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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Please just tell me where you think white people are supposed to live

A friend of mine (white, very left-leaning) recently made an offhand remark that the large US city they live in is has "sooo many white people" upon discovering that said city is roughly 50% white. By the way they said it, it was clearly meant as a complaint. Knowing this person pretty well, this was about par for the course for them so I just ignored it, but I've heard similar things from other friends and it seems to be a general theme on the left in the US lately that there are too many white people everywhere, in a country comprised of 60-75% white people (depending on how you define it) as of the most recent census estimates [1]. I've heard this about cities, and I've heard it about rural areas in the form of "Yikes, I'd never live in {rural area}, too white". Importantly, I often hear the claim absent any other explanation of why that is intrinsically bad. Being somewhat progressive myself, I definitely recognize the impact on city demographics of slavery and redlining inflicted by white populations. I just don't see why the remedy is then to complain about the actual number of white people themselves, since in cities people in general are more progressive and therefore likely to vote for policies that work to alleviate long-lasting effects of racial injustice.

As someone who doesn't have a preference for an exact racial makeup in the place they live, but generally likes places that embrace multiculturalism like many large US cities do, I don't know what the reasoning behind such a complaint is, or what anyone who takes it seriously would like to see done about it. I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is. For one thing, it is a basic fact of statistics that with a population of 60-75% white people, you shouldn't be surprised to find a city with roughly 50% white people. Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)? Taken to the extreme, you get one area with all the white people and then 0 white people everywhere else, by definition what white nationalists advocate for, not to mention something I and everyone else who isn't a white nationalist finds detestable. This becomes even more confusing when the person complaining is white, by I'll chalk that up to just plain old stupidity.

More concretely, if a white progressive like my friend wants to act on their dissatisfaction and move to a place with far fewer white people, they are increasing the new place's white population and becoming part of the problem that made them relocate in the first place. What is the reasoning here? They get a pass on being white due to their progressive bona-fides? What are they even trying to signal? If we chalk it up to virtue signaling, why not just advocate for better/more just zoning and housing policy? I realize this post is heavy on me sharing anecdotes from my friend group, but I've heard it enough times now that I felt like I had to finally ask.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221

Maybe it’s just me but I think the right to exist should not be a trivial part of one’s political identity. Enoch Powell, an ultra-conservative politician famously said he’d fight for his country even if it were communist (politics come and go, people remain). If it’s become casual to bemoan your existence among your faction, maybe you should consider defecting?

Have you considered that there may simply not be a coherent theory of mind behind the complaint "too many white people"? It's a socially acceptable(to extreme progressives) way of phrasing several different complaints, which could be "place is boring and needs better food or nightlife", "place is full of red tribers and I don't like it", or "place is too expensive to afford".

I just had a conversation like this with a friend. She was convinced the city she's lived in for years was 90% white. Spoiler: It was less than half (non-Hispanic) white. I think she was used to being in Southern cities which are plurality black, but still; that is an impressive amount to be wrong by.

I think black populations punch above their weight in terms of making a city feel diverse, if that makes sense.

Diverse might as well mean 'has lots of black people' at this point; but, no one wants to say the quiet part loud.

That would mean that California isn't considered diverse, which doesn't seem to work.

It depends also how whiteness is defined, which can be anything but straightforward. You can probably double your white population just by relaxing a bit the criteria of who is white.

I used to hear it a lot, enough to consider it a symptom of profound memetic infection, and to distance myself from the people who say it.

I'm not a progressive but I suppose the steelman would be that in the progressive view, white people are intrinsically racist and possessed of certain unconscious biases and living in an area with a lot of white people would lead someone to encounter these instances of racism and bias more often, which isn't pleasant even if they aren't directed towards them. It may also lead white people in these areas to vote for less progressive policies and make the place less progressive as a whole. Even if true though, I suspect some other demographics may hold non-progressive sentiments at an even higher rate. I'd expect a city with a large urban black population or many devout Muslims to have more sexists and homophobes for example, although admittedly that's a guess.

Anyway, if you don't mind me asking have you ever asked your friend if they can see how this sort of rhetoric would turn people away from progressivism? It just baffles me how progressives will say things like this and then wonder why people become "anti-woke" or put it all down to them being racist and too attached to their privilege, not wanting to give it up.

I’ve heard this a lot as well. I think in some sense it makes sense if you aren’t white and want to be around a decent amount of other people who aren’t white. But it’s uncomfortable and an example of why I find progressivism problematic that saying things like this are normalized. I live in a very progressive area of a very progressive city and, as a white guy, it’s weird and uncomfortable to hear shit like this and I don’t know how to respond to it, but have gotten ripped for responding nonetheless.

Doesn’t entirely answer your question, but I think the answer is that many people on the far left are straight up more than a bit self loathing. I recently read a study that studies partisans based on different attributes and that was one finding, but I can’t find it. In this case my best guess is it was nothing more or less than a virtue signal in the purest sense.

I think the fair response here is to ask your friend something along the lines of 'exactly what percentage of white people would be ideal for this city?'. And if you're feeling trollish, ask if they would apply the same percentage to, say, Tokyo or Kinshasa. Would be interesting to hear what the response is - at best you'd get them to articulate their reasoning.

White people move in - Gentrification

White people move out - White Flight

White people stay where they are - Segregation/xenophobia

White people move somewhere else - Colonization

Few progressives will say it, but 'ol Willy Ockham's shaving implements point to a direct and explanatory answer.

What’s so weird to me is that everyone I know who complains the most about gentrification lives in heavily gentrified areas.

Why is that weird? I think it's natural that people would complain about a problem that they see around them every day - even if they are part of it. I don't think it's hypocritical to complain about the length of a queue that you're standing in, for example.

The only reason gentrified communities exist is that there is demand for them. In living in one of those communities you are generating demand for them, and thus providing further incentive for communities to be gentrified.

It's like claiming that killing animals for food is unethical but also eating meat regularly.

Complaining about the length of a queue does not imply that the people in the queue are ultimately responsible for the queue. They are only participants as fellow victims, even if literally speaking the queue wouldn't exist without them.

People complaining about gentrification don't think that white people are unintentional victims of gentrification forced to gentrify out of necessity.

I'm sure people who live in areas that are in the process of being gentrified (higher expenses, higher rents) might have a lot to say on the subject.

It would be silly to complain about it if you moved there recently though.

That's what I mean. For the record, I think gentrification is often used as a pejorative for a community being developed, and the issue is a lot more nuanced than it is regarded as being.

As an educated adult, I am required to refer to "projection", but the true underlying principle is "He who smelled it, dealt it".

because they feel as if some wealthy owner of a Midwestern chain of car dealerships (or a UES banker) taking his wife on a shopping trip will disrupt their romantic fantasy of a weekend in Paris?

This is the best reply in this comment thread. A lot of white people (and I'm sure some others) maintain a kind of colonial fantasy about their relations with Black (et al) people. They expect to show up and simply from showing up and being friendly to the Blacks (unlike those other, bad whites) they'll be welcomed as Mighty Whitey From TV Tropes, emphasis mine:

All this is a setup for the white man to adapt to the Native's ways, thereby making him superior both to the natives and the Europeans back home... One particular version has it so that the sympathetic Author Avatar whitey is not only now the Great White Hope for the non-white Noble Savages, but is very often defending them from other evil whites.

The musical Hairspray and the subreddit /r/hiphopheads would be my first cultural examples. Both filled with white characters who think they're special because they really appreciate Black people/culture, in a way other people don't. But that idea only even conceptually works if you're one of a few white American pioneers in your otherwise out of the way ethnic neighborhood/vacation spot. When it starts filling with other gentrifiers exactly like you, you have to realize you're not special. Like if Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves got to the secret native army to find it filled with dozens of other white dudes doing the same thing. Would really ruin the specialness of the protagonist.

This is insightful, but only part of the larger issue. The upper-middle class has to distinguish itself from the lower-middle class, and spouting racism about what they believe the lower-middle class looks like is an easy way to do it. Of course, the lower-middle class is a lot less white than the upper, so they're essentially slagging the proles for what they themselves are doing.

There is no actionable goal in that statement, particularly not if it's coming from a white person. Your friend was uttering the signals they did in order to remain part of and have high standing in their chosen group. The only useful thing you can take away from this is to know that this belies an inherent resentment to a group you (and he) are also part of.

I've heard this too from my left-leaning friends (complaining that the suburbs and outskirts are disconcerting because they have too many white people and too little diversity) and thought it was... ridiculous. Yes, North America does indeed have a predominantly white population, and any large immigrant population is inevitably going to be in the cities. It's not as if the outskirts are going to be filled with immigrants pursuing the luxurious dream of working on a farm in Manitoba.

While I'm not in the least progressive, you asked for a steelman, so I'll try to provide one. The only possible way I can think of to steelman this and try to defend it as a legitimate complaint is that their surface-level aesthetic objection to predominantly-white areas seems to be based on a deeper underlying belief that areas that are insufficiently diverse are also going to be insufficiently accepting and welcoming, and thus won't align with their values system. Thus they don't like it.

Of course, even if I accept this premise it's not hard to see how this logic is only ever selectively applied against whites - these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics (who as a group exhibit a more severe racial in-group bias than whites do), and for the most part they won't level this criticism at countries which are more monoethnic than the West either (e.g. China) as long as these countries' populations are primarily made up of PoC especially since going to Asia and complaining about how the demographics are just too yellow is something that would likely make them very uncomfortable.

It's quite clear that many leftists expect whites to take every step conceivable to make sure they are racially conscious and accepting (even if this would entail completely overhauling their countries' demographics in furtherance of this aim), and this onus will never get placed on other races. It's just hypocrisy to the extreme, in my opinion, and their standards for white people are so much more stringent than any other group of people out there it's almost farcical.

these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics

To be fair, these people never actually live in majority-minority places. I almost never see these people in places like the Bronx that are absolutely dominated by minorities. They just know places like Brooklyn or whatever. I might be damning them through faint praise here. I don't know.

Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.

Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.

Well, to be correspondingly fair to white people, I'm an Asian immigrant to a Western country. My assessment is that white people are generally nice to me as well, both in the cities and the outskirts (and this holds regardless of the racial composition of the area). In my opinion, the entire idea of "too white = prejudiced" should be thrown out in the first place, but if we're applying these principles, we should be applying them fairly across the board.

"Yikes, too white" is in fact a dumb meme. By itself, there isn't really a way to steelman it, any more than you can meaningfully steelman "keep the government out of my social security" or whatever. Some memes are just really stupid for how catchy they are.

Memetically or genetically, pure fork-in-the-socket stupidity is not adaptive. Generally speaking, if you see people doing something dumb, it's either because you don't fully understand what they're doing, or because you don't fully understand how they came to be doing it. I think it's surprisingly rare for people to do things for no intelligible reason at all.

I think the proper approach here is to keep stepping up the meta-levels until you get to something solid. This meme works because Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense. Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense, because to a first approximation all Americans care about race in a general sense. Race is relevant to our politics in a way it simply wasn't in, say, 1990 - 2010, and appears to be growing more and more relevant over time. This happened for specific reasons, and the reasons bear discussion in a way the ground-level dumb meme doesn't. If you want some interesting exploration, I'd recommend starting from there and seeing where the history leads you.

Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)?

I don't think any of them are thinking all the white people should go in one spot. To the extent that this is a problem, mass immigration will solve it, and while the meme may be dumb, it nonetheless serves basic interests for the tribe that is pushing mass immigration. The broader pattern explains the meme's fitness, its relevance, in a way taking the meme itself at face value does not. The reducto you propose isn't actually relevant.

What are they even trying to signal?

"Whiteness bad, diversity good". It's not complicated, and unlike the dumb meme, it can be steelmanned. Whether the steelman is persuasive is another question; certainly many seem to find it so.

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It’s not actually possible for the social security trust fund to be saved. There’s no realistic way for the government to transfer that amount of money to be saved today and available tomorrow. The government controls the money supply. Their decisions effect the price of all financial assets and investing it in stocks would distort all market prices.

A small country could actually save the money by investing in larger economies without distorting prices. Switzerland does this. The US can’t.

In defense of the social security situation, what safe assets is the government supposed to buy? There is nothing safer than US government bonds, which are funded by future tax revenues. Buying foreign or corporate bonds could make sense at the margin, but it opens you up to a lot of risk.

For a large, closed economy like the USA whose inability to collect taxes would not just mean the downfall of its own economy, but the whole world order, I don't think anything else makes sense but relying on your taxation powers.

You could argue that the government should borrow less in general, but that is a separate issue from Social Security.

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point.

So, Social Security has a lot of money, right? What are they supposed to do, put it in a giant mattress and sit on it? No, if they can safely pick up even a few percentage points of return, they should . . . and, well, the safest place to put the money is US Government bonds.

Not just objectively (it is objectively the safest place, but besides that), but because the only way those bonds aren't getting paid back is if the US Government implodes. And if that happens, the entire social security system is dead anyway. So it's not picking up any added risk, just getting some absolutely free percentage points of yearly returns.

There are certainly criticisms one can make of this setup, but "the US social security system has a synergistic risk-free financial relationship with the rest of the US government" isn't one of them.

It doesn't really matter if they put it into US treasuries or cash those are just government liabilities the same as the liabilities the Social Security administration has to it's members. That is my point. The fact US treasuries pay a few percent interest over cash doesn't matter, because the Federal Government is paying money from it's right pocket to it's left.

The only thing that would matter to it's position would be if it offloaded risk or earned interest from some other entity than itself.

My gut reaction is to laugh at the notion the same way I laugh at the people who say mosquitoes have "a jewish character".

Whites are low status in America right now for a bunch of reasons that are mostly ideological and cultural but likely don't enter into your buddy's reasoning. He just correctly identifies this fact and bemoans that he has to live in a city full of low status people, which, by way of consequence, makes him low status as well.

In another time he would have complained about having to live "among niggers", for exactly the same reasons.

Why can't he be instead in a "vibrant" and "diverse" neighborhood, that is, one that exhalts the values of the elite and is therefore a sign that he's doing well and is close to the values of the ruling class (and therefore, to power and prestige). If he were a better man, he could afford all this symbolic luxury.

This racist disdain is particularly absurd, but it's really not that much different or less boneheaded than contempt for the "bunch of hicks" that also make the majority of one's countrymen. And again I think laughter is the right response to these eternal prejudices.

I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.

You're not going to get that here, the number of progressives is countable on one hand.

In any case, the words are largely empty. Talking about a place being too white is similar to doing some kind of land acknowledgment - a perfunctory thing that, after all this time, has no bearing on how they actually act. It's just another phrase you throw around without considering what it actually implies.

The traditional SSC response would be something about ingroup and outgroup and how when they say “white people” this is code for red tribe white people aka bad white people unlike themselves. I do not believe this. I believe there is a legitimate undercurrent of self hatred and suicidality to a lot of left-leaning beliefs. I believe the honest answer would be that white people should (ideally voluntarily) just die out.

They want to stay ‘on top’, live their comfortable lives with zero real changes, they just want to feel better about it.

Agree, and actually I wonder if some of the fervor behind the push for diversity and equity is to pull the ladder up behind them, to prevent meritocratic challengers from coming from behind and pushing them harder on the rat race. They're not gonna give up their jobs, but they're gonna give up the jobs of the equally talented people who would otherwise be hired after them.

PMC progressive whites advocate literally nothing that (they believe) would actually hurt themselves in the medium term (at least according to their own beliefs; complexities around the long term effects of eg. mass immigration and defunded police don’t feature in their political imagination).

You said it yourself. What kind of people stand by and cheer on their racial demographic replacement in their own countries? Can you cite other historical examples where demographic replacement wasn't the result of conquest, colonization, or atrocity? And that it was cheered on by the natives? The "too many white people" is just another expression of the same ideology that leads them to cheer on their own demographic replacement, and it's not just signaling. It's anti-white and has real-world implications.

You are influenced by this ideology such that you can't see very much wrong with this extremely unusual pattern of behavior or the real-world implications of its existence.

If instead of "too many white people", the fashionable statement was "too many brown people", you wouldn't say that they were signaling. Your downplaying of anti-white rhetoric and self-hatred is just another expression of this phenomenon.

Accepting real-world demographic displacement is the ultimate, real, terminal impact of that kind of psychology.

Amen. When someone tells you they hate you -- or themselves -- listen to them. When White progressives say something anti-White, they mean precisely that. Nihilistic self-loathing is the norm among them.

They’d donate more than 2% of their income to BLM - hell, they should do what the hardcore EA people do and give everything except their basic living requirements to BLM.

If that's your bar, no one believes anything.

They want to stay ‘on top’, live their comfortable lives with zero real changes, they just want to feel better about it.

Implies they feel bad , which was westerly's point.

The crux is that acknowledgement is very different from return; when the government of BC actually gives Vancouver island back to the Natives, then you can talk about white progressives actually hating themselves enough to give it all up.

They've demonstrated their commitment by pouring billions into underperforming minorities' programs in the last decades. There is no substantial difference between what they've been doing and handing a few indians vast amounts of land and money directly.

I believe there is a legitimate undercurrent of self hatred and suicidality to a lot of left-leaning beliefs.

Specifically when talking about antinatalism by way of climate change, though I swear that's more a way for people to cope with the fact that they choose temporary happiness over parenthood.

I believe the honest answer would be that white people should (ideally voluntarily) just die out.

Now among my natalist leftwing friends, I don't think 'die out' is really the right way to look at it. If all the white people have kids with nonwhite folks (as those friends have) is anyone or anything really dying out?

Specifically when talking about antinatalism by way of climate change, though I swear that's more a way for people to cope with the fact that they choose temporary happiness over parenthood.

I once had a single hippie mom say that to me outright. "I never wanted kids because of climate change but ah you know that's just an excuse."

Not necessarily representative (though I believe it is), but I was surprised to hear it spoken out loud.

If all the white people have kids with nonwhite folks (as those friends have) is anyone or anything really dying out?

I think this sentiment is only possible if you are convinced that there is no chance that your culture could die out or become unrecognisable.

Would anything be lost or die out if, in a collective fit of insanity, Japan decided to integrate - and intermarry fully - into the People’s Republic of China as a province? I imagine there would be a good amount of indigenous culture that would be discontinued. Of course, such forms of integration aren’t the only possible way cultures can irrevocably change or “die”, but I imagine it would be a pretty big shift with pretty monumental losses.

(Whether any particular instance of cultural “death”, like a language dying, is something to be regretted depends on your values, I suppose.)

If all the Uyghurs are having kids with Han, is it really genocide?

If it was by choice and not force, sure.

Wait, hold on. We've done a verbal sleight of hand here: you went from "is anyone really dying out?" to "is anyone being genocided?". I don't blame you, that's the phrase IGI mistakenly used, but let's rewind.

Consensual or not, if all the Uyghurs have kids with Han, are the Uyghurs dying out?

I don't think you can look at the situation without taking into account who's deciding to do what, but in either case, no, I don't think 'dying out' would be an appropriate way to describe the situation even if 'genocide' might well be.

I also think that there's an additional set of unstated assumptions: that the Han parent is going to pass on their culture while the Uyghur isn't, and I think that's something you can't just gloss over because that's emphatically not happening to mixed race US families.

Well that's one question I suppose. I'm sure there's a lot of different viewpoints as to whether unrestrained immigration counts as chosen or imposed for instance.

Plenty of people intent on destroying white as an identity and doing so against the wishes of at least some people though. Virulent advocates of that even.

I'm not one to care much for collective identities, since I remain despite my best efforts a rootless cosmopolitan, but it strikes me that every argument made to justify the oppression of whites magically becomes unacceptable when you swap them out for brown people or the Jews.

It just doesn't make sense that "the great replacement is okay actually", but "open borders for Israel" isn't. And that's just weird.

is anyone or anything really dying out?

There exist a rare plant called Catalina Mahogany that, because it hybridizes with its common relative the Mountain Mahogany, requires humans to preserve and continue its pure specimens.

I just can't rationalize the idea of people being wiped out when their line will continue for generations to come. I don't understand what's being 'lost' if my kids were mixed race instead of white. They're still mine and isn't that what's important?

Then I suppose you don't believe in significant biological differences between races?

I don't think vitamin D production differences are significant in the modern world with all year round availability of vitamin D containing foods plus most foods already come fortified with vitamin and supplements are cheap.

Significant differences would be in the different tolerance of environment, psychological aspects to thrive in society or make career and succeed. Maybe there are some differences in these things too but I don't think they are significant either because currently most social differences can be explained by culture and traditions rather than race or ethnicity.

It seems human intuition considers diversity for the sake of diversity to be an end.

Say I thought Hitler was bad for merely murdering so many people. That doesn't account for his attempted genocide which was to wipe a population away. The fact that his attempt at genocide involved killing is rather tangential. Charitably, his implementation of killing at such scale is the reason why he's the western example of evil.

We see this in non-political contexts with the designation of endangered species. Killing authorized game for food or sport is of course OK; but killing a member of an endangered species is not OK. Because these aren't human, and of course this isn't done at scale, this isn't anything like genocide, but why even bother saving species like this? Diversity is an end to us.

The U.N. considers it genocide to destroy a people group (even in part). So someone could implement genocide without actual killing, which would involve restricting births or whatever. You're fine to consider this nowhere near as bad as Hitler's mass-murder.

But, if (and maybe you don't) one considers Hitler's genocide made mass murder worse, then implementing genocide using non-murderous means is still genocide.

It's not that it's diversity, at least with endangered species, it's the finality of it. If you wipe out the last one (or nearly the last one), the entire species can be gone forever. If you kill an extra deer, there's lots more elsewhere. In some sense, deer are fungible (a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write).

It's less clear to me, but I'd also say Hitler was extra bad because he targeted innocent people for something they had no say in, AND he was trying to wipe out entire groups (that hadn't done anything to him). There's something hateful about that, and I think it's more about the finality and arbitrariness than a desire to maintain diversity.

I daresay a subset of western policy-makers don't count as "human intuition".

I heard someone claim once that sooner or later, given current trends, we're not going to have any more redheads. I like redheads, and think that would be a shame.

There's a lot of different varieties of human. If you blended them all suddenly and thoroughly, and everyone afterward were tallish, tanned semi-asians of a roughly-equivalent type, that would also be a shame.

I freely admit that this is an aesthetic preference with limited to no implications for actual policy, and probably genetic engineering will make these issues irrelevant in the relatively near future.

They wouldn't blend, because inheritance is Mendelian and discrete. Just look at the Uighurs and other Turks who still evidence the blonde hair and blue eyes of their Aryan ancestors, even red hair on occasion.

Though, recessive genes follow a power law in expression; so, they would be much less likely to be found in mixed populations. Northern Indians have 10% the blue eyes allele variant; so, they are only 1% likely to have blue eyes, and it is considered something rare among them.

Not everything is discrete. Height, skin color, facial features, body proportions are not. Isolated populations will continue getting unusual phenotypes due to recessive alleles taking root, but urban blended humans will all probably look like Tiger Woods or Charles Mingus or Kamala Harris.

In the long run? What's being lost is diversity. Whether that matters depends on your values, priorities, etc....and maybe how much you appreciate irony.

That depends on whether or not you are permitted to raise your children on your terms, with your own values, way of life, etc. In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct. You can argue that was always going to happen over a sufficiently long enough time horizon, and that's correct. But it can happen on much shorter timelines, even within a single generation, and often does.

I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.

I don't consider myself a progressive, as that term is used today, but since you'll only get conflict-theory explanations from most folks here, I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.

Your friend probably doesn't actually want to move to a place with fewer white people. Such places probably exist within the city he lives in, and you could ask him why he doesn't move there, though you'd probably either be accused (with some justice) of being a jerk, or else you'd get a response that goes "something something gentrification." (Freddie deBoer has written about the catch-22 in which white people moving to whiter communities is white flight, which is bad, but white people moving to less white communities is gentrification, which is also bad.)

Among progressives nowadays, it's just considered an accepted fact that any place or organization that is "too white" will be hopelessly infested with institutional white supremacy. The only cure is more diversity. The problem with this is that "too white" basically means "majority white," and the problem with that is that, contrary to what a lot of people think, the United States is still majority white. Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."

Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."

Motte: It's bad that this all-white cast doesn't represent the real U.S. racial demographic

Bailey: It's bad that this all-white cast is > r% white, where r is less than the current U.S. white ratio. (i.e. it's bad that America is so white)

When people argue that some too-white institution is bad because it doesn't match local/national demographics, I suspect they are saying that because it is a convenient explanation that their audience will accept (It's not the True Rejection). I'm not sure this is done consciously or intentionally. I probably overuse this class of explanation. I really like it. It's probably not charitable.

It's concerning that your steelman suggests that people really, consciously think the bailey, because the proper and honest solution here really is a kind of Great Replacement, so that we really can realize <r% whites in all our local institutions, to avoid deeply-embedded white supremacy. Whites are a kind of invasive species, requiring population control for the good of wider society.

FWIW, I think the number of people who actually want to see the white population reduced, whose true motivations are literally what the conflict theorists say they are, is relatively small. Especially among white progressives, self-loathing or not. I genuinely think most of them just don't do the math and don't realize that it's literally impossible to, for example, have 50% of every community they care about be made up of POC.

Generally the term of art for such a thing was the "demographics are destiny" slogan, I thought?

I think a lot of them also literally just don't realize the vast majority of the American population is white. This is in part because so many of them spend their formative years in a handful of majority-minority cities. To them, 30% black/25% LGBT/30% white/40% Asian or Hispanic/10-20% Jewish sounds about right because that's literally what they spent their formative years around. Yes those numbers add up to more than 100% because some of those categories are not mutually exclusive.

"Math" and "doing the research" haven't exactly been shown as woke strengths in the recent past, so it's not like they're going to naturally correct themselves on their own.

I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.

Conflict explanation--it's malice for the outgroup. Mistake explanation--it's at best thoughtlessness; "a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy" isn't a position that I'd describe as...intellectually respectable?

This is where I'm confused--I thought that Scott's advocacy for viewing disagreements as mistakes was at least partially rooted in charity: let's assume the best of those we disagree with. But in this case, it sounds like the mistake version rounds to some version of "just dumb," and it's not obvious to me that this is a more charitable explanation than malice. Both are bad; is anti-intellectual thoughtlessness clearly better than hatred?

Does a steelman exist? Is there an answer that would reflect well on progressives? If yes, what is it? If no, what's the point in picking dumb vs. evil?

You make a fair point, and I think the real problem is not that no steelman exists, it's that I wasn't really being charitable even in my attempt to provide a mistake-theory explanation. (That's why I don't make a very good progressive.)

Okay, let me try again: the steelman requires that you more or less accept the Ibrim Kendi/Robin DiAngelo premise. Our country, our institutions, our societies, are suffering from deeply embedded white supremacy. Therefore, any place in which the white majority is glaringly obvious (to the point that non-white people are notable for being the outliers) is in need of diversifying (and should "do the work" to figure out why they have so few non-white people). Why are there so few POC here? Assuming you actually do the math and conclude that a ~13% black presence is what you should expect in an equitable racial distribution, a place where you find less than 2% black people has done something, intentionally or not, to make it unwelcoming or hostile to black people.

To go further, I'd have to go further in trying to steelman DEI and "anti-racism" as expressed by those two individuals, and, well, I don't accept their premises and I'm a liberal. But presuming you are dealing with someone who does accept their premises, the conclusion logically follows that any place that hasn't achieved some (statistically improbable) level of racial assimilation is full of institutionalized, unexamined white supremacy.

"foolish" is almost always more charitable than "malice".

It's the other way around; it's hubris of the highest order to think your enemies are idiots. I respect my enemies too much to lie and call them stupid.

  1. Even if you step up the meta levels, to "whiteness bad, diversity good" as you suggest above, what's the steelman? If it's going to be a proper steelman, it ought to stand up to some level of counterargument (that's the point of "steel"), but in my experience, even the "steelman" pulls the race card immediately and declares disagreement invalid without engagement.

  2. You said "almost always," well hedged. (I mean that sincerely.) But that admits the point that massive foolishness can be worse than small malice, and then we're just arguing degree.

Grey's Law, right? "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

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