Remote View
Safe Water
Safe Water
76 comments
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When we were picking a school district, we looked at school rating sites. But then we found out that those ratings are mostly a proxy for how white the school is.
So we switched to looking at school funding instead.
And uhhh... you're not gonna believe this...
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The school district where I live straddles a wealthier, predominantly white area and a poor, predominantly black area. The idea when it was formed was because rich parents want good education for their kids, and contribute more taxes via bigger homes, the schools could provide better education to the poorer areas and over time help to improve the socioeconomic balance.
In reality, all the rich parents around us just send their kids to Catholic or charter schools, which fungus money from the school district which makes it unable to provide a decent education at all, screwing over the poorer area wise than if they had two different school districts (since the public schools need to have the capacity to in theory at year accept all the kids in the case none went to charter schools). Just more proof voucher programs are racism by another name.
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See, I grew up in the era of the Gifted And Talented Program. You'd be in a neighborhood with a mix of kids and each kid would be evaluated to determine if they were a "GT" student. Then the GT students would be funneled into one set of classes and the Non-GT students would be funneled into another set of classes.
Take a wild guess what the economic and ethnic makeups of the GT v Non-GT classes were.
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You're not going to believe this
says most believable thing ever
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I thought this comic was super racist and got confused about the upvotes. Then I read the comments.
I'm way too European for this shit.
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Nah, I just thought it was sarcastic. Like the Segregation-Era average racist attitute of: "Oh, there's not too many black people to taint the water supply" type of thing, and this comic is pointing out the racism, not being racist it self.
Then I read the comments and apparantly, it had something to do with funding.
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I thought this comic was super racist
The comic is super racist.
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Or more specifically, it’s pointing out the systemic racism in the United States.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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...what? Am I just not racist enough to understand this?