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Do you think we're going to get to a world where elected officials say "HBD is true actually and that's why blacks underperform". I really don't think so. I'm not even sure we should, although it would be better if people could understand it without necessarily saying it.
The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.
And Matt Walsh is incredibly brave. It takes a lot of guts to make a movie like this. I trust him not to cuck a lot more than I would someone who needs good standing from the elites such as Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney.
Hell, the guy went on Joe Rogan and said straight up that marriage is between a man and a woman and is for the purpose of procreation. He sticks to his guns.
As I’ve pointed out a million times before, it was not a good Schelling point, because it was inherently unstable. It required a massive, society-wide coordinated effort to pretend not to notice something that’s obvious. And more specifically, it required black people to participate in that coordination, and to sacrifice a huge amount psychologically as a result. This is a culture with multigenerational stories of (what they consider) grievous mistreatment that has never been made right, and which (as they see it) is directly responsible for the profound differences in achievement and prestige between themselves and other racial groups.
In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.
A plurality of blacks were willing to temporarily accept this new paradigm because they earnestly believed that, given a procedurally (if not materially) level playing field, blacks would inevitably start to move toward parity with whites. Thirty years later that absolutely has not happened, and shows no signs of even getting closer to happening. Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie. HBD-aware whites disagree with blacks about what exactly that lie was, but neither side fails to recognize that it was indeed a lie.
Racial grievances have more to do with the fanning of racial grievances than with actual grievances. Or, put it another way, blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today, even though today they benefit from much greater affirmative action.
People are bound to notice that blacks do worse in society. Here is the menu of choices for how to deal with this problem. I think there's a clear winner.
In an ideal world we'd be at #2. Scientists and policy makers would understand that #1 is the truth but it's not super polite to talk about it.
Don't want #2? Well, I hope you've enjoyed the last 10 years of racial grievance politics. Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.
Unfortunately, ignoring the problem is not stable, because there will always be someone who breaks the taboo and blames racism. Which means that explanations like (1) (which include "culture" as well as HBD, the common element being that the problem lies with blacks, not whites) must remain, if not on the table, at least at the ready to respond to such violations. There's no static equilibrium but there can be a dynamic one... but not if you allow the supertaboo of racism to cover all (1)-style explanations.
If the elite can be convinced of HBD, then they can punish people who break norms. So, yeah, I guess the ideal would be to convert the elite and then feed race blind pablum to the masses.
A free society will always have race baiters like Cornel West and Al Sharpton. But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.
You mean the decade of the Rodney King riots, “superpredator” discourse, and OJ Simpson?
Yep. It was actually pretty great. At the start of the decade, crime was near all-time highs thanks to 2 decades of urban decay and lax law enforcement.
A tough-on-crime approach put so many murderers in jail that the murder rate fell by nearly 50%. Many major cities like New York saw even larger gains with a corresponding urban renewal that (temporarily) stemmed the white flight to the suburbs.
Had the policies of the 1990s been allowed to persist until today, the U.S. would have the lowest murder rate in 100 years, maybe ever.
Right, I don’t disagree with any of this, I’m just trying to understand what you think are the reasons for why America stopped pursuing those policies. You refer to “race baiting” and “fanning the flames”. Okay, yes, obviously fuck Al Sharpton and Cornel West. But why do you think so many people (both black and white) were susceptible to their messaging? How do we get people to stop taking them seriously?
My basic theory is that blacks in this country are always going to go through cycles of militancy and complacency, and whites are always going to react with their own cycles of hardness and softness. I’m seeing early signs that whites might be ready to shift to a period of hardness, but this will inevitably soften once the proximate causes (Floyd-style race riots, racial grifters overplaying their hand, etc.) fade from memory.
In other words, like I said, the 90’s colorblindness wasn’t bad - I’d be perfectly fine living in it indefinitely, even if it would require me to really hold my tongue at times, especially since I have been on the receiving end of black criminality multiple times in my life - but it was not built to last. The inherent tensions and historical wounds between blacks and whites will continue to recur until either real parity is achieved - perhaps through serious and targeted eugenics and gene therapy - or separation is achieved.
I know, my position is basically "let's try it again and maybe it will work this time". But that's a legitimate position I think. We touched the stove and we got burned. Maybe next time we won't touch the stove. At least until the memory starts to fade again.
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