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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
Before mass migration we could functionally ignore HBD and be nice and get along because the country was 87% white. It was always just an easier way to govern America. When immigration increased and wide scale changing of US demographics became an issue then it was a no longer tenable position. I think for 1990’s America it probably was better to eliminate knowledge of racial differences from public view especially since everyone was still internally racists enough to do a meritocracy on crime enforcement.
What the fuck are you talking about? When the country was supermajority white there was Jim Crow and white supremacist terrorism again Black Americans. Hart-Cellar was passed only a year after the Civil Rights Act
Very much so. Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.
Why do I say this? There was a constant, very real, threat of political violence over slavery from the 1820 Missouri crisis forward, that would eventually break out into large-scale political violence in 1854 (Bleeding Kansas) and all-out civil war in 1861. After the war, there was a failed white insurgency in the South (the 1st Klan) followed by a successful one (Redemption), such that the South was not consistently peaceful until Jim Crow was secured around 1890.
There is then a period of relative racial peace (in the "absence of violence" sense, not the "presence of justice" sense) as Jim Crow is uncontested, but this requires occasional pogroms to maintain white dominance, and is a period in which a violent criminal racist organisation (the 2nd Klan) ran Indiana and was a big political player in several other states.
I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.
And post-1970, the main forms of race-linked violence in America have been black-on-white crime, attempts by white vigilantes to stop it extra-legally, and attempts by Blue state and local governments to suppress white vigilantism. And crime in general, including black-on-white violent crime is dramatically lower than it was at the peak of the 1970s/80s crime wave.
So until MAGA and Woke started threatening political violence against each other, 2010s America had less race-linked criminal violence than at any time since the civil rights movement, and the post civil rights racial order featured no organised race-linked political violence and a lower threat level of potential political violence than previous racial orders.
The escalator (June 2015) was less than a year after the first Ferguson riots (which spanned several dates, the last of which was after the escalator). I would agree that race relations probably reached their best point during the early years of the Obama administration, but there was a demonstrable slope toward weaponizing it from as early as the White House Beer Summit (6 months into office). I think many people expected better improvements under Obama's leadership (I'm not going to say those expectations were, in hindsight, realistic), and more than a few voters soured on the idea in both directions.
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