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How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.
More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.
I think the code thing is true in both cases more or less. If you’re anti-woke you oppose the DEI and “anti-racism” agenda and so on (anti-racism in quotes because this isn’t the same as beliefs in equality, but a suite of social and political views that are called anti-racism).
And in most instances, anti-racism is, in practical terms anti-white. When companies brag about their diversity, it’s generally that they e made a special effort to find, recruit and promote non-whites. When schools talk about reading more diverse sources, generally it means setting aside classic European texts to add in texts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America where the population isn’t white.
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One is true and the other is false.
One is hinged, one is unhinged.
@The_Nybbler was certainly playing a bit loose with the boundary of "low effort", there, and I definitely directed a frown in that direction, but all you did was add heat to it. Please don't do that.
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"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.
"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.
You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.
"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:
I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.
Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.
Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.
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"Diversity" is aimed (often explicitly) at reducing the relative proportion of whites (and sometimes Asians). Elimination of affirmative action is aimed at NOT doing that. These are not the same.
You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.
Aware - maybe, want - not at all. Reducing the representation is not the policy goal. Stopping artificial racist distortion of the market (and society) is. If the statistics would be different - then it will be, but it's not the goal of the advocacy. Just as the result of reducing child mortality could be raise in crime (because poor children would die more often, and if they stop dying, they have higher chance to grow up into criminals), it does not mean every pediatrician has increasing crime as their goal. Making such inferences is both unproductive and unfair.
2rafa is arguing consequentialism here, that anti-AA advocates are firmly aware of the consequences of their actions. This is indeed the bar because the context is that Diversity is anti-white in consequences.
If pro-AA advocates can play the intent and goal card, then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.
Are both of these inferences unfair, or only one?
That assumes such a distortion exists, which is very much unproven. While the AA distortion is obvious and easily seen - and, in fact, nobody even attempts to hide it, and if they did, it'd be extremely easy to disprove just quoting their own policies - the other side requires introducing phlogiston-like "systemic racism", which is immeasurable, imperceptible, unfalsifiable and can only be proven by employing the circular argument from the outcome. Admittedly, some racist policies existed, and it is theoretically possible somehow, somewhere the remnants of them survived (e.g., gun control policies or union protections have well known racist roots) - and if they did, getting rid of them would be appropriate. However, that is not what AA proponents are arguing for, and that's not what they are basing their argument on. There's no symmetry - it's like comparing General Relativity and flat-earth hypothesis - on the surface, both look structurally similar, as they both make some claims about certain phenomena, but once you bother looking deeper, the similarity disappears entirely.
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"Diversity" is anti-white in intent, in action, and in consequences. As we routinely have confirmed with advocates of such using phrases like "stale, pale, and male" or "useless white male pilots".
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I am saying that removal of discrimination is not the same as implementing it, even if some of the effects are.
Can a disabled person argue that eliminating disability welfare is anti-disabled people?
That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.
AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.
I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.
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Are you prepared to argue that being black is a disability akin to being blind? Should you argue we should allocate some NIH funds to look for the cure?
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They can argue anything they want, but I see no reason to accept their framing. "You're arguing against an advantage for me, therefore you are anti-me" isn't valid.
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I agree to an extent. Conflating demographic replacement with blacks was always an implicit lefty meme born out of their inability to distinguish ingroup/outgroup bias from narratives surrounding immigration and birthrates. The concern over blacks in the US is not demographic but 'cultural' for a lack of a better term.
When 6% of the population is committing 50-60% of all violent crime you should be allowed to ask why they are all black men and what can be done about them as black men before you start restructuring your potentially high trust white society to account for such a disruptive minority. In that sense blacks act as a disruption generator that fuels the aspects reactionaries hate the most about modern lib/left/progressive expression. Primarily the aspect that they are traitors who refuse to face the hard truths and instead let others carry the cost of the fantasies their unexamined privilege affords them.
To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes. The old generation with their old propaganda gets cycled out and the new generation with new propaganda gets cycled in to continue where the old left off.
On the other hand, modern US society is in part based on worshipping black people. I mean, can anyone deny to ridiculous effort both sides of the mainstream enact in just to get a black person to mouth off their talking points? And the fact people genuinely feel that their side is more valid if they have a black person on their side.
I wish I could find the study that, in broad terms, showed how depicting blacks as fighting for a just cause made people more likely to assume blacks in general were more virtuous. It, at the very least, confirmed all of my biases regarding the effects I felt after being exposed to a nigh endless propaganda stream of blacks protesting during the civil rights era against the evil white supremacist empire. I mean, why were the evil white police hitting the innocent blacks who just wanted to be treated the same? My 12 year old brain could make no sense of it, and came to the obvious logical conclusion that one side was good and the other evil.
Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.
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That's not the entire truth though. The backdrop to the peaceful protests was violent riots and full scale political terrorism, as is examined in detail in Days of Rage In full context, the civil rights movement is not just a bunch of innocent blacks getting beaten up by sadist white men. But that would only exist as a sideshow to the baseline that black people, in general, are not more virtuous than others, despite many people intrinsically believing so.
As for black men and crime, as long as the societal norm is to apply blame and dish out punishment based on historical crimes made by your ancestors, like is done to white people, on top of blaming them as a group for any activity a white person undertakes as an individual, which is done on top of actively marginalizing against white men based on the comparatively poor performance of blacks, as well as actively fostering an environment that excuses black crime and vilifies white crime, and all of those activities existing under an umbrella of anti-racism, I see no reason why we can't have an active anti-racist marginalization campaign enacted against black men.
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I very much agree with this but would like to make sure we're on the same page on drilling down to the individual in our pursuits of equal treatment. We should address only the criminals no matter their skincolor. But we should also be distributing aid and help also only based on need correct? No blanket affirmative action pushes so that the poor white trailer kid gets the same help as the poor black resident in a blighted neighborhood?
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Because it’s not the same rhetorical game. In my experience the ‘anti-woke’ people are vocally and actively anti-affirmative action, blackwashing, pride stuff, etc and ‘diversity’ people in my general experience tend to express that it’s never meant to be anti-white, even when it is (except that’s a good thing).
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