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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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The people who disproportionately influenced the end of blatant racial discrimination disproportionately despised "white bourgeoise culture", and saw destroying it as a good thing. The song I linked is famous because it captured the essence of the social critique being leveled against the mainstream of its time. Listen to the song, note the problems the song is asserting exist, and then tell me those "problems" weren't addressed.

Hating bad things doesn't make one good. Virulent racists hate rape and murder a whole lot; that doesn't make their solutions net-positive. The "end of blatant racial discrimination", as your phrasing appears to concede, succeeded in altering surface detail without addressing the core of the problem. Lots and lots of black people lived in misery and died violently as a result.

I don't know that the likes of Pete Seeger and the Beat poets are representative of those who were "driving" the changes in question.

The people who disproportionately influenced the end of blatant racial discrimination disproportionately despised "white bourgeoise culture", and saw destroying it as a good thing.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But:

  1. The African American leaders (MLK and the like) who were actually effective were a whole lot friendlier to white bourgeiose culture then those who were less effective. So the correlation seems to be the opposite of what you claim.
  2. More importantly, the fact that I oppose X and oppose Y does not demonstrate that I pursue the end of Y as a means of destroying X. That should be obvious.

Hating bad things doesn't make one good

No one is talking about who is good or bad. We are talking about the accuracy of an empirical claim.

The "end of blatant racial discrimination", as your phrasing appears to concede, succeeded in altering surface detail without addressing the core of the problem

  1. Ending blatant racial discrimination is a perfectly legitimate and important end in itself.
  2. And the core of the problem is?

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