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Comment by rayiner

6 days ago

If you’re part of the majority group, you really don’t see how cliquish people in minority groups are. Every time I get into a cab with another “brown” person, there is a Q&A. When they find out I’m from a muslim country, it’s all “my brother,” etc. I’ve always found it distasteful.

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rayiner

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pstuart  6 days ago

People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation.

Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.

  • rayiner  6 days ago

    > When it's about "yay community! its kinda nice

    I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.

    For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.

    • pstuart  6 days ago

      I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.

      > For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.

      Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.

  • fouc  6 days ago

    tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.

    In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.

  • soraminazuki  6 days ago

    I still can't believe we have hundreds of years of documented history to learn from, yet human intelligence is still blinded by bigotry.

    • broken-kebab  6 days ago

      The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.

      2 replies →

    • kansface  6 days ago

      I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

      1 reply →