This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.
The kid may or may not get literally stomped out, but the more black the school is, the worse it will be on pretty much every axis. Just like cities, just like countries, just like continents, and for generations now the high-minded folk telling me we can somehow rectify this have done nothing but fail miserably at every single turn.
Imagine actually staking your child's wellbeing on the idea that pie-in-the-sky intervention #8742 will be the one that finally works, much less believing that the attempt will somehow be good for them. Unthinkable. Laughable.
It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)
So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?
"Twenty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Forty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
And all the while, generation after generation, we're supposed to avoid noticing that no ground is ever actually made up.
Efforts stalled out because white people decided they would abandon their cities and move as far away as required in order to get the hell away from what they were experiencing.
Liberal anti-racist orthodoxy holds that whites uprooted their communities and fled for no good reason because they just couldn't deal with seeing people with different colored skin, but I consider this nothing but a laughable cope from a social movement discredited by sixty-odd years of abject failure
I'm not dogwhistling, I'm just saying it out loud. The more black a system is, the more of a dysfunctional pile of shit it is. There's always an anti-racist liberal standing around somewhere telling us it doesn't have to be this way. That the cities don't have to be cesspits, that the schools don't have to be disasters, that the countries don't have to be starving shitholes, if only we'll enact whatever policies they're pushing this year.
It doesn't work, it never works, it never gets better at any level, anywhere, ever, and the rest of us are expected pretend we have amnesia about it. We're just supposed to repeat this every few years forever without acknowledging the pattern.
Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. Eighty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. A hundred years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. So on and so forth for eternity.
It's a farce. It's our society's version of Lysenkoism or believing in fairies or burying our treasure in pyramids. I can't really do anything about it, but I'll be goddamned if I'll sacrifice my kids to it.
Almost literally no historian who has documented white flight ever claimed it was for "no good reason", and the level of historical ignorance overall in this comment is shocking. The old adage that history doesn't ever repeat but often rhymes bears mentioning here -- while surely some strong parallels exist, you can't seriously tell me with a straight face that literal slavery vs heavy Jim Crow vs segregation and redlining vs our modern setup are at all similar states of being. Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US. On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context. And at the end of the day people are just, ya know, people! They behave like people, and we should treat them like people too.
I'm sure some people get sucked into some liberal ideological trap of extremes, it happens all the time to all sorts of movements, but at its core I think there's at least a significant number of people who want to, you know, just be kind. Is that so bad? Is that so evil? Is that so nefarious? Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream? Jesus fucking christ dude, get some perspective.
It's possible to cherry pick a some definition of "blackness" which does not make sense. Slaves from various Western African polities were brought to various American polities and were indiscriminately mixed, losing their pre-slave distinctiveness. So most other American polities got about same mix as USA did, the difference is that south to USA, there were more race mixing.
And somehow we got non-sequitur "intelligence and personality are same on average for all populations"
More options
Context Copy link
And yet they remain a squalid and hopeless underclass that performs vastly worse than any other ethnic group by almost every conceivable metric. So much "progress" yet so little improvement. This is what I mean when I say it never gets better.
The low-hanging fruit has all been picked and it's accomplished virtually nothing. There isn't anything left on the tree in 2024 that's going to bring black SAT scores up to par, or bring their homicide rate down to less than 500% above average, or anything else you wish could be accomplished.
The idea that we're just waiting for the right high-minded idealist to come up with the right twee little plan and then suddenly we'll finally start seeing all the real progress that's been missing this whole time is a bad joke. I can't imagine taking it seriously.
I'm not starting an entire HBD tangent deep in the guts of a thread one day from expiry, but you're flatly wrong here. For now I'll just leave you with this NYT article written by a Harvard professor of genetics.
"I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."
If you want to be an altruist, do it with your own fucking kids.
More options
Context Copy link
I checked Wikipedia for the summary of academic documentation of "white flight"
Wikipedia says it's because whites were evil racists.
Whites were the evil perpetrators and the root cause of all that crime, which didn't exist until white people's racism racismed it into existence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Brown v. Board of Ed SPECIFICALLY said otherwise about the case in question
Most historians have found that although separate but equal does indeed sound like a workable (though ultimately unconstitutional) fair-ish principle, it was rarely true. Especially in the South, where most Blacks lived (and still do). Like, just to use a trivial example, a separate but equal bus scheme would be like, left vs right side -- not front vs back. You'd go to church, and the white people would get better seats near the front and get Communion first. You'd go to a public water fountain, and one would be broken and one would be working fine. If you went and applied to medical school, you'd be denied because no "separate but equal" faculty group existed, therefore could not be accommodated. All of these are real examples. I could go on. In education, already unequal facilities were made even more unequal by geographic school funding on top of already unequal treatement.
I am not talking about most historians (who I would not trust in any case) or most situations. I am talking specifically about Brown v. Board of Education. Where the court ruled that black kids DID have a "right to white people".
The ruling was that legal or otherwise fair separation is still often used to emphasize unfairness and is psychologically harmful to children, and that there are valid "intangible considerations" beyond mere obvious physical facts that make it impossible to satisfy the "equal" requirement. There is no implication here at all about white people, only that separation violates the spirit of the 14th Amendment (which amendment's history, they found, was not conclusive or useful enough to serve as a guide in interpretation). This specific decision also did not extend to areas other than public education, which is also an important point.
Indeed there is:
The implication is that the "colored" children have the right to benefit from the presence of white children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where was this "acknowledgement" made? Also, where does this language come from? "Acknowledge"? Am I hiding something or doing things in a way you are not?
Not a "significant" chance. A greater chance. You clearly do not understand the argument. You can stop being glad.
Then there is no need to pretend there is a "fearmongering" part at play. Parents choosing to go to a safer school are doing what is best for their children if they value safety highly. We both agree which schools and which communities are safer.
If your only move is using other people's children, you need a new something.
Homogenous schools do just fine with their students and they, generally, have much better outcomes.
This is an extremely racist statement that has no basis in reality. White children that come from homogenous environments are some of the happiest, healthiest and smartest in the world. There is nothing bad, comparatively, about them or their education to be found. If there was any benefit to be had from studying with lower income blacks, then those lower income blacks would surely have found it. Instead the first thing they find is delinquency, illiteracy and worse.
That is based on the assumption that white children can somehow fix black kids through their white supremacy via proximity. Considering that this is obviously not true, you have nothing outside of fancy game theory that looks great in an interactive blog post to defend your, frankly, vile and racist ideologically driven social intervention that would see children suffer in the name of ending racism or whatever.
We accept marginal risk increases and marginal decreases in quantifiable outcomes for otherwise beneficial results or moral principles all the time. For children this is no different. To conclude otherwise about kids is emotional, not logical, reasoning.
These other beneficial results, which are not always easily quantifiable, are often still important. There are more values in play than simple material prosperity. For example, I'd trade a .1 decrease in GPA for my child any day of the week if it means they turn out to be a better-quality, more tolerant, open-minded person. Something I think your claim of "much better outcomes" fails to capture. While sending them to a school with significant minority presence isn't a perfect way of acquiring this mindset, there are some perspectives only lived experience can provide, no matter how good a parent or lecturer you are. That's partly why I illustrated the point about wealth and expected vacations -- she was living in a bubble that no amount of verbal expression could pop.
I also believe that some vague sense of diversity exposure (beyond simple racial categories too, as mentioned) is long-term beneficial. Researchers have found, for example, that increased corporate diversity probably leads to higher profits (this is debated) but much more certainly leads to better decision-making, job satisfaction, and higher quality work -- see here as an example from Harvard Business Review that talks about how diversity is no panacea but in the proper context definitely does help corporations.
Plus, though I don't buy into it to the extent some people do (the whole performative white guilt thing is bullshit), there IS certainly a moral evil in saying "oh my particular in-group is happy and prosperous" and thus let's not do anything to help other, suffering groups. Especially when, you know, broadly speaking your in-group was directly responsible for those poor outcomes of other groups. That's literally dystopian. When it comes to education, to some extent there's a zero-sum pot of resources available. To say "oh well it's working out for my group personally so it's fine" is not a holistic nor accurate way of viewing the situation. You want to talk evil? That's pretty close!
There are plenty of mechanisms for which Black kids can have better outcomes other than some vague notion of proximity or magic, you are correct. I haven't listed them explicitly, but I could if you doubt they exist. Put briefly, part of the problem with US primary and secondary education has to do with the funding and geographical schemes used.
Overall, though, it's still so bizarre to me that you outright accuse me of racism. You blocked out a quote of mine and I fail to see anything racist there.
There is no 'we' here. There are vile people bargaining with the lives of innocent children and there are parents trying to protect them. Most people do not accept marginal risk for their children for no benefit if they can help it. Yes, people make these choices all the time and they are telling you in this case: No. You do not respect their autonomy or value the wellbeing of their children so you refuse the answer.
And the point I'm making is that this isn't in your control. Every single example and assumption you make is not based on the factor parents are using to decide where to send their children: Risk. You don't get to decide if its .1 decrease in GPA or bullying that scars them for life.
You create hypotheticals and make generalized assumptions based on irrelevant research to draw up a concrete picture when the reality is that you don't know. You just hold to an ideological firmament like a zealous crusader. Parents do not have this luxury as they have to accurately assess real world risk to the best of their ability. Since their primary focus is not ideology but the welfare of their children.
More diverse schools have increased rates of bullying. Whatever benefit you think you are getting, you are not counting the negatives.
White people do more to help brown people than any people on the planet have ever done. They are drawing the line at sacrificing their own children for an effort that defies any logic and reason.
The assumption of your argument is that the problems browns face can be fixed by whites. You also hold to a moral and ideological imperative that white people owe brown people. Neither of these things are true. It's just a classic example of a rape and revenge narrative. Regardless of anything else, no white person should ever listen to a person like you on anything relating to the welfare of their children, given how racially charged your ahistorical ideological viewpoint is.
If the problem is money, which its not, you could just argue to give these schools more money without punishing white children. Yet that is not your argued course of action.
The assumption that white children turn out intolerant, ignorant or sheltered if not raised in proximity to browns is racist. I explained this to you in the reply to that paragraph of yours. As I said then, white people raised in their homogenous societies produce the best people the world knows who drive the best societies. The only reason you would assume that they are somehow turning out evil is if you were making a baseless racist assumption. Which is exactly what you were doing.
No, I agree, white people don't owe brown people that much. Personally I subscribe to a school of thought that injustices older than, say, 40-50 years belong to the past and not the present; we can do more good focusing on the present. For example the idea of reparations for slavery is absurd and also not practical. If an injustice is obvious and inflicted within, say, 20 years, I think there should always be some sort of reckoning. I bring up the longer-past to more criticize the general idea that if your group is happy, it's okay to ignore others who are suffering. And to mention that success of one group is rarely some sort of idealist world where they did it all by themselves. It's not uncommon, at least, for some exploitation to be going on as the cost. (I'm not saying this is always the case!)
What I do believe is that yes, successful people and successful groups and successful societies alike have a moral, religious, and human imperative to not just like in their own bubbles of prosperity, but to uplift others, be they less fortunate or even in some cases undeserving. I also think that to strive for the elusive goal of equality is admirable. Perhaps we do not share those values. But I think they are human values, not some luxury. Humankind as a species only got where it did due to networks of mutual trust rather than pure unadulterated selfishness, which allowed "greater than the sum of its parts" effects, so I would argue these values are actually fairly universal.
White childrenALL kids turn outintolerant, ignorant or shelteredignorant in practical terms, and sheltered in many termsif not raised in proximity to brownsif not deliberately exposed to other "cultures" (ill-defined I know), races, income levels, ability levels, religion, to name a few. Simply being told about how these things exist is not enough for true, meaningful, and ultimately helpful understanding (to the kid for their future and being a well-rounded, high-quality, moral human being) . I'll admit that careful parenting and good influences, etc. can get you probably 75% of the way there for some of these, but not all. That's an important point. Fish being unaware of water and all that. That's the context here. I'm not saying that you need to deliberately sacrifice your child's well-being for social justice as a broad concept. I'm advocating for parents to carefully consider the unseen costs of homogeneity, to think about their child's whole future, and to point out that if enough people think this way we can obtain greater "justice and equity" without doing anything particularly controversial.Success in school is an admixture of teacher quality, parental support, extracurricular support, teaching approaches, appropriate disciplinary schemes; the backgrounds of the attendees is a big factor but harder to directly control. Generally speaking, it's downstream of economic and geographical trends. Weighing these factors and coming up with a better way to achieve fairness is still a tricky question I don't yet have a full answer to. But objecting to the relatively banal original idea I proposed, which was simply that inequality might lessen if people valued diversity more in selection of where to live, and attacking it as the underpinnings of some sort of nefarious liberal plan to stuff apparently perfect, innocent, destined for success white kids into inner city schools where they are doomed to a life of bullying and misfortune is a complete mischaracterization of so many things it's hard to know where to start. I hope this clarifies some.
Then we do not agree as white people do not owe brown people anything. What they do give is an act of kindness that is comparatively very rarely reciprocated.
I agree humans should help one another. Which is why I find your position so distasteful. You don't want to help white children. You want to risk their wellbeing. We can all be equal in squalor. That doesn't mean its good.
As for human values, what white people are doing and have been doing are not human values. China isn't opening its borders. India doesn't care for equal rights. Africa doesn't care for LGBTQ+ or whatever. The places on earth that engage in what you call human values are white. Humankind as a species only got where it is today because white people pushed it there. Ending perpetual conquest, ending slavery, sharing technology, pushing for an end to unnecessary suffering. The rest of the world was dragged kicking and screaming away from their barbarism and is only kept from it, still kicking and screaming, through the implementation of neo-imperial financial coercion and threat of force.
Children in general do not turn out intolerant, ignorant or sheltered if raised in homogenous schools. It's in fact easier to be tolerant of the things that are so far away from you that they practically do not exist. Children raised in homogenous schools miss out on nothing that's worth the increase in risk.
What you offer parents is a coercive bargain. You promise them total equality and an end to racism in return for placing their children in worse environments. The problem with this bargain is that your end of it is a lie. The only thing that happens is that white children become worse off whilst brown children continue being who they are, good and bad. We know your end is a lie because it, like every progressive humanist effort, has been tried and subsequently failed.
You as a person, like so many others, can not functionally understand this, for whatever reason. So you continue chasing the promise of equality and eternal salvation through whatever means you can imagine. People like you have already cost billions if not trillions in your futile efforts. White people have paid for all of it, and here you come asking for more in the name of humanity, equality and all the rest. Listen, white people already did all of this. They are doing it even today. It doesn't work. None of it works. What do you think progressives have been doing for the past 60 years?
'Success in school' is meaningless. Every teacher could pass every student with no issue by just doing what is already being done and dropping the standards so the browns can pass. What actually matters is peoples ability to interact with modern societies. That means the ability to read and understand, having the capacity for low time preference behavior and the ability to implement mathematics into practice. School outside of these things is not meaningful in the modern context. So long as a majority of the children get a grasp on these things, society can continue to function properly. The problem is that no one knows how to get the children that don't grasp these things to grasp it. It doesn't matter if they're white or brown. No one knows how to meaningfully raise IQ scores or lower a persons time preference.
Taking children and placing them in environments where they are more likely to get bullied is not banal. Arguing in favor of this by abstracting away from reality is not honest. You should take some time to reflect on what you are proposing in practice. Because there are many more values people hold to than just the imperative to help those in need. And your particular emotional proclivities in no way trump those who differ.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link