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...and then the "left woke" can point at your "good tribal politics" to argue that white supremacism is a real threat and galvanise support for non-white racial supremacism. This feeling of inevitability ("the alternative... other tribes simply take from you... don't bother... doing anything about it") surely is what toxoplasmosis feels like from the inside.
I mean the alternative to defending yourself and your interests is … not defending them. If your tribe (in whatever form) is being threatened or their interests are threatened, it’s perfectly reasonable to band together to stop that. Is it toxoplasmic? Maybe so. I’m just not convinced that unilaterally deciding not to engage is tge best response. In my opinion if you do so, it’s not being “the good one”, it’s being a doormat. And especially in politics where the goal is to distribute power among factions, the surest way to be the victim is to refuse to engage in the quest for power.
It's not like norm violations can only be answered by either mirroring the norm violation or by doing nothing at all. To have any chance of maintaining norms of mutual disarmament, such as the former uneasy liberal "colour-blindness" consensus, one needs to find a way to punish norm violators in a way that signals that one is still interested in maintaining the norm, and that the punishment can be withdrawn if the norm violation stops. In this concrete case, this would amount to punishing left-wing racial interest groups while taking care to not be directly seen as benefitting right-wing ones.
For example, I don't know, commit to always refuse to hire/admit enthusiastic racial spoils beneficiaries (DEI committee members, people who lived in racial program houses in college, ...) if alternative candidates of the same race who refuse/renounce them are available? (Keep the actual underlying quota to be legally safe or at least force courts to opine on whether you are allowed to specifically discriminate against the incumbent political group.)
In the absence of an enforcing authority, there often aren't better choices. If you want to bring the other side to the table, you can't let them have the benefits of you following the norm without the cost of them following it.
This is an obviously impractical suggestion; you'll just get punished for racism if you do it, and even if that weren't true, to be effective you'd already have to have coordinated with others of the same interest.
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And? Yes, your tribal enemies will claim they're only doing it because you're bad people and were doing it to them. That doesn't make them correct. If the left woke says "We must oppress white cis men to save black trans women from their predation", and a group of white cis men gets together and says "We must stop the left woke to keep the boots off our neck" and the left woke responds with "See, the white cis men are banding together and are therefore a danger so we are justified", the left woke is just being disingenuous.
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