I appreciate your experience is different than the statistics, but it's quite literally less diverse than the US as a whole, and less than Minneapolis and many other midwestern cities.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/overlandparkcitykansas
Also, I likely see the younger people, there are quite a few old people who retire in OP. The blue valley school districts have a makeup that skews fewer whites (70%) versus a place like San Francisco where whites apparently send their children to private schools rather than public schools. So in terms of actually raising children to meet people who are different than them, it seems like the Midwest is a clear winner. Despite whites making up 40% of the population of San Francisco, only 20% of the enrolled students are white.
I don't think they meant that you can't own a house and lead a nice life if you're not straight and white. I think they just meant to say it's difficult to 'fit into' Midwestern culture if you don't fall into certain identity categories. While I'm from the Midwest and have fondness in my heart for it, I have to concede this is true from experience.
[0]: https://shawneemissionpost.com/2020/08/18/johnson-countys-re...
The town I grew up in (unnamed Iowa) now offers to pay remote workers to move there. The town has declined since I remember it in the 1980s as a fortune 500 factory town with a population of about 15,000. It has never had a botanical garden. It was always safest to be white, straight, and normie in whatever way possible if you have to be there.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/...
I'm not trying to make any commentary on that, I'm just citing statistics and my observations.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/...
Would you say something similar about people's skin color if you went to Nigeria?
What's your point with a comment like this? Yes America is majority white and those percentages are higher in some areas. It's not a problem.
Similarly, cities and people in the midwest might be great if you're straight, white, and "normal" but that might not be true for everyone. Will people be as welcoming if they see you as an outsider? Maybe. I try to keep an open mind but I also can't be 100% sure.
That is a really long way of saying “not poor”.
Ahhhhh you gotta embrace it and find the good in it or you'll just resent everything :) St Paulite here. This morning it was 9 degrees F on the way to the bus. The snow has a beautiful, sparkling layer of ice from the rainy drizzle we got the other day. Most of the plants were covered in a thin coating of ice, the streetlights reflecting through them looked like inverted icicles. It's snowing now, we'll probably get 2" this afternoon, lovely to crunch through.
Aside from a nice blast of snow last year, it seems that our winters are now largely an indiscriminate blah of slush and rain and I'm tired. Need to relocate north or south and i can't figure out which.
I read once something along the lines of "People in New York say 'fuck off' but mean 'have a good one' where as people in California say 'have a good one' but mean 'fuck off'"
I am from the Seattle area and prefer neither of those scenarios because we are often fairly introverted (see the "Seattle Freeze").
> it seems like a great place to be, and a culture that wants you to have it... if you're straight and white and "normal".
That suggests that you are using a definition of “nice” that many people (especially those who are not, but even many who are, unless the last term includes bigotry within its ambit) straight and white and “normal” would rather strongly disagree with.
The people i met were way more polite than people elsewhere. Thats what nice meant.
> it seems like a great place to be...
It seems to be a place that is rewarding to be in and will make you happy (if you fit in and want their cultural norms). Normal in this context = Want a quaint middle class hetero nuclear white-picket-fence american-dream style life and you're also polite and friendly just like those around you. Many people want that, especially "all american" people who grew up (white, middleclass, american) with that experience themselves (and american propoganda). No bigotry implied... thats not everyones experience, but its probably the "normal" for a native Midwesterner (from my time there).
Why did you feel it was necessary to put that in your comment? Are you upset that a specific skin color of people decided to migrate to the Midwest?
Did you witness lgbtq or people of certain skin colors being run out of town or receiving some sort of prejudice? Or are you being bigoted and just saying that due to their specific skin color and life choices they want people with different lifestyles to not enjoy prosperity?
It's been a pretty consistent report of people I know who are visibly not “straight and white and ‘normal’” and whose prior US experience is limited to relatively cosmopolitan coastal areas who visit the Midwest (urban areas other otherwise) that not only does the WASP-normativity seem higher, but even minorities engage in more and more aggressive self-segregation from visibly different minorities, to the point of active avoidance on the street.
Oddly, people who are or pass as “straight and white and ‘normal’” are much less likely to report this, and often seem surprised to hear it from others.
basically I dont believe it is the fact the person is non-white, or non-strait that is the issue, the issue is the actions, behaviors, attitude, and likely politics of the person that ends up being the problem, not their immutable characteristics.
> the issue is the actions, behaviors, attitude, and likely politics of the person that ends up being the problem, not their immutable characteristics.
Are you saying that non-white or non-straight people who have negative experiences are acting/behaving/believing in a problematic way? If so, then no - they should not have to act like straight white people to be respected by society.
Also you can believe whatever you want but that's also incorrect - some people act disrespectfully towards people strictly based on their immutable characteristics, knowing nothing about how the victims act/behave/etc.
Yes. Multiple teachers at my middle and high school were fired/forced out. This was long ago but not that long ago. I'm sure much as changed since then, and I wouldn't generalize that experience to the entire region, but it's always astounding to me when people don't realize that hostility to lgbtq people is very, very much a thing that not-even-close-to-retirement folks experienced first-hand while living in the midwest.
Yes. "Prejudice" is a very polite way of describing the treatment i've seen such people experience.
> Are you upset that a specific skin color of people decided to migrate to the Midwest?
No, people can move where ever they want. Its a warning to those people that they may not have the positive experience others had. See point on prejudice.
> due to their specific skin color and life choices they want people with different lifestyles to not enjoy prosperity?
1. StraightWhiteNormal are not life choices.
2. People who are different may not enjoy or be afforded the same experience. See point on prejudice.
3. "Enjoy Prosperity" is very loaded. Not everyone finds that implied life prosperous.
Yep, which means your various other comments focusing on exactly that are a form of bigotry, prejudice and/or racism.
>"Enjoy Prosperity" is very loaded. Not everyone finds that implied life prosperous.
No, but you did in your first comment.
A close friend of mine is a black Muslim, Marine Corps officer, and Afghanistan veteran. Likes to date white women (who doesn't?). He used to live/work predominantly in Ohio, also a bit in Texas I think. He got SOOOO tired of butthurt white guys harassing him at bars and such that he resigned his commission. Why was he fighting for this country to be treated this way at home? He then joined the New Zealand military for a few years, and now lives there permanently (presumably as a NZ citizen).
-Have had coworkers openly talk about how the company hires too many Indians and it's a "bad thing".
-People saying how muslims are ruining and dirtying up their suburban neighborhoods
-Skinheads verbally yell obscenities and spit at me and my minority coworkers.
-Sprinkle in the barrier to entry for tech exec/leadership positions is not diverse and have seen first hand how douchey the hiring process is..
It's reaffirming to hear so many other people have similar sentiments.
>Or are you being bigoted
Maybe you should re-evaluate your outlook because you sound like you're part of the problem that makes the Midwest not appealing to minorities.
>It's reaffirming to hear so many other people have similar sentiments.
Oof sounds pretty similar to something a racist would say.
I'm fine with it though, move away. Part of the reason the Midwest is one of the better areas to live in and still affordable is because coastal elites continue believing they live in some utopia, while suckling the media narrative on flyover areas. Yep it's not appealing just avoid it. Enjoy all those homeless minorities you pretend to care about on the coasts! Thanks! :)
The fact you're the one getting triggered by real anecdotes and dismissive is more reason it's not going to change anytime soon.
I was born in the rural midwest and lived there for almost 30 years of my life. Not once have I ever heard of anyone receiving the treatment you claim to have received. Not once have I ever seen anyone receiving that treatment. Therefore, I'm inclined to believe your wild accusations that are so far outside the norm are some Jussie Smollett level incarnations unless you have verifiable evidence.
Since I have the experience of multiple years in the midwest and you were just briefly visiting means my anecdotes have more weight. Just like I wouldn't trust a person from London to provide an accurate representation of life in the Congo I also do not trust you to provide and accurate depiction of life in the midwest.
I live in CO now. I heard the N word multiple times coming out of white student's mouths here. So, I'll just go ahead and make an unfair blanket statement and assume the entirety of the western US is racist scum? NO, because I'm more intelligent than that and not a prejudiced bigot that assumes one person or a handful of people represent and entire area of the country.
Take look at your responses. You're the one painting an entire group of people negatively based on one experience and we have online proof of it. That is the definition of bigotry.
> BELTON: Oh, I was going to say that it doesn't surprise me that you'd have a lot of racist tweets out of Illinois or Indiana. Being a native Midwesterner, there are certain regions and hot spots within these individual states that have a reputation for people being very vocal about minorities. And in the case of Illinois and Indiana, and even my home state of Missouri, you have a significant African-American population, not enough where we're the majority in any type of capacity, but just enough where people feel the need that they can be very expressive in how they want to complain about it.
> You know, you can't complain about something unless you actually see it on a daily basis. So it's like - sometimes I think maybe people use Twitter less in Montana, but there's a lot fewer minorities in Montana.
> MARTIN: Well, but that's an interesting question, though, because there's all kinds of conventional wisdom, which may or may not comport with fact, around how racial attitudes are formed. But one of sort of the truisms is that familiarity would lessen these kinds of attitudes because people would know somebody, right, they would know somebody of a different race, and therefore - or hopefully more than one person - and therefore that there would be less inclination toward these kinds of attitudes.
> BELTON: You'd think. That's true, but in the Midwest, a lot of these major cities are heavily segregated. So in many cases, familiarity has bred like contempt between people, because people are in their segregated enclaves, and they feel very strongly about people who are different from them.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=187291...
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/preemption-in-the-midwest/
[3] https://littlevillagemag.com/the-demure-white-supremacy-of-t... (references [4])
[4] https://www.epi.org/publication/race-in-the-heartland/
There are studies proving GP's anecdotal views...
It would be pretty similar to me calling all Muslims evil since 9/11 happened. Agree?
Yup. That sums my experiences up nicely, although I would add "if you're straight and white and 'normal' and don't care about how people treat anyone else".
Obviously you can't generalize everyone, but the people i met in the MW were way nicer than the people i knew from the east coast or west coast. I've been invited into many strangers homes as if i was a close friend. Very few people seem to be captured by a blind viral drive towards success the way you find in places like NYC or SF, and instead people are just happy and enjoy their position in life. (not to say people don't do good work, or don't succeed at goals). If you dream of a nice middle class life, with a quaint house and a nice family, and all that jazz, it seems like a great place to be, and a culture that wants you to have it... if you're straight and white and "normal".
The weather sure does suck though. Hot summers, cold snowy winters. Worse than new england, with less money to keep roads and infra in shape. That said, i find myself every fall on the west coast missing "real fall" where the leaves change and the brisk wind cools you down outside as you can see your breath. Throwing on a soft flannel and grabbing something warm to drink while you stand outside and enjoy nature...