Well, back in once upon a time, black human beings were hired for their abilities and competence ("conscientiousness"). But now when merit has little or nothing to do with hiring, it's a lot different. I believe you are right about 1964/65 being the height of race relation hope. As a high school senior I remember holding hands with blacks and whites singing "We Shall Overcome" while boycotting the local segregated swimming pool. All we thought we were asking for was equal opportunity to swim--not a white night and a separate black night swim. But now we have officially mandated black-only events and programs and rewards. That is not what I thought we were holding hands for.
My simple answer is that in the 1960s is was possible to believe blacks would catch up to whites. By the 2010s it was no longer possible to believe this.
All of the ideas had been tried and failed. Worse, obviously more disadvantaged people like Asians were doing better than whites. Even Hispanics if not doing as good as whites were doing better then blacks (and often displacing them from their jobs). So there was something deeply wrong with black people.
The obvious explanation of genes was banished from the conversation, and with the liberal reformer ideas dead, all that was left was snake oil salesmen.
My second explanation is that in the 1960s blacks had two parents. The next generation had one parent, but at least grandparents. This generation doesn't even have the grandparents.
The business of promoting racial division is too profitable. Too many careers, too many egos and too much money is made on the idea that America is racist.
Racial profiteering is so profitable in the USA that those who cry racism the loudest are directly involved in producing racial inequality. Liberal run cities fail black residents in every possible way. That becomes proof of "structural racism" with the entire nation being blamed.
This is a racket. It is fraud. It won't change because the incentives sustaining the status quo are too great.
- if you put out a sustained media narrative about a certain group of citizenry that they are a) permanently discriminated against; b) widely undervalued and so should proudly stick it to their 'oppressor class' c) all and any of their dysfunctional behavior is someone (or something) else's fault (never their own); d) that they (and any of their subcultural traits) in fact make for better, sexier and more likeable human beings than those in the 'oppressor class'; d) members of which are simultaneously both arrogant and weak..............you might just (surprise surprise) get the race relations we have today.
The sane and well adjusted majority of this group of citizenry will take all this nonsense with a large pinch of salt and get on with their lives as normal but a mixed up underclass will imbibe the narrative in a way that will both
- make them permanently resentful
- wreck their own lives and
- damage everyone else's in terms of crime and disorder. (which the narrative must never acknowledge.
Myron Magnet's 1993 The Dream and the Nightmare is very good on all this.
If there is one phrase I have come to know intimately as a result of listening to economists speak, it’s, “it’s actually worse than that.”
Now I realize that no one really wanted equality.
Now I realize that the entire enterprise was to destroy the American family. And it worked. I fell for it too.
As an aside, while I was reading this article, I had Bloomberg playing in the background, and they were featuring a young African-American woman. She does very elaborate, stunningly beautiful hair weaving and design.
At one point she said, “white people always refer to their hair as their crown, and so I wanted to promote black womens hair as an extension of their natural beauty in the same way.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been white all my life and I have NEVER heard a white person refer to their hair as a crown.
I think blacks and whites don’t know each other very well. I don’t think they want to.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Charlie Munger. It was in a totally different context but if you stuff it into this one, it still makes sense:
“Diversification is for people who don’t know what they are doing”
My relations with black people have not been good. I know very few black people in my professional career or living situation. The very few I encounter in that situation are fine enough I guess, though usually an equivalent non-black would be better. My daughter had a very nice black lady in her daycare.
But most of my interactions with blacks were with random black people on the street or in public places in Baltimore. Or when I dealt with the city government. These were pretty much always negative, strongly so.
I attribute this to those blacks being "normal" blacks and the blacks I encounter in professional settings as being "selected" blacks.
Most people live in a bubble. I spent a lot of time on the NY subway, and saw things like drug deals. But I spent all my time on the subway praying. No one bothered me. I am obviously Jewish.
I also made many friends on my subway travels. I had really positive experiences. One time I was worried that a person was following me, and I went over to two black ladies on the subway and told them. They insisted on accompanying me to the next bus, and I had to protest for them not to come with me on the bus.
It's not hard to understand when one sees it as a multi-part deal among the many entities in a faction, instead of just a few traders exploiting an anti-social arbitrage opportunity.
Moral dyad (I.e., oppressors-vs-oppressed) mentality is causing a lot of confusion here. It is easy for people to accept that agitprop is profitable for the agitators who have agency and are thus deemed culpable.
If is apparently harder for people to understand it's -also- profitable for the agitated, who are less victims being brainwashed into believing a phony story, and instead more like conspirators bolstering it.
The two minutes hate is as much for the people as for the party.
Many of these phenomenon of social psychology on the scale of mass politics and ideology operate in a manner where social cues and calculation of personal interests below the level of conscious awareness spontaneously and intensely influence beliefs in a way that simply cannot be appropriately analyzed in the frame of people making intentional decisions to knowingly perpetuate mass fraud and blood libel.
The big picture is this: the leftist political formula is a kind of mass-spoils systen. It is de facto a clientalist model in which the patrons credibly promise their supporters that they will use state power to cause and sustain major deviations from market outcomes, euphemistically called 'redistribution' - of stuff, jobs, and status - but is in reality little more than simple persecution, defamation, grabbing, and confiscatory expropriation and then the handing out of shares of the booty to ones fellow bandits.
But human nature is such that such grabbing is hard to sustain in a fully open and brazenly forthright manner. In an instinctive social process that can be observed even in the most primitive kinds of small human groups, there is a trial-balloon floating iterative communication process that both probes for possible support or opposition, and also fabricates a 'justification' for why actions bases in little more than ambition, intuitive envy, resentment, and 'egalitarian' urges, and that obviously violate well-established norms, are really, when you think about it the right way, the right thing to do.
Such 'justifications' usually have very little to do with the facts and are ethically nonsensical, but that doesn't matter, because what matters is that a critical mass of supporters accept the socially-conducted narrative as the excuse for their actions. Naturally this also requires insisting that everyone stand behind the narrative with zero tolerance for dissent, heresy, or apostasy.
No need to rehash the details of the progressive narrative here again, but the point is that it's not just some political and media entities making anti-social profits by using agitation propaganda to incessantly whip people up into frenzies of acrimony, it's the hundreds of millions of their supporters who are indisputably the beneficiaries of progressive policies and who certainly perceive on some level that any reduction in leftist power or vigor in narrative-enforcement would indeed diminish their welfare, however ill-begotten it might be.
War is the continuation of politics by other means, and the history of war is mostly the history of crime. Grabbing based on hateful lies is a crime, and crime is profitable.
let's get real: the main problem is the inability of the prog class which dominates virtually every major institution to accept population group differences in most traits let alone key ones like predisposition to casual violence, iq, etc.
so when we have roughly equal rule of law etc and east asians and ashkenazi jews outperform and sub saharan black descendants underperform, why it must be they fault of the epigenetic trauma of redlining and Emmet Till's death (or something) and the white patriarchal superstate. Because genetics have been ruled out as an option based on.... I don't know. Just don't ask if you like your job/life/career/social status.
Until we get ENOUGH intellectuals and people in power calling out the nude emperor, it will only get worse with increasing hysteria and more lives destroyed.
I despair that society cannot cope with the inconvenient facts the bear on ubiquitously poor aggerate black socioeconomic performance. Problems that cannot be discussed, will not be solved.
The Moynihan Report was published in 1965 and yet, in the intervening years, we appear to have learned nothing.
For me (and I'd imagine many other people) interactions with people of other races/ethnicities in my personal/work life has been totally fine and doesn't seem to reflect the media's narrative. Maybe there is tension and I'm just too thick to notice it, but maybe I'm just associating with mostly normal people who don't obsess about this stuff for a living.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” - Eric Hoffer. Truer today than ever. It's so easy to raise money for crazy stuff. Just look at all the small $ donors to all sorts of baloney, left and right.
Maybe some hope. The kids are seeing through a lot of the silliness. Some now use the word 'racist' in the most obnoxious way - as a deflector or when they want to give the other person in the conversation a hard time. The mostly good and mostly well-meaning schools are still preaching some of the baloney, but the kids see through that too. One is studying the revolutionary war and 'slave' is now a prohibited word. 'Enslaved person' is the only phrase allowed. Changing language is fine. But forced adherence to these dogmas is silly. We go through how either phrase is OK. Just like 'Jew' or 'Jewish person'. One may be more useful or appropriate depending on circumstances. Or 'reporter' vs. 'person who reports'. And on and on.
It's possible to have "equality" - by having equality under the law, with all criminals doing similar crimes getting similar punishment.
The gov't should be doing this, and could be doing this, but isn't.
The reality that there does remain some racism allows too many racist excuse makers to excuse bad behavior because of race. When bad behavior is excused, that bad behavior doesn't change.
John M. some, but Glenn L. even more, seem tired & demoralized because they are unwilling to condemn bad behavior. Too many Black men commit too many crimes - often because they get excused if they commit just one. Too many Black women sleep with, and get pregnant with, men who don't love them. They are sluts, and we need slut shaming, and being judgmental about how bad the slut lifestyle is for the kids.
Our society needs to put the kids of poor people first - and use cultural norms & shame, not laws, to lower the status of the criminals and the sluts.
As long as there is a significantly greater percentage of Black criminals and Black sluts, racism will continue to be an issue. Steve Sailor has the courage to show the true data, like how many Blacks murder other Blacks - few other "intellectuals" are willing to be that honest.
We need more gov't experimental programs to help the non-sluts, and the non-criminals, who live in the worst areas. I'd support direct cash for the good folk - who probably "need it less" since responsible people always have better avg. situations than irresponsible.
I'm suspicious of couples therapy because it focuses too much on the problems that can't be solved rather than on the things that made you fall in love in the first place. For the most part the problems at the end are the same problems as at the beginning, but couples gradually lose sight of the good things. So if you go to talk endlessly about problems it only gives them more salience.
I think something similar is happening with race relations.
Why are race relations worse?
Well, back in once upon a time, black human beings were hired for their abilities and competence ("conscientiousness"). But now when merit has little or nothing to do with hiring, it's a lot different. I believe you are right about 1964/65 being the height of race relation hope. As a high school senior I remember holding hands with blacks and whites singing "We Shall Overcome" while boycotting the local segregated swimming pool. All we thought we were asking for was equal opportunity to swim--not a white night and a separate black night swim. But now we have officially mandated black-only events and programs and rewards. That is not what I thought we were holding hands for.
My simple answer is that in the 1960s is was possible to believe blacks would catch up to whites. By the 2010s it was no longer possible to believe this.
All of the ideas had been tried and failed. Worse, obviously more disadvantaged people like Asians were doing better than whites. Even Hispanics if not doing as good as whites were doing better then blacks (and often displacing them from their jobs). So there was something deeply wrong with black people.
The obvious explanation of genes was banished from the conversation, and with the liberal reformer ideas dead, all that was left was snake oil salesmen.
My second explanation is that in the 1960s blacks had two parents. The next generation had one parent, but at least grandparents. This generation doesn't even have the grandparents.
The business of promoting racial division is too profitable. Too many careers, too many egos and too much money is made on the idea that America is racist.
Racial profiteering is so profitable in the USA that those who cry racism the loudest are directly involved in producing racial inequality. Liberal run cities fail black residents in every possible way. That becomes proof of "structural racism" with the entire nation being blamed.
This is a racket. It is fraud. It won't change because the incentives sustaining the status quo are too great.
Some answers...or part answers:
- if you put out a sustained media narrative about a certain group of citizenry that they are a) permanently discriminated against; b) widely undervalued and so should proudly stick it to their 'oppressor class' c) all and any of their dysfunctional behavior is someone (or something) else's fault (never their own); d) that they (and any of their subcultural traits) in fact make for better, sexier and more likeable human beings than those in the 'oppressor class'; d) members of which are simultaneously both arrogant and weak..............you might just (surprise surprise) get the race relations we have today.
The sane and well adjusted majority of this group of citizenry will take all this nonsense with a large pinch of salt and get on with their lives as normal but a mixed up underclass will imbibe the narrative in a way that will both
- make them permanently resentful
- wreck their own lives and
- damage everyone else's in terms of crime and disorder. (which the narrative must never acknowledge.
Myron Magnet's 1993 The Dream and the Nightmare is very good on all this.
If there is one phrase I have come to know intimately as a result of listening to economists speak, it’s, “it’s actually worse than that.”
Now I realize that no one really wanted equality.
Now I realize that the entire enterprise was to destroy the American family. And it worked. I fell for it too.
As an aside, while I was reading this article, I had Bloomberg playing in the background, and they were featuring a young African-American woman. She does very elaborate, stunningly beautiful hair weaving and design.
At one point she said, “white people always refer to their hair as their crown, and so I wanted to promote black womens hair as an extension of their natural beauty in the same way.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been white all my life and I have NEVER heard a white person refer to their hair as a crown.
I think blacks and whites don’t know each other very well. I don’t think they want to.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Charlie Munger. It was in a totally different context but if you stuff it into this one, it still makes sense:
“Diversification is for people who don’t know what they are doing”
Media saturation is a big part of it.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
My relations with black people have not been good. I know very few black people in my professional career or living situation. The very few I encounter in that situation are fine enough I guess, though usually an equivalent non-black would be better. My daughter had a very nice black lady in her daycare.
But most of my interactions with blacks were with random black people on the street or in public places in Baltimore. Or when I dealt with the city government. These were pretty much always negative, strongly so.
I attribute this to those blacks being "normal" blacks and the blacks I encounter in professional settings as being "selected" blacks.
Most people live in a bubble. I spent a lot of time on the NY subway, and saw things like drug deals. But I spent all my time on the subway praying. No one bothered me. I am obviously Jewish.
I also made many friends on my subway travels. I had really positive experiences. One time I was worried that a person was following me, and I went over to two black ladies on the subway and told them. They insisted on accompanying me to the next bus, and I had to protest for them not to come with me on the bus.
It's not hard to understand when one sees it as a multi-part deal among the many entities in a faction, instead of just a few traders exploiting an anti-social arbitrage opportunity.
Moral dyad (I.e., oppressors-vs-oppressed) mentality is causing a lot of confusion here. It is easy for people to accept that agitprop is profitable for the agitators who have agency and are thus deemed culpable.
If is apparently harder for people to understand it's -also- profitable for the agitated, who are less victims being brainwashed into believing a phony story, and instead more like conspirators bolstering it.
The two minutes hate is as much for the people as for the party.
Many of these phenomenon of social psychology on the scale of mass politics and ideology operate in a manner where social cues and calculation of personal interests below the level of conscious awareness spontaneously and intensely influence beliefs in a way that simply cannot be appropriately analyzed in the frame of people making intentional decisions to knowingly perpetuate mass fraud and blood libel.
The big picture is this: the leftist political formula is a kind of mass-spoils systen. It is de facto a clientalist model in which the patrons credibly promise their supporters that they will use state power to cause and sustain major deviations from market outcomes, euphemistically called 'redistribution' - of stuff, jobs, and status - but is in reality little more than simple persecution, defamation, grabbing, and confiscatory expropriation and then the handing out of shares of the booty to ones fellow bandits.
But human nature is such that such grabbing is hard to sustain in a fully open and brazenly forthright manner. In an instinctive social process that can be observed even in the most primitive kinds of small human groups, there is a trial-balloon floating iterative communication process that both probes for possible support or opposition, and also fabricates a 'justification' for why actions bases in little more than ambition, intuitive envy, resentment, and 'egalitarian' urges, and that obviously violate well-established norms, are really, when you think about it the right way, the right thing to do.
Such 'justifications' usually have very little to do with the facts and are ethically nonsensical, but that doesn't matter, because what matters is that a critical mass of supporters accept the socially-conducted narrative as the excuse for their actions. Naturally this also requires insisting that everyone stand behind the narrative with zero tolerance for dissent, heresy, or apostasy.
No need to rehash the details of the progressive narrative here again, but the point is that it's not just some political and media entities making anti-social profits by using agitation propaganda to incessantly whip people up into frenzies of acrimony, it's the hundreds of millions of their supporters who are indisputably the beneficiaries of progressive policies and who certainly perceive on some level that any reduction in leftist power or vigor in narrative-enforcement would indeed diminish their welfare, however ill-begotten it might be.
War is the continuation of politics by other means, and the history of war is mostly the history of crime. Grabbing based on hateful lies is a crime, and crime is profitable.
let's get real: the main problem is the inability of the prog class which dominates virtually every major institution to accept population group differences in most traits let alone key ones like predisposition to casual violence, iq, etc.
so when we have roughly equal rule of law etc and east asians and ashkenazi jews outperform and sub saharan black descendants underperform, why it must be they fault of the epigenetic trauma of redlining and Emmet Till's death (or something) and the white patriarchal superstate. Because genetics have been ruled out as an option based on.... I don't know. Just don't ask if you like your job/life/career/social status.
Until we get ENOUGH intellectuals and people in power calling out the nude emperor, it will only get worse with increasing hysteria and more lives destroyed.
It’s weird that Black is capitalized and white is not.
I despair that society cannot cope with the inconvenient facts the bear on ubiquitously poor aggerate black socioeconomic performance. Problems that cannot be discussed, will not be solved.
The Moynihan Report was published in 1965 and yet, in the intervening years, we appear to have learned nothing.
For me (and I'd imagine many other people) interactions with people of other races/ethnicities in my personal/work life has been totally fine and doesn't seem to reflect the media's narrative. Maybe there is tension and I'm just too thick to notice it, but maybe I'm just associating with mostly normal people who don't obsess about this stuff for a living.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” - Eric Hoffer. Truer today than ever. It's so easy to raise money for crazy stuff. Just look at all the small $ donors to all sorts of baloney, left and right.
Maybe some hope. The kids are seeing through a lot of the silliness. Some now use the word 'racist' in the most obnoxious way - as a deflector or when they want to give the other person in the conversation a hard time. The mostly good and mostly well-meaning schools are still preaching some of the baloney, but the kids see through that too. One is studying the revolutionary war and 'slave' is now a prohibited word. 'Enslaved person' is the only phrase allowed. Changing language is fine. But forced adherence to these dogmas is silly. We go through how either phrase is OK. Just like 'Jew' or 'Jewish person'. One may be more useful or appropriate depending on circumstances. Or 'reporter' vs. 'person who reports'. And on and on.
It's possible to have "equality" - by having equality under the law, with all criminals doing similar crimes getting similar punishment.
The gov't should be doing this, and could be doing this, but isn't.
The reality that there does remain some racism allows too many racist excuse makers to excuse bad behavior because of race. When bad behavior is excused, that bad behavior doesn't change.
John M. some, but Glenn L. even more, seem tired & demoralized because they are unwilling to condemn bad behavior. Too many Black men commit too many crimes - often because they get excused if they commit just one. Too many Black women sleep with, and get pregnant with, men who don't love them. They are sluts, and we need slut shaming, and being judgmental about how bad the slut lifestyle is for the kids.
Our society needs to put the kids of poor people first - and use cultural norms & shame, not laws, to lower the status of the criminals and the sluts.
As long as there is a significantly greater percentage of Black criminals and Black sluts, racism will continue to be an issue. Steve Sailor has the courage to show the true data, like how many Blacks murder other Blacks - few other "intellectuals" are willing to be that honest.
We need more gov't experimental programs to help the non-sluts, and the non-criminals, who live in the worst areas. I'd support direct cash for the good folk - who probably "need it less" since responsible people always have better avg. situations than irresponsible.
I'm suspicious of couples therapy because it focuses too much on the problems that can't be solved rather than on the things that made you fall in love in the first place. For the most part the problems at the end are the same problems as at the beginning, but couples gradually lose sight of the good things. So if you go to talk endlessly about problems it only gives them more salience.
I think something similar is happening with race relations.