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Notes -
Hated Ancestors
I am part of a family heritage organization. This particular family has been in the US for a little over 400 years. The organization's main responsibilities are maintaining a few old grave sites, and serving as a bit of a repository of information for people going on genealogical hunts. I am possibly going to be joining the board of this organization in the future.
Anyways, these ancestors of mine owned slaves, and quite a few of them fought and died on the losing side of the American Civil War. I feel mostly apathy about this. I did not know these people, I didn't even know anyone who knew them. Any "wealth" they had from slavery was never passed down, they all went heavily bankrupt in the 1870s (they were all lending each other money, and someone made a poor investment so they all went down together when debt collectors came in). I don't feel any need to defend their actions, or to attack them to prove to myself I would not have acted similarly in their circumstances. Its just a fact that sits out there and is kind of interesting, but has no bearing on me personally.
I was aware that my view on this might be different than others, but it was confirmed the other day. We received this email to our general inbox (information in brackets is anonymized from original email):
In most cases I'd be happy to toss this email in the trashbin of my mind. This lady disliking me because of my ancestors isn't really a big deal. Someone lost a property sale somewhere, also not me and also not a big deal. But I do share one thing with this lady that constantly frustrates and annoys me: A Government. It would be nice to be a in a world where I could fully dismiss this kind of thing from my life. But if they vote and too many people that share their opinion vote ... well I'm sure they will find inventive ways to make their feelings towards us a more solid thing. I don't know where this leaves us. I'm certainly not going to respond to this lady's email.
It would be wrong to leave you all with the impression that this is a normal interaction. My mother has been doing genealogical research lately, including some compiling of the slaves names. She has made friends with a man in the state who was trying to research his ancestors. The man had hit a wall and couldn't find out more until my mom published the slave research.
I'll answer questions about my ancestors, but I will generally try to avoid doxxing myself, even if I'm not highly concerned with that outcome.
Why do you think that there is any chance that there are lot of people who share this opinion? This part:
really makes it sound like a fringe crazy---the left variant of the people screaming about adenochrome. As pointed out below, people who care about racial equality suddenly saying that judging others for their ancestry is ok are preemptively giving up their entire argument.
It's definitely not like a very active forum where merely supporting race blindness makes a comment one of the most controversial in your posting history. I would be much more worried that there are lot of people voting with this opinion.
I maybe should have included two "ifs" there to be more clear.
Basically, I'm not certain how many people share their opinion. Receiving the email is some level of evidence that more people with that opinion exist. I also tried to add in the second to last paragraph to make it clear that this is not the only kind of interaction.
Agreed that it doesn't make much sense. But I also think its silly to believe in ghosts. I have strong doubts that this is anywhere near the most brilliant holder of these beliefs.
I don't really like either extreme. I have lots of evidence already of one side existing, its depressing to get evidence of the other extreme existing as well.
Here's one person's experience that might make at least part of it not so depressing: I've spent a lot of times in universities in extremely left-leaning areas (Like Jill Stein beating Trump extreme). There are routinely literal communists in my circles. I've never not been able to pull an IRL political argument back from extremes through tying everything back to core ideals like egalitarianism (and playing word games to avoid certain triggering phrases)---no standardized testing isn't a white supremacist plot, which alternatives do you think are going to be less biased? Rent control isn't as obviously good as you think it is, you have to be careful not to screw over people trying to move in, have you looked at what the actual minority groups you're speaking for think about police funding? Do you really trust elite college admissions committees to implement a non-transparent, "holistic" affirmative action policy without sneaking in a bunch of details that turn it into something mostly benefiting the privileged under the cover of tokenism? etc.
I therefore thought that both extremes were basically covered by the Lizardman Constant. Reading this forum has been one of the biggest shocks I've experienced to my beliefs about the world in the last 5-10 years (second to the Ukraine invasion I guess)---here are a large number intelligent people I share a country with who actually just have irreconcilable value differences; people who have such crazy policy preferences to me not because they disagree about facts like the far-left people I meet, but because they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as.
Huh? With all the constant complaints about racism, you're shocked at the possibility of racists existing?
Who are you even talking about? We have holocaust deniers, we have HBDers, but I don't remember seeing anyone say an intelligent black people shouldn't be treated as intelligent, because they're black. It sounds like you're whipping yourself into a frenzy.
I honestly thought that most of the complaints about racism in the US were mostly caused by unconscious bias---things that the perpetrators would feel very guilty for and stop if they realized what they were doing. Otherwise, I thought the stories were some combination of exaggeration, cherry-picked bad luck, or very special circumstances---being in a certain part of Idaho or in a circa-2002 airport.
People maybe don't say this---they'll question whether there are intelligent black people in the first place or say that people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US. The first is a factual point that can be pretty quickly refuted, but the second is a values difference.
I'm talking less "complaints about racism in the US", and more complaints like "Trump supporters are racist". You're telling me all the post-2016 drama was about "unconscious bias"?
Well then I have a bit of an issue with making claims like "they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I agree there are actual values disagreements here (no shortage of folks here supporting monstrous things like surrogacy), I don't even mind slapping negative valance labels on them, like "racism", anymore. But if you're going to make an elaborate descriptive statement about what people believe, you should make sure it's accurate.
The first is a point I haven't seen anyone make here, and the latter is already a step down from your original claim, and I still want to know who you're talking about, because it doesn't quite fit into any conversations I remember.
See the discussion here.
Sorry, let me clarify---I also think there are a lot of people here who "honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I think the strongest evidence for this is what I linked above: one of the mods of this place saying that their posts supporting colorblindness tend to be very controversial because those posts are against the prevailing attitudes here.
There's another sort of of-topic interesting point: I'm not really sure that "people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US" is significantly different from "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". The cardinal, anti-meritocratic sin of judging people by their descent instead of their own accomplishments appears just as strongly in in both cases.
I find it amazing that someone who's been here for a long time and is clearly pretty smart can end up with these interpretations of themotte's viewpoints, reading the same words I have but interpreting them so differently, lol.
From the post you linked about someone being downvoted for advocating colorblindness, I upvoted this reply:
This is ... not speaking against meritocracy. If you have a way to measure someone's merit, use it, If not, because it's being suppressed, then use race as bayesian evidence. The replies to the post are evidence against, not for, your claim that a lot of mottizens believe 'people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as'.
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I disagree with your interpretation somewhat. He's talking about inventors and scientists, so the extreme end of intelligence. This is "tails of the bell curve coming apart" argument rather than intelligent black people not existing.
It's fine and well if this is how you see it, but there are people who don't agree. If you treat these things as interchangeable you'll be slandering your targets in front of them.
I don't think everything should be meritocratic, though. I wouldn't let some random dude take the place of my cousin in my family, just because he's more competent, and/or more pleasant to be around, for example.
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