Facts are Cool

[jimhines]

After reading John Scalzi’s post on SWM being the lowest difficulty setting in the game of life, and then reading the 800+ comments, I figured I’d join the crowd who decided to write a response. So I’ve dug up some information for those commenters who seemed to completely lose their minds…

I’ve done my best to find reliable, objective sources for

Comments

[rimrunner]

I think it does. I can just remember, when I was very young, that this was still sort of the conventional wisdom, and I think maybe people around my age (mid 30s) and older might have this lingering notion that the colorblind approach is the best. (I actually heard this from a co-worker in her 60s during a diversity training last year. The diversity coordinator, bless her, treated the assertion with grace and tact. I'm sure she's heard it all before.)

Ironically, at the SAME TIME that this sort of thing was being preached to us in school, I was attending a school district full of magnet programs whose locations and admissions policies were predicated on the tacit assumption that white families cared more about the quality of their kids' educations. The mother of one of the few black students in my elementary school class had to fight harder than anyone to get her kid into the program because the main reason for the program's existence was to draw white students to high-minority schools.

My mother got called racist for pointing out the hypocrisy there. *headdesk*

[3rdragon]

Whereas my school system's magnet program ensures that smart white kids and smart black kids go to different schools. I only figured out two years ago why, despite going to a majority-black school growing up, almost all of my friends were white.

[tooth_and_claw]

That attitude is still very prevalent in white liberal circles, I think, because that's what I remember being implicitly taught in my private hippie-school in the 90s. It's funny, because being colorblind and multiculturalism went hand-in-hand. Like mtlawson says below, I think that was a symptom of good minority/bad minority thinking, though in a slightly different context: "good" minorities weren't angry, or demanding, or violent, but wise and powerful. It was pedestal treatment. Minorities that spend their time debating and getting upset don't fit that mold, and therefor make white people who feel they're being good allies very uncomfortable.

It didn't help that, for all the talk of multiculturalism and the deliberate exposure to different backgrounds, our school was still in southern Indiana, and 96% white. I think with a more integrated setting, the weird "no, no, you're noble and kind and wise, not pissed off! I can't accept this!" would have been diminished.

[rimrunner]

I suppose it's too much to hope for that this problem will solve itself. (Avoid the comments unless you like having high blood pressure. For as enlightened as Seattle's supposed to be, scratch the surface and some appalling attitudes reveal themselves.)

I now work at a university that, despite recruitment efforts, is still mostly white. Most of its students are drawn from the surrounding region, and the suburban and rural areas of the region at that (the graduation program lists where all the students are from; lots from Kent and Kirkland and Yakima, almost none from Seattle). I honestly don't think this will change much until the demographics of those areas change (which they are; Bellevue is now more diverse than Seattle, I think). But it's led to peculiar situations like the student ahead of me in the lunch line one day complaining to a friend that if she'd realized that all the black students she'd seen on the college's website were basically all the black students the college had, she might've gone somewhere else. Because race still does impact life experience in this country, of course, and it was hard being around so many people who didn't share hers.

Which is a hell of a lot more self-aware than I was at that age; but at that age, I didn't have to be, you know?