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Doesn't all of this apply to words like "wrong", "selfish", or "boring" as well? Sometimes people create words to refer to things that they think other people shouldn't do. Not all of those are slurs.
I continue to believe that the word "racist" is perhaps the best one-word description for the policies you've said you'd like to pursue. You see racial divisions between people as extremely important and would like to completely restructure society along its lines; I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are. I don't say those things as insults, I'm just trying to really make it clear that "that is racist" to me is not "you hate black people", it's kind of a statement in the epistemic universe of "you are depressed"; it's my own observation that you probably have a certain bias.
Setting the prescriptive stuff aside, at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist". The crowd at CPAC would immediately, reflexively jump to your defence once they saw that I was a left-wing person calling someone racist, but if you honestly explained your beliefs in front of the crowd in the way that you did above, there would be much clearing of throats, embarrassed murmurs, and rapid changing of subjects coming from the crowd.
Define “extremely important”. I think that they have some importance. Do you believe they have none? Can you honestly tell me, after, for example, the mass rioting and looting in the summer of 2020 - committed by people who saw themselves as part of a racial group or otherwise on behalf of that racial group, and believing that the distinct experiences of that racial group mark them as divided from mainstream “white” society - that racial divisions have zero relevance to American society? Surely this is not your claim.
Again, what specific ways do you imagine I wish to “completely restructure society”? Americans are already engaged in a Big Sort - masses of people moving from one state/region to another for reasons of cultural affinity and political polarization - and have been for decades. This has been true as well of black Americans, who have been migrating back to the South - to Atlanta and the surrounding area in particular - in order to be in cultural and special communion with their own identity group. This process is accelerating, and I believe that it will continue to accelerate as America continues to polarize along political and racial lines.
My hope is that this process leads to a gradual self-segregation of blacks into something roughly approximating a discrete de facto ethnostate, at which point the process of formalizing that reality can begin. None of this would require a radical restructuring of society. My model for this is the Velvet Divorce in the former Czechoslovakia, in which two distinct ethnolinguistic identity groups decided voluntary to part ways and to pursue the political sovereignty of their respective identities. The subsequent population transfers can be achieved peacefully and non-coercively, likely with substantial financial assistance and redistribution by the federal government.
This is honestly very amusing to me. I really think you need to talk to more people who disagree with you. I think you will find that a surprising number of fairly well-adjusted, reasonable, world-wise people have views not dissimilar to mine. I’m certainly not “ridiculously sheltered”; I attended very diverse public schools for my entire upbringing, in arguably the most racially-diverse major city in America. (San Diego) I’m not “traumatized”, and though I dealt with some mild depression during my mid-twenties, I have a decent if unfulfilling life, a steady full-time job, and an active social life. My belief in racial differences and racial friction is a direct result of ample observation of those realities throughout my life.
I understand that it may be very difficult for you to empathize with someone who has observed the same realities as you have, but yet who has reached profoundly different conclusions about how to interpret those realities. I’m not consumed by hate, nor do I spend all day perseverating about race. My boss is a black woman, with whom I have an excellent professional and personal relationship. The majority of my coworkers are non-white. I have zero issues interacting cordially with them. Yet this does not prevent me from noticing consistent patterns, nor does it require me to shy away from what I consider uncomfortable implications of those patterns. I take public transit every day, multiple times a day, which affords me ample opportunity to observe those patterns. I watch the news. I consume online commentary and video content. I read about history. Why is it so confounding or difficult for you to grapple with the idea that a person who does so could reach the conclusions I’ve reached?
I think you’re really underestimating the groundswell of people who are starting to flirt with a lot of the same observations I’m talking about. Go read the comment sections under police bodycam videos on YouTube. Some portion of the American populace - I will not pretend to have an accurate read on the actual numbers, since most of them at this time are still only willing to express such opinions anonymously - are beginning to reach the “we don’t have to live with this people anymore” stage. White flight has happened before in this country more than once; why are you so confident it won’t happen again? It already is happening again! What do you think people mean when they say they want to move to an area with “good schools”? If you ask them if it’s “racist” not to want to live around underclass black people, most of them would probably say yes. And then they would carry on not wanting to live around underclass black people.
The people at CPAC can prostrate themselves before the altar of Martin Luther King all they like, but a substantial number of them are beginning to suspect that perhaps there is in fact some reliable correlation between “color of skin” and “content of character”. They can say it’s a result of “culture”; the practical effect will be the same. In the aggregate, on the macro level, black people and white people have radically different preferences and do not actually thrive when forced into close day-to-day contact with each other, such that they are made to compete for public space and political power. If you disagree, how about you lay out a case for why, instead of just dismissing me as mentally ill?
Uh ... no, I don't think I will try to define the word "extremely" for you? Was there something unclear about the words "extremely important"? I consider this is a silly and pedantic demand.
If you're willing to radically restructure all of society to take racial differences into account, then you definitely think they're extremely important. I don't think I need a more precise definition than that.
Do you deny that you consider racial divisions extremely important? I don't see how you could deny that, so this entire line of argument just feels like a waste of time.
You are correct that this ridiculous strawman that probably a only single-digit number of Americans believe is not my position, yes.
Because they're so obviously and immediately falsified by the daily experience of people who live in racially mixed areas, and by the history you say you've read, that I have to visualise your brain as metaphorically surrounded by the things they put on horses' heads to prevent them from seeing sideways.
God, I hope you're wrong. That's all I'll say about that.
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