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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I wonder how much of the sting of perceiving being viewed as “inferior” comes from a feeling of powerlessness. To give an example where the shoe was on the other foot: in Haiti, first after the abolition of slavery then after the defeat of the LeClerc expedition the Blacks and mixed race people ruled their half of the island. These are by and large the same people who were either slaves or (in the case of the mixed race) lived under basically French Jim Crow in 1788. In 1788, there was a large internalization of the view that the French were just better and they were powerless. By 1804, and even by 1794, that view was nonexistent. They had achieved self rule and clearly were not inevitable charges of the French.

It seems to me the issue isn’t this or that physical statistic, but more about the fear that “my community in perpetuity will be dominated by the outgroup.” As Haiti showed, albeit with every race massacring every other race, that feeling of agency is less about the base physical facts of the different groups and more about social position.