Tyrone N. Butts
APE Reporter
Stupid white sheeple of the day
Wealth, history play a part
Q - Segregation persists in many venues where people have a choice about racial mixing. Why?
A - When we think about decisions people have choices about, we tend to underestimate the effect of history and the structures that this history sets up. Much of the difference between blacks and whites in occupational attainment, educational success and similar measures can be explained by
the wealth that their families have, and there are historical reasons, rooted in racism and violence, why black wealth and white wealth are unequal. That's true even after you control for things we thin
k of
as choice, like education and jobs. Wealth matters a lot. The same basic pattern exists if yo
u consider how "black neighborhoods" become black neighborhoods. They do because, at a different time, banks engaged in redlining, real estate agents guided African-Americans to particular neighborhoods. People just don't up and move at the drop of a hat. Once these things have acquired a history of their own, they don't change just because people would like them to. That's one piece.
Q - What's another?
A - The other piece is more social-psychological, but based in history, too. People live in neighborhoods that are heavily segregated for historical reasons. We tend to go to church or synagogue in our neighborhood, typically the one our parents went to. The choices t
hat we make implicitly tell our kids these people are like us and those are not. Even as we try hard to tell kids you should try to be colorblind, have friends of as many colors and races as possible
, we giv
e them mixed messages that say these people are more like us than those people. And lo and behold, they go out a
nd make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Q - Is it a matter of birds of a feather sticking together?
A - People certainly do prefer to hang out with or interact with people that they perceive as more similar to them, but that just begs the question. There's no objective sense in which race defines the similarities that are important. A Martian wouldn't have any particular reason to think blacks and whites are more different from one another than, say, Irish or Italians or even than men and women. Race is a set of arbitrary but symbolically powerful boundaries that we set up through culture and reproduce through a combination of structure and the subtle messages
we pass on. The question is: Why does race define how people determine that they are more similar than different? The answer to that is history.
Q - Will we ever get past it?
A -
I think we're on
that path. Social life is less segregated than it used to be, attitudes are less racist, and on a cultural level, there is a
lot more crossover among the races than there used to be. The fact that rap music went from a totally marginal mode of expression to being indistinguishable from lots of contemporary pop music is a strong example. The cultures more easily interact than they once did. Does that mean there's not a lot more left to do? Of course not, but we shouldn't minimize the extent to which the culture has changed.
Q - Some new research has looked at genetics and theory of race. What does it show?
A - David Harris, a sociologist at Cornell University, gave a talk at Duke last fall and presented the argument that we should consider race as a 3x3 table rat
her than just as a yes-no, black or white distinction. His argument was genetics predict the color of people's skin, so to argue that there is not genetics to it would be wrong. But no one h
as managed to demonstrate --
and people have tried really hard -- that there's any connection between that genetic marker for skin color and any of the things
we observe as differences between races, like cultural preferences and residential segregation.
Harris says we should look at things like reproduction of preferences, such as where people want to live, whom they want to hang out with and where they get that idea. He's asked people of different races what their ideal neighbor looks like racially. Blacks say they'd like the neighborhood to be roughly 40 to 50 percent black; whites say they'd like 10 to 20 percent black. It's impossible for both sides to have the kind of neighborhood they want.
Just as black families think it's looking good, white families are saying,
"This looks like a black neighborhood. Maybe we should think about moving out." You get the tipping point, where suddenly everyone in the housing market understands a neighborhood
as being a black neighborhood, so m
any whites have a strong disincentive from moving in, black families find it easier to live there than to be in the stressful position of being the first n
onwhite family on the block, and segregation reinforces itself.
Particularly in a time when people have less time on their hands and are not going out and socializing much outside their immediate social circles, that whole pattern just increases the importance of the neighborhood. You are much more likely to socialize with the people next door than to go and seek out people farther afield in your community.
Q - What are the cultural costs of voluntary segregation?
A Voluntary segregation is only voluntary because we've internalized the historical, cultural patterns of violence from previous generations. So
it's not really "voluntary" at all. From a cultural point of view, new forms of knowledge, new ideas, new aesthetics come about when people with different experiences come t
ogether, work together, improvise together
and to the extent racism keeps us from doing that, it holds our culture back.
Q - How can we address it?
A - One of the things that government has do
ne that works within particular constraints is affirmative action both in employment and higher education and busing programs in schools. These are not perfect, but they address racial inequality more effectively than anything else that has been proposed. We still ought to be thinking as a society about what kinds of active social policies can help shape cultural interchange. Rather than just removing barriers, we should be building bridges.
(Andrew Perrin is an assistant professor of sociology at UNC-Carolina at Chapel Hill.)
*****************
I hope a n-gger rapes
his wife, or boyfriend, as the case may be. Living in the tarbaby state, one would think this ostrich would pull his head out of the sand every once in a while and smell the negro.<
/b>
T.N.B.
Wealth, history play a part
Q - Segregation persists in many venues where people have a choice about racial mixing. Why?
A - When we think about decisions people have choices about, we tend to underestimate the effect of history and the structures that this history sets up. Much of the difference between blacks and whites in occupational attainment, educational success and similar measures can be explained by
the wealth that their families have, and there are historical reasons, rooted in racism and violence, why black wealth and white wealth are unequal. That's true even after you control for things we thin
k of
as choice, like education and jobs. Wealth matters a lot. The same basic pattern exists if yo
u consider how "black neighborhoods" become black neighborhoods. They do because, at a different time, banks engaged in redlining, real estate agents guided African-Americans to particular neighborhoods. People just don't up and move at the drop of a hat. Once these things have acquired a history of their own, they don't change just because people would like them to. That's one piece.
Q - What's another?
A - The other piece is more social-psychological, but based in history, too. People live in neighborhoods that are heavily segregated for historical reasons. We tend to go to church or synagogue in our neighborhood, typically the one our parents went to. The choices t
hat we make implicitly tell our kids these people are like us and those are not. Even as we try hard to tell kids you should try to be colorblind, have friends of as many colors and races as possible
, we giv
e them mixed messages that say these people are more like us than those people. And lo and behold, they go out a
nd make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Q - Is it a matter of birds of a feather sticking together?
A - People certainly do prefer to hang out with or interact with people that they perceive as more similar to them, but that just begs the question. There's no objective sense in which race defines the similarities that are important. A Martian wouldn't have any particular reason to think blacks and whites are more different from one another than, say, Irish or Italians or even than men and women. Race is a set of arbitrary but symbolically powerful boundaries that we set up through culture and reproduce through a combination of structure and the subtle messages
we pass on. The question is: Why does race define how people determine that they are more similar than different? The answer to that is history.
Q - Will we ever get past it?
A -
I think we're on
that path. Social life is less segregated than it used to be, attitudes are less racist, and on a cultural level, there is a
lot more crossover among the races than there used to be. The fact that rap music went from a totally marginal mode of expression to being indistinguishable from lots of contemporary pop music is a strong example. The cultures more easily interact than they once did. Does that mean there's not a lot more left to do? Of course not, but we shouldn't minimize the extent to which the culture has changed.
Q - Some new research has looked at genetics and theory of race. What does it show?
A - David Harris, a sociologist at Cornell University, gave a talk at Duke last fall and presented the argument that we should consider race as a 3x3 table rat
her than just as a yes-no, black or white distinction. His argument was genetics predict the color of people's skin, so to argue that there is not genetics to it would be wrong. But no one h
as managed to demonstrate --
and people have tried really hard -- that there's any connection between that genetic marker for skin color and any of the things
we observe as differences between races, like cultural preferences and residential segregation.
Harris says we should look at things like reproduction of preferences, such as where people want to live, whom they want to hang out with and where they get that idea. He's asked people of different races what their ideal neighbor looks like racially. Blacks say they'd like the neighborhood to be roughly 40 to 50 percent black; whites say they'd like 10 to 20 percent black. It's impossible for both sides to have the kind of neighborhood they want.
Just as black families think it's looking good, white families are saying,
"This looks like a black neighborhood. Maybe we should think about moving out." You get the tipping point, where suddenly everyone in the housing market understands a neighborhood
as being a black neighborhood, so m
any whites have a strong disincentive from moving in, black families find it easier to live there than to be in the stressful position of being the first n
onwhite family on the block, and segregation reinforces itself.
Particularly in a time when people have less time on their hands and are not going out and socializing much outside their immediate social circles, that whole pattern just increases the importance of the neighborhood. You are much more likely to socialize with the people next door than to go and seek out people farther afield in your community.
Q - What are the cultural costs of voluntary segregation?
A Voluntary segregation is only voluntary because we've internalized the historical, cultural patterns of violence from previous generations. So
it's not really "voluntary" at all. From a cultural point of view, new forms of knowledge, new ideas, new aesthetics come about when people with different experiences come t
ogether, work together, improvise together
and to the extent racism keeps us from doing that, it holds our culture back.
Q - How can we address it?
A - One of the things that government has do
ne that works within particular constraints is affirmative action both in employment and higher education and busing programs in schools. These are not perfect, but they address racial inequality more effectively than anything else that has been proposed. We still ought to be thinking as a society about what kinds of active social policies can help shape cultural interchange. Rather than just removing barriers, we should be building bridges.
(Andrew Perrin is an assistant professor of sociology at UNC-Carolina at Chapel Hill.)
*****************
I hope a n-gger rapes
his wife, or boyfriend, as the case may be. Living in the tarbaby state, one would think this ostrich would pull his head out of the sand every once in a while and smell the negro.<
/b>
T.N.B.