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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t really do a good job of addressing minorities. What if your ethnicity makes up 3-5% of an area, are you just expected to diffuse into the general population?

For example, I come from a relatively rural area and spent a few months working in Mountain View. At first i thought it was a proverial melting pot relative to home, but then i realized that i never saw any black folks...

Demographics for the area show African American at 2-3%. So if you happen to be black and get hired on at Google, for example, is there sonething wrong with looking for an area where you might relate to your neighbors more or should you optimize for diversity?

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Isn't the whole point of integrating people together to create a melting pot where you end up with a homogenous society? If you create "perfect" neighbourhoods with a mix of all races then you'll end up losing individual identities over a few generations. Children will mix at school, couples will form and you get mixed families, and within a couple of generations, you're roughly homogenous.

The way to end racial discrimination is to end racial identities. Humans are always going to prefer people similar to themselves, so you need to make everyone similar.

If we dare to point out that humans all have 23 chromosome pairs, we can obviate much of the tension.

If one were to wax cynical, one could nearly begin to wonder if some component of that tension were not of the "self-licking ice cream cone" variety.

> Humans are always going to prefer people similar to > themselves, so you need to make everyone similar.

A very strong and potentially pernicious conclusion for such vague premises.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that humans feel reassured within their group(s) (whatever that is) and also sometime feel threatened by other groups? This behavior itself being worsened by social insecurity (giving signs of one's belonging to the in group by being hostile to the out group), as frequently documented.

Following this line of thoughts I don't think looking more similar would solve anything. It's not aiming at the problem and it's not even doable (we would have to look the same, speak the same, think the same, etc, or we would always be able to form groups).

I think you took the wrong conclusion from my comment. The whole point of mixing communities isn't for skin colour, it's to homogenise culture. Families will mix too but that is much slower than culture.

I was not thinking specifically about skin colour. You might still need to make clearer what you are thinking about, because to be honest homogenising culture sound even more impractical and hazardous than homogenising skin colour.

I think the point is to minimize externalities (negative or positive) that folks might face due to things that are outside of their control. Striving for a homogenous monoculture sounds a) incredibly boring and b) not something we are really capable of with our present biological wiring. There seems to be a strong affinity for tribes within the human animal. Look at gangs, you have people that are typically of similar socioeconomic background, similar cultures and in many cases similar or identical race and yet they find excuses to kill each other indiscriminantly.

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