Do you think increased racial diversity in us is positive, negative, or neutral?

I guess I have a hard time understanding why it would bother white people that they are no longer the majority unless you think something about races/ethnic groups is inherently worse. I have a hard time believing that it really matters which ethnic group makes up the plurality or majority. Comparing Supreme Court to ethnic representation is not apples and oranges. One dictates constitutional interpretations and effectively determines what policies are allowed given constitutional limitations. The reason I’m concerned about the conservative scotus majority is that it will lead to wide ranging judicial decisions that will directly lead to imo bad govenement policy. Very different from demographic changes.

 

I simply thought it was interesting given such a large percent of Americans said negative. I was curious if anyone thought so. Ed has already argue it is negative based on political grounds which is a perspective I hadn’t thought of and found interesting even if I disagree.

 

I’m surprised by that. Why slick?

 

I get where you’re coming from you think and correct me if I’m wrong that ultimately the messaging of the left is ineffective and that in order to move past race we have to be race blind so to speak. But I think this is not only ahistorical in its solution but simply far to charitable to the opposition of left movements.

Let’s look at the idw as an example. People like Harris, Peterson, Rubin, etc don’t simply argue that the left is using bad messaging when it comes to issues of racial disparities. They are explicitly arguing that these racial heirarchies are based on merit and largely don’t result from racism. Peterson often says we shouldn’t seek to have similar outcomes for similar groups and that’s the road to Marxism. Rubin and Harris both explicitly endorse the idea that iq disparities may be responsible for these disparities in race. Harris on his recent podcast also endorsed the idea from Coleman Hughes that culture maybe responsible, an idea popularized by Thomas Sowell.

From my own experiences in life and reading fans of theirs online it seems to be a large sentiment amongst the anti sjw crowd that it’s not simply the left is too zealous in their anti racist message but that the message itself is based on a false premise. I do agree that puritanical leftists can strawman people and take race batting too far. But I also think even the most rational level headed critiques (especially from the academic sphere) of structural racism (disparities in economic/social systems believed to be caused by racism) are largely shouted down and denied by intellectual dark web types and their followers as well as simply just conservatives of which there is a large crossover. A book like the color of money a really well researched level headed critique of racial disparities in our economic system from reconstruction to the modern day are trashed by these groups of people and they latch onto articles attempting to refute this like Coleman Hughes article. So I fundamentally disagree that the issue is one of simply messaging. I think the fundamental issue is that the idea of structural racism makes so many people feel uncomfortable that they would rather deny well researched studies or historical examinations and latch onto whatever confirms their existing worldview.

Ultimately, I think better messaging from the left would be slightly more effective but I think largely will fall upon deaf ears. People largely on both sides of the debate about racial disparities have largely dug their heels in and I think messaging is not going to make a big difference in that one way or the other. If you truly believe that disparities are caused by race (which I would argue is accurate given various studies I’ve read) then it’s hard to find a color blind solution. The civil rights movement didn’t win by being an all inclusive movement. It won by explicitly arguing for black rights and beating that over the head of people. Throughout much of the civil rights movement they were extremely unpopular but were able to push for social legal change that laid the groundwork for where we are now. But we still haven’t gone far enough in my view as these disparities exist at too great of levels. So imo yes the left BLM activists need better messaging but the notion that you should not use collective identity to rally for political change when your identity is the potential root of the problem seems wrongheaded.

This is why I think the critique of identity politics needs to be more nuanced and more clearly defined. I think that the IDW types have a point when it comes to things like people saying “well as an x identity group you can’t have an opinion on y relating to my x identity group.” That type of identity politics (let’s call it argument by identity) is a type of fallacious reasoning that is too widespread for my liking on the left but not nearly as widespread as many in the idw would have you believe. Additionally there is outrage culture where we jump down the throats of people for not being politically correct. Then there is politics that is based on movements fighting for a certain identity group. These three things are always lumped in with one another as identity politics and I wish we could have different terms because they’re not the same by any means. Argument by identity is a relatively small scale issue that largely can be seen on tumblr and Twitter. Like I said I think it’s too widespread but as a big consumer of left media I rarely see this type of argumentation.

Outrage culture is not unique to left wing politics and is widespread in the modern political context. When people freak out and start burning Colin kaepernik jerseys that is outrage culture. Similarly when James Gunn or James Damore are fired what they wrote/said that is outrage culture. Do I think it’s mkre widespread on the left yes but I think that it’s picking up steam on the right and is more an issue of collective platforms like twitter than it is of political correctness. People are easily offended on both sides of the political spectrum and companies don’t know how to respond to the massive influx of criticism for an employee saying anything mildly controversial especially given how polarized our politics are. Companies are notoriously risk averse which is why they end up dropping a lot of these people caught up in outrage culture stories and I think this is a more an issue of technology and polarization than identity politics. I think companies will start to learn to ignore internet mobs but it will take time.

Lastly, you have identity based movements and these to me are very legitimate and I hate that they’re lumped in with those other two because this is a very legitamate part of identity politics. A lot of political movements are based in identity but not in a racial context so suddenly it becomes okay. If you have a poor workers movement that is a movement based on identity. If you have a farmers movements that’s a movement based on identity. If you have a religious movement that is a movement based on identity. It’s only when we get racial ethnic identity movements that it ever becomes criticized which I find to be interesting. If you really think you’re part of a racial group and you’re being disproportionately harmed by say the legal system the obvious conclusion is to lobby for changes to that legal system as an identity block. Even historically there are mot of racial identity movements considers retroactively to be necessary such as the civil rights movement but are never considered in the moment to be so.

I think ultimately when we talk about identity politics we need to be more clear in our language or we end up talking past each other. You saw this for example in the munk debates. Dyson was using argument by identity which was foolish. Goldberg and I would say fry to a certain extent were arguing about the extent of outrage culture and their effect on everyday speech. Peterson was arguing about identity based movements. None of them were really talking about the same thing because the one phrase identity politics has become such a nebulous term and used to describe so many different things. Personally I don’t like the outrage culture or argument by identity associated with identity politics but I think that identity based movement such as blm are perfectly rational responses to societal disparities.