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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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To be clear, my experience with ordinary, working-class-in-the-sense-of-actually-works and middle class blacks has been that they know there's an issue with their culture, are often frustrated with African American Community Leaders and democrats for not addressing or acknowledging it...

I've had similar direct experiences. Unfortunately, I've also had direct experiences where individual blacks I knew bought the progressive racism/white-supremacy message hook line and sinker. There's a large section of the community that knows that at least a considerable portion of the problems are in-house. Aaron McGruder made a career out of shouting that message through a megaphone. But when push comes to shove, my observation is that the race-baiters win. Blue Tribe tells blacks that their problems are the fault of Red Tribe. Blue Tribe gets political power, Blacks get cheap hope and the avoidance of some really deeply unpleasant conversations. Until Red Tribe figures out how to make a better offer, it seems unlikely that this will change. And again, why should it? Red Tribe signed off on the promises too. Red Tribe politicians made all the same speeches about how education would fix everything. Red Tribe really does largely support and run the systems that coordinate meanness against individual blacks, at least if you're speaking in general terms. And crucially, Reds fundamentally do not have a better offer, at least from the black perspective, and at least in the short term. "we don't know how to solve this, and much of it is your own fault" is never going to beat "it's all their fault, help us beat them and we'll make you whole."

Adding to this, reds don't even have a better offer to the write-offs within white America than "At least we don't blame you for minorities' problems.". The present Trump administration is flailing at a solution for high school educated male wages being stagnant at best for the last 50 years (This fucks over black men harder, BTW, given their lower level of college education.) and probably isn't going to find one.

For better or worse, IMO Trump's rise was fueled by a creeping sense within white America that the "writeoff" portion was being expanded from "high school dropouts" (who barely exist) to "high school educated". Nobody cares about this guy, but people get mad when their nice but unexceptional kid with an IT degree struggles to find well-compensated employment.