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Go their own way where? Liberia? I don't see them doing that voluntarily, why would they go to some shithole, they are as American as everybody else (and more than myself, a relatively fresh immigrant, for example). Or just ethnically purge Atlanta and ban whites from every coming in there? Why Atlanta then and not New York or Santa Monica? How that's supposed to work without destroying every principle of American society? I mean sure, if you imagined you are building a simulation from scratch, you could add a rule "black and whites live separately" and see if it works. But this simulation has already been running for a while, and I can't even begin to think that "their own way" would mean in this context. What if they think their own way is keep living in America, just as they did - does it mean whites have to get out?
I don't think it's true. A lot of countries have ethnically heterogeneous population, and a lot of countries have a lot of issues and concerns connected to that. But nowhere (at least not among developed countries) it's as central to literally everything as in America. And it is getting worse. Which also, paradoxically, means it is possible for it to be better - because it has been. And it has been deliberately made worse, for very practical partisan political reasons. If Americans, as a culture, find in themselves to sacrifice their partisan interests to their common culture interests, if they still want to make it better and not just to win over the other team, no matter the cost - it is possible for it to be better. Will it be all ok and nice? No. Shit's probably will be going on for decades, and there would be low-key racism and low-key hatred for a long time. But it can be much better than it is now, and the only thing that is really necessary if for people to want to make it better.
The only way there could be "future favorable outcome for them" is a racist regime actively (and by our current standards, absolutely outrageously) discriminating against people who are not them. Nothing less would make a dent. Even if that were possible, it may persist for one generation, while people who saw the reverse regime are still alive and still feel guilty for it. The next generation would not feel this guilt. They will inevitably demand justice. And then what? How do you give them justice? The only way you know?
No, certainly not. The American Colonization Society - the last hope this country ever had of solving this issue once and for all - failed to seal the deal. Black Americans are not going to be deported to Africa. They would never do so willingly, and nobody would countenance the sort of coercive measures necessary to force them there against their will. I’m not advocating it, nor is anybody else.
No, the goal is simply to accelerate the process already taking place: blacks willingly consolidating their population in a handful of Southern states. This remigration is already taking place, and nobody is forcing anyone to do it. Blacks actually do want to live around their own people, when economic circumstances allow them to do so. Let them achieve such a supermajority in these places, along with strengthening the political domination they already have in most of the places I’m talking about, and then we can work on formalizing and reifying things from there.
The ethnic purge of whites from the places I’m talking about has already happened. The white population of Atlanta proper is minuscule. The white presence in the suburbs can only hold for so long before whites do what they’ve always done in this country whenever blacks start to gather strength: move somewhere else. Whites will of course still be able to travel to Atlanta - just as I can travel to Toronto, or London, or Paris, or Shanghai. It’s just that the actual citizenship and the power that comes with it will be formally restricted to blacks. Atlanta will be a black city the way that Tokyo is a Japanese city, even though Tokyo contains thousands of non-Japanese visitors at any given time.
Right, the racial history of America really is unlike that of any other country on earth. No other country contains a population of this size which is still visually and culturally this distinct and which is only in the country as a direct result of centuries of chattel slavery and subjugation. Other countries have minority populations with grievances against the empowered majority - First Nations in Canada, Aboriginals in Australia, even the Ainu in Japan - but none of them have anything remotely like the power and numbers that American blacks have. (The closest comparison, I suppose, would be the Māori in New Zealand.)
When? When was it better? People can literally only point to a roughly 15-year period. In the entire 400 years of black-white relations in the history of this country, we’ve had not even twenty years of sustained peace. (And even this period saw its share of flare-ups.) This does not paint the picture you think it does.
Blacks are not mere puppets of powerful partisan operators that can toggle levels of racial grievance up and down with a magical dial. They are responding to reality as they perceive it, which is informed by their actual lived experiences. They correctly perceive that whites largely do not like them, do not want to live around them, and would coordinate to take harsh action against a large portion of the black population if offered a roadmap to do so.
Hell, the halcyon days of the 90’s and 00’s you wish to depict as a colorblind success was also the time when by far the largest proportion of the black population was incarcerated. That was the only way to maintain the illusion of peace! By literally locking away the most execrable 10% of the black male population out of the sight of white people for a decade. The second blacks started successfully agitating against mass incarceration and the worst elements of the black population were once again thrust out in front of whites’ eyes, that’s when race relations fell apart again.
Oh! What an idea! This whole time, I’ve been trying to make things worse! Why did nobody consider trying to make it better?!
We’ve tried everything in the book to make it better. We’ve tried everything from Jim Crow segregation, to colorblindness, to affirmative action and No Child Left Behind, to active anti-white discrimination. We’ve tried mass incarceration and mass de-incarceration. The one thing that never got fully implemented along racial lines was eugenics, but it’s not like many intelligent and important people (both white and black) didn’t discuss it. (Look into what W.E.B. Dubois had in mind as far as that was concerned.) I’m not going to say that none of it has made a dent. That would be dishonest. But you yourself admit that it hasn’t made anywhere near enough of a difference. What fresh new solutions do you propose, beside sweeping this stuff under the rug and praying really hard that nobody notices the lump?
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I disagree fundamentally with some of @Hoffmeister25's axioms, but in the formulation of the problem he's more or less straightforwardly correct. Blacks will never accept being an underclass any more than whites would, and there is no reason to believe that any solutions inside the Overton window can actually extricate them from their underclass status.
As for solutions, here's a modest proposal I wrote awhile back. As a list of things that are never going to happen, I think there's much to commend it.
I think Hoff would not be wildly enthused with a plan like that, but I wonder if he'd take it. I wouldn't be wildly enthused for it either, and my expectation is that the zone would either turn into a corrupt shithole or what many now would consider a draconian police state in fairly short order. The idea of enforcing "racism is over" outside the zone is likewise laughably unrealistic; blues will never, ever let that weapon be pried from betwixt their fingers.
In any case, I think he's right that the colorblind 90s aren't coming back. Some problems don't have acceptable solutions. We can in fact keep right on burning social cohesion trying to bail water with sieves until things actually fall apart in a serious enough way to leave us with more pressing concerns.
True, and that's why the only solution is to abandon the framework where the measure of equality is the equality of statistical outcomes between races (or any other large population-wide categories, for that matter). This framework is not something that is inevitable and it's not something that is necessary. I don't care how many people who have the same eye color as me and the same nose length as me are rich and how many are poor. I care if I'm rich or poor, I care about whether my family and my friends are rich or poor. I care about whether I could be prevented from being richer or made poorer by unjust means. But wide-area statistical frameworks are meaningless to me - unless they are made meaningful by adopting them as political and cultural framework that is dominant in the society. There's no inherent reason why US should have adopted the racial framework. To be an "underclass" you should first be a "class", and "classes" are entirely arbitrary. Stop obsessing about them and the problem will be gone.
Who are "they"? Any man that can prove a drop of African blood? That's much more people than you think. What happens to other people living there, if they don't want to live in the racist paradise? What does it mean "control completely" - does it secede from the US? What happens to people that want to keep living in the US and keep being US citizens and keep having US laws? I don't see why for example a black professor at local university would suddenly want to subject himself to a regime that may not be able to sustain any universities at all. Doesn't he have any rights?
Areas can't write laws. People write laws. Who will be choosing these people? Will it be mass combat or lottery or how are you planning to choose those people? What if there would be 10 groups of people writing ten competing sets of laws - which group is the real one that gets the full control? How this control would be enforced - will US army and police participate if armed conflict happens? Will it blockade the area if there would be threat of violence spreading out? What about if they decide to build a giant meth factory and ship it to the US? Or even much worse, a giant generic drugs factory, without respecting any US drug patents? Will there be a complete trade embargo?
They already have this status, why we need the racist paradise to achieve what we already have?
Again, we can do it right now - why we need the racist paradise? What if the blacks don't want to live in the racist paradise, but want to keep living in New York and California, only better than they live now? I'm not sure what exactly having the racist paradise zone achieves. If you have a mechanism that can stop the racial grievances, I don't see why you can't use it without that, and if you don't have that mechanism, what did you achieve then?
The past is never coming back, but we're coming into the future, and it can be made better than the present, if there's a will.
Humans form tribal feelings for other people who seem like them. Humans are predisposed to perceive those who share their race as "like them". This can be overridden, but the effect is real and overriding it is not easy, especially when the environment seems threatening. Blacks have an environment that seems threatening, and there is no plausible way to get them to stop forming tribal attachments to others of their race. And this is doubly so when one of the tribes outputs a constant firehose of propaganda about how all their misfortunes are the fault of the other tribe, who hate them explicitly because of their race.
I care when people say that whites should be discriminated against or disadvantaged, because I'm white. I care when people hurt or kill white people explicitly for their skin color, because, again, I'm white. I mostly don't care how rich other whites are, because I'm doing pretty okay. If whites were an underclass, and I had reason to believe that the upper classes were keeping us down on purpose, I would definitely care about that.
And they manifestly were being made poorer by unjust means, and they've been told for decades that they still are being made poorer by unjust means. Our whole society is built on propagating that idea. Why would they not believe it?
It could be argued that "Jew" is an arbitrary class. But if the Nazis have settled on a definition that includes you, and are actively trying to exterminate you, recognizing the arbitrary nature of "class" doesn't resolve the problem.
In the same way, Blacks are, as the saying goes, "less likely", and not by a small margin. It is not in their individual or collective interest to reject group identity as arbitrary, because then most of them would still be in the same miserable position, only now they'd be alone, with their community ties severed. For most of them, that would very likely put them in a strictly worse position, and this fact is sufficiently obvious that they simply aren't going to do it.
The actual, current black community, or whoever they choose or designate from among that community. If it's actually a problem, let Oprah and Obama pick a panel to get the ball rolling. It doesn't really matter who they are, so long as they're unambiguously recognized as black by other blacks. The point is that it not be me or you, because if it's us, we'll be blamed for any bad outcomes that result. Many Blacks see themselves as a separate group, and the point is to give that group absolute power to do things its own way while insulating anyone who doesn't want to participate from the consequences.
Effectively, yes. The people inside run it however they want with zero interference from the rest of the country, but with the current level of funding that the occupants would otherwise receive under our current system, and possibly significantly more. They can keep our laws or write their own, interpret our laws however they want or discard them entirely. Let them do things exactly as they think they should be done. If they want to ban private property or institute full communism or legalize murder of white people or make everyone attend their local Baptist church on Sundays, that's fine: everyone there is there because they want to be, and if they don't like it they can leave at any time.
...You have fundamentally misunderstood the proposal. No one of any race has to go there, at all, ever. Participation is entirely voluntary. It's a place where the only legitimate legal authority is expressly reserved for its black occupants, carte blanche, but where no one at all is actually required to go, and funded out of the outlays we'd already be providing to the percentage of the population who chooses to live there voluntarily, plus however much extra is required to sufficiently sweeten the pot. The people who believe that US society is founded on white supremacy and structural racism would now have an alternative that has had any plausible influence of white supremacy removed, while sacrificing as few of the advantages of American citizenship as possible. Meanwhile, everyone else can move on with their lives according to colorblind rules. If someone in the rest of the country complains about racism, you now point out to them that if they have a problem, there's an alternative easily available to them, and if they keep complaining, you mock them mercilessly until they shut up.
It would not be my place to say, nor yours either. The point would not be to create what you or I think of as good governance. The point would be to create, as explicitly as possible, governance by Blacks on their own terms and in their own way, as an explicit alternative to the system governing the rest of the country.
That would be for them to sort out. The whole point is that they're in charge of this area, with no plausible legacy of white supremacy and racism to hinder them. Intervening in any way other than the unambiguously positive, ie providing a steady supply of cash, would be completely counterproductive.
Their authority is absolute inside the border and null outside it. People who want to leave can at any time, but are subject to standard colorblind US law as soon as they cross the border. That probably should handle any actual problems short of weapons of mass destruction.
We check goods at the border and confiscate contraband. We don't do anything to those inside manufacturing the meth, we just don't let them export it to the rest of the country. Ditto for whatever other hypothetical; treat it like a foreign country, but with more leniency than usual. If they decide to make low-cost drugs and export them to the rest of America... that might not actually be a bad thing.
The point is that many of them don't believe that colorblind society is actually operating in good faith, so you need to give them a demonstration of good faith, and that demonstration of good faith needs to actually resolve the concerns in a reliable way without opening the rest of us up to exploitation. Reparations are an example of an exploitable demonstration of good faith. This would cost less and be highly resistant to exploitation, and offer a good chance to actually resolve the majority of the distrust.
...The rest of your questions seem to be predicated on people being forced to live in such a zone, rather than being offered a free choice to live there or not as they see fit, so I'll end it here.
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