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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Counterpoint: Your neighbors child(A smiley square) got its head stomped on repeatedly by schoolmates(smiley triangles). Its head bounced off the pavement again and again and now its braindead in a hospital bed. Are you happy with your child(a smiley square) attending that school knowing the persons responsible are going to attend it again in a year?

To make my point clear: I am not against social interventions. I don't understand why you would think that. I am against putting innocent children in harms way for the sake of some ethno-sadomasochistic ideology. The squares and the triangles are not equal in the real world. We can abstract the real world to a point where we don't see the relevant details. But basing our arguments on those abstractions is no different from lying.

To further elaborate, maybe if this particular act of triangle on square violence was an isolated abnormality, we could excuse it as such. But it's not. It just so happens that smiley triangles, despite being 13 percent of the population, commit over half of all violent crime. It just so happens that smiley triangles are more likely to engage in bullying. More worryingly, smiley triangles are more likely to view bullying activities as high status, unlike smiley squares.

So yeah, we can pretend that our extreme child-sacrifice based interventions are not actually that by using smiley faces. But I am not going to pretend with you. I will, as politely as I can, point out that you are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had. This is evil and you should be punished for it.

Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.

I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.

I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.

So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.

Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.

Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.

It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)

So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?

And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality.

Brown v. Board of Ed SPECIFICALLY said otherwise about the case in question

Here, unlike Sweatt v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors

Most historians have found that although separate but equal does indeed sound like a workable (though ultimately unconstitutional) fair-ish principle, it was rarely true. Especially in the South, where most Blacks lived (and still do). Like, just to use a trivial example, a separate but equal bus scheme would be like, left vs right side -- not front vs back. You'd go to church, and the white people would get better seats near the front and get Communion first. You'd go to a public water fountain, and one would be broken and one would be working fine. If you went and applied to medical school, you'd be denied because no "separate but equal" faculty group existed, therefore could not be accommodated. All of these are real examples. I could go on. In education, already unequal facilities were made even more unequal by geographic school funding on top of already unequal treatement.

I am not talking about most historians (who I would not trust in any case) or most situations. I am talking specifically about Brown v. Board of Education. Where the court ruled that black kids DID have a "right to white people".

In Sweatt v. Painter, supra, in finding that a segregated law school for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportunities, this Court relied in large part on "those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school." In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, supra, the Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intangible considerations: ". . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

The ruling was that legal or otherwise fair separation is still often used to emphasize unfairness and is psychologically harmful to children, and that there are valid "intangible considerations" beyond mere obvious physical facts that make it impossible to satisfy the "equal" requirement. There is no implication here at all about white people, only that separation violates the spirit of the 14th Amendment (which amendment's history, they found, was not conclusive or useful enough to serve as a guide in interpretation). This specific decision also did not extend to areas other than public education, which is also an important point.

There is no implication here at all about white people

Indeed there is:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.

The implication is that the "colored" children have the right to benefit from the presence of white children.

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