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Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas
with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
But this goes to the core of it. What if normal whites have noticed enough that they decide "You know what, I'm going to act like every other race treats me." What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians? What if they start giving out contracts to white owned businesses the same way the federal government gives contracts only to black or minority owned businesses? What if they forgive debt for white's the same way the federal government keeps finding way to forgive debts exclusively for blacks? What if they give preferential medical treatments to whites the same way preferential treatments were given to blacks?
None of this requires deep supremacist neo-nazi beliefs. Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
I mean they did right? Even more than that actually. This is something white Americans already did. It's how you ended up where you are now. Do you think trying it again is going to work better? You have affirmative action and white guilt, people trying to make things up to black farmers and the like because this is what happened before and white people decided, actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that. Then they decided they didn't like it. Black people didn't have the power to change it. White people themselves did.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!), to try and make up for slavery and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. Instigated by white people themselves!
They already did the "What if?" You know how it ended.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
I haven't seriously tried to leave yet, so I must agree.
Cost, yes. In perpetuity, no. The largest costs should be opportunity costs- taking the moral slow route rather than the immoral fast route. Saving a drowning child should not imply that your great-grandchild is indebted to theirs, even if you also knocked the child into the river.
Obviously the best "time machine" choice is to stop the first European that intended to take slaves from Africa. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
What came before is not what followed after. Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicanism lost to federalism. America emerged from that forge stronger in many ways and weaker in others, but most definitely changed.
America failed to live up to its founding ideals, and tried to repair that by carving away further.
We're using that phrase differently and maybe I'm drawing the boundaries too narrowly to be truly fair. I would like to draw a bright line between people like William Lloyd Garrison and Tema Okun or Robin Diangelo. Or anyone else that has written positively of "critical race theory" rather than damning it to where it belongs: in the Valley of Hinnom next to the most odious theorists of Hitler and Mao and history's other monsters. What I mean by "white guilt" has been nothing but poison in the veins, harming the very people it claims to want to protect and everyone else in the process.
Perhaps I am relying too much on hindsight, and that "racism is good, actually" of modern progressives does have a true and consistent through-line with "maybe black and white people are reasonably equal" of the abolitionists. But I certainly hope not. Surely one should be able to call evil evil, and good good. Abolishing slavery is good. Suggesting that white people shouldn't be vaccinated to
reduce the surplus populationproduce "health equity" is the vilest evil short of war. Somewhere in between is that line I can't quite define but am confident exists.I think many things are bad. Letting perfection be the enemy of good is bad, but I'm not sure that measuring against what society has declared the worst possible thing instead is much improvement in itself.
Genocide is terribly bad, of course. So is slavery.
Tiers of justice, ceding the commons to the lowest common denominator, deciding that racism (or sexism) is good so long as you target it at the right people, restricting the right of association based on certain protected classes but not other categories of those classes, so on and so forth are also bad. Less so. Does that make them reasonable prices to pay for moral improvement? Does that make a functional multicultural society? All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Maybe, that's the point. It might be once it committed to slavery that America had no good outcomes. Either genocide or hundreds of years of racial animosity and war or affirmative action and critical theory. As you say the best option would likely to have been not enslaved a bunch of people. Once you do that as Jefferson noted, you have no good options.
So it might be that (hopefully not!) the price that must be paid for moral improvement is what you see today forever. Or it might (and hopefully will) decline over time. How long the racial wound of slavery and discrimination takes to heal is an open question. The question is given we can't change the past, is this the best option we have of those available to us? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was what 200 years give or take? So maybe roughly 200 years is what it will take to heal. Would 200 years of the things you don't like now worth 200 years of what black people had to go through in their 200 years? Or is that too great a moral price to pay?
There is no objective answer to that, really. I'd sway to the idea that yes that would be a reasonable price to pay. But that is also predicated on the fact, I think being a white man in the US is pretty good even with whatever headwinds being faced. So I don't really view it as much of a cost at all. I'd choose to be white over than black in a heartbeat from a flourishing point of view in the US right now and I don't see that changing particularly.
But how much of a cost (if any at all) anyone person is willing to bear for the mistakes of Americans past, is going to be invariably a very personal thing.
Why measure in time, and not lives? Or GDP, as reparation advocates want, with numbers larger than the wealth of the entire world?
Two wrongs do not make a right, so why would four centuries of opposing wrongs make a right? The past cannot be undone. Do the principles matter, or not? If the principles matter, then they shouldn't be violated over and over, no amount of violation fixes what's wrong. We are individuals, "created equal," "endowed with unalienable rights." And saddled with blood-debts and those rights left contingent on our protected class identities.
If the principles don't matter, than such arguments are bullshit and the problem isn't that we failed to live up to them, it's that we pretended they exist at all. But now that's moving away from concerns of moral improvement and into a suggestion of moral anti-realism.
It is, it could certainly be worse, and the social psychosis is a little less fevered than it was 2016-2023. And yet! Black-letter law says discrimination isn't allowed. And yet!
How many Supreme Court cases before Harvard and UNC and Michigan give up being racist? Or the state of Minnesota, apparently. Alas, they have taken the Jacksonian stance on such things.
I like it when laws mean things. I like it when words mean things.
If the only choice is black or white, I too would choose white, even if that means zero chance of being Idris Elba and nonzero chance of being on the meth transformation list. But why limit the choice to those options, if choice is to be imagined? Anyone would choose to be born to a rich family rather than abjectly poor, given the choice. To be born in fair weather and healthy lands than next to an EPA brown site or tornado alley. Beautiful rather than deformed, smart rather than stupid, et cetera.
The point is we don't choose. Isn't the lesson from Rawls' veil that we don't want laws where such differences matter?
Moral luck rules the day. So shall it ever be. Unless we're aiming for Harrison Bergeron communism, we can only do so much to account for moral luck, and the more we account for it the further we are from those principles that supposedly matter to have failed.
The cost I am willing to bear for history has gotten much, much lower since becoming a parent.
And if you were a black parent to a black child, how much of a cost would you say you and your people have borne only to end up (statistically) at the bottom of the ladder?
Words and laws do mean things. They mean what the people interpreting them thnk they mean, no more and no less. Just as "all men are created equal" didn't stop race based slavery because all men didn't really mean all men.
I completely agree that two wrongs do not make a right. If we could wave a magic wand and be done with race based issues, I would. But we don't live in that world. And in this world the sins of the fathers appear to be visited on the children whether we want it or not. Our options are constrained by human pyschology and the dynamics thereof.
I'm ok with headwinds for my kids, they'll be fine either way. My bigger concern is that Affirmative action et al doesn't actually primarily help the people its meant to help. I'd take a much more narrowly tailored version if I had the power.
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