exists. The problem is that:
1. There are a huge number of ways to model the same process. There are many details of the model that could be changed or tweaked, each giving different results. This is a bigger problem for agent based simulations than traditional game-theoretic/economic models (although it's a pretty big problem in both cases).
2. Even if you know that your model is the "right" one for the process you're interesting, in the real world all kinds of processes are interlinked. E.g. racial segregation is highly linked with Southern vs Northern, rural vs urban and wealthy vs poor. It's possible that there things swamp the process that the simulation is modeling. Even if they don't they can make the data so messy that it's impossible to test the model empirically (not that there was any attempt in this case).
The model is defined in terms of the attitudes.
If the model does not match the stated definition of the attitudes, then that is a bug in the code, not being creative about how to model those attitudes.
> It does not demonstrate this, because the parameters and details of the model have no relation to reality.
You say that, yet you go on to contradict yourself:
> All this model demonstrates is that for some parameters, individual preference for similarity of neighbors dominates over preference for diversity of the community. Which is (to me) obvious anyway.
The model shows that you can assemble a wide range of attitudes that most people wouldn't dream of considering racist, yet that still contributes to make segregation worse.
That's certainly not been the prevailing attitude. A lot of people that are strongly in favour of desegregation have been assuming that relatively small steps (e.g. getting people to be fina about moving into mixed areas) would be sufficient to over time lead to desegregation.
Yet the model blows that idea out of the water.
That there are other factors is largely irrelevant to addressing this attitude.
http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/12/R...
There is a liberal-conservative correlation on the map, a but far stronger correlation is the racial makeup of the state. The "deep roots" of racism don't seem to go away with exposure. Other empirical data, such as Robert Putnam's work mentioned in another comment, suggest just the opposite.
The faster we demonstrate to our younger generations that our erroneous tradition must be corrected, the faster the goals of more diversity and elimination of racial bias can be achieved.
I think the main problem is that most people lack a true passion for anything. Even many people of the same race don't get along well because they have no real interest in anything. If they don't even share the same race (i.e. have even more different properties), shit is about to get real.
Based on that theory I would guess that you see less racism amongst hackers, musicians, athletes etc.
Humans may have made great progress technologically. But having neat digital watches didn't help society as a whole to grow intellectually to the same extend.
Who cares about that? Just having that question is an implicit assumption that race matters.