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Comment by leothekim | Hacker News Reader

One consideration for me to live in the NYC area is the general level of tolerance/acceptance of diversity. Certainly it isn't perfect here. But having grown up in the mid-west in an immigrant family, I have strong memories of being rejected by classmates and the local community (daily taunts, regularly being told to go back to my home country by kids and adults alike, people vandalizing my house, etc). I strongly believe this was a function of being in a community where people from foreign countries was uncommon, and back in the day in podunk mid-west, this was very uncommon.

Now that I have a family with (bi-racial) children, I would be super reluctant to consider a place where my own children would encounter that kind of hostility. Nashville I'm sure is great, and maybe I'd love living there, but I would personally think twice - for a reason that the author of this article didn't at all need to consider for himself.

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This is a big issue for me when people tell me to "move out of the coasts".

Apart from the hostility (lets assume that's waning), services for immigrant populations is non-existent in most cities. Well-stocked Asian grocery stores, temples, a good selection of restaurants etc. are common in most coastal cities, while not so common everywhere else (apart from say, Houston/Austin).

I don't doubt there is flight from these coastal cities, but just like in the 70's and 80's, this seems to be mostly "white flight" [1].

Immigrant populations have no choice but to stay in the coasts, I wish more effort was put into making the coastal cities more affordable than just assuming everyone can move out.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2017/02/14/512875545/leaving-urban-areas...

Not as true as it used to be. In my experience any midwestern city over 100,000 in population will have an Asian grocery store, and it's often got the best fresh produce in town.

Here is an alternative perspective.

For the past 15 years I have been mostly working in NYC and around 6-7 years ago I had the fortune to work remotely on-and-off in Nashville for 6 month in total. So my personal anecdotal experience in Nashville was all positive, actually. Racism wasn't a big issue at least for me in the tightly knit tech startup community there in Nashville (12th South/Green Hills Mall area). My boss and teammates were smart and respectful. In fact the Southern hospitality made me feel right at home from the beginning. I missed those days.

And yes I come from an immigrant family as well.

PS: TN is not a midwestern state.[1] It is considered as a Southern state though.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

Without diminishing your personal experience, I should point out that kids can be pretty harsh and that almost all of us are picked on in one way or another, for a variety of reasons.

You know in 'Revenge of the Nerds' where at the end, the Nerds make a call to everyone who felt slighted and diminished to come out and stand against the 'Alpha Betas' (basically the cool/athletic alpha-bros?) - and everyone came out!

95% of people have either something that stands out that could enable them to be picked on, or, give them some kind of anxiety one way or another.

So, the adult world is very different.

I suggest there is a very low likelihood that you'll encounter acute problems (though maybe kids at school), issues would be more systematic than acute, i.e. the more local people have tighter social circles - much like Europe is very 'open, tolerant, progressive' both intellectually and in terms of policy, and yet at the same time 'very, very closed' socially. Even a white person, born and raised in Paris, utterly fluent and indistinguishable from anyone else ... but with a Polish last name ... might have some difficulty integrating outside of Paris. It's not like the French 'hate Poles'. It's just a kind of ethnocentrism that is fairly common in most places.

Other than maybe your kids having to deal issues perhaps a little more often than the kids next to them in class ... I wouldn't ever be apprehensive about living most places in the US at all.

I lived in France (not Paris) almost all my life with a Polish name and that has been a problem exactly 0 times. (I just need to spell my name when someone wants to write it)

I don't mean that it would be evident, definitely not in the way you could 'count the times' something would happen. That's not how I would describe systematic integration issues.

I lived in France for quite some time with near fluent French and it was nary impossible for met to break into French circles. I made basically zero French friends, most of my colleagues were ex-pats. And it's not like I was ever remotely 'mistreated', nor could I pinpoint any specific time wherein I was 'left out' or 'ignored' because I wasn't French but there was obviously some kind of invisible barrier. My girlfriend at the time, much like you, was born and raised French, but has Polish ancestry, and though, like you I don't recall her ever mentioning a single 'incident' ... it was clear she wasn't quite in the same group as the others. The demarcation was subtle, but to me it was there.

In Germany, where I lived for a year and barely speak a word of German, I felt as though my German surname gave me special access, as though I was 'a lost child', it's like I wasn't really 'foreign' just happened to be raised elsewhere - whereas the demarcation of Polish people (and especially Turks) was evident. Just like even in urban North America where you might see tables in a restaurant (or neighbourhoods) occupied by different groups (i.e. a very Asian table, a very white table), I found in Germany you'd see heavy demarcations as well, but more subtle: a table of Germans, a table of Polish/Germans, a table of Turks. Those divisions basically amount to barriers of a kind, because they will exist everywhere, at the office as well.

That experience was 20 years ago.

Comparing New York of today to the mid-west of 20, possibly more, years ago is unfair.

There is plenty of racism in New York to last a life time. I wish you had stayed and fought the racism instead of moving away for better comfort, leaving other immigrants to suffer.

Lastly, I don’t want to invalidate and your pain and suffering. I am sure it sucked, and the younger you were, the more pain it probably was.

Are you sure minority experiences have gotten better during these 20 years? I’m not convinced.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm not convinced in today's Trumpian times minorities are accepted- especially down South.

I live in the South. You're wrong. Boston is still the most openly racist place I've been, and NYC to most segregated (in terms of day to day encounters). I live in the South partly so that I do interact with non-white people on a daily basis without venturing far from home.

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