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Not yet... that bill still has to pass the Senate. Write your Senator...

The side of the argument that I'll never understand is the idea that equality for one person or group is an inconvenience for or interferes with the equality of another group.

There was an expert on The Daily Show that made the point that 130 nations have had exactly zero vaccinations. This is problematic because these are the places that a vaccine resistant variant could evolve and potentially require us to start over. I wonder why few people other than Bill Gates are talking about this. It's literally an issue of national security.

bigboy said:

The side of the argument that I'll never understand is the idea that equality for one person or group is an inconvenience for or interferes with the equality of another group.

If you've been in a position of privilege, equality means surrendering that privilege. While it may be just, it is still a loss.

United Nations is talking about it. Criticizing wildly uneven and unfair distribution of vaccines. 10 countries have administered 75% of all vaccines. People in the US willing to delay their place in line so someone in those 130 countries can get vaccinated?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/18/wildly-unfair-un-says...ccine-dose

Wrapping back to last evening and earlier comments.

First, my outlook on others, you may call me an asshole, and I am fine with that because perception is reality. My interactions with people typically have me thinking about drivers behind behaviors, everything is cause and effect and every behavior is driven by an underlying desire or need. In my experiences I have been taught that people are manipulative, self centered, and will step on others to better themselves. Therefore my interactions with unknowns have me on guard and trust is minimal. If by chance over time you demonstrate that you are not acting in 100% your interest then I may open up to you. This may give some insight to how I think and act. I have been taught that only I will look out for myself and thus I believe everyone in life is replaceable and should not be relied upon heavily.

Second, I typically engage with people who can hold a conversation at an educated level, topic isn’t of major concern, however I expect you to speak intelligently, without a ton of slang. I expect that your home isn’t a hoarder house, that you don’t have a double wide with a plastic pool and dirty couch on the front lawn. I think you can understand what I am getting at here. I have had my careers and my travels and been inside many homes and I can certainly identify patterns and correlations in things. Not every poor person is in a dirty trailer park or ghetto with trash everywhere and horrible speaking skills. However, everyone of the dirty poorly educated people I have met and dislike are typically poor. Some poor people are actively trying to better themselves, but most I have worked with are not. When you are at home, out of work on employment, but you have a filthy house, why? You have time, clean that mess up, you are breeding kids in that mess, this is how they are raised, they are likely to continue that cycle. They are happy to collect their welfare check and sit in their messy house and drink beer all day. Those people I have zero interest in. Those are the slovenly poor people I avoid.

I have met many people, rich and poor and between, various races, one thing I have seen is that it doesn’t matter the race, but the resources available to the person. I don’t think the problem that causes systemic racism is so much a racism issue as it is a poor/well off issue. Poor homes typically breed poor people, poor schools create less opportunity, people work to get away from those environments. A poor person will fight to break the cycle and then will attempt to do better for their children. They move out and look for a better area. A rich person can do everything for their children already. I will say that I would avoid moving into a poor neighborhood, but I wouldn’t avoid moving into a diverse neighborhood. How many diverse neighborhoods are poor and how many aren’t? Do those people like living there? If not the first chance they get they leave and don’t look back. Naturally this creates areas of opportunity, wealth, and resources. Everyone else is left in a rut together in a poor crime ridden area that anyone with resources avoids. To fix systemic racism you will need to fix resource distribution. People aren’t typically racist, but they are surely going to avoid the mess that is the typical poor neighborhood, and those poor neighborhoods just happen to be made up of non white populations in many cases.

Andy, you say open a business in a low income deprived area, but as a business owner I don’t want to deal with theft and vandalism that typically comes along with that. You say throw some beautification and resources into those areas, but when that happens the residents damage the additions and graffiti and ruin those exact things that should have made it nicer. I have seen it time and time again. I have seen brand new apartments opened to low income resident only with holes in the walls and trashed, plants ruined, because the residents don’t take pride in it. How to resolve this?

Do I contribute to systemic racism, maybe I am, but I know that when I go outside in the morning I don’t want my car on cinder blocks, and I would prefer to not hear gunshots at night etc. I don’t worry about the race, but I do look at crime rates and school zones and other things to make sure I am not somewhere that causes me headaches on a daily basis.

For the record I have visited the black church, it was the Baptist’s, and it’s a blast, they sing dance and it’s like a huge party. The catholic/Christian church’s suck compared to it.

I could probably sit here and spew my thoughts into 40 or 50 pages, but I figure I will just add and clarify if anyone responds or quotes anything. I could probably clean this up if I did an outline and rewrote and drafted but that just doesn’t seem necessary.

Equality is easily in ones self interest, especially if you're the one on the wrong end of the stick. If the justification for acting in your own self interest and potentially contributing to systemic racism is because everyone is doing it, things are never going to get better. No one is saying you need a perfect record.

So, just a couple other random thoughts.

First, the whole police thing, I am not sure why blacks are targeted, is black crime more 'visible'? Is white crime occurring more behind closed doors and so your average beat cop doesn't see it as much? Police are majority ex military, consider the background and the training. It is no surprise why police are heavily armed and have armored vehicles etc. Consider that a chunk of police may have been involved with recent wars with middle eastern individuals. I am sure that being shot at by that subset of the world population certainly changes your views and that might be hard to overlook back in civilian life. Should ex military be in charge of our police duties?

People gravitate toward familiarity and similar cultures and backgrounds. You see it in all ages. Are more educated people better able to understand and work out differences and better mix cultures?

Supply and demand, salary hasn't kept up with cost of living, rent, groceries, etc. Are we overpopulated? This would cause demand for all the needs, but an abundance of labor. If companies couldn't find bodies they would pay more to compete, this isn't happening.

Here's the thing: Everything you listed as being about self interest but not racism directly contributes to racism. Only wanting to associate with people who speak a certain way, only wanting to live in a certain neighborhood, only wanting to open a business in the nice part of town, etc. etc. etc. are the excuses that perpetuate systemic racism. All the money, opportunity, and services leave neighborhoods of color because "I want a nice house in a nice school district." This has literally been the excuse since it became illegal/not politically correct to say, "I don't want to live near black people." (See: white flight)

I would contend that more often than not, the code isn't very subtle and most people judge "nice house" and "nice school district" by "not populated by people of color." But even if that weren't the case, it's still pretty crappy to actively avoid thinking about other people's suffering because we can insulate ourselves from it by moving away from it. It's literally the priest and scribe from the Good Samartian who have "legitimate" reasons to cross the street and ignore the plight of the man lying there dying.

So this was my thought after writing all of that and I started alluding to it earlier. My prior neighborhood was a nice area, and it was also quite diverse. I had a Latin couple on one side, a Jamaican couple on the other, and they were great, I did have one below us who use to blast music slam doors and would constantly be fighting with family members. I didn’t like him, he got evicted two months later, shocker, a poor person.

My current neighborhood is less diverse but that is a product of the tiny town I currently reside in, work opportunity brought me here and the next work opportunity will move me somewhere new again.

Anyway, do these people have this lousy behavior because they are poor? Or are they poor because they have this lousy behavior?

People typically don’t want to be around those negative behaviors so how do we resolve that? I will live in an all poor neighborhood with no issues if, I don’t get robbed, my kids aren’t constantly exposed to drugs, and I don’t have to be concerned with shootings outside.

Expecting society at large to intermingle rich/poor/social standing/race/whatever would be simple if the conditions for living/existing are largely similar. But they clearly are not, and thus we have these islands of segregation that develop.

It isn’t just white flight, I have a good friend, black guy, grew up semi poor, no longer is, moved into a neighborhood where homes are 600,000+. Wanted to provide a nice life for family and ensure kids have as much opportunity as possible. Have another friend, Cuban, lived in a couple places, some of the primary drivers of searching for his home were low crime, nice area, and school district for the kids.

White people move away from it, but so does everyone else whenever they are able. It isn’t simply a racial thing, white flight really should be renamed rich flight. I have a trailer park not too far from here and it is a craphole, it is nearly all white, and I wouldn’t dare set foot in it much less purchase property there. I would be awash in white people if I lived there, but I would never live there.

When I say rich in all of my posts, don’t read as millionaires, more so people that are well enough off to afford it.

They're poor because they've been denied opportunity. They've been denied opportunity because they're people of color. Wealth breeds wealth, education breeds education, opportunity breeds opportunity. Turns out that releasing millions of slaves without giving them any of those things (and with continued prejudice) doesn't ever lead to equal opportunity, even after a hundred and fifty years.

The great American fact is that the privileged (see: white) generally see people of color as "less than," deny them opportunity, and would rather abandon them than sacrifice any part of their privilege to help them. The mental gymnastics required to justify this denial changes over time from "they need to be shown proper civilization" to "they are naturally subservient" to "they have smaller brains" to "separate but equal" to "I just want a nice house in a nice school district" but the end result is always the same.

The fact that many people of color would move out of those neighborhoods if they could is irrelevant, because, unlike white people, they aren't given the opportunity to. The fact that people of color would go to a "whites only" establishment if they could does not make it okay for it to exist, because what they would do is irrelevant if they're not given the chance.

Unrelated: You do know how tired of a trope the "my one black friend" anecdotal evidence is, right?

ApolloAndy said:

I would contend that more often than not, the code isn't very subtle and most people judge "nice house" and "nice school district" by "not populated by people of color."

I disagree here, but I'll admit that I can only speak for myself and that it's possible that most of the time, this is what people mean. When I think about living in a nice neighborhood, I think about whether or not the houses look like they've been maintained, if there are beat up cars parked in the street, fences worn out and falling over, garbage not being tended to, etc. Now, an argument could be made that one should not be preoccupied with those things, and that caring about the way things look in your neighborhood is just another form of hollow materialism, and that's fair. You could also say that having the time and financial resources to keep up with the curb appeal of your property is a form of privilege and luxury that lower income people working two jobs don't have (and here I'm trying to anticipate the arguments that Andy is going to volley back to me). But I don't see what this has to do with race, other than the considerable overlap that exists between minority and poor communities.

When it comes to how I feel about the racial makeup of my neighborhood/community, more diversity only makes me happier. The idea that I would look at an otherwise "nice" neighborhood and be turned away by the site of black or Latino families couldn't be further from the truth. I would actually find that more attractive. Same with the school system. I want my girls to have a diverse set of classmates, if for no other reason than that I don't want someone's skin color to be any more salient than their hair or eye color.

And that gets to the heart of where I struggle with this issue: should we focus more or less on people's skin color? Should we attach our own identity to our skin color and assume, or even demand, that others identify with their skin color? I was raised to believe and have always thought that the ultimate utopia would be that skin color simply does not matter--MLK's whole judgment based not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character thing. Is that not the goal anymore? Was it ever? If it is, do we somehow in the present moment have to focus more on a person's skin color before we can finally begin to focus less? If so, I'm not sure how that math is supposed to work.

That's a really good point and it is one that I wrestle with. I don't think the ultimate utopia is colorblindness (even though the 80's and 90's would have led us to believe otherwise). I think respecting and valuing different cultures and what they have to offer is the ideal. People are different. Cultures are different. Values and behaviors are different. I think that's a good thing to be celebrated.

I get the idea behind wanting to live in a neighborhood where people maintain their properties and things look nice and there's no crime and the schools are good. I don't have any intention of living in a neighborhood where I don't feel safe walking down the street. Maybe I overstated the point in the part you quoted for brevity's sake, but I still contend that wealth and race are inexorably connected and I still contend that, whether we're conscious of it or not, our brains use "person of color" and "culture of color" as shorthand for "poor," "uneducated," "dangerous" etc. Implicit bias along racial lines has been demonstrated time and time again in arena after arena.

So I guess to expand the point a little: When we say, "nice neighbors" what do we really mean? Do we mean they don't have loud parties? Do we mean they mow their lawn? Do we mean they speak with proper grammar and pronunciation? Do we mean they dress in button down shirts and don't sag their pants? Might a lot of the things we call "nice" be actually just things that are "white?" When we think of people of color who are "nice," do we really mean they do a good job of acting white?

It's hard to deny that we collectively respond differently in a dark alley at night to a person of color walking at us vs. a white person walking at us. I literally have to consciously think to myself, "Am I crossing the road because of the color of this person's skin?" "Am I giving this panhandler money because of the color of their skin?" "Am I suspicious of this person because of the color their skin?" It's something that rests in our subconscious most of the time and if we don't intentionally move it into our conscious thought, we won't be able to change it.

I know many "nice" things aren't white specific ("not wanting to get shot" isn't a particularly white phenomenon), but imagine the effect of centuries upon centuries of millions of interactions in which there is a small, subtle privilege given to acting white, let alone being white.

But you can't skip to "skin color doesn't matter" when it still does. That's a white person's utopia, because it has never been true for everyone else. When realtors are telling their clients to make their house for sale appear "less Black," and white sounding names on resumes are preferred over those that sound foreign, and people of color are disproportionately represented in government, and... do I even have to keep going? Until everyone insists that this stops, you can't skip to "colorblindness."

It's a whole lot like the calls for unity from Republicans on Jan 7th. If you're not willing to admit the harm caused by your actions, you can't really expect the harmed party (not political party) to buy into your unity.

This debate exemplifies the urban/rural idealogical divide in this country. This is the third big factor at play here along with economic and racial division.

How so? I haven't thought much about the rural/urban divide, so I'm curious.

I think your perspective (and mine) typically represents the urban, while the Rider represents the small town mentality. You both have described your environments as much in the above posts. Without marginalizing the other factors (the race issues have always been present) , I think the urban/rural divide is where our country has become most divisive then ever before the past decade (capitalized on by politicians and pounded in by the 24-7 cycle).

I say this based on my own experiences of constantly traveling through all parts and environs of the US the past 10 years. The way people live and therefore see the world is very different.

Gerrymandering has allowed regional tribalism to grow into more extreme echo chambers on both sides.

EDIT: And to tie two trains of thought together with the original topic. It is now officially one year since I've stepped on an airplane, after having flown 2-4 times monthly the prior decade for work. An insignificant but weird milestone to the changing world.

I went to school in rural Ohio. Trust me, the folks there don't fear skyscrapers and high density housing, they fear, and often hate, people of color.

ApolloAndy said:

I think respecting and valuing different cultures and what they have to offer is the ideal. People are different. Cultures are different. Values and behaviors are different. I think that's a good thing to be celebrated.

I totally agree. Of course, actual color blindness is impossible, unless you are literally color blind (or just blind), because the light that reflects off of a person's skin and hits your eye is going to register in your brain no matter what you do. I think understanding that a person's skin color may have something interesting to say, though it may not necessarily, about that person's cultural background while also understanding that it should not form any more of a basis by which to judge their character than their eye color would is what I understand color blindness to represent.

Jeff said:

But you can't skip to "skin color doesn't matter" when it still does.

It does still matter, but the two questions I'm posing are 1) Should it matter? and 2) If it shouldn't matter, do we get there quicker by focusing more or less on a person's race (which is different than focusing on racism)?

As I said, I used to think that the answer to 1) was obviously "no," but I'm not sure that's the case anymore.