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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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From the UK: White pupils excluded from extra Saturday literacy lessons

Parents at a primary school in Haringey have been told that schools will fund Saturday school places for children from black and black heritage families to “accelerate progress in reading and writing whilst also developing the children’s knowledge of black history and culture”.

However, no comparable offer was made for white pupils despite parents arguing that evidence shows white working-class boys have fallen behind their peers.

Schools in Haringey and Enfield are able to enrol pupils for the classes at the Nia Academy which has been established by the Haringey Education Partnership (HEP), a not-for-profit organisation which provides services to member schools.

There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!

In general, I think it's a mistake for ethnonationalists to focus so strongly on purportedly intrinsic psychological properties of certain groups, like IQ or criminality. It does leave you open to the question of why you're an ethno nationalist, instead of an IQ nationalist or a low-crime nationalist (a focus on crime rates in particular leads to consequences that are unpalatable for the far right: if your overriding goal is to reduce crime rates, then you should be trying to build a society that has as few males as possible!).

An argument for ethnonationalism that sidesteps these concerns is that racial discrimination and preferential race-based treatment are more difficult to implement in a racially homogeneous society. If everyone in your city is white, then it won't even make sense for the local school district to set up a special program for black children. Instead, they'll just direct their resources towards the one and only racial group that is actually present.

It will be objected that there can be intra-European ethnic conflicts as well. Why stop at European nationalism? Why not separate out, say, the Anglos and the Germans too, to make sure they don't start engaging in preferential ethnic treatment as well. To which I say: if that's what you want, then fine! If two European ethnic groups did get into an ethnic conflict, then I would recommend (as a possible option, assuming that reconciliation does not seem feasible) that they should split up and live apart from each other as well. But there is currently no such ethnic conflict. There are however active tensions between whites and other groups, so that's the level of analysis that people tend to work at. Ethnonationalism is not an a priori eternal first principle of political organization; it is a pragmatic proposal designed to ameliorate ongoing conflicts, the same way that a couple can propose a divorce if they aren't getting along.

Granted, I don't think a Saturday school program only for black children is a catastrophic loss for white children. I think the school system itself plays a rather small role in a child's "education" anyway, in comparison to genetics and the child's home environment. But it is symptomatic of how it is currently popular to show preferential treatment to non-whites in Western countries today. More sweeping examples would be university affirmative action (recently made illegal in the US, but, I don't think university admissions officers are simply going to give up consideration of race that easily) and corporate DEI initiatives. It simply wouldn't be as appealing for Disney to woke-ify their classic franchises if they were based in a country that was 95% white to begin with.

There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!

IQ is like strength. It measures performance.

Race is more like nationality, it's about measuring what team you're on.

Say aliens with 1000 IQ showed up tomorrow and harmed our interests by scooping up all the world's forests for their zoo or whatever. It makes no sense to support them just because they're high IQ. For that matter, it makes no sense for Englishmen to support fellow Englishmen who sell them out to foreign interests or exploit public resources for personal gain.

Intelligence is not an unalloyed good in all contexts - just consider our longstanding concerns about AI! The most important thing is what team one is on, capabilities are secondary. If someone is high IQ but uses that intellect to market addictive drugs or perpetrate financial scams, they're worse than their anti-social low IQ peers who tend to be less destructive.

Race, religion, culture, nationality, language are the surest ways of defining what team people are on, in that order. These factors last longer than political ideologies. See the conflicts between communist Russia and China, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Now some will say that different races can work in harmony under a single state. I agree. They can work in harmony, for a time. Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up. Multiculturalism as we know it today has only really been tried since the 1960s. The Austrian empire ruled over diverse nationalities for centuries (and not nearly as diverse as we're talking about today), yet it still collapsed back into its constituent parts.

We grossly underestimate the importance of unity. What happens when there's a major, serious crisis on the scale of the world wars? Someone will lose, some countries will be put under incredible strain by defeat and recrimination. Multi-national states disintegrate, national states survive. Just imagine if your country suffered 1/10th as much as North Korea. Fifty years of harsh Japanese occupation, then a devastating failed war where every single urban centre was incinerated by the USAF such that people were living in holes in the ground. Then forty years of Stalinist dictatorship, a famine as your superpower ally disintegrated along with your trade, near total isolation from world markets (remember that North Korea is mountainous, cold and lacks much fertile land or oil), blatant hostility from another superpower (Axis of Evil speech)... and despite all that they still have thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missiles plus a huge army! If North Korea had been multi-ethnic, it would've fallen apart like Iraq and Syria. IQ is also a factor, Koreans are pretty smart.

Anyway, diversity isn't strength, unity is strength. Trading unity for brainpower makes the state fragile and more prone to internal conflicts. Everyone should be on the same team, especially when chips are down. This very story proves that the UK is not united, there are open divisions even in peacetime. Consider the RAF stories of whites being rejected, general diversity aspirations throughout the workforce. This is a bad sign!

Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up.

Why does tension and eventual breakup mean race must be the main arbiter of which team you're on? France had tension despite being relatively homogeneous right before the French Revolution; China broke up and reunified countless times throughout history, all the while slowly Sinicizing major parts of modern China so that even genetically different people who didn't use to be "Chinese" became culturally "Chinese."

Racial differences are not the sole cause of internal conflict within a country. China (or at least the core parts of what we think of as typical China) has been majority Han for thousands of years. That unity and staying power is impressive. China kept returning, Rome died. China was the opposite of multicultural for the period where it was homogenizing everyone into being Han. Indeed, it was more modern-sounding innovations like affirmative action for Mongols and Central Asians in civil service tests under the Yuan, (amongst other things) that angered the Han.

Why does tension and eventual breakup mean race must be the main arbiter of which team you're on?

Because it's the most obvious, salient difference. If you're of a different race it almost certainly means you have different culture as well, probably different language and the other dividing characteristics I mentioned above. Yugoslavia, the Austrian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Roman Empire... Where there are racial differences, these usually become central in times of imperial collapse - the French Empire was unique in being fairly homogenous and even then we have Haiti as a clear example of what I'm talking about: someone on top, tension, break-up and collapse of the old system.

Ah I see where you’re coming from, thanks for elaborating. Given the genetic diversity of “Han,” is it not possible to extend racial identity to promote group cohesion? I can think of “white” expanding to include Italians as another example where the genetics didn’t change but the concept of what the “race” entails did.