Race:
JoT re Lee re "Race" and "Desegregation"

You write as if you're disagreeing with me, which confuses me because I agree with almost everything you say.

That race is a powerful social construct.

That our categories of race and ethnicity are inconsistent.

That current racial disparities in privilege result from a long history of vicious racial oppression.

That racism is alive and well in the U.S.

You say that racial disparities in privilege are the legacy of racism. I say that racial differences in school performance, school discipline, and crime rate are (at least partly) the result of disparities in privilege. These two statements don't disagree with each other.

The only substantial claim you make that I half disagree with is this one:

Concentrated poverty is one of the biggest results of housing segregation.

You may be right that racial segregation concentates poverty, but economic segregation concentrates poverty even more effectively. Obviously making poor people live in the same place is going to concentrate poverty more than making black people live in the same place.

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.

I never said that race is only coincidentally correlated to class. And it is rude to imagine that other people are ignorant just because they disagree with you.

—JoT
November 2002, February 2003

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