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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26303 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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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.

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.

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.

Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream?

And somehow we got non-sequitur "intelligence and personality are same on average for all populations"

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

If you want to be an altruist, do it with your own fucking kids.

Almost literally no historian who has documented white flight ever claimed it was for "no good reason

I checked Wikipedia for the summary of academic documentation of "white flight"

However, some historians have challenged the phrase "white flight" as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. In her study of West Side in Chicago during the post-war era, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood, when in fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics.[18] Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton, attributes white flight both to racism and economic reasons

Wikipedia says it's because whites were evil racists.

White flight contributed to the draining of cities' tax bases when middle-class people left. Abandoned properties attracted criminals and street gangs, contributing to crime

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.

See also:
"White demographic decline"
"White genocide conspiracy theory"
"Xenophobia"

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