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 -
I really don’t. I’ve pointed numerous times to the waves of middle-class blacks who have moved to Atlanta and other largely-black cities in the South over the past decade, reversing the Great Migration which brought their ancestors to the North and the coasts four or five generations ago. Meanwhile, whites are voting with their feet, streaming out of California and the Northeast and fleeing to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and other implicitly-white enclaves. (I lament that at the moment these places are only implicitly white - certainly nobody can look at the demographics of Florida and Texas and conclude that these are Whitopias - but given the churning internal migrations this country is undergoing right now, who knows how things will shake out?)
People are translating their revealed preferences into concrete action and physically separating themselves. This is happening right now. Of course we’re talking about baby steps relative to what I’m ultimately aiming for, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like it’s not happening or that it couldn’t possibly lead to more bold steps in the future.
"White flight" has been a thing for generations, and general population migrations for much, much longer.
Creating Whitelandia and Blacklandia is more than just a bold step, it would be essentially a forcible deconstruction of the United States as it exists now, and the explicit acknowledgment of hard racial boundaries. This is the stuff of speculative SF novels (written by white nationalists), not of contemporary society. Could your project happen in, say, two hundred years? I wouldn't rule out anything happening in two hundred years, including Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. But as far as trying to move in that direction now, good luck, but yes, I am going to judge your project by the ideology of your fellows.
Self determination of black Americans as separate nation was Communist party project (in style of pre-Stalin Soviet national policy).
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-belt-republic-1928-1934/
It was not the most succesful plank in CPUSA platform, to put it mildly.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you find the fact that the so-called “black national anthem” (“Lift Every Voice And Sing”) was sung at the Super Bowl - before “The Star-Spangled Banner” - to be a meaningful step? Like, that seems to me like a very bold and extremely public move toward acknowledging the next step in the formal ethno-national awakening of black Americans. Hundreds of millions of people watched a luxuriant celebration of blacks as a separate and distinct people with their own “national anthem”, and I think this is a profoundly meaningful portent. If you don’t - or, if you don’t want it to be - that’s fine, but I think you should give a bit of credit to people like me who see it as a fulfillment of our predictions for how things will develop.
A black/white ethnic split is on the same level of plausibility as a red/blue national divorce (which gets a lot of play in centrish-right circles, e.g. michael anton* wrote an awful 50 pages on in an explicitly dissident right magazine). It's at least a little more plausible, in that kicking out the blacks wouldn't shear every institution, business, or organization in half - but that's pretty faint praise.
Most black people have white friends, and hold no strong animosity against white people. They work at their jobs with white colleagues, have white friends, use products produced by whites, watch TV shows written by whites with white stars, hire white plumbers when their pipes leak, etc. They're also attached to their cities, communities, their physical homes ... all of which physical relocation would tear up. What could possibly interest them in blexit?
And 'racism' continues to decline. Even in 1990, interracial marriage still polled at <50%. Now it's 95%. A "black national anthem", played for the sole purpose of whites accepting blacks more, isn't a portent of anything. Black separation didn't happen after slavery, it didn't happen during segregation, though there were attempts - and racial tensions are now .5% of that. It's not happening.
You can find a few things that, if you squint at the words, support any trend. But for every indicator trending towards black/white separation, a hundred things point the other way. Even (although, realistically, this data is meaningless) measures of geographical racial segregation find integration has increased recently.
* I mean, probably michael anton? Maybe it's a joke I'm not in on? It's really bad. It's just Tom (the republican)'s paragraphs upon paragraphs rebutting Malcolm (the democrat)'s individual sentences of imagined 'libtard whining'.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's on a continuum of racial disharmony that has been increasing over the past decade. In itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing (celebrating black anthems and MLK has been part of the national religion for decades now); you map it to something more sinister because you see everything through that lens. We've had more ridiculous posts here on the Motte essentially arguing that any movie with a black protagonist who could have been white is anti-white racism.
I don't disagree that there is A Problem. I would prefer a return to the 90s ideal of striving towards a colorblind society and peaceful coexistence. Of course you are going to say that's implausible and unrealistic. Let's say both our aspirations are unrealistic; I lean towards the one that doesn't lead inevitably to a civil war and doesn't require me to regard all the black people I know as future racial enemies. (Yes, I know, that's not what you think you're doing, you think you can someday persuade them to move to Blacklandia.)
N=1 but while I grew up with MLK imagery all over the place, in a school system which very much placed the black struggle and civil rights at the heart of the moral curriculum, I had never heard any "black anthems" or similar. I knew that the civil rights marchers sang "We Shall Overcome," but no-one sang it in my school or before high-school football games or anything - that would have been considered out of place and disrespectful.
More options
Context Copy link
Huh? What, in anything I’ve said, leads you to conclude that I think this is sinister? I think it’s wonderful! I want this process of black ethnogenesis to proceed apace, and I wish it were happening even more quickly than it is. See, this is what I mean when I say you’re consistently misreading me, or failing to accurately model my mind. I just said that I believe it will be a good thing for black people to become fully distinct and separate, and to want and receive their own separate homeland so that they can fully blossom into the best version of themselves that they can be as a people. You seemed to acknowledge that I’m sincere in that belief, yet you’re now accusing me of believing that there’s something sinister or anti-white about blacks having their own national anthem? Do you see the cognitive dissonance here?
You seem to be arguing that accelerationism is good because it will lead to a peaceful separation? It's not cognitive dissonance, it's not understanding your model of the world.
Okay, so it's good that blacks increasingly see themselves as not part of our society or our country and will push for more black ethnonationalism. And this is good because then we will say "Cool, here's Georgia and Alabama and a pile of money, and we all live happily ever after"?
I mean, I believe you that you think this is a good thing. I just don't see how you actually consider it plausible.
Do you think that the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two independent ethnostates was a good thing or a bad thing for the citizens involved? How about the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire into distinct sovereign ethnostates? What about Finland becoming politically separate from Sweden and then from Russia? Maybe if I had a clearer picture of how you perceive other historical examples of the dissolution of multiethnic imperial political projects into smaller sovereign ethnostates, I would better understand why your opinion of the prospects of a black/ADOS ethnostate is so radically different from my own.
The breakup up Czechoslovakia was accomplished more or less peacefully; the breakup of Yugoslavia, not so much. Which do you think is a more likely predictor of how things would go in the event of an ethnonationalist partition of the US, given our history?
Given our history?
Even the supposed epitome of semi-modern American racial brutality, lynching - killed 4743* people, only 72% of whom were black. If you assume racial demographics of crime were the same back then (nearly all victims were accused of rape and/or murder), it is exceedingly likely that they were nearly all guilty. Arguably in fact, given that Blacks are roughly 60% of murderers today nationally, and the South were most lynchings occurred is disproportionately black, even the Jim Crow south might have disproportionately lynched Whites!
More options
Context Copy link
Since I believe that the break-up is going to happen regardless, I obviously believe that it is in everybody’s best interests to make sure that things are as much like the Czechoslovak “Velvet Divorce” and as little like the conflicts in Yugoslavia as possible.
Because of that, I see the voluntary separation of racial groups in this country which I see already happening all around us as an unequivocally wonderful thing. The more that people start separating themselves without needing to be coerced, the less dramatic and more smooth the partition will be once it becomes a reality. People are already warming up to it, and as they rediscover the joys of getting to live in homogenous communities of people similar to themselves, the break-up won’t need to be a gigantic deal, because it will formalize and reify the ways in which great numbers of people are already living.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link