What you're talking about are things that happened in larger cities, but that's not the whole world and that doesn't match the history of much of the midwest.
The parent was right, if there is discrimination it's about culture not color. There were a few adopted children with heritage from different parts of the world and as far as I could ever tell, they were treated the same as anyone.
The discrimination you did see to any degree was on a protestant/catholic split and whether you lived in a relatively richer part of town.
I just didn't see racial hatred growing up. Actual racism was a foreign concept until I left. Something you saw on TV, not in real life. I'm aware that it isn't necessarily something I would have always seen... but I have seen racism since I left in a way that I definitely did not before.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
One article is about the south and the other one is about racist policies in the 30's. In the 30's there were essentially no people to be racist against in my community.
You're talking about urban planning departments, the concept is ludicrous in my home town which you could walk across in an hour surrounded by towns which you could walk across before finishing a sandwich.
It wasn't accidental in many smaller towns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
I do expect that the Great Depression also contributed with small minority communities moving to cities.
The census count for "black" in my county in 1920 and 1900 was 5. Not 5%, 5. It was 99.97% white.
It's a fact that people seem to have quite some trouble with. Much of the midwest is nearly entirely white (and at that a pretty narrow subset of northern europeans) because only a small set of people had any interest in settling there.
I think the threat of race-based violence would have made this very difficult. One family, perhaps, but a little neighborhood? Not OK -- I'm thinking specifically about the Tulsa riots of 1921 and other racial violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...).
(Grew up in suburban Kansas and spent plenty of time hanging around towns like the fictional Gedanken.)
Iowa has a history of progressivism. For example in 1851 it was the second state to legalize interracial marriage. In 2009 it was the forth state to legalize same-sex marriage (and not through any change of the laws, the Iowa supreme court decided it was legal)
I know the culture I experienced was not pervasive in the whole midwest. I'm also not saying that there weren't bigots, but it was certainly very much different than a lot of other places in this country.
The white population was "down" to 98.9%
Cultural conditions created an environment that was welcoming to white people and hostile to PoC.
Look at the history the history of the KKK in my home state of Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Klan and tell me you don't see widespread organized racism in it's past.
We didn't see racial hatred growing up because our grandparents and their parents contributed to the conditions where there simply were not people of color. That and because subtle racial prejudices were more easily normalized by a distinct lack of larger communities of color.
I look at the emails I get from representatives in Indiana and I'm baffled by the issues they present: undocumented citizens, Islamic terrorism, etc... Communities in the midwest intentionally isolate themselves from people they perceive as "others". How is that anything other than racism?
I've lived in the midwest in a small farming town where virtually everyone, mostly only excluding my family, was directly descended from people that moved there from the same small part of what is now the Czech Republic at around the same time. It was incredibly homogeneous culturally.
What you're saying is true.
But it's also the case that some those homogenous, snow white communities worry about jihad, even though there aren't any Muslims within a hundred mile radius of their house.
And it's especially true that when these small, homogenous communities diversify -- due to refugee placement or just economic growth and sprawl -- the latent racism becomes not-so-latent.
When non-whites did migrate to the area they did so to cities to find work and they weren't always met warmly or treated fairly, but those cities were a world away from the culture and environment of my youth.
[This leads to a stereotypical kind of storyline where a biased individual gains a friend or family member of the given type (perhaps a child comes out as gay or so on), and once the issue becomes real and personal for them, changes their mind.]
Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe.
This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).
According to Thomas Sowell, the norm when groups migrate, all throughout history, across cultures, all over the world, is for people to form highly homogeneous cultural communities. This seems to be borne out by history.
When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism.
There is always latent tribalism and prejudice. It's hard to fully know this, unless you are a complete outsider -- a minority of one. Also, unless one has had such an experience, it's hard to know how Sisyphean a task it is to directly tell another about it. In fact, I'll even come out and say it's inadvisable. In teaching, one comes to realize that there are some lessons which are best learned indirectly.
If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.
One of the lessons of history, is that shared interests that cut across ethnic groups are the most effective means of overcoming prejudice. This is why I see many of the Postmodernist and Social Construction viewpoints as fundamentally harmful, because they take the seductive half-right position and often declare discourse between groups to be inherently impossible, and so go on to cut off the best means we have of remedying the situation. Competition, commerce, and all forms of engaged interaction are the best remedies. It's isolation of one form or another that makes things worse. It's isolation that makes a subgroup vulnerable to oppression and exploitation.
The past did contain city planning that was racist and had redlining. Those are past problems that do need some form of correction and I would support correcting them if you have specific actionable ideas.
I would like to point out that race isn't the only reason you couldn't afford college. Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?
> Do you see any problem with race blind admissions and race blind aid? That way everyone who is disadvantaged when it comes to being able to pay for college gets a helping hand?
It sounds like you're describing need-blind admission. Few universities have the funding for that, they depend upon a certain percentage of students paying most or all of the tuition. Harvard, which has very strong financial aid and is officially a need-blind, still admits a high percentage of "legacies," who are much less likely to need a lot of financial aid.
Courts have decided that it's legal for universities to consider race as one of the factors when deciding who to admit. After centuries of bias, you can't just say "anyone can apply" and expect better outcomes to just happen, it requires more active effort. That doesn't mean taking someone who is unqualified but of the pool of qualified people, you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
I agree that more would need to be done than just saying "anyone can apply" but I don't think that the University should be doing most of the work, I think that we should work in the communities that need help to improve education so that more people are encouraged to apply and those that apply are more qualified.
>you don't just pick the "top" people based on quantitative measures.
Please be careful how you say this, some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people." This gives the alt-right the opportunity to fan flames that should die.
That was in response to you mentioning race blind aid. Need-blind admission helps combat the affordability problem that's more likely to affect people of color. If you're saying there shouldn't be scholarships exclusively for black people or some other group, I disagree but those make up a trivial amount of the aid available.
The biases baked into school systems are a bigger problem but there universities don't have a wait a generation for someone else. It's not about admitting unqualified students, universities shouldn't and I believe generally don't admit unqualified students (when they do, I suspect it's more for legacies than people of color). Part of what a university can do is recognize that a student who's the first in their family to go to college or who didn't go to a preparatory high school may not come in with knowledge and skills that will help them succeed; matters that are not taught in any classroom. There are white students with those needs as well and who should get such help, but they're less common.
> some people will hear "We should pick PoC over more qualified white people."
Tough, sometimes that's the way it's going to look if all you're looking at it grades and standardized tests; that's the basis for a lawsuit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard. That group has twice the representation within Harvard than it does in the US but they're still suing because other students with lower scores are sometimes admitted instead of an Asian American applicant with higher scores.
Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.
There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formation of primarily white communities.
You mention people making distinctions based on where you go to work, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, how you dress, etc.. If I'm black and couldn't afford college for various reasons, I'm going to have a hard time getting a job that would allow me to buy the kind of car, dress in the clothes, send my kid to the schools, buy a house where the other people who had a _systematically_ easier go at life would.
My point is; When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.