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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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“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.