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As far as I can tell, the primary beneficiaries of "disproportionate impact" policies and hiring of "marginalized people" are black people. The people advocating and voting for these policies are white people.
How and when did this come about? Well, affirmative action dates back to the sixties, and was well underway in the nineties. As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.
What if my ancestors didn't own slaves, and in fact fought to free them? Do I get a prize?
They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.
Slavery was a bad idea, and should never have been implemented. You might as well blame Kulaks and wreckers for the failures of Communism. Your ancestors should, in fact, have picked their own damn cotton.
You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.
My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.
We allow all kinds of hot takes, including "slavery was good, actually," as long as you can argue the case civilly and in accordance with our rules.
You've broken a few of those rules, notably "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" and "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."
Sometimes people really want to say something about a particular group of people, because this is what they really, honestly believe. Things like "Jews are vermin," "Women aren't sentient," or "Black people are animals." And when we mod them for saying these things, they complain that we are "protecting the feelings" of the group they despise. Well, no, we don't care that you might hurt someone's feelings (arguing that blacks have lower IQs and higher criminality, or that women are hypergamous, or that Jews have disproportionate power in Hollywood, likely hurts some people's feelings, but you are allowed to say that). But it's one thing to describe your grievances with the behavior of a group, and quite another to declare they are less than human and should be treated as such.
Assuming you are not just trolling, pretend there are black people participating here (sometimes there are) and that you aren't trying to insult and denigrate them (even if that's what you do want to do - you may not).
Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.
Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?
Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.
So that's the perspective, more or less.
I am not sure how to give you guidelines for how you can argue that blacks and women are incapable of functioning as fully sentient adults with agency, which seems to be what you're asking for. I mean, your post above would not, IMO, break any rules, much as I disagree with it. But I would suggest that if you want to argue that black people cannot and should not be free citizens and need to be "domesticated" to keep them in line, or that women should be property (not sure if that is your position, but it has been the position of some other posters), well, we've allowed those arguments, but it matters a lot how you say it.
"I don't think women are actually fully capable of expressing agency the same way men are" - probably okay. "Women don't have agency" - not okay.
"I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - probably okay. "Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Now, some of our critics will be quick to say "Aha! It really is just about using MOAR WORDS!" But it isn't. It's about expressing some epistemic humility, or put another way, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong. And at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that.... But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
All good and well.
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
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