The thing about the swimming-pool example is that “town leaders” (rich whites) were okay with poor whites using town pools, but freaked out at black people using them.
While this is true, I think it’s more of a symptom of the in-group expanding when it acquires an easier-to-distinguish bullying target. Excluding the Irish and Italians in the US was (generally) more difficult than looking for melanin or hair texture, and as they lost their accents many could blend right in before being noticed. And once you’re in, you’re much harder to dehumanise. These days a “no Irish” sign would be quickly laughed off or removed, but they were everywhere in the US once.
Same problem with excluding poorer whites of all varieties from pools, you might be able to do it by looking at clothing, but even that’s harder and there will be infiltrators to the niche in-group social sphere. The Great Gatsby infiltrating the ultra wealthy, and the kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes friends with less-poor kids at the community pool.
You can see it in England as well, the old-money Londoners will look down on another equally white English person for having an accent that indicates they’re from Manchester or Sussex. Or even worse, gasp Yorkshire! I’ve seen that happen to Bavarian and Saxon Germans too - people ashamed to speak because their accent identified them as out-group.
I’m glad this is slowly changing as more historically out-group people make it into in-group leadership positions, and people aren’t as shamed out of intercultural relationships. But I think that there will always be some arbitrary group of people who are considered to be the bottom of the social hierarchy. And those people will generally be the people who are most obviously different from the equally arbitrary ‘ideal’. Like people who rely on assistive technology, or people who are very overweight, or people with ‘bad’ teeth.
Maybe in the future it will be all humans if we’re conquered by an alien species who we can’t easily blend in with. We’ll all be inferior to the many-tentacled, who are clearly the superiorly limbed species.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of “I’m taking my ball and going home” that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town “elite” who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to ‘white’ vs ‘black’.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and ‘race relations’ and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn’t.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because ‘mixed marriages don’t work’ (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same ‘race’, their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow ‘different’ in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It’s really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.
The thing about the swimming-pool example is that “town leaders” (rich whites) were okay with poor whites using town pools, but freaked out at black people using them.
While this is true, I think it’s more of a symptom of the in-group expanding when it acquires an easier-to-distinguish bullying target. Excluding the Irish and Italians in the US was (generally) more difficult than looking for melanin or hair texture, and as they lost their accents many could blend right in before being noticed. And once you’re in, you’re much harder to dehumanise. These days a “no Irish” sign would be quickly laughed off or removed, but they were everywhere in the US once.
Same problem with excluding poorer whites of all varieties from pools, you might be able to do it by looking at clothing, but even that’s harder and there will be infiltrators to the niche in-group social sphere. The Great Gatsby infiltrating the ultra wealthy, and the kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes friends with less-poor kids at the community pool.
You can see it in England as well, the old-money Londoners will look down on another equally white English person for having an accent that indicates they’re from Manchester or Sussex. Or even worse, gasp Yorkshire! I’ve seen that happen to Bavarian and Saxon Germans too - people ashamed to speak because their accent identified them as out-group.
I’m glad this is slowly changing as more historically out-group people make it into in-group leadership positions, and people aren’t as shamed out of intercultural relationships. But I think that there will always be some arbitrary group of people who are considered to be the bottom of the social hierarchy. And those people will generally be the people who are most obviously different from the equally arbitrary ‘ideal’. Like people who rely on assistive technology, or people who are very overweight, or people with ‘bad’ teeth.
Maybe in the future it will be all humans if we’re conquered by an alien species who we can’t easily blend in with. We’ll all be inferior to the many-tentacled, who are clearly the superiorly limbed species.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of “I’m taking my ball and going home” that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town “elite” who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to ‘white’ vs ‘black’.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and ‘race relations’ and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn’t.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because ‘mixed marriages don’t work’ (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same ‘race’, their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow ‘different’ in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It’s really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.