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.
Yes, the wholesale destruction of the two-parent families that a majority of blacks had up until the 1960s is where is all goes wrong. I hadn't considered that the subsequent generations will have fewer grandparents going forward- probably only the maternal grandmothers.
The future looks bleak because I see the breakdown of the two parent family spreading like a disease.
What destroyed the two-parent family, especially for blacks but not just them, is LBJ's welfare state, which penalizes mothers who have a husband or even a boyfriend in the home.
What is keeping them down, besides that still-badly-incentivized welfare state, is the misguided civil rights agencies that assume that anybody firing or evicting a black or not giving him special privileges is engaging in race discrimination, regardless of the merits. This doesn't mean all or even most black employees and tenants are bad news, but it means the employer or landlord is forced to so assume. The law has created a "market for lemons" and is keeping it that way, with the help of public schools selling intersectionality, and of Big Media and Big Social Media.
Then the FBI/deep state got involved, and is trying to make it effectively legal for blacks, Muslims, and Democrats to rape, loot, pillage, and burn, and illegal to defend yourself against it. So blacks get the (usually undeserved) reputation of "lemons" that ruin the big cities they're in. And again Big Media and Big Social Media support it, probably because nearly all of them are part of the deep state or paid off by it.
The alternative social media (BitChute, Rumble, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social) are not the cause of these problems, and are badly needed to cure them if it can be done. But the cure has to be in the form of taking away the immunity that makes blacks "lemons."
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.
Yes this is a really good article. Seriously, someone needs to make a book out of all the amazing Tablet articles from the past few years. Really top notch stuff.
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.
The key insight to be gleaned from all this is that The Narrative is part of a system of evolutionary feedback with the expediencies of winning power in any particular political situation, and in that process of flexibly iterative adaptation to circumstances, it is more determined than determining. It doesn't have to be stable or coherent or based in truth, it only has to work better than its competitors at winning that critical mass of support. It makes sense that the ideological content would be unstable over time, as it needs to fit circumstances, and circumstances change.
What -IS- stable about the left, however, is the more general pattern of the abstract political formula of excused spoils redistribution by the state and allied elites to its supporters. That is and has been "the left" for centuries.
Glenn Reynolds has this "public choice"-like expression, that politicians write laws in such a manner so as to maximize opportunities for graft, and their reluctance to implement certain policies often boils down to those plans having insufficient opportunities for graft. The same logic applies to the evolutionary trajectory of the left's Narrative: it must by necessity preserve sufficient opportunities for spoils. "Conservation of Spoils".
The reason race relations are worse now than what people expected after Obama's election is because they made the mistake of thinking The Narrative was about anger at widespread bigotry and invidious discrimination, and the election of a black man was strong evidence that the era of such genuinely hateful sentiments being harboured by a significant portion of the population was behind us.
But the general justification for grabbing and redistribution is that the have-nots are only have-nots because they are victims of the evil haves, who only got what they have by benefiting from mass, grave injustice.
If the haves are allowed to demonstrate in any way that they are not evil, then the grabbing justification collapses. But since spoils are conserved, the Narrative had to change to make it -impossible- to disprove evil, and indeed to redefine grabbing-justifying racism as merely the continued existence of any group differences. This makes blacks permanently angry at all whites who are permanently marked for denigration, discrimination, and dispossession, because their blameworthiness is unfalsifiable.
This was what was necessary to keep the spoils system going, and it was necessarily timed to occur after Obama's election. This mutation - the exhaustion of plausibly reasonable bases for blame and their replacement with irrefutably inherited blame - is what really advanced the already cancerous leftist Narrative into its currently aggressively metastatic stage.
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.
If you live online, you'll think race relations are worse than they've ever been. If you live in the real world, you know that just the opposite is true. Most of the commenters here live online.
“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.
If wise, and sometimes even if not, a Southerner knows that people are different and while friction will naturally arise, that difference is not the most fundamental aspect of life. It falls short of fundamental, but does make life interesting. Because our hubris doesn't extend to believing we made the world. One must live in it as one finds it and one must find good things and celebrate them, while maintaining a judicious silence (!) about some things. He may be forgiven for looking at the North - which AK is dead-on about, as to locating the sources of the trouble - and finding it ironic that Yankees cannot accept that people are different, but cannot stop talking about it, despite their much-vaunted notion of tolerance, and perennial view of themselves as the magnanimous of the world.
But that's neither here nor there as ever since Sherman decided Southerners, as he would later with Indians and buffalos, were things to exterminate, they haven't had a part in the national conversation.
The Yankee is a doer. He must act. In this case he must act to stamp out difference. This goes deeper than race, of course. The widgets must all be made alike. If they cannot be made alike in the direction of the mores and virtues of the solid middle class and the best of the elite, then we shall pivot and proclaim the virtues of the lower class, and try our best to engineer society so that that is the ideal, or nadir, to which we all trend. The radical of American politics, though probably not a Yankee per se, preferred the latter course for his own reasons, which no one has ever really been able to fathom.
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.
Yes, the wholesale destruction of the two-parent families that a majority of blacks had up until the 1960s is where is all goes wrong. I hadn't considered that the subsequent generations will have fewer grandparents going forward- probably only the maternal grandmothers.
The future looks bleak because I see the breakdown of the two parent family spreading like a disease.
What destroyed the two-parent family, especially for blacks but not just them, is LBJ's welfare state, which penalizes mothers who have a husband or even a boyfriend in the home.
What is keeping them down, besides that still-badly-incentivized welfare state, is the misguided civil rights agencies that assume that anybody firing or evicting a black or not giving him special privileges is engaging in race discrimination, regardless of the merits. This doesn't mean all or even most black employees and tenants are bad news, but it means the employer or landlord is forced to so assume. The law has created a "market for lemons" and is keeping it that way, with the help of public schools selling intersectionality, and of Big Media and Big Social Media.
Then the FBI/deep state got involved, and is trying to make it effectively legal for blacks, Muslims, and Democrats to rape, loot, pillage, and burn, and illegal to defend yourself against it. So blacks get the (usually undeserved) reputation of "lemons" that ruin the big cities they're in. And again Big Media and Big Social Media support it, probably because nearly all of them are part of the deep state or paid off by it.
The alternative social media (BitChute, Rumble, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social) are not the cause of these problems, and are badly needed to cure them if it can be done. But the cure has to be in the form of taking away the immunity that makes blacks "lemons."
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.
That the incentives are so big for racist tribalism rather than universal meritocracy means:
we must change the gov't money incentives that now incentivize the racists.
But that does seem unlikely.
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.
Media saturation is a big part of it.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
Yes this is a really good article. Seriously, someone needs to make a book out of all the amazing Tablet articles from the past few years. Really top notch stuff.
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.
See my comments about the bubble.
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.
The key insight to be gleaned from all this is that The Narrative is part of a system of evolutionary feedback with the expediencies of winning power in any particular political situation, and in that process of flexibly iterative adaptation to circumstances, it is more determined than determining. It doesn't have to be stable or coherent or based in truth, it only has to work better than its competitors at winning that critical mass of support. It makes sense that the ideological content would be unstable over time, as it needs to fit circumstances, and circumstances change.
What -IS- stable about the left, however, is the more general pattern of the abstract political formula of excused spoils redistribution by the state and allied elites to its supporters. That is and has been "the left" for centuries.
Glenn Reynolds has this "public choice"-like expression, that politicians write laws in such a manner so as to maximize opportunities for graft, and their reluctance to implement certain policies often boils down to those plans having insufficient opportunities for graft. The same logic applies to the evolutionary trajectory of the left's Narrative: it must by necessity preserve sufficient opportunities for spoils. "Conservation of Spoils".
The reason race relations are worse now than what people expected after Obama's election is because they made the mistake of thinking The Narrative was about anger at widespread bigotry and invidious discrimination, and the election of a black man was strong evidence that the era of such genuinely hateful sentiments being harboured by a significant portion of the population was behind us.
But the general justification for grabbing and redistribution is that the have-nots are only have-nots because they are victims of the evil haves, who only got what they have by benefiting from mass, grave injustice.
If the haves are allowed to demonstrate in any way that they are not evil, then the grabbing justification collapses. But since spoils are conserved, the Narrative had to change to make it -impossible- to disprove evil, and indeed to redefine grabbing-justifying racism as merely the continued existence of any group differences. This makes blacks permanently angry at all whites who are permanently marked for denigration, discrimination, and dispossession, because their blameworthiness is unfalsifiable.
This was what was necessary to keep the spoils system going, and it was necessarily timed to occur after Obama's election. This mutation - the exhaustion of plausibly reasonable bases for blame and their replacement with irrefutably inherited blame - is what really advanced the already cancerous leftist Narrative into its currently aggressively metastatic stage.
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.
If you live online, you'll think race relations are worse than they've ever been. If you live in the real world, you know that just the opposite is true. Most of the commenters here live online.
“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.
If wise, and sometimes even if not, a Southerner knows that people are different and while friction will naturally arise, that difference is not the most fundamental aspect of life. It falls short of fundamental, but does make life interesting. Because our hubris doesn't extend to believing we made the world. One must live in it as one finds it and one must find good things and celebrate them, while maintaining a judicious silence (!) about some things. He may be forgiven for looking at the North - which AK is dead-on about, as to locating the sources of the trouble - and finding it ironic that Yankees cannot accept that people are different, but cannot stop talking about it, despite their much-vaunted notion of tolerance, and perennial view of themselves as the magnanimous of the world.
But that's neither here nor there as ever since Sherman decided Southerners, as he would later with Indians and buffalos, were things to exterminate, they haven't had a part in the national conversation.
The Yankee is a doer. He must act. In this case he must act to stamp out difference. This goes deeper than race, of course. The widgets must all be made alike. If they cannot be made alike in the direction of the mores and virtues of the solid middle class and the best of the elite, then we shall pivot and proclaim the virtues of the lower class, and try our best to engineer society so that that is the ideal, or nadir, to which we all trend. The radical of American politics, though probably not a Yankee per se, preferred the latter course for his own reasons, which no one has ever really been able to fathom.