Have you ever realized that a certain area of town has a certain race more than others?
Most people might look at that and see political reasons for this happening. In some cases it is, but in many cases, it’s the fact that people tend to hang around and live near people that are like them.
I recently read a book called Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell. In the book, he talks a lot about the stats and discrimination that we see all around us. He makes some very interesting points, including ones like saying that there are different kinds of discrimination, and some are actually quite good. It caused me to think about a lot of plain sense stuff with new perspective.
One of which was on this subject of “people sort themselves out”.
When you see two parts of town and one has mainly black people and the other mainly white people, it’s easy to think that there’s some kind of discrimination going on, but what’s odd is that not nearly as many people will point out to you that in that same town, 90% of the people from India live within 2 miles of each other. I’m making some of these numbers us to help emphasize, the point is, however, that people who are similar to one another often tend to move together whether there are politics or racism involved or not. It’s natural.
Another interesting point, aside from the idea that people actively sort themselves out is that nature isn’t exactly what you might call fair when it comes to the way it spreads it’s offerings out. Why is it that Yellowstone has 60% of all of the world’s geysers? Or why is it that Asia has over 100 peaks over 20,000 feet, but Africa has none.
Sometimes things that seem too sinister to be a coincidence really aren’t willful discrimination, it’s simply the way things spread out.