site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Being a liberal, this might blow your mind, but states with higher rates of integration have higher rates of intermarriage. Contra the popular narrative, New York and California are substantially more segregated and stratified than states like Florida Alabama and Georgia are these days.

Is this true? This is what I could find online:

  1. (via Wiki) This paper from the 90s claims based on census data that between the 60s and 80s intermarriage rates between blacks and whites were much higher in the Western US than in the South. In 1980, 16.5% percent of all marriages involving a black person were with someone from another race on the West Coast in comparison to just 1.6% in the South.
  2. This map by Pew shows no obvious trend in the South. Metro areas in Texas and Florida have high rates, but basically the same as SF or LA and not that far above Chicago or NY. Elsewhere in the South it looks like average or slightly below to me. (caveat: this is for all races, not just black-white, and it's just urban areas)
  3. As a proxy for intermarriage, although 56% of all black Americans live in the south, just 41% of mixed-race Americans with black heritage do so. Naively, this seems to point to higher intermarriage rates outside the South, although this might be skewed by internal migration.

Is this true?

Anecdotally, as in go to a middle-class sportsbar in Atlanta or Gulfport during football season and compare the demographics of the patrons to a similarly middle-class sportsbar in Boston, Denver, or Sacramento, absolutely. It is not even close, and I would be deeply skeptical of any source claiming otherwise. As the old saw goes, there are three sorts of lie, lies, damned lies, and statistics.