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I'm reliably informed that the US remains a white supremacist state to this very day, so how would I even tell the difference?
The same way I quantify it for the population generally. See that gigantic mountain in the middle of the graph? Have you ever compared Hiroshima or Nagasaki to Detroit? When your social policies are objectively less destructive than literal nuclear bombardment, "appalling" seems like a reasonable descriptor.
Yes. Obviously, violence is largely inter-racial. Why do you think that is? Is it because both blacks and whites prefer to victimize people who look like them, or might it just possibly be because whites and blacks mostly don't live together? And if there was a time or a place where they did in fact live together, for example when the government and large social institutions were actively cooperating to move blacks into white neighborhoods, why would you expect that generality to hold?
The standard "white flight" narrative is that poor blacks moved into white neighborhoods, whites were super racist and fled, and then with all the white people gone the poor blacks fell into violence and crime for some strange reason that was definately the fault of racism.
What those excerpts and other, similar accounts demonstrate is that when the poor blacks moved into white neighborhoods, immediately began committing large amounts of crime, the majority of it targeting their white neighbors. A lot of those white neighbors got victimized one way or another, most of them fled, losing much of their wealth and all of their social capital in the process, and the resulting majority-black communities ended up significantly worse for the blacks themselves than their previous condition. At least, that's my understanding. Where has my reasoning gone wrong?
Indeed it is, because in fact in the "Rosedale" case (a false name applied by the author to a neighborhood in Texas, incidentally), and in fact in most others, my understanding of the evidence is that it did not materialize in any large-scale way. Doubtless many crimes were committed by whites against blacks, but the evidence I've seen is that the overwhelming majority was black-on-white until the whites had fled. Nor would this be surprising; the white communities were low-crime and cohesive before the blacks arrived, black crime was already disproportionately high before the migration, and community bonds that might hold crime and violence in check would have been wiped out both by the move and by the new racially-heterogenous conditions.
Additionally, I've never heard it argued that white violence against blacks triggered the formation of all-black ghettos. It's always claimed that the whites fled and then the violence started as a result of poverty and deprivation. And if the whites caused the violence, why didn't it stop when they left?
I don't believe this is true, and I believe "Left Behind in Rosedale", a book written by a progressive community organizer who helped implement desegregation at the street level clearly demonstrates that, at least in his area, it was not true. The blacks who moved in came from a disproportionately poor and disproportionately criminal and dysfunctional underclass that had existed long before the migration, as attested by their own advocates and champions. The end of slavery was supposed to change that. It did not. Education was supposed to change that. It did not. Desegregation and Civil Rights were supposed to change that. They did not, and in fact they made the problem objectively worse.
Sat around, how exactly? There were places they could move beyond the reach of Jim Crow. Restrictive covenants did not cover the entire land-mass of the North American continent, and there was plenty of land to settle and build on, particularly out west. In the northeast, there was no Jim Crow, only normal racism, which again I am assured has persisted to the present day.
"Fortunately", why, exactly? Are you appealing to some bespoke deontological imperative, or are you claiming that the actual process of desegregation did more good than it caused harm? If the latter, I'd like to see your math, because here's what I see:
During segregation, most blacks live in extremely poor, all-black communities, interacting mostly among themselves. Crime is quite high in these all-black communities, and illegitimate intimidation and violence from the white majority and its institutions is a constant threat. A minority of them acquire wealth and begin to pull themselves out of poverty, some acquiring significant wealth, and this tends to uplift the surrounding black communities, but all blacks are treated as second-class citizens. Meanwhile, cities across the country see large communities of whites living in tight-knit, cohesive, safe, peaceful and prosperous communities.
When the process of desegregation is completed, most blacks live in extremely poor, supermajority-black communities, interacting mostly among themselves. Crime is much worse in these supermajority-black communities, which are now completely flooded with narcotics and the attendant crime, death and dysfunction they bring, and illegitimate intimidation and violence from the white majority and its institutions is still a constant threat. A somewhat larger minority of them have acquired wealth, and the ceiling on that wealth has possibly increased significantly. The majority of poor blacks are treated like second-class citizens in a way functionally indistinguishable from how they were treated before; wealthier blacks are still often treated as second-class citizens, but the law is on their side and things are, slowly, getting better. Meanwhile, numerous healthy white communities in those cities have been annihilated, their residents wealth greatly diminished, relationships destroyed, and lives blighted by exposure to racially-charged criminal violence and horrifying disfunction. They are probably a lot more racist than they used to be, because their lived experience of coexisting with blacks is that it's straight-up not possible. A few cities have been outright destroyed. All of them have been severely blighted, with even partial recovery taking further decades if it is possible at all.
From this point on, further progress becomes glacial, if not entirely absent. Desegregation has largely failed, and further attempts become politically impossible. Black progress relative to whites effectively stalls out. Majority-black schools are a complete disaster, arguably much worse for the students than the segregated black schools ever were. Crime rates remain sky-high for decades, resulting in a whole lot more dead black people. When the crime rates do come down it is because society implements mass incarceration, with a significant portion of the black population literally back in chains. Police abuses decline somewhat, but black perception of the police does not materially improve, and race riots continue to destroy black communities in impotent expressions of rage. All attempts to break this holding pattern fail, usually at extreme cost. Hope for any serious improvement in these conditions has largely died, and what remains flocks to increasingly extreme ideologies, polarizing and destabilizing society as a whole.
What part of the above narrative do I have wrong? If the above narrative is accurate, why is the above an obviously preferable success? I've argued previously that the Civil War was probably preferable to trying to wind slavery down peacefully over additional decades, but Jim Crow, repugnant as it was, was not slavery, and segregation was not the entirety of Jim Crow. Further, by any reasonable assessment of its proponents claims, as well as the opinion of the black community and their progressive advocates, desegregation failed. I'm sick to the back teeth of hearing how Progressive policies are a great idea because look how well the Civil Rights movement worked, and also how they have to be implemented because nothing has changed since the bad old days of the KKK. Pick one and stick with it.
I do not value segregation; a reasonable portion of my neighbors are black, and I have no interest in seeing that fact change. I do not consider blacks to be subhuman or otherwise lesser. I don't believe they should have lesser rights, either idealistically or practically. I don't see any value in the HBD hypothesis. On the other hand, I don't actually see positive value in diversity in and of itself, and I'm not willing to go along with the polite lies our racial "conversation" consistently demands. My black neighbors are pretty clearly good neighbors because they've been filtered by economic factors for conscientiousness and a willingness to be law-abiding and productive, the same way I have. I've had friends who lived in the ghetto, and I've had family members have the ghetto move into their neighborhood. I have no interest sharing a neighborhood with the unproductive and criminally-inclined, and I do not actually care if that excludes a larger proportion of blacks than it does of whites. I believe blacks should have had the option of armed self-defense against the KKK and racist whites generally, and I believe I should have both reliable law enforcement and the option of armed self-defense against criminals, regardless of their skin color.
Most importantly, I do not believe that Progressivism and the civil rights movement actually delivered on its promises, and I am unwilling to accept blame for their evident failures. Progressive racial ideology has done incalculable damage to this country. They (according to the standard narrative at least) did not create the problem, but they have absolutely burned vast amounts of irreplicable resources trying to fix it, and their fixes have absolutely failed, by their own definitions and on their own terms. I am not willing to perpetuate a system where Blues derive vast wealth and sociopolitical power by promising to fix problems, failing to do so, making things worse, and then blaming the results on people like me. If you want to argue that the Civil Rights era worked and blacks are way better off, your argument is with Progressives and with blacks themselves, not me.
is this post unlinked? I cannot see it in the context
the person I was replying to deleted their comment in a fit of pique, which screwed the threading on the back-end.
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