Racism - It's a Neighborhood Thing
As some of you know, I recently moved from a neighborhood in St. Paul, MN to a western suburb of Minneapolis. We bought a townhome in a small development, so we're selling our previous house right now. It went on the market a little over a week ago. I'm getting some lessons in neighborhood prejudices from that.
The neighborhood I lived is at least half Hmong families. They've bought homes in the six square block neighborhood as they've gone up for sale. We liked our Hmong neighbors. They were quiet, polite, and willing to pitch in with things like snow removal during the 17 years I lived there.
The other half of the homeowners and residents in that area are almost all white. My next door neighbor, the neighbor in the house behind mine, and several others in the immediate area.
So, I'm gone from there now, and our realtor is handling the sale pretty much on her own. What I've heard from her shocked me. I wasn't surprised that most of the people who have been shown the house are Hmong. I expected that. What I didn't expect was to hear from my realtor that some neighbors have openly told her "I hope you don't sell that house to Hmongs." I never heard anything like that from them when I lived there.
Of course, it will almost certainly sell to a new owner who is Hmong. That's fine with me. I don't care one bit who buys my previous home. We put on a new roof, painted the entire interior of the house, and installed new flooring in the basement, a bedroom, and the bathroom. I installed some new appliances, too, and dolled up the kitchen cabinets. All neutral colors in a Taupe color scheme. Well, I didn't do any of that. We hired folks to do that. I've only been in there once since the work was finished. I have better things to do.
I've been trying to figure out what on Earth my neighbors have against the Hmong people who live in that neighborhood. I can't remember anything any of them ever did that bothered me one bit. It can only be simple racism. How strange that I'm only now finding out that some of my neighbors are racists assholes.
Anyhow, since about the only people who have looked at the house are Hmong, I'm sure it will sell to a Hmong family. Too bad for the asshole neighbors, I guess...
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I also think it's interesting that minorities will tend to flock together, but it makes sense if they feel there's greater protection (or simply kinship) with their similar minorities.
I used to work for a company that acted as a third party to settle disputes between customers and suppliers regarding the quality of the products. We'd use the documents in their agreements with each other as a guide, and then inspect the parts ourselves. Sometimes the parts were located at the supplier's business, sometimes at the customer's business, and other times they were sent to my employer's big warehouse.
I was often sent out to inspect parts away from our warehouse, and I got to see a wide variety of factories that way. Many of them seemed like hell on Earth, to be honest, but especially one place that was extremely HOT from huge ovens always operating inside that place.
Working there was almost nobody except immigrants from Nepal, but it was a Japanese-owned company. To my amazement, I never saw any of them even perspiring despite the terrible heat! One of their supervisors was a Nepalese man who spoke some English (most of them couldn't speak English at all), and he told me that Nepal is very hot except at high altitudes (like the nearby Himalayan mountains), so they were used to it.
And he said that company became mostly Nepalese from word of mouth, with a few Nepalese people recommending that company to their kinfolk from Nepal, with those people applying for jobs there immediately after coming to this country.