Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
These are good points though a significant part of the situation is attributable to governmental policies, past and present. Residential segregation that was enabled by blockbusting and redlining with complicit governments at various levels.
Also of course the way public schools are funded in the U.S. is a complex web that can only have originally been designed to discriminate against poorer communities, many of them African-American.
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This is true although Canada is quite different in those areas.
I think the idea that any Canadian authorities were out to get minorities in the 1960's is seriously overplayed (it was true at times in history, like with wars against native groups or anti-Asian policies around 1900 but nobody from that era is alive today). It is more accurate to say that in the postwar period there was a paternalistic view toward minorities and the economically disadvantaged, combined with a mistaken belief that urban renewal was an effective tool. Back in those days there wasn't the same track record of failed interventions to consider, so we have to be careful how we judge people of that time. It was not necessarily obvious that Regent Park or Uniacke Square or Cabrini-Green would turn out as they did, and those were all examples of constructive intervention, people being given modern homes with what were good amenities many households didn't have back then.
If I were to pick the 2 biggest misconceptions about this issue, I think they'd be:
1) Poor or uneducated people don't know how to look after themselves, so they need to be controlled.
2) The state of affairs of disadvantaged minorities happened because of a history of malice or intentional bad decisions.
How you think about (1) and (2) can have big impact on how good different interventions look. (1) means you rely on less effective top-down directives rather than supporting people and getting buy-in. (2) allows you to believe that simple solutions will work.
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