This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
More options
Context Copy link