This interactive game explains WHY evil prospers when the good do nothing…
The Civil Rights movement changed America yet racism and oppression stubbornly persist. The few who deny this have a seemingly strong argument… “Look, the laws changed decades ago. I don’t have a racist bone in my body, and neither do my friends. If minorities aren’t succeeding, it’s certainly can’t be society’s fault!” In other words, without racists, whence racism?
Part of the answer lies in the false premise that racists are gone… laws may have changed and (until recently) bigots may were being embarrassed into silence, but not inactivity… they didn’t go anywhere. Another, scarier part of the answer is structural racism; oppression built into the system itself. The systems we have today evolved from the racist systems of yesterday, and while laws may be neutral the people that implement them are not. Everyone brings their own attitudes, and to a large extent we are chained to each other’s biases…
That’s an easy concept to hand-wave away for those few denialists we mentioned, so we thought we’d show you how it works in one sample area, neighborhood segregation, using an animated interactive game-theory model. The simulation is based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning game theorist Thomas Schelling and his 1971 paper, Dynamic Models of Segregation. We present to you…
Parable of the Polygons- A Playable Post On The Shape Of Society, by Vi Hart and Nicky Case
Your task is simple… you’ll be God, in control of the ‘shapist’ attitudes of a population of cute squares and triangles. You won’t be presiding over a shape-war hell though, because while these polygons do ‘notice shape’ they aren’t bigots. Each polygon wants their neighborhood to be integrated. They’ll welcome different shapes into their neighborhood, up to a point, but they’ll get angry and move to a new neighborhood if they become the minority. Is that enough to desegregate their neighborhood? What happens when they become more- or less- accepting? What happens if they won’t move to a segregated neighborhood? What happens if you remove all bias? What happens if there never was any bias at all?
No matter what your preconceptions, we bet this game won’t play out like you think. We’ll give you a spoiler… it IS possible to achieve a stable, non-segregated equilibrium (assuming that’s your goal), but it’s not as straightforward as you might think. And here’s another spoiler… achieving that (or virtually any) goal depends on people not sitting quietly and hoping it happens, but actually pushing for the change they want to see!
This “playable post” was created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case, inspired by Bret Victor’s Explorable Explanations and Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric. Vi and Nicky had website suggestions with the original post, and we’d like to encourage you to check them out… Black Girls Code (gives coding lessons to girls of color), Girls Who Code (teaches high school girls to code), Code 2040 (helps blacks & latina/os get into tech), Code Liberation (free workshops to help women make videogames), and Nicky’s Patreon (makes public domain playables (such as this one!))
Digging Deeper…
Parable of the Polygons- A Playable Post On The Shape Of Society, by Vi Hart and Nicky Case
Dynamic Models of Segregation, Thomas Schelling,Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1971
Residential preferences and neighborhood racial segregation: a test of the Schelling segregation model, W.A.V. Clark on NCBI, Feb 1991,
The Schelling Model of Ethnic Residential Dynamics: Beyond the Integrated – Segregated Dichotomy of Patterns, Hatna and Benenson, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Jan 2012
Social diversity is initially threatening but people do adapt over time – new research, Bryan Keogh on The Conversation, Jul 2019
10 Signs Of Institutionalized Racism And The Rhetoric Of ‘Greatness’, Robin Lughes on Huffpost, Jun 2017
What is Institutional Racism? Vernellia Randall, University of Dayton, Jul 2008
5 Examples of Institutional Racism in the United States, Nadra Kareem Nittle on ToughtCo. Jul 2019
Systematic Inequality- How America’s Structural Racism Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap, by Hanks, Solomon, and Weller on Center for American Progress, Feb 2018
Lens of Systemic Oppression, National Equity Project
Does Systemic Oppression Really Exist?, by Humera Lodhi on HuffPost, Nov 2016
