I’ll tell you a story. Once in more financial secure times I was about to take on a couple as roommates. They were gonna take the the other room and we were gonna split the bills. I was being nice and helping them pack when:
Her:“Oh it’s a great neighborhood. A nice White neighborhood.”
Me:"…"
him:“yea nothing like a White neighborhood”
me:"… uh I know I look kinda white but technically I’m half Latino and Inuit, and a trace of Shawnee"
awkward silence
me:“So don’t ever say that again.”
Around my area, that’s the Greeks. Once you’ve concreted and pebblecreted every speck of greenery in your yard, there’s no need to trim a lawn.
Plenty o’ diversity on the Discovery Channel
[Minor Hijack]
What does that mean ?
[/Minor Hijack]
*Ducks *and Runs.
waterfowl and diareaha?
I still dont get it.
Stepford Village?
Kidding, of course. Maplewood, NJ is pretty diverse, pretty affluent, but the houses aren’t all the same since it’s a pretty old town. For houses all being the same, you’d probably have to go to some new developments, maybe in the Phoenix or Indianapolis suburbs? Not much diversity there, I guess, though, but I bet the houses are pretty cheap now. Central NJ has a lot of new housing developments that seem pretty generic to me, Cranbury or Robbinsville maybe. Central Florida? Maybe one of the Levittowns – I think they were designed to be pretty generic towns.
Good luck with the search. Most developers try to add some diversity in the housing so people aren’t turned off by the conformity.
Ethnocentrism - Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one’s own culture. The term was introduced in 1906 by William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor and anti-imperialist, in his book Folkways. Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one’s own race or ethnic group is the most important and that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups. Within this ideology, individuals will judge other groups in relation to their own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and sub-divisions serve to define each ethnicity’s unique cultural identity.[1]
Nothing wrong with what you want to do at all. Minorities, especially in big cities, have their own enclaves to be ‘around their own’. Music, food, cultures, traditions, religions, etc.
Okay, so what would potentially be “evil” about this?
Points at location.
Again, not sure what would be potentially evil or immoral about this. When you bring discrimination into it, morality is an issue. Otherwise it’s just a lifestyle choice.
Well, you’re still allowed to leave your house and stuff. Even if you live in a gated community.
Personally, I’m happy to go out and find diversity throughout the day and still come home to my quiet homogenous neighborhood.
Another vote for boring.
Does “homogenous” refer only to race? Or do other things come into play?
I ask because, admit it or not, MOST of us prefer to live among people who are very much like ourselves. That’s true whether you’re a married, religious conservative or a gay, liberal atheist.
If a white Baptist engineer with a stay-at-home wife and four kids buys a house in a suburb filled with other similar white Christian families, a liberl SDMB regular is likely to sneer at the lack of diversity in that neighborhood. But I’d wager the liberal SDMB member doesn’t have a very diverse group of friends at all.
If white, Christian families with numerous kids started to move into downtown brownstones, do you REALLY think the childless (oops, I mean “child-free”) liberal bohemians living there now would be thrilled about the “vibrancy” and “diversity” the new neighbors are going to bring? Guess again!
I’m betting such people would roll their eyes and groan, “Where did all these Bible-thumpers and their brats come from? I HATE what’s happening to this neighborhood!”
Are THOSE people evil to prefer living among people just like themselves?
I live in a boring neighborhood, though not a particularly affluent one in an “inner” suburb. It’s reasonably diverse, I think–Korean Church on the corner, 4 or 5 ethnic grocery stores within a mile. But it is very boring–50 year old cookie cutter houses that are exactly alike. I never talk to my neighbors. And I’ll admit, I moved there because I like the space and the predictability. In the city proper, there isn’t any middle–either you live in a half-million dollar home or condo or you live in an area where you can expect to get your car or apartment broken into 2-3 times a year or you live in a handful of moderately-priced gated communities that are relatively calm, but have apartments the size of my living room–and I don’t have a big living room.
Across the street from me is an Iraqi poet who was jailed by Sadaam. Next to him is an Arab who marries a platinum blonde southerner. My neighbor to the left is black.He has 3 kids in high school and college. To the right is a white family. across from them are Romanians who send tons of goods back to Romania. They were visited by homeland security and cleared. But they questioned the neighbors and had a bunch of cars around that weekend. I know and talk to them all. The worst of the lot is the white family. They are quarrelsome. The rest are polite and kind.
Good lord. Wanting to be with ones own “race” is racist now? You people have redefined racism beyond all meaningful use. How is anyone oppressed, threatened, harmed, or disenfranchised if I don’t want to live in their neighborhood? It’s ridiculous.
I marched in civil rights marches in the sixties. Those people were protesting fire hoses, attack dogs, lynchings, voter disenfranchisement, segregation, crappy schools and the like. They would laugh their asses off at what passes for racism today.
Won’t you be my neighbor?
As for the OP-is anyone else thinking “Pleasantville?”
Only if you are white male not in prison with an education and a job.
The rules are different for everyone else. Please try to keep up.
Black child being adopted by white parents? Oh, the horror! (now usually expressed by black “rights” groups).
If, and you’ll note I did say if, the decision is based on preferring one race over another, how isn’t it racist? Doesn’t it involve judging people based on skin color? It sure sounds like a categorical pre-judgment to me, which is why I said it sounds prejudiced.
What do you mean “you people?” :mad:
Seriously though, yes, this kind of thing can be racist. I’m sure you’ve heard of “steering,” the results of which are all over Long Island, where I grew up. If you haven’t, it’s the practice by real estate agencies of refusing to sell houses in certain areas to minorities, segregating them from the nice white folks who want to be with their own kind. Is anyone oppressed by this? Maybe, maybe not. It has “separate but equal” written all over it. Then again, people are still getting homes - just not the ones they want, if they had the bad taste of wanting to live near the white people, where the money and the best schools probably are. This kind of thing still goes on, although not as much as it used to, and the result is that Long Island is very heavily segregated in some places. I read once that I lived around the most segregated suburbs in the country. You might see where I regard this as a negative.
Nobody’s oppressed, harmed and so on if I go home blog about how much I hate black people either, but you’d still correctly say I was a racist if I did it.
Good. So? Some problems in the world are mostly solved, some aren’t. I don’t think I’ve misapplied the term at all, though:
That is not really a big deal for me, I never thought that my living preferences made me racist like that. However there always seems to be a lot of implied resentment and racism charges to the term “White Flight”, as if though me using my resources to live a better life somehow abandoned the needy and left people uneducated or some such, but really I was just looking for a better place to live.
My experience is that “white flight” is when white people start leaving a neighborhood because minorities have started moving in. I don’t think that applies to what you describe in this post.