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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Possible answers: Because the interaction between middle class white women (blue tribe) and say working class urban black people is close to zero, they don't hold the same opinions and while they might be on the same "side" when reduced to left/right they are not homogenous. A white middle class woman not striving has basically no impact on why a black teen in the projects might not strive. Entirely separate living conditions and ecosystems.

In addition, it would pretty easy for oppressed black people to feel that white women complaining is co-opting the arguments of the oppressed for their own advantage. See "Karen" as a meme. This can either be used to fuel you to strive more, or as an excuse to strive less dependent on each individuals locus of control. They are not a single united group.

Your question is predicated that what middle class white women do has a sizable impact on the mind set of what others might do. But you first you have to find out if that assumption is true or not. Just like some middle class white male programmer blaming him not getting promoted on affirmative action might not have any real impact on why a poor rural white guy living in a hollowed out ex steel-town turns to opioids rather than trying to pull himself up by his boot straps.

The other assumption is that a progressive might expect people to talk themselves into striving at all. I suspect they would be more likely to look at addressing the systematic reasons why people might not be striving than put the expectations on the individual to strive in poor circumstances. "We're all one bad day away from living on the streets" and the like. Whether you strive or not is not going to help you against a system. So the answer might be "I don't expect anyone to strive when the system is against them, which is why we must change the system. " You can't transcend a culture or system that is keeping you down, you can only strive to replace that system with another.

In other words are you sure you are even asking a question that makes sense to progressives?

Because the interaction between middle class white women (blue tribe) and say working class urban black people is close to zero, they don't hold the same opinions and while they might be on the same "side" when reduced to left/right they are not homogenous. A white middle class woman not striving has basically no impact on why a black teen in the projects might not strive. Entirely separate living conditions and ecosystems.

In addition, it would pretty easy for oppressed black people to feel that white women complaining is co-opting the arguments of the oppressed for their own advantage. See "Karen" as a meme. This can either be used to fuel you to strive more, or as an excuse to strive less dependent on each individuals locus of control. They are not a single united group.

I'm going to second that blue tribe women are unpopular in actual working class communities, including among blacks, and that my experience has been that a black person complaining about "white people" more often than not is referring upper middle/upper class and politically liberal women.

I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?

I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them."

If you are talking about moderates then the answer is they probably think there is some level of racism and sexism, but don't support affirmative action or CRT, and much as almost everyone else, they simply do not think too deeply about the situation beyond that. They probably vaguely sad when they see on the news some black kid was killed by the police, and probably hold vaguely "normie" views about not seeing colour personally, but of course the racist history of the United States is terrible. They probably think racism and sexism is real, but somewhat overstated. And of course like everyone else they are likely to see their own situation as the important one. If Bob was promoted and she was not, it is possible that it's because of sexism. Just like in the opposite situation Bob might complain that it was only because they wanted a woman in the C-Suite that he lost out. We are all the main character in our own story after all. When we do badly it is because of other people and when we do well it is on our own merits. It takes a huge amount of self-awareness and introspection to move beyond that. And for most people there is no real need to. Our selfish journey continues regardless.

The vast majority of people do not reason hard about their positions and about the wider world. Because for the vast majority of day to day lives it is entirely irrelevant. They hold the positions they hold because they are the positions their communities hold. Just as the average Christian does not think too deeply about the exact theological underpinnings of why they are a Methodist rather than a Catholic.

My experience is that no matter your station in life, you earned it, your boss deserves it but depended on luck, and his boss is a know-nothing jerk who relied on nepotism and backstabbing.