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I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them? We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests. South Africa tried the same thing with identical results. No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.
Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay. (This is a standard argument re: the fictitious "women's pay gap." If women actually accepted less money to do the same work, then non-sexist companies would out-compete by hiring less-expensive female employees instead of more-expensive male employees. The same is true of racism; if you're a racist company, you're leaving money on the table.)
We still mostly do the race blind thing. It mostly works fine. The people relentless advocating for their racial interests (whether they are white, black, or otherwise) need to be told, as clearly and repeatedly as possible, that they are wrong.
No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.
I'm not saying we should surrender to the identitarians on the left. Of course not! I am very critical of leftist identitarians. But in this thread I am saying that surrendering to the identitarians on the right is in the end the same basic mistake.
The liberal non-racism you desire is not a stable equilibrium. The only chance you have of reaching it is for the various identitarians to reach it as a truce -- and it must be an armed truce, because as has been demonstrated, as soon as one group starts taking liberal non-racism for granted, another set of identitarians overwhelms it.
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I don't think that's true (assuming we're talking about a net cost). When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them. When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?
If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist and illegal whether or not I'm correct about how often race X shoplifts. Shoplifting rates by race are a factual question and I may or may not be losing money based on the numbers, but the numbers are irrelevant to whether I'm being racist.
To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist. I may or may not also be economically rational based on the facts but that's a separate question. If my workers are doing hard manual labor all day then I'm probably being economically rational because women are worse at that type of work on average. If my workers are caring for young children then I'm probably factually incorrect and I'm leaving money on the table. But either way I'm a sexist.
Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist because I'm making assumptions about people based on the color of their skin. But instead of imposing a cost on me it may very well save my life or at least my wallet.
Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters. It's not a coincidence that the liberal status quo always gives way to racial strife in diverse societies. You can have a dictator keep the peace by force or you can have a dominant ethnicity holding the reins or you can do the Jordanian thing where you explicitly divide up power ahead of time but you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.
Sure. So we should complain about racism, not divert vaccines away from black people instead.
To hear Clarence Thomas tell, it hurts them. But perhaps more importantly, trying to judge "hurt" and "help" in terms of who gets to be a Supreme Court justice or Yale law professor, and who is instead relegated to graduating from a top-10 law school and making millions of dollars as a partner at a top law firm (but who doesn't get to tell her friends she went to Harvard) seems like piss-poor reckoning. It's not as though the Asians "harmed" by Harvard's racism (whites actually appear to benefit very slightly, or at least not be harmed, by Harvard's preferences) are facing a choice between Harvard and never going to college. The real harm is so slight as to be essentially invisible, except for the part where we decide to reject racism on principle instead of on the basis of who gets to have the most desirable status signals. Rejecting racism on principle is good.
It's not racist to see facts. If there is an ethnic propensity for antisocial behavior, there's nothing wrong with taking reasonable action as a result.
Right, you can't just say "because black people are more likely to shoplift, all black people are excluded." Instead you should say "we need to construct a law enforcement system which makes it easier to detain and punish shoplifters." There's nothing racist about that. Oh, sure, an identitarian will say there's something racist about that when it turns out that a bunch of mostly non-white kids are the ones who end up actually doing time, but I am not an identitarian, I'm the one arguing against identitarianism.
No, that's wrong! This is exactly my point. To call that sexist is the problem with identitarianism! Pay people whatever you want! As a job creator you don't owe it to anyone to pay a penny more than they are worth! And if they are worth more than that, someone else will pay them more. But if you're sexist, you're at a disadvantage versus others who are gauging merit instead. There are of course inefficiencies in the market, this won't work perfectly, but your responses to me are completely mis-targeted because I'm the one arguing against identitarianism! You're criticizing certain bad social practices and telling me "to combat racism and sexism I have to be racist and sexist" but all you've done is accepted the wrong definitions of racism and sexism. Once you do that, it's just "ingroup versus outgroup" all the way down, you lose the ability to complain persuasively about racial and sexual preferences because you've shown that you want racial and sexual preferences for yourself. A black-hating racist and a white-hating racist are just engaged in a game of power, there's no principle to appeal to, just pure in-group preference. But very often it is cooperation, not competition, that we need to coordinate if we're going to get stag.
I cannot emphasize this enough: you are just buying the wrong definition of racist here. If you disagree with left-identitarians, why would you let them define your key terms? This is what makes me crazy about the alt-right: they allow their enemies to set the poles of the debate--and that means they are destined to lose. They have lost the game before they have even begun to fight.
I agree that democracy is mostly bad and even the small protections of minority rights built into the U.S. system (Supreme Court, Bill of Rights, the original selection method for senators, the Great Compromise, the electoral college) have been much eroded by identitarianism. Proposing to fight fire with fire, however, too often just ends up getting you burned.
This is a different problem, though. You're no longer arguing for "the good kind of racism," now you're arguing against the practice of democracy. Because if political parties can't divide people along racial lines, they will just divide people along some other lines. The blues and the greens of the Roman chariot races are the canonical example, I think.
The United States began as an uneasy alliance between a bunch of "white" abolitionists and a bunch of "white" slavers. Later came Germans (now "white"), Irishmen (now "white"), Chinese immigrants (now "white adjacent" for purposes of college admissions), Hispanics (usually "white" within two or three generations)... Native Americans who don't maintain sufficient blood or cultural purity become "white," many blacks "pass" as "white," the way these lines get drawn is political.
And sure, you can say "I would like these lines to be drawn to my benefit," but then you're just doing the same stupid thing the people you're complaining about (indirectly, in your selection of examples) are doing, in reverse. And intelligence is not reversed stupidity.
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I agree to an extent. The sort of woe is me type ingroup expression is distasteful. But on the other hand there is another angle to that line of argument.
To keep things simple, as an example, be young and try buying a house. Depending on where you live your quality of life is lower than your parents since the price of housing has so dramatically increased. Depending on where you are in the world, to the extent that the price of housing has increased as a result of increased demand, it is in many places primarily an increase due to immigration.
Now what if I allow myself to imagine what my life could have been like if the price of housing had been lower. What would the job market look like if it was not driven on the expectation that an endless stream of foreigners would be there to pick up the slack? Isn't it possible that the life of the average whitey could be better? Not in a comparison to other whites. But just as a general thing. More purchasing power, cleaner streets, less crime. There would still be class stratification, but so what?
In other words, it's not about what you could have in multiracial America, it's about what you could have in monoracial America. It's not about what you could have compared to the Joneses next door, it's what you could have compared to your mirror image in a different America. Because you can have good things in both Americas. But one of them has some very obvious downsides the other one does not have.
To that extent I don't see ethno-national aspirations of a life free of the White Mans Burden to be a whine any more than the aspirations of foreigners who want to live in white countries to be a whine. Those foreigners imagine a better life in the White Mans Backpack. I've never encountered any righteous indignation directed at them, telling them to stop being so envious. "I want more. I deserve more!" Why can't they just accept their lot? Why aspire for an environment where you are more likely to flourish?
And likewise, I agree to an extent. But I feel like the examples you give, and the more complicated ones you didn't give, fall into "just so" stories, narrow selections of what-might-have-been.
For example: by young and try buying a house. "Depending on where you live" is doing a lot of work in your example of price and other pressures. Houses today are bigger and in other ways far more luxurious than they were 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Anti-growth environmentalism and government overregulation (including various government subsidies for, especially, first-time home buyers) have far more to do with anyone's housing woes, than immigration. And even so, "Generation Z" is actually tracking as more likely to own a home than their parents were at their age.
Are the streets meaner, crime higher? Well, "depending on where you live," no, for example violent crime has gotten a little worse since the Great Awokening (thanks, Obama!) but is still way down from its peak some 30 years ago. Immigration has probably suppressed some wages, but in the United States the people who seem to be most economically harmed by Hispanic immigration are black Americans who are the next most likely demographic to pick up the manual labor. Oh, sure, maybe some white kid has a harder time getting a good wage at a coding job because the government is handing out H1B visas like Halloween candy, but people have been predicting the total implosion of computer science as a viable career choice for at least two decades that I know of; still doesn't appear to be happening and young white kids with CS degrees are still making a lot more money fresh out of school than, say, me as an educator. There are no solutions--only tradeoffs!
But what do you lose in a monoracial America? What do other people lose? The identitarian position for white nationalists and black separatists and those who make "stolen land acknowledgments" is always the same: "my people would be better off if everyone else would just submit to our demands!" Well, maybe that's true, but history tells a very different story: trade and liberty (in particular, of movement and commerce) leads to widespread increases in quality of life, in ways that nothing else ever has in all of history. If it is true that white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to non-white people, and non-white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to white people, and both groups set about denying liberty to the other--then the practical result is that neither group is going to be better off in the end, they're just going to constantly be fighting about which group gets to be on top. Better to find intelligent ways to cooperate, than to compete in a zero-sum game (that might not even pan out empirically in the end). Especially since white people are a small and shrinking global minority.
Of course, there is a global ethnic minority that did attempt to build itself an ethnonationalist homeland, and I don't know what history has in store for Israel but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not "peace in our time." Likewise, casino operation has changed this in some places to some degree, but ethnically pure Indian Reservations are in general riddled with poverty and cultural malaise. Even Japan, arguably a shining beacon of ethnonationalism and certainly an economic powerhouse, is struggling with demographics and economics in ways that are changing their historically xenophobic culture rapidly. There just aren't any positive examples of "purge the undesirables" I can find anywhere in history; the most successful one that comes to mind is the ethnic divorce of Greece and Turkey in the 20th century, and neither of those countries are today places ripe with golden opportunity.
The other one has some very obvious downsides, too.
Everyone below a certain reasonable threshold should aspire for an environment where they are more likely to flourish. They just shouldn't aspire to get there by hurting other people. And this is where the identitarians always end up, tweeting ("ironically! to start a dialogue!") about ethnic cleansing of one kind or another. It has been tried, it doesn't work.
I said as much to begin with. This is just imagination land and the examples are broad and not universally applicable, but that's not the point. The point is to get to a place where we can imagine and embrace an instance where less brown people is beneficial to white people and see where that leads instead of traversing weeds and red herrings.
Every counter example you gave relies on immigrants existing in the first place. The political landscape without immigrants is not just different, it's more right wing. On top of that, we are not comparing crime rates against time. I think it's a given crime has been trending downwards with time. We are instead comparing crime rates between people. Blacks have a higher crime rate. Hispanics have a higher crime rate. The societies these people come from have higher crime rates.
The point is not to say that living with browns is unmanageable for whites. Sure, you can get a programming job and live well. But would your lot be better if you did not have to outcompete every brown spud looking for a better life in America? If you did not have to bear the burden of a dysfunctional group of browns. Not just you personally, but every aspect of your environment. Are the news channels talking about some politically relevant thing like where best to place the new bridge or are they talking about black kids not knowing how to read after graduating high school? Are we looking to advance education to help our best and brightest or are the best funded schools filled with illiterates?
Sure, you can pick the examples apart, but I'm kind of relying on you not to. Instead hoping you can recognize that in the places where the examples hold up, the idea of white identitarianism isn't any more or less bad than any idea based on self preservation and the pursuit of happiness. And I think we got to that point given your argument shifted away from a basic pursuit of happiness towards a basic pursuit of happiness without doing harm to others.
This new caveat changes things a bit. Since it's kind of de facto true that any action you take can be construed or contextualized to harm others. And since it's obvious that living with white people is much better for browns than living in their own societies, do we just resign ourselves to the fact that brown people living with white people is a sort of axiomatic right of theirs? To that end, who is keeping score of harm? Because my entire argument to begin with was that the harm goes both ways, which is why I think whites have a case to be made from the standpoint of their own best interest, rather than always considering the white mans burden before making up their mind.
Browns don't want for liberty. They want for white mans liberty. No one is keeping them from emancipating themselves in their own countries. They could reach for the stars if it wasn't for the fact they have to live amongst themselves. I don't disagree with the notion that the white man can carry these browns like he has been doing for decades now. The point is what impact this is having on his back. That's harm. And it's harm caused in the white mans homelands, and he has no place to turn to when it gets damaged beyond repair.
(As a sidenote, I'm ignoring the broad geopolitical 'it can't work' arguments. We all know white societies work just fine. Two distinct nations separated by clear and enforced border can still trade. Japan facing a demographically induced economic downturn is a self correcting problem if you don't flood the country with immigrants to prop up an economy that outscales the native population. Conflating political/moral progressivism with technological advancement is not something I agree with. If you can import people you can deport them. If you can prop them up in your own country you can prop them up in theirs until your conscience tells you you've given enough handouts.)
I remember reading articles on the hispanic crime rate and its convergence with the white crime rate. I'm hesitant to believe those reports given the chronic undercounting of hispanics in crime and incarceration in general. https://apps.urban.org/features/latino-criminal-justice-data/
But besides that, if age is a maximally relevant factor it would only start playing a part if the immigration of young people from South America was at some point halted.
But since your first link is re change over time, that is a valid concern only if the rate of undercounting has increased over time. Do you have any reason to think that is true?
The data in that link is still suffering from undercounting. Point being that fluctuations or a convergence with current data would still not impact the truth value of the statement that hispanics commit more crime than whites.
It would be both.
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