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If you're on Mastodon I highly recommend giving Mekka Okereke a follow. His longer posts on racism in the USA were very eye opening. I've lived through most of what he discusses and some of it even surprised me.
If you have any issue or complaint about the USA, racism is almost certainly at the root of it. No public transit? Because it disproportionately hurts Black people. Bad public schools? Hurting Black people. No social safety nets, rampant health industry abuse, pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and on and on it will astound you how many bad things in America are bad just to spite Black people and regardless of the universal harm they do.
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Is all of this really caused by racism? Or is it designed to hurt poor people, which are predominantely black due to racism?
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I think therea a lot of little racism along the way that inadvertently affected whites as the middle class dwindled and the number of poor whites increased.
So, all rooted in racism, maintained by classism, I'd say.
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In a country founded by white aristocratic slave-owners it should be no surprise that racism and classism are intertwined.
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These are also all things that disproportionally affect the working class
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Some of those things I could see a pattern as described. The exception for me is public transportation. It exists in urban areas with high diversity. But it doesn't exist in the suburbs which are much more white. The rich suburbs, it doesn't matter as everyone is driving a new Audi or whatever. But the poorer white suburbs are really a terrible place to live, you can't go anywhere without a car, and most jobs don't pay wages that accommodate housing, food and car expenses anymore. The cost increases have way outpaced wages. I know that affects urban life too, but at least they have access to buses etc.
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Car centrism lobbied by oil and auto industries is very responsible for the laws and policies that forged this situation. But to assume it isn't sieved through a racists filter as well is naive. The most popular public transport in America, New York, is a perfect example. There's a subway, fast and frequent, highly convenient in a high density city. They have buses, awful and inefficient when deployed in a traffic adled city without priority lanes. There are black and Hispanic, and white neighborhoods. Guess who got what when the system was designed?
Rural America is a bit different, of course, but guess which communities get all the high capacity high speed highway projects and high frequency maintenance, and who gets stuck with small rural roads and zero maintenance or investment?
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No public transit? Because it disproportionately hurts Black people
Why is that? Due to getting harassed by controllers?
Or are you just being sarcastic?
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Because access to public transport helps poorer communities.
And then as the other reply said, when transit networks were planned they would give black neighbourhoods less, if any, connectivity into the metro networks.
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There are cities that have poor transit connectivity to certain areas because when the systems were designed those were black areas. Some places even ran highways through black neighborhoods to further segregate them from other areas.
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Excellent recommendation. Instant follow. Currently listening (Read Aloud for Firefox on Android) to one of his threads and it's so good.
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Mekka Okereke
posts on racism in the USA
Works at Google 😬
That's gotta suck for him.
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Targeting the messenger of truths is right outta fascist playbooks.-
If you're implying I'm targeting him, I'm not. I'm saying it must suck for him that the company he works for went full bootlicker.
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Ah yeah that wasn’t clear. Apologies.
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79 comments