What hypocrisy? Your argument fails in assuming that people who like public schools think everyone should attend one. Unless you’ve heard either Matt Damon or myself make that argument, there’s no hypocrisy. I’ve never had a beef with public schools; I attended an excellent (suburban!) one myself. It’s not my fault if the imaginary voices in your head say something different.
It’s a tad fatuously expressed, yes, but it was a quick way to illustrate my real point: the fact remains that my daughter can get a better education at the school she’s at without taking anything away from the public school system (which is one of the concerns about the voucher system).
There’s nothing wrong with a two-tier system as long as the lower tier isn’t utter shit. A decent basic set of public services for everyone; better and extra services for those that can afford them. What’s hard to understand about that? It’s the liberal philosophy in a free-market world. NHS for everyone; private healthcare system with better facilities for some. Police for all; private security for some. Etc etc. There’s a separate argument about those who can afford the upper tier paying taxes to support the lower one, which is usually the space this discussion falls into, but that’s another thread.
You won’t get through to him, that same sort of “hypocrisy” was being bandied about when people noted that Warren Buffet believes the rich should have higher tax rates but they cunningly pointed out, Warren Buffet doesn’t choose to pay more taxes, therefore he’s a hypocrite for thinking the tax system should be revised so the all of the mega-wealthy have to pay more.
In other words there is something fundamental to the conservative brain that makes them unable to determine what is hypocritical. Doesn’t stop them from trying though.
(BTW I believe that food stamps should be a thing that exists, yet I choose to not be on foodstamps myself! I’m a total hypocrite!)
You were the one said about how you want to only live with your own kind, and descrined everyone else in less than flattering terms. That’s “US vs THEM” thinking, and is the definition of bigotry. You stated a belief only people who are like you have value and that everyone else is some undesirable group.
And then you used a racially loaded term such as thugs and welfare recipients. Don’t act like you didn’t know that those are code words used by racists.
So you say bigoted things and use racist code words. What are we supposed to think?
And, mind you, I don’t have that big a problem with monocultures. I think it’s possible to live in one and still not be a bigot. I think it’s a little harder, and a little diversity is good, but that full out multiculturalism is not necessary. It has value, but not everyone needs to live in that environment. Mostly because, well, multiculturalism is self-defeating. It destroys cultures by melding them into one megaculture.
But that’s completely different from thinking that people who are different from me are thugs and moochers or what have you. You clearly hate some groups of people. It’s not that you want to be around people who are similar to you, but that you want to not be around people you deign inferior to you.
And, even if you aren’t racist, that’s something you have in common with them.
This is going too far. It’s you devolving into an US vs. THEM thinking on political grounds. You are taking something about a small subset or conservatives and extracting it to the whole.
There are quite a lot of conservatives who know exactly what hypocrisy is. It just so happens that there’s a subset of conservatives who use the term without understanding it. This is only because it is a conservative buzzword.
Heck, I know at least one self-professed conservative on this board who goes to great lengths trying to illustrate what hypocrisy really is.
Other parts of your posts have been addressed by many posters, but I want to address what I bolded above. How in the world do you think food deserts are a city-only problem? Suburban and rural communities also usually do not have any food stores within a mile away, and they are much less likely to be able to support specialty stores. Most of the U.S. is a food desert.
Didn’t say that. I just said they could all be white because I’m white, and it doesn’t make any difference for the purposes of the discussion.
I may be classist, but I’m not racist. But to a lot of people around here, they can’t separate the two things. I’d rather have black middle class neighbors than white trash neighbors, and I suspect almost anyone rational would, no matter their color.
I thought this whole thread started as “US vs. THEM thinking on political grounds.” In this case “US” was suburban conservatives and “THEM” was urban liberals who wanted all of “US” to die in a hail of gang gunfire and freshly baked baguettes.
Some people are racist therefore you are racist - is that it? I fail to see how the fact that there are racists in this world is relevant to calling someone in this thread a racist. You’ll have to explain that one. Otherwise it seems like you and others just enjoy calling people racists. It’s strange.
It is relevant, and worth pointing out in this discussion, because suburbanization and residential segregation by race, while separate phenomena, are also related phenomena, and we can’t fully understand the former without noting and understanding the latter, and the latter is undeniably a problem. That does not mean all white suburbanites left the city to get away from the blacks, but it is important to the important question of why they spent decades keeping them out of suburbia and why suburbia remains overwhelmingly white to this day. See post #387.
Of course it is. And if someone very different from you wants to move in next door, that’s OK, too.
There is when they exclude those unlike them. You have a right to live where you please, means permitting, but that is the only sense in which you have any right to choose your neighbors.
You get much more and worse conflict if you separate them, as history American and foreign shows.
Every wave of immigrants to America formed enclaves where they could talk to neighbors speaking the same language. But in large part they left the enclaves eventually. There are still some old Irish and Italian neighborhoods, quaint survivals where ethnic holidays and customs are celebrated, but you will also find plenty of Irish- and Italian-Americans in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. And in all-white suburbs, because they managed to get accepted as white; the result being that being Irish or Italian no longer holds one back in American society, as it once did. They got into the melting pot. It will be the same with Latinos eventually.
False equivalence. Whites are the only ones in American society with any skin-privilege; when they form Whitopias, and many do, even today, it is much more socially harmful than a Little Italy or a Chinatown.
I’ve read several of Pat Buchanan’s books. You can get some very interesting viewpoints from him – but it is extremely foolish ever to take them seriously.
Is this a claim that most people wouldn’t want to segregate according to socioeconomic status (regardless of skin color) or that “a great many white Americans” would rather live next to White trash than a Black middle class family?
If the former MHO is that most do self-segregate according to SES primarily and cultural group (be it Black, Hispanic, White, family nationality heritage, etc.) second and that more by wanting to have some critical minimal mass of those like them more than anything else.
If the latter then I dispute your claim of “fact” and since you claim it as “fact” request some support of the claim. (And not just the cover of a book.) MHO is that such is very untrue, that very very few Middle Class and higher Whites would prefer to have “White trash” next door over the family that consists of say a Black accountant father and his marketing department honcho wife with their 2 to 3 studious children.
Of interest to this portion of the discussion is this article:
Once again, see post #387: "Writing in 2000, historian Stephanie Meyer pointed out that race still plays the key role: “Many whites remain reluctant to accept African Americans as social equals. They refuse to accept African Americans as neighbors.” Do you really believe that has changed all that much since 2000? Going by the footnotes (it’s a very heavily footnoted book), Loewen is quoting from Meyer’s As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods.
An encouraging sign if true – that is, encouraging if race is losing its social salience. But replacing racial bigotry with a color-blind contempt for lower classes is only slight improvement.
Hmm. Read that post and see nothing that supports your claim. In fact, in contrast to your claim that color matters more than social status, your excerpt claims that even in the origins of the suburbs the prime focus was not to avoid African-Americans but to secure social status.
And sorry, quoting Loewen quoting a claim of Meyer that has little to do with the claim that color trumps class, is hardly supporting the claim. On many levels.
And do I think that much has changed over the past 13 or so years? Yes, I do. I believe that the article I cited is correct: we are now more much divided by class than by race. A White trash neighbor would be much more objected to in almost every suburb, even one lily white, than a professional or solidly Middle Class Black family. Note: this does not claim that there are no racists, but the racist in suburbia is more worried now knows that his/her property value is not threatened by the Black family and is by the “trash” (not quite equal to just lower SES btw) family of whatever color, and that matters most to him/her.
City or suburb Americans segregate into functional villages mostly according to class with other factors as secondary aspects. And self-segregation is not equal to contempt.
I thought this whole thread started as “US vs. THEM thinking on political grounds.” In this case “US” was suburban conservatives and “THEM” was urban liberals who wanted all of “US” to die in a hail of gang gunfire and freshly baked baguettes.