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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the reality on the ground. You can talk all you want about some theoretical shared history and kinship among whoever he considers white people, but it has little tangible effect on my everyday life. Compare me to an American black person — we speak the same language, share similar religions (i.e. we're both Christian), consume similar pop culture, eat the same food, etc.Why should I feel more of a sense of kinship with a Finn? He speaks a different language, has never been to my country, let alone my city, has no sense of shared civic responsibility, no sense of my country's history, and he's probably never even eaten peanut butter before. If a random black guy from Pittsburgh ends up in my living room, I guarantee I'll be able to relate to him better than a random guy from Finland with whom all I really share is skin color and the fact that our ancestors emigrated from central Asia some time in the distant past. At the very least, the black guy isn't going to complain when I offer him Miller High Life. This article is nothing more than the author trying to fabricate an intellectual justification for his own irrational prejudices.

Move a Finn to America and within 5 years he'll fit in. When he has kids you won't be able to tell them apart from anybody else. Move a black person to America and 400 years later they're culture is still wildly divergent and they have different outcomes from white Americans on every measure you could think of.

Anyway I think you're overestimating how much in common you have with black people. Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter.

With Europeans you have deep similarities and superficial differences, with other races you have deep differences and superficial similarity.

400 years

Of which well over 200 were spent in chattel slavery, and the following century as a legal underclass.

Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter

I suspect it would be substantially easier to fit in than doing so in a school in rural Romania.

Will we reach a point where slavery is far enough in the past that blacks and whites will be the same then? People have been predicting that for a long time. When do you expect the process to be complete?

That rather depends on what happens in the future. History casts a long shadow. While you can undo slavery, if you create a enormous racial underclass you can't expect to wipe away three centuries of that history in a short amount of time. I don't just mean this in a 'systemic racism' way, but also in the broader cultural heritage of slavery - thinking here of Ogbu, 'acting white' etc.

If these differences are inherent though, how have swathes of African-Americans been able to become - in all but colour - indistinguishable from their white neighbours, friends and colleagues? Until very recently, the black-white wealth gap was on a long-term downward trend. The crime/imprisonment gap is also on a downward trend.