Comment by goodmythical | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodmythical | Hacker News Reader

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It is not necessarily obvious to all. Some choose to stay out of a belief that there is a chance that order can be restored or perhaps created for the first time and that it is worth staying to participate in the work toward the prefered order.

This happens in all sorts of queer communities. Some do leave for the greener pastures, but some choose to stay and fight to build a supporting community where they already live. Some believe that they should not have to flee to the gayborhood in order to live their lives.

If every pro-choice individual left a pro-life community, the pro-life community will suddenly have zero votes against pro-life candidates/policies.

If all of the immigrants (or at least the ones with skin colors that trigger people, because no one seems to mind a white Swiss immigrant), knowing that many in the US are openly hostile toward them, simply left or chose to never enter in the first place, the US would never have a chance to develop a tolerance for these peoples.

Many Jewish people, given the chance to flee, chose to stay in Hitler's Germany in order to help others flee/hide, or support others in the area doing things like getting groceries to families that were at greater risk of harm.

Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run.

It is a personal decision that any who find themselves in hostile territory must make. Fight, flight, or freeze?

> Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run

I think I understand the instinct behind this, but I’m not sure if it’s actually mechanically true.

What I’ve seen in practice is that when there’s an exodus of any major part of any group, then the group effectively dissolves

You’re right there may be some kind of final consolidation period of dogmatic people, which often splinters, but it mostly seems like exodus leads to long term dissolution, which seems like the goal of leaving it

Hence “vote with your feet” is the best protest

I think that depends on the scale.

If it is possible to get enough to leave such that the underlying community collapses, then it can work.

But if the effected population is 10%? 1%? If those individuals aren't in positions integral to the existence of the community?

If the 1% that left say the US were the "top 1%", then that would certainly cause waves, though I'm not sure it would completely dissolve the US. If on the otherhand the 1% that left were...hold on what's a 1% demographic..."everyone with rheumatoid arthritis", "those suffering from celiac disease", "people with natural red hair", "american indians", "chinese americans", etc then the US that remains is probably not a whole lot different from the US that was.

Brief research points to networks surviving random departure at rates as high as 50% (a random half of town folk leaving for different reasons) and loss of core individuals (healtchare/teachers/admin) at between 10-25%.

It seems there is indeed a threshold where collapse can be triggered by sufficient flight, and of course we've seen this in digital communities like digg.

I guess I'm just looking at like, if you're say a thousand racial minorities in an on average racist city of 100,000, and you all leave, the ratio of racists to non-racists will increase assuming the minorities aren't racist themselves. There is now less reason for the non-racists to campaign on behalf of the minorities because now there are fewer instances of injustice, and less reason for the racists to change their minds because they are less likely to engage in any racially driven encounters that give them the opportunity to change their mind.

I can see the appeal of leaving. You do the math, figure it's never going to change or won't change soon enough, the impact on your life is too great, leaving doesn't cost as much as staying does, and so you leave.

But suppose you've got lots of friends/family in the area. Elders you take care of. A neighbor whose pie is almost literally "to die for". The racism sucks, but your boss isn't racist and there's really only the one guy at work, so it's really just the subway that's a problem. Now staying is less expensive than leaving so you stay and make the most of it - vote to get someone like you on the city council, organize or participate in a support group, see something say something.

There is no one answer to fight or flight. It will always depend on the exact relation between the oppressed and their oppressor(s).

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