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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.

I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?

I'd always assumed Jim Crow laws grew out of the same sentiments held in South Africa around that time; that black and white people would thrive better if separated.

I'm pretty sure "white flight" in the US was a phenomenon almost entirely concentrated in the North, and mostly happened as a consequence of the Great Migration, after the Civil Rights era, so it has scarcely anything to do with Jim Crow laws.

I think perhaps the root of your inability to understand why Jim Crow laws existed is that you seem to have a misunderstanding about what they were. You seem to think that they were simply residential segregation laws. But, that goal could be served by restrictive covenants, and the quintessential example of a Jim Crow law was, of course, the requirement of separate water fountains. That was obviously not about fear of crime. Nor were laws requiring separate dining facilities. Nor laws requiring separate cemeteries. Nor laws requiring separate swimming pools. Nor laws requiring bus companies to have separate ticket windows for each race. Nor laws requiring separate hospital entrances.

And, of course, there were the cultural aspects of Jim Crow, such as this one:

The white owners of clothing stores did not allow blacks to try on clothing as a general rule, fearing that white customers would not buy clothes worn by African Americans. Some stores did allow blacks to put on clothing over their own clothes or to try on hats over a cloth scarf on their heads. Shoes were never tried on as a general rule, but most white clerks did allow exact measurements to be made.

As should be obvious, much of Jim Crow was about trying to maintain "purity."

Cheezus. You're right, I didn't know the full extent of Jim Crow. This is nuts and I appreciate you telling me about it.

It's very hard to believe this question has been asked sincerely, but you're also getting a lot of questionable answers. White southerners were very often racists, in the classical sense of believing in their inherent racial superiority. But you're right that simple racism is probably not sufficient to support Jim Crow laws all on its own.

If you know anything about the history of the Civil War, though, you know that after the Civil War, the South was Occupied Territory. All the newly-freed slaves formed an enormous voting bloc, and they all voted Republican. This was a huge opportunity for carpet baggers from the North to break into federal politics, which were substantially dominated by a New England elite. If the Southern states were to have anything approaching self rule ever again, it was extremely important to disenfranchise the Republican-captured black electorate. And so: Jim Crow.

Once you've got the practical foundation of "we need to disenfranchise black Republicans" in place, then the rest of the stuff--anti-miscegenation, segregation, etc.--follows pretty naturally from the prevailing (racist!) worldview of the politically powerful whites in the "Reconstructed" South. But the New Deal starts bringing black voters over to the Democratic Party, and segregation becomes a regional issue rather than a party issue for much of the 20th century. After that, it was just a matter of institutional inertia.

Of course, people in the past didn't know many of the things we know now, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried; nationality and race were (and in most places still are) indistinguishable concepts. Native Americans are to this day allowed to (encouraged to!) live in racially segregated communities, and presumably some well-meaning individuals saw parallels there as well. So I don't mean to suggest that there were no plausible arguments (beyond racism) for Jim Crow laws. I just think that, in purely political terms, the desire of Southerners to cast off, if not the yoke of the Union, at least the yoke of the Republicans, is quite sufficient to explain their desire to disenfranchise black voters by whatever means necessary.

Isn't it also the case that blacks lost their majority of the population in many southern states when many of them migrated to the north?

In some cases--but substantial migration doesn't appear to have happened immediately, and not every state was majority black. South Carolina was 57% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is 27% black today. Mississippi has similar numbers. Georgia was about 44% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is today about 30% black. Florida was also 44% black in 1860, but is just 17% black today.

Today the states with the highest absolute number of black residents are Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and California; four of those five are also in the top four most populous states (Georgia is #8 on that metric). The so-called First Great Migration of black Americans north and west is commonly held to have begun some 45 years after the end of the Civil War; I guess if you really wanted to know the precise year when South Carolina or Mississippi became more white than black, you'd have to do a deep dive into the census numbers.

Thank you so much! This explanation makes the most sense to me. It is very thorough and I'm going to use it as a guide for further research.

“The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried”

  • is this a little too strong? I guess if you define racially diverse as black/white/yellow. Is Italy/Rome a counterexample as they let barbarians into the Senate. UK thought of the Irish/celts as a separate race. Mexico and a lot of South America seems to have implemented a mixed people earlier. Perhaps Russia at times was more diverse.

is this a little too strong?

Well, maybe! "What's a race" obviously matters a lot in deciding the question. Rome was pretty diverse overall but also mostly, and most of the time, segregated by dint of geography and language--Roman citizens had freedom of movement, vassals less so. Irish migration to Britain versus British migration to Ireland is something I don't have any priors concerning, and I know even less of Russia.

The apparent willingness of the Spanish and (to a lesser extent) Portugese to "go native" is also interesting, but Mexico becomes a country in the same approximate era as the Civil War itself, and I would tend to characterize the Mexican people as more a mixed people than a diverse people. This may be the idea that was working in the background of my thought process, there. Humans have been migrating, and mixing, forever. But "mix" or "exterminate" seem to have been the default historical options, followed eventually by "colonize," which ends up being a confusing combination of the two. "Mixing" with blacks was often explicitly not the goal of even the white, progressive abolitionists who spearheaded the North's anti-slavery efforts.

In a way, this plants the seeds for contemporary ideas about race--is the ultimate outcome for the United States to be a slightly-whiter-and-blacker version of the aboriginal/European mixed heritage that dominates South and Central America? Or is it to become a collection of pseudo- or actual-ethnostates, from the Navajo and Apache and Cherokee reservations, to Black and Christian nationalist microstates, and so forth?

Well, that's pretty far afield, but the point is that maybe it is a little too strong... but still I think something new was being tried, there, even if I have failed to characterize it perfectly, and that whatever it was, it continues to have unique consequences today.

A possible solution to your quandary is that a black criminal underclass did in fact form in the intervening years between emancipation and the creation of Jim Crow laws. The black ghetto subculture that colonized Northern industrial cities during the Great Migration was not a novel development but grew out of a preexisting subculture that had existed for generations in small Southern cities dating back to emancipation.

I may be misremembering, but I believe a lot of ghettos originally grew out of the Contraband Camps set up by the Union. After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves were 'seized' as contraband and put in camps. This became a humanitarian crisis, as disease ravaged these camps and there were shortages of food. I believe some hundred thousand+ black people died. Many former slaves returned to the south, or travelled north, after the war ended, but many stayed in these camps. It'd be interesting to overlay the historic locations of those camps with various post-war maps and see if any of them are still ghettos and/or predominantly African-American.

I thought states started adopting Jim Crow laws almost immediately after the Civil War ended.

No, immediately after the Civil War the south was occupied by the Union and went through a period called reconstruction where it was forced to accept the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and basically existed under the control of the federal government.

It was only after the south was fully reintegrated with the Union and reconstruction ended that they could start passing Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and then early 20th century.

Though, of course, there was extra-judicial violence and prejudice against blacks like the original KKK. But, the actual Jim Crow laws are decades after the Civil War.

Huh, is that so? It always felt like there was a mysterious void in history class around that period. Any books you can recommend on it?

The scientific perspective of the time was that blacks were inferior intellectually and culturally. The ethical consensus of the time was that groups were allowed to keep their wealth and have dominion over the towns and cities they created. The geopolitical-historical perspective of the time was that white people were simply one member of a multicultural family of enslavers and were not uniquely guilty of any sin. The cultural perspective was that blacks were more prone to criminality, and that white people were unique in certain “civilizational” abilities. All of these combined form a strong argument (for the late 1800s) in having white towns staying white.

The justification was about preventing miscegenation. Jim Crow laws were written with the assumption that black men sleeping with white women was an inherent harm, that white men sleeping with black women was also less than ideal, and that it was important to whiten the population and keep it that way. Louisiana briefly attempted to segregate its public schools by sex to prevent black and white students dating after brown v board of ed.

Miscegenation was the primary reason for Jim Crow laws- most were written to maintain distance, and while blacks were definitely viewed as lesser, maintaining a subordinate position(rather than protecting the purity of the white race) was a distinctly secondary goal. Black wealth was tolerated and blacks were permitted to attend college(but segregated to ensure they didn't impregnate any white women). This is a different story from Apartheid in S Africa.

Do you have evidence on this? We have a ton of writings from the south during reconstruction, and while the rape of white women by black men was an important issue (it influenced the Tulsa race riot), and still is an important issue according to fbi stats, I don’t recall much writing talking about consensual sex being the important issue.

The people writing Jim Crow laws didn't make a strong distinction between rape and consensual sex when it came to a white woman and a black man, just as today we wouldn't make a strong distinction when it comes to a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man. Segregationists had a different mentality about miscegenation combined with a view that black males were inherently rapey towards white women and thus couldn't be trusted around them.

I don't say these things to make value judgements, but I do think it's important to remember that people in the past had values dissonance when we try to understand their thinking.

This doesn't show that their "primary" fear was about what today would be considered consensual relations rather than what would today be considered rapes.

I thought anti-miscegenation laws were separate. Was the idea that people might be tempted to break those laws without forced separation?

Jim Crow laws were created because of pervasive white supremacist sentiments in the South. They served to keep southern blacks politically disempowered and economically subordinate to Southern elites while also satisfying demand for racism among the general southern population.

Before blacks were a criminal underclass, they were the sort of people inclined to become a criminal underclass; Whites historically disliked them, and Jim Crow laws were in fact designed to disenfranchise them. Given how the black bloc consistently votes these days, I miss ol' Jim Crow.

  • -18

Permabanned for ban evasion and racial slurs.

How can one address historical sentiments without using the words of the time?

Are all historical questions off-limits if they lead to bans?

How shall one keep updated to the current-day appropriate language toward any arbitrary time period? Columbus Day or Indigenous People Day? Perhaps we'd need some kind of Brazilian guidebook.

Just to make this clear, they weren't "using" racial slurs in the sense that they used the word while talking about its historical context, they were literally using racial slurs to attack people in the community.

You've brought too much heat and too little light, here. You're also not writing to include everyone in the conversation. To refer to an entire group, the majority of whom are not criminals, as a "criminal underclass" is clearly inflammatory. The rules do not forbid inflammatory claims; what they forbid is claims that are not also proportionally effortful, bringing argument and evidence (and kindness and charity!) to bear.

And I'd leave it at that, but in the short time we've been on this site, you've managed to accumulate a ban from Zorba, a ban from Amadanb, and five other warnings besides! Take two weeks off this time. You do not seem interested, at present, in the project of making this place a fruitful discussion ground. If you continue to show that unwillingness, your bans will only continue to grow.

If Blacks and Latinos actually voted according to their beliefs they would all vote NOT Democrat. Blacks, Latinos, Asians or just about any non white immigrant in the US is significantly more socially conservative on average than whites.

Consider it a failure of the NOT Democrats Political parties to capitalize on that.

Blacks, Latinos, Asians or just about any non white immigrant in the US is significantly more socially conservative on average than whites.

hmm...not sure about that https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2012/04/4-25-12-8.png This shows the difference rapidly narrowing

Whites and Hispanics almost tied:

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2017/06/1_31.png

Good article on the subject by a former participant here. Important points like Asian republicans being more anti-gun than white democrats, and literally all non-white groups regardless of party affiliation being even more hostile to free speech than white democrats.

I wish we could get him back on here.

It's true that the hispanic population is generally socially conservative, but aside from homophobia secular blacks don't seem that socially conservative, and it's unclear that asians are socially conservative rather than just expecting a functional society.

That gets to the question of what we mean by 'socially conservative'. African Americans are religious, significantly more likely to oppose abortion than Democrats (though less likely than Republicans), significantly less likely to be accepting of homosexuality than Democrats (though more likely than Republicans), etc... but social conservatism in the US tends to imply conformity to Red Tribe cultures and political priorities, not just individually conservative views. So even though there are a fair number of blacks who would tally as socially conservative if we took them issue by issue, they're not necessarily very attracted to the politics of American social conservatism.

As far as hispanics go, most of the same dynamics are in play - they're more socially conservative than Democrats but less than Republicans, but overall just don't have the same priorities.

"It's the Republican's fault they don't bribe the minority underclass enough" is a true statement, but I'd rather be rid of that particular underclass than held hostage by their vote.

Good conflict theory. What are you going to do about the fact that you are "held hostage" by women being far more left wing than men?

I'm no wokie but I don't think wanting to be "rid" of black people is an idea I can get behind. And frankly that's just a ridiculous statement to make at its face. How do you propose getting rid of them? You are absolutely free to your own views, but views that will never ever be implemented ever and saying them with a straight face is called "larping"

The mass physical deportation of minorities is off the table. The mass disenfranchisement of them is not only on the table, it's frequently being discussed as a real thing that's actively happening.

So I don't want to deport them. I just want to strip their voting rights.

views that will never ever be implemented ever and saying them with a straight face is called "larping"

Just saying that would make an awful lot of actual political views larping, including actual Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, religious fundamentalism, etc.

I'm just saying, free one-way tickets to Wakanda or that all-women island Wonder Woman comes from would be pretty cheap and self-select for problem cases ("lesbians with penises extra welcome!!!") Even if we had to buy some countries to rename first.

Liberia didn't work out, but I'm sure people would have put more effort into it if they knew how the next few centuries would go.

Pretending for a moment that this question is asked in good faith and not the obviously loaded "Howdy fellow kids, golly gee why is racism?" question that it is, there are actually history books written about this.

Jim Crow laws were not just about "keeping black criminals away" but as much as possible, enforcing the subjugation of black people that had previously existed under slavery but was no longer technically legal now that they were (on paper) equal citizens.

Consider for a moment the possibility that racism actually exists, and that sometimes people act in a discriminatory and oppressive fashion not solely because they are rational actors responding in an evidence-based manner to anti-social behavior, but because they don't like certain classes of people and consider those people inferior to them, and are very unhappy about not being able to legally prevent those people from working and living and mixing with them.

Based on my experience asking these sorts of questions, I figured that at least some people would assume that I'm acting in bad faith. I appreciate you answering my question in spite of this assumption.

Slavery has an obvious economic incentive in that it's profitable for businesses to make people do unpaid labor at gunpoint. When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself. Slaveowners, for the most part, weren't people who found human suffering an inherent positive. They were indifferent to human suffering, which means they would gladly enable it for the sake of profit. To my knowledge, Jim Crow was not a way for white businessmen to make money, and so it did not serve in any way the same purpose as slavery. If there was a way for Jim Crow to be used for profit, then that would change my understanding of this period in history.

Telling me to read books doesn't work unless you name specific books. I don't trust my own education, or anything I'd randomly pick up at the library. I'm well aware now that any issue relating to race will be skewed in the present-day news, and I have no reason to believe this would be different for books about historical racial issues.

In addressing your last paragraph, I know that some racists of the kind that you describe exist, but I have no idea how numerous they are now or how numerous they were historically. I only know that I, and many others, have been falsely accused of being this kind of person, no matter how much we champion liberal values or equality under the law, and the amount of false positives does make me wonder how common the real deal ever was. If I take your description of historical racism as the truth, and I try to imagine how that would work with my understanding of tribalism today, I suppose that historic racism would poor whites treating poor blacks as their outgroup and rich whites as their far group. That would be comparable to things I'm aware of.

Most people don't enjoy human suffering. In order to profit from it at scale, you evolve a culture that frames your inhumanity to fellow men as something else. The slavery was gone, but the culture that had evolved to enable it persisted. Understand?

I can understand a certain reluctance to simply accept at face value that the authors and supporters of Jim Crow were actually super racist, given modern trends. But I don't think it makes sense to reject it entirely. IMO it is likely true and fits all of the classic patterns of outgroup-suppression. We hate them because of some easily-identifiable difference and so will stomp on them and make up reasons for it later. It's a pattern as old as time itself, no reason to assume we're immune to it.

In fact, my model for how wokeness went crazy is that, back when there was substantial and established actual racism, we established a bunch of groups to fight it, which is basically a good thing. The problem comes in when those groups become established institutions with money and power and people identify with their participation and support of them. The consequence of that is, when you're actually successful and the problem you were created to fight has 95% gone away, you don't just pack up your bags and go home, hanging a great big "Mission Accomplished" banner behind you. You have to find a way to declare that the problem is now worse than ever and so you still need even more money and power than you had before. It can't ever be admitted to have gone away because then your position and identity goes away too.

The problem comes in when those groups become established institutions with money and power and people identify with their participation and support of them.

They then go on to become the monster that they were created to fight (ala anti-white, anti-christian, anti-male bigotry).

When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself.

I'm saying white people didn't believe that black people should hold equal stature to them and in particular did not think they should intermingle with them in society. White Southerners especially, having recently lost a war and been forced to free their slaves, were not keen on their oppressors (as they saw it) dictating that they treat their former slaves as equals. Others have pointed out that a large part of this was fear of race-mixing (i.e., white women sleeping with black men), and that was certainly a large part of it though not the entirety of it.

I am not sure what to tell the persona you are adopting that pretends to be unaware of basic facts of American history. Leaders of the day were not subtle or covert about their motives; they spoke very openly about wanting to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, and why. I don't think even white supremacists will disagree with my summary. They will only disagree about whether the motives and means were justified.

What other reason do you think there would be for Jim Crow laws if not racism? The motive I suspect you are trying to extract from this discussion is "It must have been justified by their actual dealings with black people." Even if made in good faith, this attempt to map "rationality" onto all past behavior doesn't work because people are not, for the most part, and especially not in large groups, rational actors.

I know that they didn't want to share schools or restaurants with black people. What I am having trouble understanding is was why. I don't know what leaders of the day said, I only know what memes I learned in high school history. With that said, your explanations do make sense and I am currently internalizing them as part of my world view.

Of course white supremacists wouldn't disagree with your summary - it gets them off the hook for having to actually explain how any of their beliefs are supposed to make sense.

I have read quite a few racist authors since joining the motte, but I don't think I have seen any who declared racism good as is. Who had no justifications for it, zero logic behind their position, just an inherent intolerance for black people which they considered reason enough to build a society around. Anyone asks them why they don't like black people and they say 'I'm racist, now help me institute these laws'.

Like everyone else on the planet, racists are motivated by logic. It is usually terrible logic, and usually post hoc justification for inherent intolerance, but there is a chain of thoughts which they use to justify their beliefs to themselves and their peers. They always have reasons like "criminal dispositions" or "racial purity" or "God said so".

Determining the logic which led to Jim crow laws would in no way justify it, and in fact gives us the best opportunity to demonstrate the flaws in their logic. If you are so certain you have augured the op's motivation, why not use it to demonstrate the flaws in their beliefs for everyone else reading?

Of course racists never say they are racist just because they hate black people for no good reason. Everyone has reasons for feeling the way they do.

Like everyone else on the planet, racists are motivated by logic.

I don't agree with this so much, though. You can usually find some logical thread in the motives of sane people, but that doesn't mean everyone is actually motivated by logic. Many people are motivated by feelings, including aggrievement, resentment, or a sense of righteousness. And sometimes, yes, naked hate.

If you are so certain you have augured the op's motivation, why not use it to demonstrate the flaws in their beliefs for everyone else reading?

Because I see little value in doing that, especially when I doubt the OP's sincerity.

I'm saying white people didn't believe that black people should hold equal stature to them and in particular did not think they should intermingle with them in society.

Your phrasing here glosses over a slightly more complex picture--namely, that Northern and Southern anti-black racism had different emphases. There's a reason that the preclearance measures of the VRA covered several northern cities as well as several southern states. Northern racism said that blacks could be "high but not near;" Southern racism was "near but not high." In other words, the racists of the North tended not to be threatened by powerful black people, but they didn't want to live near them. The racists of the South had less of an issue with black people nearby, so long as they didn't get "uppity."

Neither viewpoint is remotely admirable, but the details go some way to explaining how race relations, preferred policies, living patterns, and the like developed in somewhat divergent directions long after the Civil War. As I understand it, this was also a difference in emphasis, not 100% this vs. 100% that.

I'm aware, but I was presenting a simplified version for our OP who suspects racism is just something modern race activists made up.

The old saying that Southerners loved black people but hated the black race, while Northerners loved the black race but hated black people, is also a simplification but has some degree of truth.

Jim Crow laws required all blacks to have jobs and allowed the local authorities to find jobs for them, at whatever rate of pay they saw fit, if they were noticed to be unemployed in any way, at least in their original, pre-Plessy, form.