[Timoteo]

(03-13-2012 12:11 PM)basilransom Wrote:  

(03-13-2012 12:01 PM)Timoteo Wrote:  

(03-13-2012 11:07 AM)basilransom Wrote:  

(03-12-2012 09:10 PM)Timoteo Wrote:  

Most public schools reflect their neighborhoods, so schools end up segregated also. If more kids grew up with different kids, you'd see a lot of this go away, but unfortunately adults ruin kids.

That's only with the 'right' other kids. I met a blonde girl awhile back who had gone to a majority Hispanic school, and she didn't have the most pleasant experience. If you're white and go to such a school and get trashed for it, even while your parents are total hippies, I don't think you'd have such a rosy view of things. Same for if you're black and send your kid to a school where the white kids are really clannish.

It doesn't matter what color you are, if you have a chance to get your kid away from people like that subway chick, or skinheads, or cholos, you'll take it.

You kind of repeated my point. I said schools are largely segregated, and that odd kid that doesn't "belong" gets ostracized. I meant if kids GREW UP (not just attended school) with kids different from them, you'd see less racism - namely more diverse neighborhoods. If a neighborhood is more diverse, the neighborhood schools will likely be also. My own brother went to a predominantly white private junior high/high school, and his only real friends there were a couple of other black kids and an Asian kid. They were cool in school, but after, you didn't get invited along to anything. He didn't always like it there, but it was a quality education so you do what you have to.

I see your point, and I realize mine was separate from yours. I meant that everyone preaches tolerance and diversity, but if you get paired with a bunch of bad apples of a different race, you're probably not going to think very well of them. So exposure to 'diversity' in that case will make you *less* tolerant.

I do feel for your brother though. I doubt it was racism, but if people don't want to hang out with you, the effect is the same. I've always found it a little strange how upper middle class enclaves tend to breed insularity. Many of the people that come out of that environment are unable to socialize with anyone outside their circle. You'll find them years later, with the same friends they made in summer camps and prep schools. One way or another, they're nearly always living in places where they have lots of old friends. Not all the kids are like that, but the popular kids, the ones who run the main scene, often are. Think the sorority girl who can't talk to anyone unless they have sixty friends in common. Sort of like what Roosh described of the Icelanders, and the ethnic Danes at the folk school my friends attended.

It isn't a virulent form of racism, but race does matter. It's basically what we were talking about, in that in their world, there's no SUBSTANTIVE contact. Just on a human level, it wouldn't be a major undertaking to invite that kid along, but part of it is also how they'll be viewed by certain peers who do hold certain views of people that aren't like them. There's this limit on just how good of friends you can be with certain types of people, even if you think they're cool.

Over the years I've encountered a few people here and there who were that black kid in a predominantly white school. At my last job I worked with a woman who grew up in Dorchester, MA. She was that kid that didn't get invited to other kid's parties, while everyone else did.

I grew up in Harlem/East Harlem, so until I went to college, I really wasn't around anyone other than blacks or Latinos. But some of my coolest college buddies were white guys. All but one of my roommates in college were white, and there were never any problems. Sure, there are jokes about the kind of music you listen to, and your fashion, but it's all in good humor. I ended up getting turned on to music I might never have stumbled onto otherwise. We all hung out, got drunk together, played intramural sports together, watched tv together. Occasionally there would be a little flare-up (there's always a little something under the surface), but we'd get past it. During a break, a guy invited me up to his family's home in Ballston Spa, NY because we were that cool with each other. His girlfriend was Pacific Islander, from Guam, so maybe I simply found a guy that didn't really care about race. I spend a long weekend playing pick-up football with his brothers and girlfriend's brothers and his friends from the area. I had another friend, who I recently reconnected with, invite me up to her house in Connecticut when we were home on a break. Recently, she asked me if I remembered. She told me that her mom adored me, but people in the neighborhood talked shit about her because she had a black dude come to visit and hang out with her (we weren't fucking). I'm not naive about the world I live in, but that's still kind of fucked up, as if it were beneath them to have anything to do with someone black. There was the occasional issue with townies, but college towns can be that way, and if it isn't something racial, it's simply because as a student you're a visitor in their town and they're territorial.

Many of the friends I have now were guys that I met as an adult through one of my first cousins. I'm a little older than them, so we didn't hang when we were younger. They all first met in Jr. High (Wagner JHS on the upper East Side in NY), and that school draws kids from all over Manhattan. From then some of them went to Bronx Science, another incredibly diverse school. They all hung together, know each other's parents, etc. So most of my best friends are cool with whoever is cool with them. And it isn't some bullshit about not seeing differences - it's more about embracing differences and appreciating them, and realizing they aren't barriers to anything significant. It's kind of funny - I went to a basketball camp in Silver Spring, Maryland between my jr and sr years of high school. When kids there found out I was from NY, they asked me shit like, "Have you ever seen a dead body?" I had to laugh, because it was simply the perception they probably drew from media, or some ignorant adult about New York. If you were black from New York, you had to duck bullets and step over bodies to get to school...HA HA!