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The I have a black friend argument.
I do too. I’ve had a few. One went to Northwestern, they all pretty much have corporate jobs doing normal blue tribe stuff.
The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends. It does go too far too call black people in general animals. We all know many who function quite well in western civilization. However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.
There is a counterargument to this which is that there are many white people who are also the dregs of society. Objectively there isn't much difference between a George Floyd and a Kensington zombie. That the problem is more acute in the black community is obviously true; that it is something inherent to being black is something HBDers assume to be true.
"I have a black friend" is of course a trite cliche, but it's also something I cannot overlook every time people bring up HBD and argue, essentially, that we should just accept that blacks are lesser, or even go further and argue for full segregation (the premise being that the only alternative is race war). I do have black friends. Educated, professional black friends. Now of course in an actual race war, everything can go sideways and your black friends won't count for much, but it seems like a lot of people arguing, essentially, that blacks are animals are either making some kind of "But I don't mean you" exception for their black friends, or they really believe that black people who are intelligent and socialized are like unicorns.
For some of us it's more like we just give up. As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it. It never gets better, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to.
It's not that we're all ideologically dedicated to the idea of HBD, necessarily, so much as it's the fact that the alternative is a hodgepodge of unfalsifiable just-so excuses that in aggregate strain credulity beyond the breaking point. I just don't really buy that they're equally capable but have coincidentally been kneecapped by one historical mishap or another, everywhere, a hundred percent of the time, forever.
I don't really buy that we just need to eradicate the latest iteration of structural systemic invisible racism and suddenly their homicide rate will plummet by 90%, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. It looks exactly like an ethnic group with lower IQ ending up exactly where you would expect it to while people make up other reasons for it. The idea that they're collectively capable of advanced civilization on their own is, let's say, unevidenced, and it doesn't look like that evidence is ever going to come.
What about Bahamas or Mauritius? They both have an Human Development Index comparable to Western Europe (I don't consider HDI to be the ultimate measure of quality of life, but it's a pretty good approximation nonetheless).
For historical examples, what about the Mali Empire?
Western civilization is, in the words of Gandhi, "a good idea". Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries. Didn't the Western world itself took more than just notes from Arab math?
I enjoy how, even for two supposed counter examples of Sub-Saharan African self-sufficient capability, the former is a tourist-dollar-rich series of islands whose “natives” have substantial European admixture (especially those who are running the show) and the latter is an African country predominantly composed of Indians, with ample whites and Southeast/East Asians having chimed in.
But maybe that’s the joke and I got semi-whooshed.
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