I'm working on an essay about the blatant cultural appropriation of the black intelligentsia - the fact that they seem to want to associate themselves with the struggles and experiences of poor/working class black Americans. I was planning to post it within a few hours but your essay has given me more to think about. Thank you!
Race talk is certainly confusing and often counterproductive when it comes to identifying underlying causes of disorder and developing appropriate policy strategies.
The reality is that when almost 20% of black male students in school exhibit disruptive behavior, race is a useful tool for identifying an urgent problem, even if just over 80% of black male students in the school are not acting disruptively.
I read the study you cited: the model shows that the working class white man’s family is almost 100% certain to experience violence as the proportion of blacks living in his neighborhood rises high enough.
When a mental model works this well on an issue that really matters, ie our personal safety, that mental model gets applied by all but the ignorant, the self-deluded, and fools.
But then how do we protect against flawed instances of correlation not actually being the prospective cause we presume it is/was? It would appear that a great deal of flawed pattern recognition capability was carried along by evolution in conjunction with the correct perceptions that truly aided survival and reproduction.
So now, failing to recognize and follow the "success sequence" in modern life ends up having survival problems. Young male bravado may end before sufficient sanity is available to lead to children, etc.
Do the studies show that we all (males at least) have a similar genetic element of honor and shame and guilt and desire for respect, etc., but then various cultures emphasize one aspect (set of aspects) over another? Or is there a genetic dominant element in play, too?
That is getting into the genetic weeds beyond my knowledge base. Clearly, as I have discussed in the first post and will discuss in the next, there are heritable differences between groups in propensity to reactive aggression. But public policy is not helpless in the face of these differences.
> "... a substantial proportion of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings were directed against moral failings within African-American communities—something that contemporary academe memory-holes."
I remember being gobsmacked -- literally!! 😉🙂-- when watching Obama's first inauguration where he decried the high percentage of single-parent families -- mostly headed by women -- among the black community.
Somewhat apropos of which and since you too are apparently a "Twitter outcast" 🙂, you might be amused by my open letter to Jack Dorsey and his Twitter 1.0 minions almost 7 years ago -- how time flies when you're having fun ... :
"Tit-for-tat" clearly not being well-received in that benighted neck of the woods. Not sure that it has changed much with Twitter 2.0 captained by Musk and his own minions.
But in the same vein, you may recall Chris Rock's video on the theme. A paper on linguistics that links to and quotes some amusing snippets therefrom:
The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism;
CR: "There’s like a civil war going on with black people, and there’s two sides: there’s black people, and there’s niggas. The niggas have got to go. .... You know what’s the worst thing about niggas, the worst thing about niggas? Niggas love to not know. Nothing makes a nigga happier than not knowing the answer to your question. .... Niggas hate knowledge. Shit, I was talking about niggas breaking in your house, well if you want to save your money put it in your books. Cause niggas don’t read. Put the money in the books, shit, books are like kryptonite to a nigga ...."
Great letter to Twitter. The insanity of it all is frustrating. That Chris Rock video is legendary....I loved his routine when I saw it. As they say "It's funny because it's true."
You might be out in "the antipodes" with Lorenzo, and may not follow much of the insanity in the USA, but a US lawyer -- Yassine Meskhout -- had an interesting podcast on "Our Loony Epistemic Reality?" that you might be interested in. My comment thereon with particular attention to the barking mad transactivist mantra "trans women are women":
🙂 Somewhat "problematic" as they say. For example, an old Kathleen Stock article on UK politician Stella Creasy:
KS: Last weekend it was the turn of Stella Creasy to provide the Daily Telegraph with an easy headline, in the course of a wider interview about her work as a campaigner for women’s rights. “Do I think some women were born with penises?” the MP for Walthamstow asked herself. “Yes,” came her response. “But they are now women and I respect that.” Warming to her theme, she continued nonsensically: “I am somebody who would say that a transwoman is an adult human female”.
"chicks with dicks" arguably just endorsing the "trans women are women" mantra. Better bet is male transvestites if they still have their nuts attached and sexless eunuchs if they don't.
I see the pervasive drive to edit and selectively erase and replace stereotypes as a function of the nonwhite intelligentsia more than anyone. If they didn't sign on to the effort, it would lack any credibility... but they do, because there's status and protection from accountability in it for them.
It's white people who've done the heavy lifting in this regard but without their helpful shields and tokens it wouldn't have been possible.
Excellent analysis! It's cruciall to surface these historical nuanses. However, internal community critique often comes from a very different place than external oppression, don't you think?
The first step in saving men is don’t try to save them, this ruins them.
Now as long as there are subsidized exceptions and enormous “non profits “ and billions per day for millions of people this will continue, until change…
The change will either be the racketeering drops off of something horrific happens. As it happens horrific is coming anyway.
I'm working on an essay about the blatant cultural appropriation of the black intelligentsia - the fact that they seem to want to associate themselves with the struggles and experiences of poor/working class black Americans. I was planning to post it within a few hours but your essay has given me more to think about. Thank you!
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/white-supremacy
Excellent essay.
Race talk is certainly confusing and often counterproductive when it comes to identifying underlying causes of disorder and developing appropriate policy strategies.
The reality is that when almost 20% of black male students in school exhibit disruptive behavior, race is a useful tool for identifying an urgent problem, even if just over 80% of black male students in the school are not acting disruptively.
I read the study you cited: the model shows that the working class white man’s family is almost 100% certain to experience violence as the proportion of blacks living in his neighborhood rises high enough.
When a mental model works this well on an issue that really matters, ie our personal safety, that mental model gets applied by all but the ignorant, the self-deluded, and fools.
Stereotype accuracy is a thing. Moreover, we are pattern recognisers for a reason.
But then how do we protect against flawed instances of correlation not actually being the prospective cause we presume it is/was? It would appear that a great deal of flawed pattern recognition capability was carried along by evolution in conjunction with the correct perceptions that truly aided survival and reproduction.
So now, failing to recognize and follow the "success sequence" in modern life ends up having survival problems. Young male bravado may end before sufficient sanity is available to lead to children, etc.
Do the studies show that we all (males at least) have a similar genetic element of honor and shame and guilt and desire for respect, etc., but then various cultures emphasize one aspect (set of aspects) over another? Or is there a genetic dominant element in play, too?
That is getting into the genetic weeds beyond my knowledge base. Clearly, as I have discussed in the first post and will discuss in the next, there are heritable differences between groups in propensity to reactive aggression. But public policy is not helpless in the face of these differences.
Great series. Much to think about.
You may have heard of it already but Fox Butterfield wrote a book on the legacy of Southern honour culture on African-American crime:
https://www.amazon.com.au/All-Gods-Children-American-Tradition/dp/0380728621
Butterfield was exceptionally liberal, but his findings were astonishing. If you can get a copy, it is worth reading. .
> "... a substantial proportion of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings were directed against moral failings within African-American communities—something that contemporary academe memory-holes."
I remember being gobsmacked -- literally!! 😉🙂-- when watching Obama's first inauguration where he decried the high percentage of single-parent families -- mostly headed by women -- among the black community.
TBF, you have to be black to be allowed to say even the most obvious failings of blacks, so Obama was advantaged in that regard.
"Speaking as a black person ...." 😉🙂
Somewhat apropos of which and since you too are apparently a "Twitter outcast" 🙂, you might be amused by my open letter to Jack Dorsey and his Twitter 1.0 minions almost 7 years ago -- how time flies when you're having fun ... :
https://medium.com/@steersmann/open-letter-to-twitters-board-of-directors-d1c87603a832
My "crime"? Me objecting to someone saying "fucking white dudes" with a rejoinder of "Yea -- those 'white dudes', almost as bad as those niggers 😉":
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*Slq82mIW1nSdUUe5QCsMmA.jpeg
"Tit-for-tat" clearly not being well-received in that benighted neck of the woods. Not sure that it has changed much with Twitter 2.0 captained by Musk and his own minions.
But in the same vein, you may recall Chris Rock's video on the theme. A paper on linguistics that links to and quotes some amusing snippets therefrom:
The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039015000041
CR: "There’s like a civil war going on with black people, and there’s two sides: there’s black people, and there’s niggas. The niggas have got to go. .... You know what’s the worst thing about niggas, the worst thing about niggas? Niggas love to not know. Nothing makes a nigga happier than not knowing the answer to your question. .... Niggas hate knowledge. Shit, I was talking about niggas breaking in your house, well if you want to save your money put it in your books. Cause niggas don’t read. Put the money in the books, shit, books are like kryptonite to a nigga ...."
YouTube; Black People vs N***as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51vFbsZkhXU
Great letter to Twitter. The insanity of it all is frustrating. That Chris Rock video is legendary....I loved his routine when I saw it. As they say "It's funny because it's true."
Sir, you are "one of the good ones"!
Thanks. And for reading my letter. 🙂
You might be out in "the antipodes" with Lorenzo, and may not follow much of the insanity in the USA, but a US lawyer -- Yassine Meskhout -- had an interesting podcast on "Our Loony Epistemic Reality?" that you might be interested in. My comment thereon with particular attention to the barking mad transactivist mantra "trans women are women":
https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/our-loony-epistemic-reality/comment/168083818
A classic case of "2+2=5".
I guess "chicks with dicks" has fallen out of favor as the preferred language.
🙂 Somewhat "problematic" as they say. For example, an old Kathleen Stock article on UK politician Stella Creasy:
KS: Last weekend it was the turn of Stella Creasy to provide the Daily Telegraph with an easy headline, in the course of a wider interview about her work as a campaigner for women’s rights. “Do I think some women were born with penises?” the MP for Walthamstow asked herself. “Yes,” came her response. “But they are now women and I respect that.” Warming to her theme, she continued nonsensically: “I am somebody who would say that a transwoman is an adult human female”.
https://unherd.com/2022/05/stella-creasys-bourgeois-feminism/
"chicks with dicks" arguably just endorsing the "trans women are women" mantra. Better bet is male transvestites if they still have their nuts attached and sexless eunuchs if they don't.
I see the pervasive drive to edit and selectively erase and replace stereotypes as a function of the nonwhite intelligentsia more than anyone. If they didn't sign on to the effort, it would lack any credibility... but they do, because there's status and protection from accountability in it for them.
It's white people who've done the heavy lifting in this regard but without their helpful shields and tokens it wouldn't have been possible.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-pathetic-mindset-of-the-black
Excellent analysis! It's cruciall to surface these historical nuanses. However, internal community critique often comes from a very different place than external oppression, don't you think?
Yes. Especially as the Jim Crow system was genuinely oppressive rather the modern bs version of “unequal outcomes” or “a constraint I don’t like”.
The first step in saving men is don’t try to save them, this ruins them.
Now as long as there are subsidized exceptions and enormous “non profits “ and billions per day for millions of people this will continue, until change…
The change will either be the racketeering drops off of something horrific happens. As it happens horrific is coming anyway.
We know