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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves

I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.

Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.

People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.

Like hell they have. Integration in America was done without legislative authority, and at the barrel of a gun. It's not Americans who have decided anything, it's the royal court who have decreed it, and the country then gets dragged along behind.

If Americans got to choose, they would have chosen white. They did choose, and did choose white, and then weren't allowed to make that choice.

without legislative authority

What is this even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that the Civil Rights Act (and other related pieces of federal legislation) were unconstitutional?

it's the royal court who have decreed it, and the country then gets dragged along behind.

If the country was being simply 'dragged along' in matters of race and immigration, why did Hart-Celler poll so well (70% approval)?

If Americans got to choose, they would have chosen white

They did get to chose. It's called representative democracy. At any time they could - and can - elect a Congress with a white nationalist majority.

Are you suggesting that the Civil Rights Act (and other related pieces of federal legislation) were unconstitutional?

Hell yes, but you're late.

What is this even supposed to mean?

I mean Brown v Board was wrongly decided, that it was the royal court proclaiming that segregation must end, in direct opposition to the citizens, and their elected representatives. That Brown v Board was only enforced at the end of a gun, after a group of 9 took it upon themselves to read into the law what had not been written.

A pattern I have noticed since then, especially with Obergefell v Hodges and Bostock v Clayton County. Again the court reads into the law what was never written, and refuses to allow the legislature as elected by the citizenry to legistlate.

If the country was being simply 'dragged along' in matters of race and immigration, why did Hart-Celler poll so well (70% approval)?

Lies and propaganda, mostly. They said it wouldn't change the character of the nation, and on that basis, it was unopposed. That was a lie, of course, and it's easy to tell that now, where at the time it was hard.

Hell yes

Why not?

in direct opposition to the citizens, and their elected representatives

It is not the Supreme Court's job to reflect the will of the 'citizens and their elected representatives'.

read into the law what had not been written.

This is the more relevant criticism, however I don't think it's fair at all. That segregated education denied African-Americans the 'equal protection of the laws' would seem to me pretty obvious. After all, if there really was no difference in the education being received, then why was segregation necessary? Even the lower court whose decision Brown overturned conceded that segregation ipso facto entailed an unequal education.

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system

Simply following the text of a law through to its logical conclusion and then applying it is not 'reading into the law what was never written' - or rather, it might be, but one must also read into a law what is logically implied by it.

Lies and propaganda, mostly. They said it wouldn't change the character of the nation, and on that basis, it was unopposed

If this is true, then why, when immigration did increase substantially in the following decades, was the backlash, all things considered, rather muted?

After all, if there really was no difference in the education being received, then why was segregation necessary?

It wasn't necessary, it was chosen by the voters, as is their right to do in a constitutional republic. The court should have enforced the equal part of separate but equal, because there's no reason why segregation necessarily requires unequal treatment before the law.

Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system

We know now, decades after, that integration doesn't make the negro child equal to the white child. The ruling was based on logic that was disproved by reality. It is not the segregation which keeps the negro child behind today, and it was not segregation which kept him behind then, either.

that integration doesn't make the negro child equal to the white child.

That is irrelevant, whether or not it is true. Segregation need only to have adversely impacted the education of black children in any way, and to any non-zero extent, in order to be impermissible (and, also, one cannot criticise the Brown decision on the basis of putative information not available at the time). There was every reason, and still is now, to believe that segregation ipso facto prevented the provision of an equal education. For one thing our prior should be very high that segregated education impacted outcomes - would it not be quite astonishing if integrated and segregated systems merely happened to produce the same outcomes? In turn, the African-American was always going to come off worse in the latter system. Put it this way. Is there anywhere in the South you can point to that had established a reasonably equal segregated education system by the time of Brown? If none of them achieved it within well over half a century, it was quite plainly never going to happen.

The (pretty well unanimous) conclusions of research conducted prior to Brown into the issue of the impact of segregation and institutionalised discrimination on the development of black children is well summarised here, from p. 139 on.

https://archive.org/details/personalityinmak0000midc/page/138/mode/2up

it was chosen by the voters, as is their right to do in a constitutional republic

Segregationists did not give a damn about rights in a constitutional republic, nor about the will of the people, hence their systematic attempts to disenfranchise black voters. The South has only itself to blame - segregated education was never going to be equal when managed by unrepentant racists. Segregation may have been chosen by the (white) voters of the relevant states, but its abolition was likewise chosen by the nation's voters at their federal elections, as is their right.

In turn, the African-American was always going to come off worse in the latter system.

Is there evidence that education of African-Americans is any better today?

There's that one 'experiment' in Kansas City with a judge throwing millions of dollars at black education to improve it that apparently failed.

The problem I see with 'desegregation' is that at some point you run out of white children to 'integrate' with your children who desperately need an 'integrated' education for whatever reason.

Is there some kind of breeding program to address this?

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for integrated education.

education of African-Americans is any better today?

Relatively, yes. Unfortunately comparable data seems only really to go back to the 70s - though desegregation of schools took a while to get going in earnest - but since then the black-white achievement gap has been closing at a fair clip - convergence stalled in the 90s but got back on course in the 2000s. State-based data which would allow us to look just at the South only goes back to 1990 disappointingly, so we don't know what component of convergence is accounted for by non-Southern states - still though, the overall picture is of a gap closing post-integration, and in 1970 still over half of African-Americans lived in the South.

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