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"The same issue affected Asian-Americans. When progressive suburban developer Joseph Eichler’s company sold a home in 1954 to an Asian-American family in Palo Alto, word spread through the neighborhood and five homeowners approached the company demanding immediate refunds.

'Get out,' Eichler’s business partner, Jim San Jule, told the white homeowners. 'We don’t even want people like you in our subdivisions.'"

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Segregation is an insidious evil that can exacerbate problems such as violence and poverty for generations after legal controls or social pressures disappear. See: the entire city of Chicago and the issues it has faced.

"Seperate but equal" was abandoned by SCOTUS decades ago. Maybe it's time for you to catch up.

He's describing voluntary movement. For example, the tendency of Mexicans to live near each other, or for Indian immigrants to the US to live in Jersey City or Edison.

Enlightenedfool's point is that most people, including very pleasant people, harbor tribalist feelings. And these tribalist feelings inform consumption choices. For example, the bad romantic comedies my girlfriend watches have a disproportionate number of black people in them - eventually google informed me that "African American Comedy" is a genre.

A steelman of enlightenedfool's point might note the condemnation of white people making consumption choices based on tribalism, and ask if a black woman preferring to watch movies with Meagan Good and Taraji P. Henson rather than Kate Hudson and Jennifer Aniston deserves similar condemnation.

> Housing segregation traditionally has been the practice of denying African American or other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Misinformation can take the form of realtors or landlords not giving a certain ethnic group, or race, an accurate portrayal of available units. Racial steering typically occurs when realtors or landlords steer European Americans to available units in white communities, and African Americans to black or racially mixed communities. Generally, racial steering involves misinformation on the part of the realtor or landlord as well, because they will not tell the African Americans or other minorities about the available units in the European American communities.

That used information asymmetry, not threats of violence, to steer 'voluntary movement' and end up with a higher amount of segregation than would have occurred if all parties were equally informed.

While illegal, these forms of housing segregation still exist: see http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-obtains-120... as an example. The quote "Unlawful steering by real estate agents frustrates the rights of people to make fully informed housing choices and perpetuates segregated housing patterns" shows that these non-violent policies are directly tied to segregation.

Nobody except you said there was a threat of violence. The original article even compared the violence of the Jim Crow South with "the Californian way [which] worked tacitly through housing, jobs and education policies. On top of racially restrictive covenants, realtors around the San Francisco Bay Area were engaged in a practice called blockbusting."

This isn't violence. Restricted covenants have been unenforceable by the government since Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, so it's not like there's even any threat of government force to back up a covenant through the civil courts.

The comment by enlightenedfool are personal, but don't reflect the law. It is illegal to discriminate based on national origin just like it's illegal to discriminate based on race. Both have been illegal since the Civil Rights Act of 1968/Fair Housing Act. Currently the only legally accepted threat of violence, for those who hold that government force is backed by a threat of violence, is against those who use discriminatory practices.

In any case, enlightenedfool was not talking about violence either. ("And that's not because of violence.") Neither was yzzxy, who referred to the housing discrimination in Chicago, which were very similar to the non-violent way of California.

For your statement to make sense means (I believe) that you inferred that yzzxy's reference to "separate but equal" was a statement that equated enlightenedfool's beliefs on "own kind" as identical to the specific government practices ruled illegal in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and that you believe laws are only possible via the threat of violence by the government, and therefore yzzxy must mean that enlightenedfool also want coercive violence.

This is a stretch. It's much easier to believe that yzzxy uses it as a short-hand for the thinking behind the separate but equal doctrine rather than specific implementation points. For one, Brown v. Board of Education was not about private discrimination in the housing market but about government discrimination. For another, the theory of "laws backed by threat of violence" is extremely tenuous here. Redlining occurred through mortgage discrimination, via the National Housing Act of 1934, where banks ended up denying mortgage capital to high-risk/strongly minority areas. Where is the violence in "we will not give federal mortgage insurance to houses in this neighborhood"? For a third, if anything, it is yzzxy who supports government-backed violence as a way to prevent further segregation.

The only way I could understand your conclusion required an implicit acceptance of an incorrect definition - that 'housing segregation uses threats of force to live separately.' It seemed easier to first start with that wrong statement, as it would otherwise be impossible to address your other substantive points.

Instead you ended by asserting that any definition arguments are pointless - quite odd from someone who asked "What does "systemic" mean?" on this very thread? If you really believe that definition arguments are meaningless, why do you get into them?

You say you are "trying to understand", and yet reject as meaningless anything which might lead to a change in your understanding.

How disingenuous. And yes, I'm using my own private definition that you can't respond to because I haven't told you what it means.

Yzzxy did refer to violent segregation: ""Seperate but equal" was abandoned by SCOTUS decades ago. Maybe it's time for you to catch up."

The fact is that housing segregation in this era was enforced by threats of violence, aka "law". Same for banking regulations.

Instead you ended by asserting that any definition arguments are pointless

Providing definitions is important to clarify thinking. Thanks to you providing a definition, I know what concepts you refer to when you say "segregation". In contrast, I don't know what concept "systemic" refers to because of the lack of a definition.

There is no point in me telling you your definition is wrong. If I convince you, all that will happen is you'll apply different mental labels to the same things. Your conclusions will remain the same, they'll just be phrased with different words.

Further, all this argument over definitions has gotten us completely distracted from the actual point. The point is this: humans often allow tribalist feelings to influence consumption choices (housing, movies, etc). Is this a bad thing that should be prevented and/or condemned? The definition of segregation is completely irrelevant to the answer to this question.

If you scroll up, you'll realize that we are discussing cases where no one has the power to restrict anything. The only power anyone has is to buy or sell a good (movies in my example or houses in enlightenedfool's example) to a willing partner in trade.

I also didn't "decide" anything. I merely asked a normative question. I know you have some vendetta against me, but it might help to read my comments before carrying on this vendetta.

This is something you keep saying to different people. The common factor is you.

You claim to ask the difficult quesions when all you do is spew inane trash; then bicker about weird definitions; and then play the victim card by claiming everyone has a vendatta against you.

That is not at all what was being discussed, but what you decided the discussion was about by making the wrong assumption that housing choices were as voluntary as picking movies. They are not, neither are they voluntary, as research shows (as well as the discussed article). Going back to "systemic", bureaucracies in the US (both private and governmental) do restrict housing choices by discriminating based on proxies for race (i.e. correlated variables, that are sometimes directly related to race, and sometimes less directly).

I have no vendetta against you, but the way you're discussing these issues is insincere, and shows complete disregard to the vast body of evidence collected. But it does provoke an emotional reaction on my part because it is a prime example of "nerd bigotry" that's so rampant among startup people.

You say you discuss objective facts, where, in fact, you make false analogies and presumptions that are precisely where racism is often found. The most obvious example, given by countless people before you, is that of "voluntary choice", while racism works precisely by restricting choice. I will not go at length into how that's done, because the process has been documented so many times and in great detail. But if person A has choices, say, 1 through 5, and person B has choices 1 thorough 3, and exercising those choices requires more effort on the part of person B, it is true that whatever person B chooses is voluntary, but it is no less true that it is less voluntary than the choice of person A. This is doubly true, if choices 4 and 5 -- unavailable to person B -- or, say, choice 3, which is available for person B but extremely hard to achieve, are precisely the choices that confer more power on their chooser.

So: 1/ restriction of choice is not binary, and is often done in roundabout ways (which is why studies are required). 2/ Not all discrimination is equal :) - discrimination that results in unfair power distribution is far worse than discrimination that has little effect on the distribution of power.

I.e., banks choose who to extend loans to based on non-racial factors like debt/income, job tenure, home appraisals and models of future home value? Yep, nothing voluntary at all about a private party choosing who to trade with.

Anyway, it's completely tangential to this particular thread, which is about people choosing which houses to buy based on tribalist feelings.

But it does provoke an emotional reaction on my part because it is a prime example of "nerd bigotry" that's so rampant among startup people.

Asking concrete questions is "nerd bigotry"? Um, ok. I'm not even sure what that is, but asking makes me just a creationist so meh.

I will not go at length into how that's done, because the process has been documented so many times and in great detail.

My uncited experts proved that your uncited experts are wrong and also worse than Hitler. I win! <- See how appeals to unstated authority are not productive?

Now remember how I compared to discussions on topics like HFT? If this were an HFT discussion, one of the HFT's would have just linked to a page on nasdaq.com and said "go read the docs on hide-not-slide orders, you'll see they work like I just described".

The fact that those factors are non-racial does not mean it's not racism! We're back to that again. Racism (like sexism) does not require malice or ill intent (or even bigotry or prejudice) once its systemic! Suppose you make sure by some way that there's a strong correlation between race and wealth, and then a bank gives loan only to rich people. Well, that's racism! That doesn't mean the loan officer is a bigot! This is something you need to understand. Banking practices can be racist even if no one at the bank is prejudiced (they can all be liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, twice), and all of their decisions are based on pure financial reasons, only because hundreds of years ago society was organized in some particular way. That's how it works. In fact, you could say that everyone is a victim, because those bank officers, through no fault of their own, are now cogs in a racist machinery. So they're victims, too, except that some people are bigger victims than others -- some are part of a racist system, and some feel its consequences every day.

If you, by some mechanism, create a society in which people's rational, self-serving actions would result in a system where power is largely withheld from some racial groups then you've built a racist society even if no one in that society is a xenophobe.

> which is about people choosing which houses to buy based on tribalist feelings.

No. "Based on tribalist feeling" is your conjecture. Yes, tribalist feelings are probably a contributing factor, but racism is a much more dominant one. How do I know that? Well, because I bothered to read some studies.

> Asking concrete questions is "nerd bigotry"? Um, ok. I'm not even sure what that is, but asking makes me just a creationist so meh.

No. Pretending to ask question you don't really want the answer to, and ignoring science because it isn't physics is.

In fact, there are a lot of interesting questions an interested nerd could ask. For example, while anti-nerd discrimination is certainly not systemic, one could ask about discrimination against unattractive people. I think there are studies that show they are being discriminated against even on loan applications (and from there you could take it to other correlations and discrimination by proxy etc.). Of course, it's not too hard to show how that's not at all like racism or sexism (if only in measure), but at least there is something interesting to talk about. That would be a college-, or even graduate- level question. But your "questions" are kindergarten level, and show that you have no desire to even learn the very basics of this issue.

> See how appeals to unstated authority are not productive?

My uncited experts can be found in a 2 minute Google search. Yours are made up so I win.

> If this were an HFT discussion, one of the HFT's would have just linked to a page on nasdaq.com and said "go read the docs on hide-not-slide orders, you'll see they work like I just described".

Wow, those guys are really smart! I won't send you links to the top 50 papers showing the data, or even to the top two, because either you won't read them, or, if you do, you'll make up a baby-nerd argument to invalidate them because the definitions (which, as always, would rely on you having some basic background in the science) won't be rigorous enough to your liking (because you don't have the background). Then, I'll send you links to books with the definitions, which you won't read, and it will end up just you asking me to teach you all of psychology and history back to first principles, which you won't find satisfactory until I go back to elementary particles, which is impossible because we're dealing with intractable science (and hard because I'm not knowledgable enough). So, no thank you.

Also -- and that is the real reason you find HFT discussions different -- this kind of discussion evokes a response in you that makes you unwilling to open yourself up to new information. HFT doesn't. Yes, just like a creationist; I'm sorry, but it's the same kind of emotional response, only you and the creationists reach for your own kind of weapon -- yours is misused logic. I mean, you know all those thousands of studies exist (I'm sure you've seen those buildings at your university), and you know everyone who has studied them reaches similar conclusions (similar enough for you, that is; there are quite a few controversies), but you choose to believe that those conclusions are based on faulty logic rather than on data (they are based on data), and you think you can argue with them using logic (logic, BTW, is not so effective in the intractable sciences, just as it's not so effective in QM -- until you learn the basic mechanics of things). Those conclusions are the result of 40 or so years of research by thousands of historians, social workers, sociologists and psychologists. Some of them -- though not all -- are great scientists.

Similarly, much as I dislike them, the "No Students, Foreigners or Bachelors" restrictions imposed by most housing societies near me are voluntary.

We're all humans? Aren't we all our own kind? There is no need to make further segregation.

If you segregate individuals into sub-standard education, you end up with people who's ability doesn't match their potential.