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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a boomer. I have kids who are in high school. Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.

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The word used was segregation, not discrimination.

Come visit Baltimore and I’ll take you for a drive around the city. You can tell me if it isn’t de facto racially segregated. And then you can visit the actual South where racial segregation was “law”, and you can explain to me how actual patterns established under segregation haven’t been locked into amber.

Are schools still segregated? That’s the topic.

Again, come visit Baltimore, or go visit the South.

I have. To my knowledge, schools are not segregated by law.

I try really hard to be precise on HN because I recognize and even begrudgingly respect pedantry. This is why I wrote “de facto segregation” in my original post, just because I was concerned that somebody responding to my post might not be clear about the topic of discussion. And while I can reluctantly respect pedantry, I have zero patience for people who combine pedantry with careless reading.

If you think that 'these neighborhoods tend to be black, and these neighborhoods tend to be white, but for largely historical and cultural reasons, and people are free to move and live where they want' is "de facto segregation," then I think you have seriously watered down the term.

This isn't pedantic nitpicking. Segregation is a deeply evil employment of the state machinery to enforce and persist strict racial divisions in a society.

People choosing to stay near their friends, family, and community centers & therefore the census showing large clustering of self-identified racial groups, is not in any way the same thing.

If you go visit the South, you’ll find that many of the segregated neighborhoods that were once segregated by law are still effectively segregated. And beyond that, you’ll find that economic opportunity in many of those neighborhoods is massively restricted. You’ll ask yourself “why don’t more of these people just avail themselves of the same economic opportunities (education, jobs, training, public transportation) that their counterparts in wealthy neighborhoods took advantage of?” And then you’ll notice that in subtle ways many of those things don’t exist: the schools are terrible, the public transportation doesn’t run there, and the jobs don’t exist. One day you’ll notice that the one public light rail line in your city doesn’t have a stop in the wealthier neighborhoods, even though one was planned in the original design, or that specific lines and road projects were blocked because wealthy people objected and bought up essential land and built on it, and so on.

At the end of the day you just have to be open to figuring this stuff out. If your view is that people were herded into airless ghettos, and then just stayed there with all the lack of opportunity that entailed, because they were making rational free choices to deprive themselves and their children of economic opportunity, you’re living in a fantasy world.

De facto segregation != de jure segregation.

It happens that some neighborhoods are dominated by a certain race / ethnicity, while in others it goes the other way. Unless you want to go back to busing there’s not an easy fix for this problem

De facto segregation today is often a consequence of de jure segregation yesterday. Eliminating bad laws is just step one. Remediation for past ills is step two.

> Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.

If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.

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