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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

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 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.

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

Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.

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.

Nothing should be done about "black men", but something can be done about criminals. Those are two separate categories.

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?