The other day,
and I had a great conversation over at his podcast, The Walt Right Perspective. We talked about a number of topics, and we could’ve probably gone on for a lot longer about some of them, so I’m going to elaborate on some of the things we touched on during our conversation that I didn’t get a chance to talk about a little more in-depth. (Side note: another of his other guests recently did something similar, which I saw as I was in the middle of writing this, which I thought was a funny coincidence.)We started to talk about some of the biggest differences in racial relations that I’ve noticed between my experience in Minnesota compared to Virginia, and mentioned the segregation in the former versus the latter; on the books in housing for a while, and de facto later. This is, of course, due largely in part to the history of slavery in the latter region and the subsequent policies in the former that were enacted when Black Americans migrated North en masse and settled mostly in a handful of cities looking for economic opportunity in industry, and to escape the harsh and often deadly policies and culture of the postbellum South.
A related topic we discussed briefly are Somali refugees in Minnesota. Somalis have been coming to Minnesota as refugees since the early 90s, which sounds earlier than what I said on the podcast (“fairly recently”) but what is time, anyway? The 90s was mentally ten years ago, as we Elder Millennials know well. What I was referring to and wanted to elaborate on more was how the organizations that placed the Somali refugee population tended to place large numbers of refugees in the same areas, creating a lack of incentive for the newest population to integrate with the broader culture and acclimate more easily into the local culture where most were likely to stay. I think this practice makes sense in some ways, as a refugee population is especially vulnerable to, or already suffering from, trauma and fear from displacement from their homes and the violence and instability in their home country, and having people nearby who share your culture and background is important to the process of healing from all of that. I would hope for the same if I found myself in such a situation.
But, I always worry when I see a trend toward racial segregation in a diverse community. I didn’t realize how rampant it was in the Twin Cities when I lived there, like a fish who didn’t know what water was. From a white perspective, racial tensions are so much… less… where I am now in Virginia than they can be back home. It’s refreshing. It feels like I was in a snow globe someone forgot about but then finally saw one day and shook up, thankfully resetting my expectations and social abilities.
Anyway, immigrant and refugee populations pretty much always assimilate into the broader American culture after a generation or two, and while I worry about the ill effects the de facto and even well-intentioned segregation in the manner described above can have on society and racial relations as a whole, especially considering Minneapolis’ history, I don’t think we need to catastrophize about any immigrant or refugee population, really, for that reason. I kinda just wish people would chill on that. But, of course, sharing a common enough culture is important for social cohesion, which means assimilation is usually the goal in countries as diverse as ours. I remember two big waves of refugees in Minnesota: a Hmong wave early in my elementary school life in the 90s, and later, Somalis, the latter of whom I never really got to know well because most of them were placed in South Minneapolis, while many Hmong refugees and their families were often in North Minneapolis, where I lived and went to school. In doing some research for this post, I have found a number of articles about refugee dispersal policies that I’m going to need to look into more before I can provide any greater insight or take a position one way or the other. I simply don’t know enough about the Somali population to offer a real informed opinion here because I always lived in other parts of the city and had more of a natural interest in the Hmong diaspora since I was more familiar with it.
Before yoga teacher training started in February, I was reading a book called The Devil You Know by Charles M. Blow, about his case for building Black political power by encouraging a reverse Great Migration where Black people living in those segregated, racist, cold Northern cities where White people just didn’t seem to want them there would move their families to the states in the South that already have large Black populations, like Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and a few others (I believe he lives in Atlanta now). As a White person, it feels a little weird to agree with him, as if it can only sound like I’m saying, “yeah! Put all the Black people down there, away from my people!” (although I live in Virginia now, one of his destination states, so that doesn’t really work, but you see what I’m saying: it just feels weird), but he makes a compelling point in regards to the positive effects this could have on the Black community. I’m looking forward to getting back into the book when I have more time for recreational reading again in a month or so. The book intrigued me because it directly contradicts my intuition on segregation and how it's detrimental to a very racially diverse society like what we have in the United States, and because it’s coming from a Black perspective instead of a White one. After that, I really need to finish American Nations by Colin Woodard. I’m obsessed with the map that came from it but just haven’t gotten past the first few chapters. And I think it will complement Blow’s book nicely as it gets into the cultural differences in each American “nation” and how and why they came to be.
I talked about my always being a little obsessed with maintaining philosophical consistency in my world view and how, when I started my anarchist phase, that affected the way I started looking at my romantic relationships for awhile and got me interested in polyamory (and practicing it, somewhat sloppily, for a few years). A similar pattern preceded the beginning of the end of my pure identification with left-anarchism a few years later: I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer for an economic alternative for capitalism other than various band-aids like regulations and safety nets; I didn’t trust centralized, planned economies and thought things like bartering and mutual aid were too rudimentary in such a large population. The only thing that appealed to me, distributism, was so niche and relatively unknown and had no chance of having a revolution of any kind in my lifetime (although there’s potential to gradually get there), and the desire to be ideologically consistent outweighed my need or the utility of calling myself an anarchist anymore. I couldn’t reconcile it. I still have the requisite anarchy symbol tattooed on my arm (poorly, of course), though. It’s a nice reminder of a period of my life on which I look back fondly.
I think my shift toward writing more personal essays rather than focusing solely on cultural and political commentary like I used to might be related to how mentally exhausting it can be to feel this compulsion to align every part of my philosophical ideas and ideological stances in such a way that I feel almost decision-fatigued when I try to argue a case in any direction. I am plagued by the need to understand and explain every side as well as I can so I don’t argue poorly and, while I’m pulled naturally in the direction of empathy and fairness, which usually puts me on the left in most cases, I’m never confident enough that my own understanding of my own opinions will hold up in some random debate with someone from the other side, and I always fear that I am missing something important or have some blind spot I don’t know about.
This causes another “problem,” which I put in quotes because it also has its perks: I read, watch, and listen (and sometimes talk!) to people I naturally disagree with more often than I read, watch, and listen to people I feel more of a political or ideological affinity for (the opposite generally tends to be true socially, but that changed more as I moved to a more conservative area and don’t have as much of a choice). The result is that I often end up understanding the opposition much better than others in my cohort — which makes the bad arguments and rhetoric from my own side even more irritating to me. Like I told Walt, I spent a few months listening to Richard Spencer’s podcast backlog prior to the 2016 election in a near-feverish attempt to learn everything I could about this mysterious new “Alt-Right” that had been all over the media in 2015/16. Similarly, back in 2010, I read all of Glenn Beck’s goofy little cartoon books, and a couple of Milton Friedman’s books and essays on capitalism (I tried so hard to read Ayn Rand but just could not get through more than a few pages of anything she wrote). As Walt mentioned in the list of the topics we discussed on the episode, we have a “shared appreciation for people who go to war with their own side,” and I think that’s related to my contrarian tendency to consume more media from people I don’t agree with than people I do, in some chicken vs. egg way. It’s why I appreciate writers like Walt, Freddie deBoer, and Hanania, among others. It’s how I’ve usually structured my arguments when I wrote mostly about gender issues and economics, as well as left politics in general.
But personal essays are a lot more fun right now: I don’t have to decide what to say, I just have to decide how to say it. I have lots of stories.
Anyway, that was my first time on a podcast, and it was so much fun. I appreciate that Walt is interested in talking to people from so many different backgrounds and with perspectives much different from his own. It’s like listening to Rogan, but without all the psychedelics and MMA and advertisements for supplements. You never know who you’ll hear from next. I definitely enjoyed talking to someone from “the other side” about such an array of interesting topics in a way that wasn’t structured as a debate, but rather a friendly conversation.