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Please just tell me where you think white people are supposed to live
A friend of mine (white, very left-leaning) recently made an offhand remark that the large US city they live in is has "sooo many white people" upon discovering that said city is roughly 50% white. By the way they said it, it was clearly meant as a complaint. Knowing this person pretty well, this was about par for the course for them so I just ignored it, but I've heard similar things from other friends and it seems to be a general theme on the left in the US lately that there are too many white people everywhere, in a country comprised of 60-75% white people (depending on how you define it) as of the most recent census estimates [1]. I've heard this about cities, and I've heard it about rural areas in the form of "Yikes, I'd never live in {rural area}, too white". Importantly, I often hear the claim absent any other explanation of why that is intrinsically bad. Being somewhat progressive myself, I definitely recognize the impact on city demographics of slavery and redlining inflicted by white populations. I just don't see why the remedy is then to complain about the actual number of white people themselves, since in cities people in general are more progressive and therefore likely to vote for policies that work to alleviate long-lasting effects of racial injustice.
As someone who doesn't have a preference for an exact racial makeup in the place they live, but generally likes places that embrace multiculturalism like many large US cities do, I don't know what the reasoning behind such a complaint is, or what anyone who takes it seriously would like to see done about it. I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is. For one thing, it is a basic fact of statistics that with a population of 60-75% white people, you shouldn't be surprised to find a city with roughly 50% white people. Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)? Taken to the extreme, you get one area with all the white people and then 0 white people everywhere else, by definition what white nationalists advocate for, not to mention something I and everyone else who isn't a white nationalist finds detestable. This becomes even more confusing when the person complaining is white, by I'll chalk that up to just plain old stupidity.
More concretely, if a white progressive like my friend wants to act on their dissatisfaction and move to a place with far fewer white people, they are increasing the new place's white population and becoming part of the problem that made them relocate in the first place. What is the reasoning here? They get a pass on being white due to their progressive bona-fides? What are they even trying to signal? If we chalk it up to virtue signaling, why not just advocate for better/more just zoning and housing policy? I realize this post is heavy on me sharing anecdotes from my friend group, but I've heard it enough times now that I felt like I had to finally ask.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221
I don't consider myself a progressive, as that term is used today, but since you'll only get conflict-theory explanations from most folks here, I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.
Your friend probably doesn't actually want to move to a place with fewer white people. Such places probably exist within the city he lives in, and you could ask him why he doesn't move there, though you'd probably either be accused (with some justice) of being a jerk, or else you'd get a response that goes "something something gentrification." (Freddie deBoer has written about the catch-22 in which white people moving to whiter communities is white flight, which is bad, but white people moving to less white communities is gentrification, which is also bad.)
Among progressives nowadays, it's just considered an accepted fact that any place or organization that is "too white" will be hopelessly infested with institutional white supremacy. The only cure is more diversity. The problem with this is that "too white" basically means "majority white," and the problem with that is that, contrary to what a lot of people think, the United States is still majority white. Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."
Conflict explanation--it's malice for the outgroup. Mistake explanation--it's at best thoughtlessness; "a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy" isn't a position that I'd describe as...intellectually respectable?
This is where I'm confused--I thought that Scott's advocacy for viewing disagreements as mistakes was at least partially rooted in charity: let's assume the best of those we disagree with. But in this case, it sounds like the mistake version rounds to some version of "just dumb," and it's not obvious to me that this is a more charitable explanation than malice. Both are bad; is anti-intellectual thoughtlessness clearly better than hatred?
Does a steelman exist? Is there an answer that would reflect well on progressives? If yes, what is it? If no, what's the point in picking dumb vs. evil?
You make a fair point, and I think the real problem is not that no steelman exists, it's that I wasn't really being charitable even in my attempt to provide a mistake-theory explanation. (That's why I don't make a very good progressive.)
Okay, let me try again: the steelman requires that you more or less accept the Ibrim Kendi/Robin DiAngelo premise. Our country, our institutions, our societies, are suffering from deeply embedded white supremacy. Therefore, any place in which the white majority is glaringly obvious (to the point that non-white people are notable for being the outliers) is in need of diversifying (and should "do the work" to figure out why they have so few non-white people). Why are there so few POC here? Assuming you actually do the math and conclude that a ~13% black presence is what you should expect in an equitable racial distribution, a place where you find less than 2% black people has done something, intentionally or not, to make it unwelcoming or hostile to black people.
To go further, I'd have to go further in trying to steelman DEI and "anti-racism" as expressed by those two individuals, and, well, I don't accept their premises and I'm a liberal. But presuming you are dealing with someone who does accept their premises, the conclusion logically follows that any place that hasn't achieved some (statistically improbable) level of racial assimilation is full of institutionalized, unexamined white supremacy.
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"foolish" is almost always more charitable than "malice".
It's the other way around; it's hubris of the highest order to think your enemies are idiots. I respect my enemies too much to lie and call them stupid.
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Even if you step up the meta levels, to "whiteness bad, diversity good" as you suggest above, what's the steelman? If it's going to be a proper steelman, it ought to stand up to some level of counterargument (that's the point of "steel"), but in my experience, even the "steelman" pulls the race card immediately and declares disagreement invalid without engagement.
You said "almost always," well hedged. (I mean that sincerely.) But that admits the point that massive foolishness can be worse than small malice, and then we're just arguing degree.
Grey's Law, right? "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
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