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When people both here and elsewhere say that HBD is true but that society should still treat people as individuals or practice colorblindness, I get really mad. I don't disagree with them, but I still get mad
Because what I want to say in response is that that isn't good enough because your premise was supposed to wrong! The edifice that was used to justify anti-blackness for centuries was supposed to be completely discredited, put into the dustbin of history. You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!
But I can't express that belief because of how obviously irrational it is. It's a demand for cosmic justice, not a real intellectual rebuttal. Yet I can't help it
Please try harder to step out of your point of view. If you truly believe that Black people are inferior, which you just said, this is because you have accepted a certain set of rules that means the qualities of Black people are inferior to the qualities of other groups of people.
A long time ago I had a boyfriend who was Black. He could barely count when he went to pay for things (this is not an exaggeration) and I'm not sure he could even type to text or if he used speech to text for everything he wrote. Yet still there were qualities he had that impressed me. He was so kind, had a great memory, so musically talented, so friendly, even when we were doing something so casually like going to a movie or dinner he made it feel like a special occasion. He passed away a few years ago but I still remember him fondly and think I became a better person and my world was improved by being with him even though it was for such a short time. He had various health issues he was saddled with from his birth he had no control over that eventually ended his life far too early. But despite all this I do not today or ever in the past see him as inferior to me in any way. I am not religious but I believe every person is equal and that we must treat each other as such. It offends me that people might have seen him as an inferior person to me. And I feel the same way about other boyfriends I've had in the past, regardless of their race, people in my family, who are all the same race as me, and every other person living or dead.
The broader point I want to make is that there is more than one measure of a man. If you belong to mainstream bourgeois western society today, there are certain skills and traits that are predominant and revered. I have Noticed that most of these traits align with the traits of White people especially and to a lesser extent East Asian people. These traits are portrayed as intelligence, time efficiency, cleverness, and so on. But intelligence brings with it an arrogance, time efficiency the specter of impatience, and cleverness a tendency to manipulate. These are not inherently superior traits, and often are perceived badly by people outside of the modern West.
In other words, if you buy into a worldview that places Black people as inferior to any other race, perhaps your worldview is wrong.
This isn't a hostile comment; I'm just curious. Your capitalization of "Black" suggests that you're in favour of leftist racial politics. But are you aware that they don't capitalize "White" the same way? Neither makes linguistic sense, since they're adjectives not based on a proper noun.
From what I can tell, modern journos decided to start capitalizing "Black" specifically because it's silly and wrong, as a way to signal tribal affiliation (like putting obvious pronouns in one's bio). So capitalizing "Black" will annoy people on the right, but capitalizing "White" will annoy people on the left. Is it your intention to do both?
No, I don't think this is a charitable interpretation. I think modern journalists started doing it to be respectful. I capitalize Black because I think it is silly and wrong and points to the hypocrisy of the left and the surrealism of our society as a whole. I do it because it is the "correct" way in the style guide newspeak of today. It is similar to how some American Indians prefer to be called Indians as it points to the idiocy of the explorers who believed they were in Asia and so on.
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I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.
Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.
You are, if anything, understating thé taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage; before WWII different kinds of ethnic Catholics wouldn’t marry other ethnicities of Catholic. But it’s also more or less true that red tribe whites are functionally an ethnicity these days, and this is what ‘white’ as an ethnic group normally refers to(because it is the majority, and often a large majority, of the white population outside of New England).
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