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This isn't the message, though. Being born to a particular race certainly can be bad luck depending on the race and society based on the discrimination that goes on in that society. But the average IQ - and more broadly the average of any trait - of your race has no real bearing on your lot in life. It's your own personal intelligence that has the bearing on your life. And that personal intelligence isn't influenced by the average intelligence of your race - it's the other way around, where the average intelligence of your race is influenced by the personal intelligence of you and everyone else in your race, because that's literally how one would calculate that.
In theory, yes. But people aren't just individuals, they are also members of communities - familial, ethnic, racial, national, etc.
"Even if your people are naturally less intelligent, you might not be" doesn't seem like it would be much consolation. Especially if it turns out you aren't one of the lucky ones at the favorable end of the bell curve.
So, given a choice between "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because you are intellectually inferior and there isn't much that can be done about that," and "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because of historical discrimination and institutional racism, and we can fix that," which one do you think most people are going to choose? How easy would it be for you to accept option a?
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been particularly hostile to you. Obviously I disagree with your ideology, but I don't recall ever being uncivil to you.
I accept that you are sincere in wanting a peaceful separation where we all just get along on our respective sides of the fence.
I just don't believe most white nationalists are so benevolent. Sure, they might not all want a race war if there is a less violent alternative, but they don't actually care about the well-being of black people; they just hate and resent black people because they perceive blacks to be making their own lives worse.
Let's say that's true. I think even you must know that your project of the US setting aside a chunk of the country for African-America and subsidizing them for a few generations is about as likely as AIs turning into benevolent overlords who give us Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So I don't see white nationalism leading to anything but a race war, whatever your personal intentions might be.
I really don’t. I’ve pointed numerous times to the waves of middle-class blacks who have moved to Atlanta and other largely-black cities in the South over the past decade, reversing the Great Migration which brought their ancestors to the North and the coasts four or five generations ago. Meanwhile, whites are voting with their feet, streaming out of California and the Northeast and fleeing to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and other implicitly-white enclaves. (I lament that at the moment these places are only implicitly white - certainly nobody can look at the demographics of Florida and Texas and conclude that these are Whitopias - but given the churning internal migrations this country is undergoing right now, who knows how things will shake out?)
People are translating their revealed preferences into concrete action and physically separating themselves. This is happening right now. Of course we’re talking about baby steps relative to what I’m ultimately aiming for, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like it’s not happening or that it couldn’t possibly lead to more bold steps in the future.
"White flight" has been a thing for generations, and general population migrations for much, much longer.
Creating Whitelandia and Blacklandia is more than just a bold step, it would be essentially a forcible deconstruction of the United States as it exists now, and the explicit acknowledgment of hard racial boundaries. This is the stuff of speculative SF novels (written by white nationalists), not of contemporary society. Could your project happen in, say, two hundred years? I wouldn't rule out anything happening in two hundred years, including Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. But as far as trying to move in that direction now, good luck, but yes, I am going to judge your project by the ideology of your fellows.
Self determination of black Americans as separate nation was Communist party project (in style of pre-Stalin Soviet national policy).
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-belt-republic-1928-1934/
It was not the most succesful plank in CPUSA platform, to put it mildly.
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Do you find the fact that the so-called “black national anthem” (“Lift Every Voice And Sing”) was sung at the Super Bowl - before “The Star-Spangled Banner” - to be a meaningful step? Like, that seems to me like a very bold and extremely public move toward acknowledging the next step in the formal ethno-national awakening of black Americans. Hundreds of millions of people watched a luxuriant celebration of blacks as a separate and distinct people with their own “national anthem”, and I think this is a profoundly meaningful portent. If you don’t - or, if you don’t want it to be - that’s fine, but I think you should give a bit of credit to people like me who see it as a fulfillment of our predictions for how things will develop.
A black/white ethnic split is on the same level of plausibility as a red/blue national divorce (which gets a lot of play in centrish-right circles, e.g. michael anton* wrote an awful 50 pages on in an explicitly dissident right magazine). It's at least a little more plausible, in that kicking out the blacks wouldn't shear every institution, business, or organization in half - but that's pretty faint praise.
Most black people have white friends, and hold no strong animosity against white people. They work at their jobs with white colleagues, have white friends, use products produced by whites, watch TV shows written by whites with white stars, hire white plumbers when their pipes leak, etc. They're also attached to their cities, communities, their physical homes ... all of which physical relocation would tear up. What could possibly interest them in blexit?
And 'racism' continues to decline. Even in 1990, interracial marriage still polled at <50%. Now it's 95%. A "black national anthem", played for the sole purpose of whites accepting blacks more, isn't a portent of anything. Black separation didn't happen after slavery, it didn't happen during segregation, though there were attempts - and racial tensions are now .5% of that. It's not happening.
You can find a few things that, if you squint at the words, support any trend. But for every indicator trending towards black/white separation, a hundred things point the other way. Even (although, realistically, this data is meaningless) measures of geographical racial segregation find integration has increased recently.
* I mean, probably michael anton? Maybe it's a joke I'm not in on? It's really bad. It's just Tom (the republican)'s paragraphs upon paragraphs rebutting Malcolm (the democrat)'s individual sentences of imagined 'libtard whining'.
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I think it's on a continuum of racial disharmony that has been increasing over the past decade. In itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing (celebrating black anthems and MLK has been part of the national religion for decades now); you map it to something more sinister because you see everything through that lens. We've had more ridiculous posts here on the Motte essentially arguing that any movie with a black protagonist who could have been white is anti-white racism.
I don't disagree that there is A Problem. I would prefer a return to the 90s ideal of striving towards a colorblind society and peaceful coexistence. Of course you are going to say that's implausible and unrealistic. Let's say both our aspirations are unrealistic; I lean towards the one that doesn't lead inevitably to a civil war and doesn't require me to regard all the black people I know as future racial enemies. (Yes, I know, that's not what you think you're doing, you think you can someday persuade them to move to Blacklandia.)
N=1 but while I grew up with MLK imagery all over the place, in a school system which very much placed the black struggle and civil rights at the heart of the moral curriculum, I had never heard any "black anthems" or similar. I knew that the civil rights marchers sang "We Shall Overcome," but no-one sang it in my school or before high-school football games or anything - that would have been considered out of place and disrespectful.
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Huh? What, in anything I’ve said, leads you to conclude that I think this is sinister? I think it’s wonderful! I want this process of black ethnogenesis to proceed apace, and I wish it were happening even more quickly than it is. See, this is what I mean when I say you’re consistently misreading me, or failing to accurately model my mind. I just said that I believe it will be a good thing for black people to become fully distinct and separate, and to want and receive their own separate homeland so that they can fully blossom into the best version of themselves that they can be as a people. You seemed to acknowledge that I’m sincere in that belief, yet you’re now accusing me of believing that there’s something sinister or anti-white about blacks having their own national anthem? Do you see the cognitive dissonance here?
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Again, I don't think this is the message. There are plenty of things that can be done about lower intellect to give people better lives - just as many as can be done to effectively improve people's lives by countering historical discrimination or institutional racism, by my lights - and plenty of people specifically push for policies designed to do just that. I do think the message gets negativity attached to them because of the lionization of "intelligence" as the indicator of worth or value in a person, but then the solution is clearly to get rid of that lionization. I'm pretty sure concepts like physical strength or martial prowess used to be a far greater indicator of someone's worth as a human being (at least among males) in the past, but that association is mostly gone now in modern society. I think we can do the same for intelligence. And, frankly, I think we must if we are to create at all a functional society going forward.
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