What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice?
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.)
An increase in diversity is a goal, it's not 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. Forced de-segregation (as in the case of bussing kids around in public school districts) is only temporary, as the people who want to be in their groups will take action to achieve that end.
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.
> An increase in diversity is a goal, it's not a course of action.
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?
Why not both? I think we can work to address both the symptoms and the disease in tandem. Treat the symptom of segregation by implementing programs or initiatives that actively promote diversity. Also, root out the underlying cause by.... doing lots of various things over the course of generations to convince/teach people that racism is wrong.
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.
"More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help"
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.
I also went to a very diverse highschool (recently; class of 2012), and saw the same self-segregation. However, when I saw the census dotmap that was on here a while ago[1], it was obvious that even though the school district was diverse, each of the neighborhoods was clearly a "${race} neighborhood". I'm willing to believe that the self segregation in-school reflected the segregation outside of school; that more diverse schools and neighborhoods might solve this.
It's worth reading the link here: the point is taht people have a tendency to segregate even for entirely arbitrary reasons, eg when they are playing members of different groups in a make-believe story for film. I've seen similar behavior on lots of film sets; if there are 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in the cast, they'll gravitate to each other at mealtimes, and likewise cast and crew tend to self-segregate as numbers increase.
I went to a diverse high school as well, and the county I live in now is about 45% white, 40% black, and 15% Hispanic. High School was segregated, Churches are segregated, even stores are segregated to a degree.
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.
Yeah, I think it has more to do with how you're taught to think about people than what you're exposed to.
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.
The racial diversity in Seattle and in the UK did not result in the same attitudes! Of course, there are other 'tribes' over on that side of the world that do matter. But they aren't the same ones as matter over here.
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.
Your quote is really ambiguous, I can't figure it out at all. Is there something wrong with Seattle black people? Surely not, but then just what exactly does that mean?
He means that the difference between white and black in america is magnified in comparison to the uk.
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.
Many black Americans participate in a different subculture than white Americans. They speak a different dialect, enjoy different entertainment, and have different traditions and values. This is largely due to centuries of segregation, and ends up reinforcing itself.
That definately happens but is an underlying cause. I'm not sure what it is. I've lived in other countries where this natural segregation does not happen.
There's a fascinating example in computational studies that partly explains this: if you have people of different groups moving around randomly on a lattice, even a very slight preference (51%/49%) for being next to people in the same group as oneself ends up leading to a self-segregated pattern.
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:
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.
Yes. But, due to powerful cultural influences, humans will tend to want to group together for comfort purposes. Diversity implies fractured culture. Humans are loathe to fracture their sense of community through shared culture.
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.
Not really true, at least if physics/chemistry intuition can be trusted. Absent a segregating force (e.g. dipole attraction, what causes oil to separate from water), one expects two fluids to eventually become well mixed.
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?
>No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community.
Well, some do. In their right minds et all. And could not care less about such racist BS. Except if you mean that the black neighborhood is poorer and less developed, so they might prefer the richer one.
Here's a well known example:
[Johny Otis] grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where his father owned a neighborhood grocery store. Otis became well known for his choice to live his professional and personal life as a member of the African-American community. He wrote, "As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black.
What's unfortunate is this attitude of "just face it, everybody stays away from (poor|black|stupid|ugly|martian) people, anybody who denies it is a hypocrite". Speak for yourself, own up to your prejudices, don't project them on others.
I've lived in "half-black" (wtf?? more like just "black") neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and Oakland CA. I prefer it to lily-white neighborhoods. Got carjacked once, have bars on my windows currently, projects are nearby. There's also a vibrancy to the neighborhood, in the music, the clothes, the attitude, that is precious. There are cultural differences, if you talk to folks on the street it's best to be sensitive and aware of nuances of communication. The reward is fresh perspectives, genuine encounters with different people. It's just plain stimulating. And no Starbucks either.
Sure, my ideal neighborhood would be less impacted by poverty, but I would slit my wrists if I lived in Park Slope or the Upper West Side.
> No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community.
I think the problem here is that you confusing "who shares my personal preferences" with "in the right mind". The two concepts are radically different.
I think you need to take a look at crime statistics again. They're income-based, not race-based. In the United States, poor often also means minority, but it's not race that makes inner cities violent. It's destitution, and the desperation it causes.
I'm not remotely defending his thesis (and my life choices contradict his claims pretty well) but you are simply wrong about the crime stats. To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers. However, there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.
Further, international comparisons suggest you are wrong about American-style "destitution" causing crime. I know many professionals (I live in India) who are far more "destitute" than any poor American (at least in terms of goods and services they can afford). Strangely they don't turn to crime at anywhere near the rates Americans (of any race) do.
>To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers. However, there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.
Those whites don't have the same heritage of poverty, bad education and racism against them though. Nor are over-represented by a huge margin in incarceration rates.
>Further, international comparisons suggest you are wrong about American-style "destitution" causing crime. I know many professionals (I live in India) who are far more "destitute" than any poor American (at least in terms of goods and services they can afford). Strangely they don't turn to crime at anywhere near the rates Americans (of any race) do.
"American style" is not just about being poor / destitute and not being able to afford things.
It's about the particular flavor of being that, in the context of the general societies attitude, prevalent climate, ways to deal with it, etc. So people in India being "far more destitute" doesn't mean they share the "American-style "destitution"".
Moron4hire stated a very clear theory: the disparity in crime rates is caused by income/poverty. That particular theory is wrong.
Now you seem to be claiming that the disparity in crime rates is caused by some complex combination of things. Can you clearly state what that combination is and what evidence would prove your views wrong? Or are your views not even wrong?
>Now you seem to be claiming that the disparity in crime rates is caused by some complex combination of things.
Not just me. Sociologists also.
>Can you clearly state what that combination is
* Emphasis on extreme individualism (everyone for himself, or at best, his family) that destroys community bonds (that in other places serve to provide assistance to the individual, guidance etc).
* Extremely materialistic societal views, where the official national "dream" is about making loads of money.
(to prevent easy rebuttals: almost everywhere people would like to make loads of money, the difference is in how is this accepted / embedded in the collective psyche. E.g. in Japan, for an example, collaboration and being a part of something bigger is prioritized instead of "making it", whereas in some European countries an overt desire for money would be considered tacky).
In the US this also goes with the idea that those that didn't made it are "losers" -- and that they also only have themselves to blame ("didn't try enough" etc), something that's not the sentiment in other countries.
* People that have a history of little over a century of being "free" from slavery (with all that means for their chances of inheriting family fortune accrued over the years, access to good education etc), and little over 50 years of not being officially seggregated, while still being unoficially and covertly seggregated, denied jobs, targeted by police etc because of they color.
* Lack of "safety nets", a bad social services system, and a widespread contempt about the people making use of what exists (coupons, etc).
* Lack of proper education and cultural awareness in inner city schools. Those kids are mostly left to fail.
And other things besides.
>and what evidence would prove your views wrong?
Observing places with the same general conditions as described above which do not have elevated crime levels.
For example France's example with the "banlieues" is a similar case, with similar output.
>Or are your views not even wrong?*
I find this uncalled for, not to mention insulting.
India has the same general conditions as described above, and to a far greater extent than the US or France. Rather than individualism it's "every family for itself", but apart from that your description fits India better than the US.
Crime, apart from sex crime, is far lower. On many occasions I've walked around at night and been in no danger.
I'm not even sure if black Americans satisfy your criteria, actually. The US has a huge safety net - most of the bottom ventile are supported by the government. And my general impression is that black communities are far more collectivist than the rest of the nation. Do you have data on this?
Something really weird. On the one hand, the minute I heard your theory, I immediately thought "wow, this has to be overfitting". Then it took only a few minutes to realize these conditions are actually quite common and probably describe everything besides Scandinavia. And even those Scandinavian nations have subgroups with far higher crime than income levels would predict.
I'm sorry you found my question insulting. I'm simply attempting to determine if there is a real theory here; many people expressing similar mood affiliation to you have none, and I'm trying to avoid getting into a long debate about mood. My apologies.
And, yes, we in Scandinavia have plenty of crime committed by our ever so wonderful freshly imported Muslims -- and it is NOT because they live in poverty.
> To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers.
They may make up half of all people convicted of murder, but then its been widely observed across many different categories of crime that, on similar fact patterns, blacks are more likely to be charged with a crime and are likely to be charged with a more serious crime than whites.
The NCVS, for obvious reasons [0], doesn't even track homicide (nor, from looking through the questionnaires it uses, does it appear to gather information on perpetrator race), much less corrobate the conviction stats presented for murder (and, in any case, as victims of crime often rely on law enforcement to identify the perpetrator, wouldn't really be an independent check, even for those kinds of crime it does address, on the UCR for perpetrator demographics, though it can be, for those crimes that both address, for crime incidence and victim demographics.)
[0] "In the last six months, have you been murdered?" is not a particularly viable question.
I think the point tsax meant to make is that the NCVS tracks most crimes besides homicide. For crimes besides homicide and burglary, the victimization surveys agree well with the arrest rates.
I suppose this data doesn't rule out the possibility that the UCR is not very biased for robbery/rape/assault, but is biased for murder.
Or maybe self-righteous Zionists like Einstein could try diversifying their own promised land before proscribing said diversity to others?
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.
I assume, before you posted this angry message, that you refreshed yourself on the differences between Labor Zionism and the right wing flavor in power in the state of Israel? And took into account that this was written in 1946?
The poster of the dead comment that is a sibling to this one is totally invited to tell me how I committed a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
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.
Mathematical models can be used to argue for a wide range of viewpoints.
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.
The maths does not favour a "side" here. The maths demonstrates the consequences of different distribution of attitudes. Dependent on your views, different parameters will lead to good or bad results.
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.
>The maths demonstrates the consequences of different distribution of attitudes.
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.
> It demonstrates the consequences of a modeling different distributions of attitudes in a particular way.
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.
Yes I am. I don't think they are a useful way to think about the world.
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).
Did you play with it at all? It's somewhat flawed--for example, boosting the "prejudice" level to > 85% often leads to diverse, if not stable, communities. But I think it demonstrates the concept well. If a community starts out segregated, it takes being actively displeased with the lack of diversity to get it to change, because people, without a reason to move, won't move.
No I didn't. My point was that when you expand or change the model, you open up a whole new range of possibilities. I'm not particularly interested in how the model is parametrized or what parameters lead to what result.
If the point is the story, what purpose does the model/simulation serve? In this case, the best that the model does is prove that the story is internally consistent. It doesn't prove that the story has any relationship to reality, because there are hundreds of other stories about segregation that you could tell, each with their own model.
It serves the point of illustrating that a common belief about how segregation and level of racism in the population does not hold together: More segregation can occur even with beliefs we would not consider racist; all else being equal, reducing, or even preventing the increase of, segregation takes far more than absence of racism.
What do you make of this map, then? It shows scores on an Implicit Association Test, measuring subconscious racism by white people against black people.
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.
I think Einstein's very next sentence, "He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias." is great advice.
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 believe a greater benefit would occur were we to have more mixed race couples, and with it the offspring that would tend to be produced by those relationships.
absolutely. More generally you could say that people from different races need to have something in common to get along with each other. Or even more general: People need to have something in common to have a healthy relationship.
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.
Although, this sort of integration was encouraged and took place in Brazil and the mixed-race Brazilian offspring of today still seemingly and disproportionately prefer to be categorized as 'white' based on year-to-year census results.
Forced integration is a terrible idea that is proven to not work. It is the equivalent of locking enemies in a room and hoping they work it all out peacefully.
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.)
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/