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As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true
This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community". I happen to be an uppity big-lipped nigger myself. But I do my best to refrain from feeling any sense of community with the "urban youths". Rather, I exist primarily online, as a being with no face and no race. When I am forced to exist in meatspace, I think of myself primarily as a competent and diligent employee, not as a black person.
Individualism!
This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.
I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).
The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".
So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too? What does that life even look like? We're not all born to be sin eaters for our ingroups or large targets for our outgroups, and that shouldn't be an expected life trajectory. Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.
Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"
It might be "alright", whatever that means, but it makes them lesser men. We (Americans) live in a relatively free, safe, and prosperous society because the founding fathers and continental soldiers answered the call of duty to a higher purpose than minding their own business. We owe them a monumental debt that we can never pay back. We can only pay it forward by living up to their legacy of duty and sacrifice.
"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." [Pericles]
"Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"
This is kind of the opposite of my statement. I'm not guilty because I don't stand up for every cause every time. The Devil also never said anything, because it isn't a real thing.
These are the statements I am comparing:
They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.
Your statements of "duty" were very declarative, should I not have taken that at face value? Perhaps they were only vague suggestions of possible prosocial behavior, but they were not phrased thusly.
I cannot tell which "statements of 'duty'" this refers to.
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