[rayiner]

Residential zoning is just so wrong. It’s trendy on the left to say it’s “racist” and it is that, but it’s also classist and elitist and WASP supremacist (e.g. banning multigenerational families, which are common among both Hispanics and lower-tier whites).

I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)

[spacemanmatt]

IIRC, we call it racist without the scare-quotes because of it's disproportional effect. That's how that word works.

[rayiner]

> That's how that word works.

Incorrect. In ordinary usage, “racism” means prejudice based on race. There are efforts by some to muddy its meaning, to encompass both racial prejudice and “disproportionate effect,” but that’s not the common usage.

[JumpCrisscross]

> In ordinary usage, “racism” means prejudice based on race. There are efforts by some to muddy its meaning, to encompass both racial prejudice and “disproportionate effect,” but that’s not the common usage.

Thank you. For some reason I've never been able to explain it so succinctly when two people I respect get into an obviously semantic argument around something being or not being racist and then getting lost in the weeds of the intentions of the long dead.

[tptacek]

Just so we're all clear, the racism of prohibitions on intergenerational housing --- which is what BLM is talking about when they talk about the "nuclear family" or whatever it is they said to spook the normies --- is racism, not disproportionate impact. Single family zoning was designed to keep specific ethnicities out of "white" neighborhoods. It's not an accident.

[spacemanmatt]

Do you think that there is a large gap between prejudice and disproportionate effect? I'm just curious how this break down for you.

[tptacek]

I don't know, I'm just saying these policies were motivated directly, maybe exclusively by racial animus.

[spacemanmatt]

> In ordinary usage

Sounds like you are referring to a connotative value which is common to a subculture of English speakers. I learned to use the dictionary definition from sociology 101.

[rayiner]

You definitely didn’t learn the “dictionary definition” in any sociology class, but rather a redefinition of the term developed in social sciences circles that’s used mainly there.

https://www.google.com/search?q=racism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=...

> noun prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized. "a program to combat racism"

[spacemanmatt]

That's nice that you think the dictionary definition is an newer academic construct

[lelanthran]

> That's nice that you think the dictionary definition is an newer academic construct

If you have to change the dictionary meaning of a word to make your argument work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.

[rayiner]

I’m not sure I understand your point. The dictionary definition, as I quoted above, refers to prejudice. Is that what you learned in sociology?