Race:
Lee re "Race" and "Desegregation"

I was well pleased to see such a fine game designer as yourself taking on social issues such as race and diversity.

However, I largely disagree with your assessment of the validity of racial categories in considering discrimination. You prefer to consider "ethnicity", because you feel that it is a purely social construct and is not considered to have any scientific basis in categorization.

This is a limited view and is unfortunately not very well supported by the historical record. Over the course of time in the U.S., Blacks, Latinos, Irish, and Jews have each been treated as being of different "races". In common discourse historically they were more often referred to as being of different "races" than they were of being of different "ethnicities". One might be categorized by color, another by language, another by national origin, and yet another by religion, but in U.S. history they have been both referred to and treated as racial minorities during various time periods.

The widespread use of the term "ethnicity" in the social sciences is a relatively recent phenomenon, and is still a very confused one. Why does the U.S. Census Bureau categorize "Mexican" as an ethnicity and "Korean" as a race? There's no decent intellectual reason for making such a distinction in this context, yet it is done.

The point of this is to say that while race is not a very valid concept in terms of genetics, it's an extremely valid concept in the study of human social behavior. Race is perceived by many has being very real, and people have for years, without the benefit of scientific data which could show even a dime's worth of genetic difference, treated people differently because of social, cultural, or minor phenotypic differences.

To discard this fact so casually is to ignore the plain history of race relations in the U.S. and in other parts of the world.

While I will concede that race does not, per se, equal class, and that many educational outcomes, etc. are correlated strongly with class, the fact that many racial minorities are disproportionately poorer than "whites" is not coincidence.

A history of educational, economic, and housing discrimination in the country is, by and large, responsible for the class differences between minorities and whites in the country.

The vast housing segregation that occurs in inner city areas like Chicago is no accident. Overt discrimination in the housing market and lending markets have led, over time, to a high concentration of blacks in parts of the metro area with reduced economic and social capital. Anyone who is familiar and fair about a study of the legal and social history of housing discrimination in the U.S. can readily attest to this fact.

Housing discrimination is very important to consider for a variety of reasons. First, educational outcomes are not only bad for people living in poverty, they are even worse for people living in concentrated poverty. Concentrated poverty is one of the biggest results of housing segregation. Housing segregation limits access to quality schools, in some cases to decent transportation systems, and limits ready access to high paying jobs. Housing discrimination occurs because of social prejudice based on perceived difference -- people engaging in some types of housing discrimination can and do discriminated based on class (such as unlawfully discriminating against people receiving government assistance), but more often than not it is based on social differences attributed to racial or national origin discrimination.

Housing and lending discrimination have made it difficult over the years for blacks in this country to build up a source of intergenerational wealth (in the form of housing and real estate investment) to pass on to their children. Also, another intergenerational phenomenon is educational deficits. Children of educated parents are more likely, regardless of class, to be educated themselves.

While any or all of these hurdles can be overcome with the right opportunity and assistance, combined with a positive attitude, in practice they are very difficult to overcome.

Many of these social distinctions in jobs, personal wealth, educational attainment, and equal access to housing are correlated with class, but to end the inquiry there is pointlessly oversimplistic. Someone engaged in such an inquiry might happily point out that there are more poor whites in this country than poor blacks. Of course, that would be true -- there are more whites, period. However, blacks and other racial/ethnic minority groups in this country are disproportionately poorer and more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty.

There's a reason behind that -- long term vestiges of past and present racial and ethnic discrimination. And to those who are doing the discriminating, and those being discriminated against, race is a VERY real social construct, even if it's one you choose to ignore.

I recommend that you look at the underlying causes driving those statistics you were trying to cite. The class of a given individual may have resulted exogenous of race -- however, to believe that race is only coincidentally correlated with class suggests a lack of familiarity with the legal, economic, educational, and social history of the United States.

Since you are a very clever fellow, I encourage you to turn on some of the copious brain cells you show in your game design endeavors, and start doing some serious research on the history of discrimination in the U.S.

You might be surprised with some of the things you find.

—Lee Valentine
November 2002

JoT

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