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The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways. Some time ago I read a book of MLK's speeches, and MLK frequently appealed to the idea that unless America can show it offers equal treatment to AAs, it's going to lose the battle for hearts and minds in the wider global context.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad. It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are, from Chavists to parties like EFF in South Africa to radical Islamists (who surely would be willing to say that there's no racial discrimination in an Islam, whether that's true or not).
Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that), the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine. Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
Black African countries are very, very weak. Russia/Wagner managed to coup 3 while fighting Ukraine, they're pushovers. Most of them aren't even food secure. Yemen is especially reliant on imports. If we actually wanted to beat the Houthis as opposed to looking like we were doing something, they'd have no choice but unconditional surrender.
The original blank-slatist assumption was that once Africa was decolonized, they'd turn into powerful, modern industrialized states like Italy or Japan. So it would make sense to court them. But in reality... African countries have basically non-existent power projection and manufacturing, all they can do is offer bases and natural resource exports. It would be pretty easy to secure the resource-rich ones. If Wagner can do it, so could Blackwater (provided that there was no democracy-promotion mission).
Again, I wasn't talking simply about Africa, and the sheer size of population alone would mean this sort of a policy would inevitably become costly. After all, it's not something that America is doing now in a major way at least, despite there being unfriendly regimes - Black Hawk Down is still a point of reference.
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The Houthis did take over, they won the war and for all intents and purposes are the government of Yemen.
For an example of pirates not being able to be wildly disruptive to global trade because they didn’t take over, you don’t even have to leave the general area; the Somali pirates mostly just increased the price of insurance.
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Insist on believing the lie and forcing everyone in the country to act as if it is true, or suffer this imagined parade of foreign policy issues?
Naa, I'm not worried about Africans hating us. Africans are happily cooperating with Russia and China, after all, who certainly don't engage in affirmative action towards blacks. Providing special privileges for American blacks so African blacks will like America more would be a terrible idea even if it would actually work. I'm not actually suggesting we go back to the days when the Soviets could say "and you are lynching negros" and be correct after all.
Yeah, this would be absurd. Especially since special privileges for American blacks are already more than provided for.
Throwing idpol privileges toward a domestically negative value-add populace in the hopes that an internationally negative value-add populace will like the US more strikes me as some absurd, farcical combination of pathetic, cucked, extortionary.
If we accept that cross-generational grievances are a thing, and that Black Americans are entitled to some greater degree of moral and political consideration than other Americans (Black Lives Mattering More), Black Africans are just as guilty as White Americans with regard to the slave trade, if not more. "Sorry for buying what you were selling," was the online wrong-think-sphere term of art in reacting to Biden apologizing to African leaders over the "original sin" of the slave trade.
Good for the Chinese if they're better able to make use of the natural resources in Sub-Saharan Africa than the native populaces. After all, the young Chinese men working there are just refugees seeking a better life away from a tyrannical, oppressive government, and subpar socioeconomic and cultural conditions. They're merely Lao Yang-maxxing; let them cook.
From your comment below:
Indeed, how awful it would be for developed countries if Sub-Saharan countries considered the US, Canada, Europe, East Asia and the like as terrible racist regions, and started forcibly forbidding their natives from visiting—much less migrating—to such awful countries to avoid anti-black racism for their own good.
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Neither has a notorious history of anti-African racism to compensate for, though. And it's not just the Black Africans - though they're an easy example here precisely because the polls show that they are strongly pro-American and the current efforts of USA to recompensate past wrongs provide an easy partial explanation (there are other factors too, of course, like the work of American-derived Christian churches and so on), the US treatment of African-Americans has generally tended to globally be seen as symbolic of the wider idea of American white supremacy and "sins of the nation", so to say.
OK, fine, if Africans want to consider the US a terrible country forever because of past anti-African racism, unless we forever pay by engaging in domestic pro-black racism, I'm willing to endure their hatred. And that of the rest of the world too. Though I doubt any such change in hatred would amount to a gnat's whisker. This is just another in a long line of excuses to maintain these policies.
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"Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)"
That is not exactly a fair presentation of of the philosophical basis of meritocracy.
Yes, but that's how it would be presented, at the very least.
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While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.
By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.
Yes, sure, all that is older than the Cold War, but it was Cold War that created the suitable preconditions for civil rights legislation to be actualized. Plenty of seeds existed, but the field needed fertilizer.
My understanding is that while the Northern public opinion, at least, was that segregation was a bad thing, there was a lack of political will to make the actual push, as there were fears that the South would get mad and violent (or at least cause political problems). The urgency of the global struggle was an essential factor in creating that political will, which was of course then compounded the fact that Southern resistance turned out to be largely a paper tiger.
I guess my only quibble is with the word 'essential'. It's not crazy to think that, absent the national distractions of the Depression and the War, something along the same vein would have happened even earlier. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly organized and I'm of the opinion that another important factor was the prosperity of the post-war era. The foundations for that prosperity were lain in the massive productivity gains of the 30's, so an alt-40's where the Depression and the War don't happen could well have seen an alt-Civil Rights movement.
The Cold War provided an impetus, but it was one of many and not an essential one.
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