Re:On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality
by stcredzero on Thursday November 16, 2017 @04:32PM
(#15716839)
There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S.
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.
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.
http://a.co/fDK6vrZ
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.