[extropy-chat] all that concerns me is the future of education

[Lee Corbin]

Mike writes

> On 11/4/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> > Moreover, the services are much more racially integrated than society at
> > large;  young men and women there mix freely while their counterparts
> > on college campuses self-segregate.  Just visit your local college or
> > university and go into commons or cafeteria room to see what I mean.

Well, this is an objective question.  I admit that this is what I have
heard, not seen.  A high school a few miles north of hear even had
segregated parking lots, or so a newspaper article in the San Jose
Mercury said.  There was an Asian parking lot, a white parking lot,
a black parking lot and a hispanic parking lot.  Presumably these
were divisions within the single high school lot.  The reporter asked
a kid if something bad would happen if he didn't park in his group's
lot.  "Probably nothing," came the reply, "but I just wouldn't feel
comfortable doing so."

> It may be that you are seeing what you want to see based on your own bias.

As I say, this is a completely objective question. We need folks
to randomly drop in on high school and college campuses. Hmm,
there was even a book about this a couple of years back, IIRC,
written by a black woman sociologist.  I glanced through it at a
bookstore.  She made the same claim that I'm repeating.

> The same could be said about a homogeneous group of white European-
> descendant Americans - they are likely to segregate themselves into
> groups of Irish, German, French, etc.

And, in America, they did.  They did, that is, until they all actually
assimilated by virtue of the now defunct melting pot.

I don't *know* if any self-segregation along racial lines is principally
because of cultural differences, or physical differences.  But the latter
*could*, you surely admit, be a possibility.  Even fully assimilated
people might have a feeling that they don't *know* if people are
going to react to their racial appearance---and so they might self-
segregate just to avoid that feeling of uncertainty.

> We may actually be in agreement, but I am having difficulty with
> the terms you are using and how you are presenting your ideas.
> I hope I am misreading your intentions.

Could be  :-)   Let's be open, frank, and honest, and---naturally---
write as clearly as we can about our conjectures.

Lee