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Why do you feel like neighborhoods need to be static in terms of racial composition, forever?

Science is science? Okay then. Is tech tech? It seems that there are more white and Asian people in tech, and Apple is hiring in RDU. Should they not hire the best technologists? Should those technologists not have homes in the area?

By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.

Let’s just speak openly: you’re part of the problem. Neighborhoods can’t get claimed by any given race. People can move where they want. Successful businesses adding jobs to a historically poorer area is a good thing, and you shouldn’t use silly code words like “gentrification” to signal that you don’t want whites moving into your town.




Should they not hire the best technologists?

I do worry about the long-term consequences of removing the "natural selection" factor. My best friend growing up was Korean. His parents were dirt-poor but he was still more academically successful than me and got a better job out of university than me. Because he worked the absolute shit out of himself. The idea someone would deny him an opportunity in order to give it to someone else because of their ethnicity who didn't work as hard nauseates me.

By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.

White people move in, it's gentrification. White people move out, it's white flight. Some arguments are doomed to intractability from the start.


I have no issue with racial composition. I have no issue with Apple hiring the best technologist independent of race. To me, gentrification is a symptom that the people being "displaced" did not have *equal opportunity* to become the best technologists.

This is because funding for upstream programs are ignored in these discussions about student loans, affirmative action, and now DOE grants.

K-12 public schools and literacy rates are shit in the US compared to much of the developed world, and we're sitting here yapping about diversity in applied physics research.

What the actual fuck?


Ultimately a job at Apple is the pinnacle for most engineers. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by kicking this racial bias / affirmative action anywhere else down the chain, or onto a different ladder, whether it be in tech, physics, education, research, sports, or whatever.

Equal standards for every one. Every adult, child, race, and creed. Every ladder at every rung. Not all outcomes will be equal and any sort of do-gooder (and often do-badder) effort to “correct” for disparities will be worse than doing nothing at all.


How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"? Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?


> How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"?

Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.

Source: went to private schools my entire life. Saw affirmative action at every admission level (1st grade, 6th, 9th, undergrad, and grad school). Have plenty of friends today working in some prestigious jobs/industries who were basically pushed to the next level undeservingly for the final ~6-8 years of their education. And even when they weren’t reaching the next rung undeservingly, they were attending a school that they didn’t have the test scores to get into on pure merit alone. And you better believe they displaced more deserving kids from the area.

>Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?

The poster that I was replying to never made this claim, and I never rebuked it.


>Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.

I don't think you're addressing what the OP was suggesting. We should be making public schools desirable to go to. If everyone can get a decent education, you might have a chance of not having an affirmative action problem.

For example in Australia, wealthy private schools over funded. But the parents are already well off, they can fund themselves. Meanwhile there are public schools that are under funded. All that money should be going to public schools and building a great public schools system. The US probably has problems with the public school system too.


Let's leave aside the American-style debate around ethnicity for a moment. We know what happens when high-income workers move en masse to a neighborhood. Things get more expensive, and the quality of life decreases for people who did absolutely nothing wrong except live in a place that eventually got settled by some adtech company. The character of the neighborhood changes, and is destroyed in favor of a copy-pasted hipster area with expensive coffee shops. The previous locals do not get the new jobs because the highly-educated workers are imported from other places or work remotely. They do not have the capacity to move easily unlike the new workers.

Yes, you could say tough luck, kids: that's just life and people can move in and out. However, we can clearly see that gentrification is a real concept that people will fight to prevent with some justification and not just some social justice dog-whistle.


There is actually a one to one mapping between anti immigrant rhetoric and this gentrification nonsense.

If people wish to maintain the racial makeup of their neighborhood then they should at least be honest about it. Don't use dogwhisles like neighborhood character when everyone knows it means race


I live in one such neighborhood. The ethnic mix has not changed, at least not in a noticeable way. The cool people are gone, and were replaced by tech workers. The old locals are struggling. A new coffee shop with high-priced drinks and a co-working space literally just opened a few weeks ago.

Don't assume your own North American perspective maps to everything.




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