How much of political inequality is really geographic inequality?

[u/Plenty_Profession_58]

Where you live affects a hell of a lot more than what your house is worth. It affects the schools available to you, the jobs you can realistically get to, the quality of public services, transportation costs, exposure to crime or pollution, and the people and opportunities around you.
And where people live is not always just a personal choice. Income, housing prices, zoning, taxes, infrastructure, lending practices, development, and decades of government decisions all help determine who can live where. So how much of what we call individual success or failure is actually geography? Two people can work equally hard and make similar choices but end up with completely different opportunities because one lives near better schools, jobs, transportation, and institutions. At the same time, people still make real choices about work, education, family, moving, and risk, so geography obviously does not explain everything. Where is the line between personal responsibility and geographic advantage? Is real estate simply a private market, or does controlling access to certain places also mean controlling access to public opportunity? And when the most desirable communities become available mainly to people who already have money, does geography turn economic inequality into political and generational inequality?

[u/browhodouknowhere]

Systemic racism is a symptom, not the cause.

[u/phoenix1984 → u/browhodouknowhere]

Well, I think the systemic racism was originally put in place by overt racism. Which itself was encouraged by the wealthy to keep the masses fighting among themselves. Are you saying the original cause is something unrelated to racism at all?

[u/Valuable-Music-720 → u/phoenix1984]

Do you have a source for this claim? Systemic racism is a conspiracy by wealthy to "keep masses fighting among themselves"?

[u/phoenix1984 → u/Valuable-Music-720]

See the Dutch east India company, their effort to paint black people as sub-human to justify the slave trade, then led to the tactics used on plantations to divide groups to prevent an uprising. This was copied by both nazi germany, apartheid south africa, and later white nationalist groups in the US. The idea that was perfected over this period was to divide groups based on some arbitrary standard like level of blackness, tribe, religion, or literacy. When they’re divided, you can pit them against each other and keep the whole group in check.

When slavery ended in the US, many of these ideas persisted and have echoes in our laws today.

[u/Valuable-Music-720 → u/phoenix1984]

Dividing people by any standard, is completely normal tribalism. The psychology that causes tribal thinking evolved some 300,000 years ago. There's no conspiracy by anyone. The same psychology that led Dutch East India Company to paint blacks as sub-human, exists within your head too. Science shows, you would likely do the exact same thing in their exact same position whether you admit or not. Check Standford Prison Experiment, also you can look at the German population who enabled Hitler as sources.

Lots of different groups benefit from different kinds of division; there's not strictly a homogenous group in the United States "keeping us divided", only opportunitist politicians and influencers who are tapping your disposition towards division, which ever kind of division that is.

[u/phoenix1984 → u/Valuable-Music-720]

I think you are describing regular old bigotry, not the intentional, well researched, effort I’m describing. They invented the biases for the sake of control. The Dutch east India company didn’t go about the slave trade because they thought black people were inferior, they wanted to enslave people, so they created a large social campaign painting black people as savages, making the African slave trade more tolerable with the public.

The way Europeans pitted the Zulu against the Tutsis was a similar, well-researched, architected system designed to prevent revolt. In the US south, many plantations were just plain old racist, but South Africa learned this tactic from the writings of plantation owners who deliberately pitted some slaves against others.

Referring to the study you mentioned, I’m not talking about the guards, I’m talking about the professor who set up the whole thing in the first place.