School busing threatened parents’ spatial shorthand for judging strangers

Evidence

The city to her is made up of many districts and to know where someone lives is to be able to judge him. Thus, with regard to her daughter, she can tell a lot about people her daughter meets by the school they go to, for the school they attend tells one the neighborhood they live in, and the neighborhood they live in tells one something about the kind of people they are. She notes that busing [of school children] would make such judgments impossible and she feels that this is one of the reasons she is opposed to it. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 470

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Demonstrates concretely how the spatial order undergirds social judgment — a mechanism that ties directly to the reader’s question of how the categorical system fails or breaks. Also echoes Lofland’s earlier chapters on ordering the public world.

Related

• Residential location serves as a moral and social judgment device (similarity 0.87)