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Demographics alone are insufficient to explain the status of Baltimore and St Louis. The black populations of these inner cities have by far the highest violent crime rates (outside of actual war zones) of any black population on earth (Cape Town is still lower when controlled for demographics). Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data). Higher even than Haiti, which is in many ways literally lawless.
The complete explanation for Baltimore’s poor status includes inertia and options. The US is the wealthiest major country on earth. Anyone in Baltimore who is unhappy with the state of affairs can leave without expending any great effort. There are plentiful jobs almost everywhere else. The city is entirely selected for people who are satisfied with the state of affairs and do not care to change it. There are a lot of people (including rich and powerful people) who have to live in New York. Nobody has to live in Baltimore.
I think there are other thing unique to American inner cities that might account for the difference. For one thing, there’s actually a very strong selection bias still at work. Anyone with any sort of talent, ambition, and work ethic tends to flee the ghetto areas for better areas. The ones that remain are the ones who have few prospects and aren’t ambitious enough or smart enough to make a better life. Add in that the younger generations living in that area are decades removed from positive role models of the sort that happen in better areas — a man working hard to get a good job, hell a man sticking around to raise his kids, parents who care about what their kids are doing with whom at what hour, kids expected to learn in school. Basically the kids are raised feral by adults raised feral and don’t know of anyone in their peer group who are civilized in the conventional sense. All of that mitigates against any sort of Law, Order, or Respect.
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I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Most white genetics in the African American community come from slave owners and their sons- upper class- and not from borderers(who tended to live far away from the main slave holding areas).
I think it's more complicated than that. A lot of ex-indentured servants mingled with black servants and slaves in the early colonial period, and a supermajority of slave owners (~70%) owned less than 40 slaves, most significantly less than that. Plus, slaves near urban areas or major transportation routes were frequently rented out as industrial (for men) or domestic (for women) labor, remitting most of their wages to their owner. Those slaves obviously were much freer to develop relationships in the general population than agricultural workers bound to a single plantation or homestead.
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I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
The way it worked was geographical: in the lowland Tidewater and Piedmont of the Eastern Seaboard, large scale plantation owners were the descendents of early settlers groups -- Barbadians in South Carolina, the famous Second Sons Cavaliers in Virginia --, while the large scale plantation owners in the more recently settled Trans Appalachian West was a mix. There were a lot of people who were descendents of settlers from the old frontier in the uplands of the Appalachians, which would include the Scotch-Irish and Scots Borderers everyone is talking about, but also just a mixture of the lower classes from up and down the coast who left the old, more settled areas to seek their fortune out West.
This group is where the planters in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi come from. While Tidewater/Piedmont planters did up sticks and move West, they had to deal with a lot of cracker neighbors who would be beneath their notice back East.
They also were the group that pushed into the Trans-Mississippi West below the Mason Dixon line (and Missouri), including Louisiana and Texas. Sam Houston's family originated from the Shenandoah valley, for example. The exceptions there are the old French planters of Louisiana and the Spanish Royal land grantees in Texas.
So, the answer is 'Old Wealth on the coast, New Money everywhere else, mostly'.
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While there were some descendants of involuntary transportees who owned plantations, they were by definition upwardsly mobile and successful- eg not with typical borderer genetics. And it’s my understanding that while the average slave-owning household had a single digit number of slaves, slaves were more likely to live on big plantations because those households didn’t own very many people- and that the slaves on smaller farms skewed maler than the slave population as a whole.
No doubt there was some forcible rape going on, and male promiscuity seems to be correlated mostly with bad things, it seems a lot more plausible that most slave women having babies with members of their owner’s family were essentially mistresses/concubines- the documented examples, like plaçage in southern Louisiana, or Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings, certainly seem to have been that, and most historical examples of slave systems that were less embarrassed about such things seem to have worked that way.
I am not saying that these relationships meet modern- or other reasonable- standards of consent. But I doubt that would occur to men OK with owning people.
While this doesn’t sound implausible, plantation owners themselves didn’t seem to think it was happening- they thought half-white children born on plantations were all the descendants of the owners.
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It's also plausible that slave owners would take a dim view of randos raping their slaves, and respond with violence and/or prosecution. (this kind of activity was technically illegal on a number of levels after all)
Do you have any evidence one way or the other, or are you just speculating? (and/or operating under the assumption that White Man Bad?)
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
Slave owners ran breeding programs to produce a more docile slave population. Sexual access to female slaves probably wasn't guarded 100%, but it assuredly wasn't available to randos on the basis of nobody caring.
This was debunked decades ago. See Time on the Cross.
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You know who was in even closer proximity to a lot of female slaves than white guys?
Male slaves -- if the slaveholders didn't care about their slaves being raped, I would think inter-slave rape would be a much bigger problem than 'other poor whites in the vicinity' wandering onto the plantation for some raping.
I think that neither probably happened very much, for reasons along the lines of those elucidated by thrownaway.
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They presumably wouldn't have been guarding the honor of their "random enslaved field hands" so much as their productivity. A slave was an investment. Part of that investment particularly for female slaves was breeding potential. An unexpected pregnancy with unknown paternity eats into that investment.
Slaves were property and damaging the property of the elite is generally not tolerated regardless of whether or not they actually cared about the women.
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Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans. Borderers (in Appalachia) were not the normative background of slave-owners who were pedigreed Anglo-Saxons. African Americans derive their white admixture pre-enfranchisement to the most high-performing European Americans, not to the poor borderers.
So there’s an interesting effect on African Americans: they were (as noted above) the most backwards of the most backwards part of the world; they received upper class pedigree white DNA; after emancipation until probably 1990, the white DNA they received would be significantly worse than normal white, because of the taboo.
Yeah, this isn't close to true. It was kind of true in the 18th century but, when Westward expansion hit the Appalachians and the Revolution happened, New Wealth became extremely common in the Old South West. Andrew Jackson was not from the 'highest class of European Americans'. Plenty of slaveowners in Alabama or Mississippi or Arkansas or whatever has borderer background.
Not to mention that not all plantations were vast affairs with hundreds of slaves. Plenty of slaveowners had just a few slaves and these people would be almost entirely of lower class background back East.
Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans, not “every slave-owner descended from the previous highest-class Europeans”. Borderers were not the normative background, not “there was no borderer slaveowner in the South.” Reading carefully is important, yeah. Andrew Jackson amassed slaves after he had already ascended to the upper class of European Americans (his first slave purchased was after he came an attorney with high-status friends, the same year he came protege to founding father William Blount). He ascended to the upper class like, I don’t know, JD Vance. (As today, the highest class is not all descended from the previous highest class, but pass through a rigorous selection filter which requires a high IQ, which gets to the very point of what we are discussing (the genetic quality of the slave-owning class)).
If 70% of southern whites did not own slaves, and if slave ownership was in direct proportion to wealth, then it hardly matters whether (of the remaining, wealthier 30%) many had just 1-2 slaves, as the wealthier families with many slaves means that most slaves worked for the wealthy. Here, do the math: those who held 40+ slaves collectively held 31% of all slaves; 7-39 slaves held 53%; and those who owned less than 7 collectively held just 16% of all slaves. I imagine those who held 1-2, aka the poor (but not as poor as the remaining 70% of white families lol) is much lower, like 2%. So the median slave experience was actually working under a wealthy white who could employ 7+ slaves, and perhaps the median number is as high as 30+!
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They may have been upper-class, but the Tidewater gentry still subscribed to a violent honor culture and disdained manual labor, so I don't think it should be surprising that some of their descendants would display these negative qualities, particularly absent the kind of social hierarchy that maintained their whole neo-feudal enterprise.
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It is unclear that most African Americans’ white ancestry is from the Anglo owner class, though. They may have been victims of sexual predation by lower class and lower status local whites, too, and perhaps even predominantly.
The slave owning class told jokes about light skinned slaves being their owners bastards and the larger groups of poor whites didn’t live near the plantations anyways.
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I find that unlikely as plantation slaves would not be intermixing with poor whites, and a poor white harming a rich white’s property would be a crime.
My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.
Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.
The slave owning class wrote jokes about themselves raping slaves, and broadly tended to keep borderers as far away as possible IIRC. The poor whites working on plantations might have some borderer descent, but the majority weren’t that different, ethnically, from their betters.
Interestingly, plantation owners tried to keep poor landless whites away from their slaves because they believed the "white trash" would be a poor influence on their slaves.
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Can you offer support for your assertion that white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore? It has never been my impression that the rates of violent crime or property crime are at all comparable between those places. To provide one example, poor, mountainous West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the nation from 1971 to 1998.
https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1680
I'd say the mirroring only applies with regard to rates of drug abuse and alcoholism.
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In theory, you could test this hypothesis by researching whether African Americans with a higher percentage of white ancestry have lower rates of criminal behavior than African Americans with a higher percentage of black ancestry. For added fun, you could see if it makes a difference whether that white ancestry is predominantly Puritan/Quaker or Borderer/Cavalier (to use the terminology from Albion’s Seed).
Given that black criminality rates have increased markedly since the 1950s, my guess is that you’d find the elevated rates are almost entirely culture-bound, for reasons that were laid out in the Moynihan Report sixty years ago. The fact that lower-class whites are now showing similar signs of social dysfunction where they didn’t before is further evidence that culture, not genes, is the primary factor involved.
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Absence of stable families correlates strongly with all this awful stuff. Stable families correlate with the opposite of all this awful stuff. We know a considerable amount of the variance in family stability is cultural, because we've seen the rates change dramatically within living memory due to cultural changes.
Ditto for the crime rate generally; We've had it lower, and we've had it higher. What we have is what we've collectively chosen.
You made me curious, and I did a search for: "What happened to black family stability?"
"The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population."
From the abstract of a 1995 book, The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/decline-marriage-among-african-americans-1
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
Eliminate the minimum wage so that they can find work at their natural wage, eliminate zoning and build more housing so that they can afford to live at below minimum wage salaries, and eliminate welfare so that they don't have to compete with the government for the role of husbands to black women would be a good start.
I'm going to invoke Chesterton's fence on this one (although there are some possibilities for different fences).
Does Chesterton's Fence apply here? We know why the minimum wage and welfare are there (provide a floor on labor prices and give assistance to help the needy). Eliminating them might have consequences we don't foresee, but that isn't exactly what Chesterton's Fence is about. It's about not eliminating something unless you know why it was put there.
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the argument can be drawn at least three decades earlier.
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This sounds like the mirror image of chalking every disparity up to systemic racism. Can we at least try the El Salvador solution before cursing people down seven generations?
I mean, I'd be willing to try that to be proven wrong. But we won't. So all I'm left with is my wondering.
The El Salvador solution (locking up the most violent 4% of the male population) would indeed almost certainly yield huge QOL improvements for cities like Baltimore, New Orleans and St Louis.
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