There's something uncanny here. I finally placed what it is, but those reading probably need some context.
I'm in New Orleans for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Some may recall me working like crazy on a paper/session proposal a few months back, it was for this conference. I'm doing part of a tutorial session on biomolecules and possible feedback/control problems relating to them. (Yes, several cool things, for one I'm actually giving a talk! two, part of it is a small paper that's being published in the proceedings, three, I get to meet other people here and possibly get some people interested in my field.)
Anyways, the uncanny thing since I got here (tuesday) has to do with race: A large percentage of the people I've seen who work here are black. But I don't think I've seen a single conference attendee who was. There's certainly many different races and countries represented here, but it's still a pretty glaring gap. I think what bothers me about it is my own projection of what the people who work in New Orleans think about the conference because of that skewed proportion.
Maybe I shouldn't be bothered though, the people I've met here (both conference attendees and people who live/work around here) don't seem to be bothered. I certainly like being here, there's something about the south and how friendly people are here that I like.
3 comments:
New Orleans is one of the few major American cities with a majority black population. I noticed the same thing when I was in Baltimore for the APS meeting two years ago. There are a set of service jobs that in California are usually filled by Hispanic immigrants, and it's interesting to see how the demographics of these jobs change when you're away from border states.
I remember that Atlanta is like that (yup, it's right there on the list) --- though as far as I know Atlanta doesn't share the serious income gap that New Orleans apparently has. But the demographics (including the point Travis makes) are quite noticeable when one walks around the city.
I'm glad you're having fun at the conference! Let me know how things go with the talk and with future collaboration prospects!
Cynical comment: As for whether the people in certain towns are friendlier, as far as I can tell that depends a lot on who they're talking to. I only saw friendliness toward people within a certain radius. I don't find most of these reputations to be as broadly true as is reported. (And I think it goes beyond my own difficulties interacting with new people. I seem to generally be considered outside this radius, in part -- and perhaps even mostly -- due to my own mannerisms.) If one is in the radius, however, then I have seen increased friendliness in certain places.
(I wouldn't say that the people one sees walking down the street in Oxford are especially friendly as a matter of course, but I also don't feel like I am being put into a category of people to be less friendly to, which I do feel has happened in some other places. Inside the grounds of Somerville, people are actively friendly, but this is like comparing walking in Pasadena at large versus walking on Caltech's campus. I also run into people I know all the time in basically all the main parts of the city, so that obviously helps my comfort level a lot so I wonder if that also has something to do with my perceptive differences about the friendliness of other places?)
Since we've been living in Baltimore (65% African American in Baltimore City), I've experienced some of what you're talking about. However, as Jonathan and I are living in a downtown area, there is a much more mixed feeling of race, ethnicity, cultural and econmic backgrounds.
The interesting part about Baltimore is that it seems to me the further you move outward from the central area of the city, the clearer the lines between these groups become. Anyhow, it's interesting.
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