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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 16, 2022

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Does anyone have a good sense of how African Americans living in smaller towns compare culturally to those in large cities, or how they compare to their non-black neighbors in town? I'm thinking more along the lines of places that are 5-20k population and aren't super close to a metro area such that the metro's culture seeps into the town by osmosis. I also have in mind places that aren't the deep South, so, where the black population in the town may only be 5-10%.

By culture, I mean the sort of behavior that, in my opinion, drives segregation in cities and makes predominantly black neighborhoods less desirable places to live. I'll give a few examples that I hope outlines roughly what I'm talking about. For instance, a general sense that they don't need to follow the tacit expectations of society in regards to dress, politeness, language, obeying what seem like trivial rules, and dozens of little things like that; the glorification of criminality; a disinterest in the traditional family unit (e.g., no real sense that they're "expected" to settle down with a wife and kids; having children and more or less abandoning them and not seeing that as particularly shameful); an intense culture of honor, where slights by strangers must be met with a verbal or physical altercation.

Now, even though this is The Motte and I shouldn't have to, I'll go ahead and state the obvious: those things apply to a lot of white people, and they apply not the slightest bit to a lot of black people, even in the cities. Still, I hope it's not controversial that there are average cultural differences between the races in the US, even if just as the result of a cascade of historical misfortunes that are in some sense no fault of their own.

I feel like I have a good sense of what small town white people are like, but I feel like small town black people in the non-South is a complete blind spot for me, culturally. Like, I almost can't picture it.

Has anyone lived in small towns outside the south like this? How did the culture of whites and blacks in town differ, if at all?

My comment doesn't really address your question, and is more about the weird bubble that Americans seem to live in. The white people who live in all the apartment buildings near me make me think of The Wire more than any non-white racial group I've encountered in the country.

In my midsized Canadian hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, we don't really see a lot of direct racial segregation, so poor people are just whoever was here 100 years ago and gradually got dragged down to the bottom rungs of the ladder. The kinds of behaviours that people tend to apply to poor black people in the US so obviously apply to mostly white people in Canada because our cities don't seem to have a group of people who were herded in to specific areas and then continually oppressed with real estate and zoning. (Very much with the exception of indigenous Canadians who were royally screwed and herded in to small areas and continually screwed with by locals the government). I'm not an expert, but our "bad parts of town" tend to just be the old industrial areas that got wiped out thanks to globalization, rather than an area with any kind of racial homogeneity beyond "generic white Canadian"

I feel (I don't have good data to base this off of) that many of the Americanisms like racial segregation, long term outcomes of segregation, or your strange healthcare system are like water to fishes; it's impossible to see that you're wet and that there might be a world outside. This makes a lot of racial politics that get exported from the US feel strange here.

Why does my perspective matter? Hmm... I think there is a tendency for conversations about race to want to make sweeping claims about people with the DNA for darker skin, when my experiences in my hometown, and bigger and smaller cities in Canada are so tilted away from the idea that a single genetic population displays meaningful differences.

Also, I want to push back a bit on the idea that any meaningful universal things about people with dark skin can be acquired by looking at the population of black people in the US... but also, I don't want this to come across as pandering anti-racism or something...

For what it's worth, I (the OP) am Canadian as well and live within an hour of Hamilton (not the Greater Toronto Area, though). And also for what it's worth, I definitely do notice in my home city a racial difference in the sort of behavior I mentioned. It's probably not as stark as might be observed in the US, but it's certainly obvious to me.

Ok that's fair :) I think I'm confusing the magnitude. There are no other racial tendencies I do see, just not as stark as the US.

First and obviously, just to do the ritual throat-clearing before we all inevitably get called "racist", there are all sorts of differences between individuals and communities, Not All Black People etc. but I may have a bit of insight.

I went to HS in a small rural midwestern town, about 35k population. My graduating class was under fifty people, and there were only a dozen or so black kids in our school. Frankly, they really didn't stick out in culture, accent or behavior at all. None were athletic either, which was a big disappointment to our basketball coach, who had to play people like me. To the teenaged me, they clocked as completely normal small town midwesterners, with black skin.

In contrast, there was another smaller town maybe twenty miles away that for historical reasons had a small but cohesive and very poor black community. A few hundred people out of twenty thousand or so. But they all lived in the same part of town, in small section 8 apartment buildings, very squalid, high crime, etc. All the dysfunction we associate with underclass areas, be they trailer parks, reservations, ghettos or barrios. It's where you had to go to buy weed, but it was sketchy as shit. We would play their schools in sports quite regularly, so we got a sense of the school. The black kids there were far more in touch with wider black culture, spoke with a slight southern accent and all the latest slang, wore fashions wildly out of place with the Amish chic of the area and were generally much more stereotypically part of black culture. Their school was also much more socially segregated than ours, possibly because there weren't enough black people in our school to form their own subculture.

To answer your question in the most unsatisfying way possible: It depends very much on the individuals, the history, the social class etc. I do think there's a critical mass that any minority can hit that results in a distinct subculture. I think the main reason the black kids in my school were better integrated is that there weren't enough of them to form their own clique. When there's ten other black kids and two of them are your younger siblings, you're gonna need a wider friend group and dating pool.

The culture you describe is that of a small pct of African-Americans even in urban areas; just yesterday, my doorman, who is African American, was telling me about some crazy person on the subway who was staring at him because of a perceived slight. My doorman certainly did not think that was normal behavior among his peers. I also taught high school for many years at an urban high school and can tell you that the attitudes you describe were very rare (note that they can be both very rare and more common than in other groups). And, speaking of high school, the attitudes you discuss tend to be those of young people. Given that rather few African-Americans live in small towns outside the South, you are going to have a hard time getting good data.

a small pct of African-Americans even in urban areas

Maybe. I live in a majority-minority, plurality black town and that sort of behavior is more or less the norm that I see. Lots of exceptions, of course, but definitely the majority of black people around here have a noticeably distinct set of behaviors, accent, slang etc. The more violent and criminal aspect is a small minority, but the larger "ghetto" or "urban" culture is the dominant one. There's a wide scale of underclass behavior, and there's nothing inherently wrong about being louder or touchier than normal for a given culture, but it is noticeable and isn't a fantasy or conspiracy theory. I'm sure there are places where the black underclass is a small minority of black people in the area, but it isn't my town. The underclass is "average" here.

Of course, we're pretty poor in these parts, so the same holds for whites and the hispanic population as well. The white people who live in town are a lot trashier than the ones who live out in the township, and dress, talk and act distinctively. The black people from the township tend to be much more conventional and middle class than the town residents, but there's just a lot less of them. The city is around 45% black and ~20% hispanic, the county is 75% white. So, the middle class suburbs are disproportionately white, while the poor city is disproportionately nonwhite. But middle class people tend to act like middle class people, and underclass like underclass, no matter the race or specific flavor of subculture.

Well, the OP was not referring simply to slang, or accent, nor merely being "louder or touchier" -- my doorman can be a bit touchy. And, as mentioned, I taught in an urban public school for many years,so I am well aware that a subculture exists. But OP specified some particular, anti-social behaviors which are not common. If they were, my doorman would not have thought it worthy of note, and I would have seen it much more often.

As I said, there's a range of behavior native to the subculture, some of which is anti-social, some of which isn't, just like any subculture. Some people just talk the talk, some of them walk the walk.

I would like to very gently point you to the key word to all your commentary that jumps out to me. "Doorman". You live in a building with on-site staff. There's not a single residential place like that in the whole county where I live. A nursing home would be the closest thing we have to that. I would expect that people who live in a place with staff whose whole purpose is to control who can get into the building will have a lot fewer interactions with the seedier side of the tracks.

I would expect that people who live in a place with staff whose whole purpose is to control who can get into the building will have a lot fewer interactions with the seedier side of the tracks.

Because most people's interactions with other people are inside their building, rather than outside? I am going to gently point out that someone who lives in the community you describe living in might well have fewer interactions with people from the seedier side of the tracks than someone who is on the NYC subway every day.

I also want to point out that I mentioned, twice, my extensive experience teaching in an urban public school -- I taught there longer than I have lived in a building with a doorman. So the intimation that somehow I have no idea what the "underclass" is like is mistaken.

I would also like to point out that it seems a bit odd that you are suddenly conflating urban African Americans with "the seedier side of the tracks."

Anyhow, let's not forget the actual claim that the OP made: That 'African Americans . . .in large cities" exhibit "a general sense that they don't need to follow the tacit expectations of society in regards to dress, politeness, language, obeying what seem like trivial rules, and dozens of little things like that; the glorification of criminality; a disinterest in the traditional family unit (e.g., no real sense that they're "expected" to settle down with a wife and kids; having children and more or less abandoning them and not seeing that as particularly shameful); an intense culture of honor, where slights by strangers must be met with a verbal or physical altercation."

My point is simply that that description -- especially glorifying criminality and responding to slights by strangers with verbal or physical altercations -- applies only a to small minority of African Americans in large cities, and I stated the evidence on which I based that assumption. And you actually haven't even refuted that! All you have said is that an urban subculture exists, but your description of that subculture -- that people are louder and touchier, and have a particular mode of speaking -- is far milder than that described by the OP, and one which I agreed with.

Moreover, if indeed the African Americans in your town indeed generally have the attitudes and behaviors that the OP describes, then perhaps that answers OP's question: African Americans in towns like yours are worse than those in urban areas, because the African Americans in NYC and Oakland do not generally have those attitudes and behaviors.

Finally, a note on doormen: The reason that many buildings in my area have doormen is that, 30 years ago, the area was in fact quite seedy -- prostitutes and drug dealers were quite common. So, the presence of a doorman can indicate not that the residents of the building never interact with the seedier side of life, but rather quite the opposite. Moreover, the job of a doorman in NYC is not so much to keep people out as it is to provide services to the residents, especially dealing with deliveries, a major issue in a city where many people do not have cars. And, it is not as if buildings without doormen, including those in your town, must of necessity allow unfettered access to the building: There are such things as buzzers, after all.

I would also like to point out that it seems a bit odd that you are suddenly conflating urban African Americans with "the seedier side of the tracks."

There we go, thanks for playing.

Does anyone have a good sense of how African Americans living in smaller towns compare culturally to those in large cities,

I live in a town of roughly ~19,500 people, of which less than 3% of which is black, from my memories of the last census I checked. 95% White with a smattering of minorities. I've lived here for sixteen years or so, and in that time I've lived in the poorer projects areas as a kid, and nicer places as an adult.

There's minimal crime here, and when it does happen it's usually drug related. There was a drug bust a street or two over last week for fentanyl with five arrests, and three of the five were young black men (there was also a White man and woman who I assume were a couple, but fuck if I know from mugshots). Very little violence, no gangs, nada.

There's a small neighborhood I walk through sometimes I've noticed is disproportionately black. They host more outdoors events in their yards during the summer than the other people I see, but other than loud music it's harmless.

My sense, as a White outsider, is that there's not really enough blacks here for any sort of black community to thrive. Yeah, okay, some black families live in the same area, maybe even most of them given the small absolute number, but even those areas are still White.

The key to integration has always been to spread minorities out and not let them form into ethnic collectives. These blacks might still be disproportionately involved in the crime we do have, but they're not a blight. They're just black-flavored poor Whites.

To be clear, poor southern whites have barely better outcomes than blacks.

Except when it comes to crime

The White underclass is nothing to envy, certainly.

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