Comment by CountDrewku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CountDrewku | Hacker News Reader

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Ok how about this since we're going to just throw out unproven accusations and anecdotal evidence...

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.

> MARTIN: If you're just joining us, we're talking about a new study that literally puts certain racist, homophobic and hate speech directed toward people with disabilities on the map. Our guest is Professor Monica Stephens, who led a team that literally put these terms on a map. Danielle, you wanted to say something.

> 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...

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