I try really hard to be precise on HN because I recognize and even begrudgingly respect pedantry. This is why I wrote “de facto segregation” in my original post, just because I was concerned that somebody responding to my post might not be clear about the topic of discussion. And while I can reluctantly respect pedantry, I have zero patience for people who combine pedantry with careless reading.

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adastra22 5 days ago | parent [-]

If you think that 'these neighborhoods tend to be black, and these neighborhoods tend to be white, but for largely historical and cultural reasons, and people are free to move and live where they want' is "de facto segregation," then I think you have seriously watered down the term.

This isn't pedantic nitpicking. Segregation is a deeply evil employment of the state machinery to enforce and persist strict racial divisions in a society.

People choosing to stay near their friends, family, and community centers & therefore the census showing large clustering of self-identified racial groups, is not in any way the same thing.

	▲	matthewdgreen 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you go visit the South, you’ll find that many of the segregated neighborhoods that were once segregated by law are still effectively segregated. And beyond that, you’ll find that economic opportunity in many of those neighborhoods is massively restricted. You’ll ask yourself “why don’t more of these people just avail themselves of the same economic opportunities (education, jobs, training, public transportation) that their counterparts in wealthy neighborhoods took advantage of?” And then you’ll notice that in subtle ways many of those things don’t exist: the schools are terrible, the public transportation doesn’t run there, and the jobs don’t exist. One day you’ll notice that the one public light rail line in your city doesn’t have a stop in the wealthier neighborhoods, even though one was planned in the original design, or that specific lines and road projects were blocked because wealthy people objected and bought up essential land and built on it, and so on. At the end of the day you just have to be open to figuring this stuff out. If your view is that people were herded into airless ghettos, and then just stayed there with all the lack of opportunity that entailed, because they were making rational free choices to deprive themselves and their children of economic opportunity, you’re living in a fantasy world.