Why is racial grouping of diverse ethnicities with different backgrounds still considered acceptable?

Great Debates
81

I think Americans are so obsessed with Racism because the alternative is Classism. Americans will cop to a racist past but Americans above all will not admit to living in a class conscious society. To accept we are stratified by birth spits in the face of American identity at every level, from the rugged individualist to the anti-aristocracy we like to think we still support.

On some level, Racism is a problem for most countries so we feel better that at least we don’t have Class warfare also. But we do and are. Fighting any particular aspect of Racism isn’t going to be effective if the financial component isn’t solved and for that to happen we’ll have to admit it’s mostly a financial problem. People with lots of money would rather Americans not think about that too much.

82

Americans are stratified by wealth, not class, and they are not the same thing. Lots of new people have become very wealthy, rising from blue collar or similar backgrounds, for example recently in tech fields. Lots of other people inherited wealth, and there is some snobby “old money” around that hold their noses against the nouveau riche, by whom they are vastly outnumbered, and who don’t give a damn about the old money snobs.

I don’t think fear of classism has anything whatever to do with the existence of racism in this country. The financial component of racism is lack of equality of education and opportunity, but it’s the racism that creates and perpetuates the inequality, not the other way around.

83

I agree money and class are different things and perhaps the New World doesn’t grapple with class in the same way as The Old World. But American society does value money, and money increasingly stays in families who are well known and powerful.

Racism was how Aristocrats in The South got hayseed voters to preserve their Plantation and privilege despite having greater financial common cause with black owned people. Racism was not why they did it, Racism was how they did it.

84

The existence of racism among all social classes in the white south allowed slavery to exist. The southern slaveowner class didn’t need to do anything for that mechanism to work. It was virtually built in.

I don’t see any financial common cause between poor white farmers (i.e. too poor to own even one enslaved person) and enslaved blacks, not during slavery. After slavery was over, if white sharecroppers had anything to cling to, it was that they weren’t black, and they did their best to make sure that their one claim to “superiority” would not be diluted or diminished. Not through education, not through opportunity to “rise above their station.” They were willing to accept poor conditions, as long as the black people had it worse. That is a strong motivation for poor whites in the south (and elsewhere) to this day.

Going back to the post I first responded to, I also disagree that “Americans are … obsessed with Racism.” Many of the people on the receiving end of racism (no capital letter needed) are no doubt concerned, some to the point of obsession. Most white folks are oblivious, wondering what all the complaining is about, since slavery has been over for almost 160 years.

85

I am sorry, but this is absurd on it’s face. You think white people transported black people to America in droves because they didn’t like black people? They tried this first with poor indentured white folks and it worked for awhile, but the problem was even as a servant they had rights and would one day vote. That’s a problem for the money spigot.

Now what if you could get a workforce that would never have rights and could never vote? You’ll have to convince everyone there is a good reason you are doing this, but really it’s because you want money and don’t care who you hurt. These owned people will be destitute like many of your already white poor labor force so to keep an insurrection by both from happening it’s important to make the poor white guy feel special, and it’s the Property Owner that will preserve that Hayseeds way of life. And they will too, just not in the good way.

As Germany demonstrated, slaves can work in factories also. If racism is the cause why didn’t the North have slaves in iron foundries or ship yards?

86

A book about this is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. She traces the origin of racism in the U.S. (and perhaps other countries too) to the creation of castes. She says that caste systems go back further in time than racism.

87

Interesting thread. I am African American, but also a first generation American (mom was born in Jamaica, dad in the Jim Crow south). I spent most of my formative years in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s when Britain was experiencing its own racial cleavages (aftermath of the Enoch Powell “Rivers of Blood” speech and the rise of the National Front). At the same time, having an identity that usually went nationality, then race/ethnicity (“Oi you Yank!”) was an interesting wrinkle. But other times, being racially abused by phenotype - I always note I’ve never been called a racial slur to my face in the US, but it happened a LOT as a kid in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.

Because I went to American schools with the requisite Cold War propaganda that America is Great and Solved All of Our Problems During the Difficult Sixties, I tended to believe in the colorblind ideal that we strive for in the US. After all, we were solidly middle class, my parents were successful, and we lived in military and civilian housing with people of different racial backgrounds and even social class (commissioned officers have nicer houses in the military context, but they live in the same community).

So when I moved to the US permanently at age 14, I was flummoxed to see that Black and Brown folks generally lived in segregated communities. I went to a Department of Defense school in the UK that had every ethnicity, but in America my school was almost exclusively Black and Brown kids. White people didn’t live in the community near the school, and those who did found ways to get their kids out of the school. So there was a handful of white kids, but not enough for them to acutely feel out of place (I imagine).

As it turns out, my hometown of Austin Texas was determined as the most socioeconomically segregated city in the US. And in the US, socioeconomic status is strongly correlated to race. In essence, I had the myth of racial equality deconstructed as a teenager. I initally did not believe police targeted kids of color, until it happened to me and my friends - but not to my White friends (or at least to the same degree). It so happens that my city was under court order to integrate its schools until the late 1980s, 30-odd years after the Brown v. Board of Education case. Austin wasn’t an exception; this was more or less the norm in the Southern US. I happened to be in school at the time when school zoning was court ordered, so even in my school in the Latino barrio of Austin, we had Asian and White kids in the school as well. And though we were exposed to the same toxic racist stew from the media and society writ large (and in some cases, our own families), we mostly got along. My best friends in school were Asian, White, Latino, and Black (we got together over the holidays and it looked like a UN convention). Kids tend to figure this stuff out.

The funny thing that I have noticed (anecdotally, I’m not an anthropologist) is that in my peer group, we had a lot of cultural exchange. At a class reunion a decade ago, I was struck by how many interracial couples were in the class below mine. White and Black, White and Latino/a, Black and Latino/a, Asian and Latino/a… it was noticable. (My White best friend is married to a Taiwanese American.) I feel fortunate to have been in school at that moment and to have had that natural intermingling, and learn that there were awesome people, and assholes, regularly distributed across each ethnic and racial group.

I also learned that we were an exception. Some schools in my city were less diverse and were clearly “Black” or “Brown” or “White.” For the latter, they were in the west part of the city and generally had better facilities, resources, etc. In fact, after a fight between students at an affluent White school and a low income Black school, the superintendents of both districts created an exchange program where ambassadors visited each others’ schools. I was selected and hosted a kid from the affluent White school, and couldn’t quite understand why he asked so many questions about how run down our school was. When I was hosted by him at his school, I got it. His school was superior in every way - facility, library, sports fields, cafeteria. I’m sure his teachers were great, but ours were awesome too. Seems like you would have to believe in the possibility of all kids learning to be a teacher at my school.

Anyway. I’ve spent my career analyzing racial disparities in education, and I think it has a lot to do with my formative experiences - having the ideal of a colorblind society posited, believing it, but then the sharp shock of seeing that ideal completely debunked. I take a class of my students to the UK every summer to comparitively analyze inequity in both national contexts, and of course the social class rifts are quite apparent and different from the UK. However, the racial gaps exist too, and Brexit brought that to the forefront, even if there are proxies used to discuss race (and the conflation of xenophobia and other forms of prejudice).

I find this super interesting, look forward to reading others’ perspectives.

88

That was a very interesting and informative post, thanks for sharing.

I grew up in a rural, white, racist area of the Midwest. I was in and around a lot of poverty. The high school I went to wasn’t great, by any standard. I think we were solidly a C. It didn’t really hold me back academically.

During and after graduate school as a student/graduate of social work, I became engaged with work in Philadelphia, particularly in the Kensington community which at the time was like the second poorest congressional district in the country. I was absolutely floored by what passed for education in some of these schools. They didn’t have the resources for even some basic classes. Crowded school rooms, thirty kids to a room. Failing air conditioning and heat. Constant violence and threats of violence. The conditions under which students in certain demographics are expected to learn are appalling. I don’t know why people turn a blind eye to this. Well, I do know. People don’t care about Black and brown kids as much. But God, the way some people go on and on about the children and protecting children, you’d think more people would be outraged about this. It’s criminal.

89

That, of course, is exactly why racist parents do NOT want their precious children “exposed” to other groups - the kids will figure out we’re all just people and >gasp!< not just get along but intermarry!

90

I think we need more of these chronicles of how we all come to an understanding of difference and (in)equity. Having an empathetic bridge to what it is like to not have the full access to possibility would help us craft better policy and support for making the American dream, as it were, more accessible to everyone.

Inequity may be baked into capitalism. I can accept that. But the degrees of magnitude of difference in regard to education, housing, and health care - to name three life-sustaining and changing categories - is stupifying. Like you said, seeing what other kids and their families have, or don’t have, is galling and infuriating.

I can accept that there are are wealthy spaces and low income spaces in this country. I think many of us would argue coming from low income or working class backgrounds gave us resilience and perspective. But the gaps are horrifying. We shouldn’t plan a society for outliers to be successful - it should be possible for those in the middle.

I taught in inner city Houston after I finished college. I taught kids with the same verve, intellect, and creativity that I would meet years later in an elite university setting. Difference was, opportunity, resources, and possibility. That’s all.

As you say - it is the inability to look at Black and Brown (and poor white and other ethnic) kids and say, “Those kids deserve the same shot at success as my kids do, even if it means those kids might move ahead of my kids given the same shot.” This is the premise of Richard Reeves’ book, Dream Horders - I highly recommend it. Sometimes it takes an outsider (Reeves is British) to call out our actual BS when it comes to committing to a meritocratic society.

And Broomstick - that exactly what it is. I taught a course and I used a video of families in Levittown from 1957, when the first Black family moved into the community. Note that this family had equivalent financial resources to be able to afford to move there - this supercedes the idea of class superiority. The mother speaking here in 1957 may as well be speaking in 2023. The fear is about miscegenation and her son/daughter bringing home a Black/Brown/Asian/some other foreign date.

Sadly, I’ve had friends who went through that. Amazingly, if they do end up marrying the partner and have kids… over time, most of them come to love their grandkids. It’s just so tragic that this is how the experience starts. I’m sure a lot of couples who date interracially give up with this pressure.

91

This is interesting to me that you say thirty kids to a room indicates a sub-par school. All my elemenary school classes were closer to forty kids per room, and this was considered a superior school. It was more like thirty kids to a room in high school, but still thirty kids. Are class sizes in the last few decades so much smaller now???

92

Nope.

When I was in school in the early '70’s it was generally considered a bad thing for there to be more than 20-25 kids in a class.

It’s not impossible for a larger class to get quality education but its rare without extra resources/support.

93

I’d say I had less than twenty in my classes. But I went to a small school.

94

I experienced a similar change when I stopped going to DoD schools and attended my first civilian school. It probably didn’t help that we moved to Colorado which wasn’t the most diverse place in the United States. The second civilian school I went to was Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary and I can only remember two black kids in the entire school. One boy in 5th grade and a girl in 4th grade. It’s possible there were more and I simply can’t remember them, but there were so few that they stood out.

I had the colorblind upbringing as well, not only from going to schools with a lot of diversity, but from my parents whom I cannot recall ever saying anything negative about any group (other than a few comments my father made about North Koreans). In some ways this was good because I could accept people for who they are. But when you’re raised believing things are fundamentally fair, that racism might exist but it’s isolated and not systemic, well, it took me a until I was in my 20s to recognize the problems you saw as a teen. And it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I fully appreciated just how serious some of the problems really are.

I’ve tried discussing some of the systematic problems different groups face with my mother but she has a really difficult time understanding. She thinks most people had a similar experience as hers, one where there were plenty of black students in her high school. I think I got through a little bit when I described how the percentage of black and brown students in my classes went down. And when I did go to schools with a good percentage of black and brown students they were hardly in any of my classes. My mother’s school had a majority black student population and when I reminded her of how poor she was growing up it was like a lightbulb turning on. She finally got it.

95

You don’t think conditions like these might have more to do with it? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I grew up in a pretty white area in the UK. There was really no overt racism because the few non-white people we knew could not really be anything but individuals. IMO this was both good and bad - much better than the sort of racism @Spice_Weasel saw, and avoids the formation of negative stereotypes that affect even well intentioned people. Bad because it leads to ignorance, unfamiliarity with different cultures, and treating people as different because of their race.

There were still good and bad schools, though not to the degree described above. Bad schools were invariably those serving poor areas, and it really seemed inescapable - and still does - that it was the children attending those schools (and indirectly their parents) that made them good or bad. Private schools were best and got much better results (a lot of affirmative action in UK university admissions is focused around private vs state schools). Presumably they have smaller class sizes, better facilities etc, but also, the parents are paying for the education and expect and demand their kids make the most of it. At the other extreme, schools serving poor areas suffered lots of disruption and behaviour that made learning very difficult. Most of the kids were not interested in school and didn’t care to learn.

My school was middling, and when I moved to 6th form at 16, it was a huge change for the better: 16 was the end of compulsory education, so everyone in the classes had chosen to be there. No one was disrupting the class and wasting everyone’s time, and we were able to focus on lessons and get through the material much faster. Attitude makes such a difference.

96

Surely North Korea has to top this list?

97

Click on the link that DrDeth gives. It has a map in it which ranks the countries using a spectrum of colors. However, many countries are colored grey. These countries, for whatever reason, are not included in the ranking.

98

Corretc. But yes North Korea would likely be up there in racism.