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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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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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