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Comment by barake | Hacker News Reader

My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.

1: https://www.wlky.com/article/forced-busing-anniversary-50-lo...

2: https://www.louisville.com/redlining-louisville-dividing-lin...

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I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.

St. Louis has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmar_Divide.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.

Her other book, Caste, was what made me understand American racism, and how it differed from racism in societies I knew. I strongly recommend it.

i have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different/

Thanks for the link. I'm a white American who has been lucky enough to visit Sri Lanka! I don't agree with your conclusion that American racism is inescapable, or uniquely so. I believe we can make progress on bigotries - in particular, despite the current and despicable wave against people who are transgender, non-binary, or otherwise queer, I believe we have made significant progress in reducing homophobia over the last 5 decades (the ones I can remember!). On the negative side, I did reach the conclusion (due to what I've seen during the Trump era) that much of what I thought was progress on racism was simply racists learning to code-switch. That part's depressing.

I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.

The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".

> I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.

Liberal Americans said race is arbitrary in my experience. And people who said gender identity should be respected believed it was fixed.

I answered to the sibling comment. Saying it is one thing. Being consistent with that position is what seems to be missing.

I would have thought American liberals (like me) would mostly view race as a social construct and therefore not immutable. However I am not an expert in sociology and my experience must be shaped by not being part of any visible minority.

I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.

For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".

Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.

To me the ideal is that the colour of someone's skin is a minor and unimportant physical attribute - like the colour of their hair or their eyes.

A lot of liberal Americans argue against this.

I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 70s and 80s. My district was one of the last to desegregate schools in the state, fought for years to avoid it. Well, it finally happened in the early-80s, a 'bussing' program was started to bring Black kids from North St. Louis to attend schools in my district. I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I remember all the adults in the neighborhood were furious. There were protests outside my school on the first day. People threw rocks at the bus from North St. Louis when it pulled into the parking lot.

It was a little tense at school for, maybe, a few hours, but mostly it was just confusion - WTF is going on?. But after that, it was cool. All the kids quickly realized we're all basically the same - we all hated homework and were intimidated by girls, the usual adolescent stuff. I didn't know it at the time, but the school deseg program was one of the most impactful events of my childhood.

Redlining in Omaha's history too.

(You can kind of blame real-estate agents to a degree. There was an interesting indie documentary on it that played last year.)

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