Segregation: A Modest Proposal

[SonicG]

Ok, if you want to talk about the living conditions of preachy white "progressives", I'll step out of the way...

The laws were initially supported by black communities and congresscritters. That is to say, if it is systematic codification of prejudice they helped it be written and signed into law. Laws, once passed, can be rather hard to get rid of.

And this certainly points to a sad division in black communities along class lines.

[justdrew]

well, last I checked, the goal of ending things like Segregation, red-lining, binding covenants, and probably ten other obscure legal discriminatory practices, laws and policies. Pointing out white privilege is not to say that one should not have it, it's to say that all should have all privilege. So some guy can't talk about the subject because he lives in a predominantly same-"race" neighborhood? That's absurd. What are "white" "libruls" supposed to do, "gentrify"? I guess they're just fucked no matter where they live, they should no doubt renounce all worldly possessions before speaking in favor of fair treatment for all.


---

and any such laws supported by 'black communities' would obviously only have that support because those communities were TRYING to find some accommodation with a racist government system setup by racists.

[SonicG]

Pointing out white privilege is not to say that one should not have it, it's to say that all should have all privilege..

Indeed and agreed. We all have the right to be greedy.
https://libcom.org/library/right-be-gre ... everything
http://www.primitivism.com/greedy.htm

If you want to pick at the foundations of ANY ideology, we'll be here all fucking day...As Black says, "Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you?"

[General Patton]

well, last I checked, the goal of ending things like Segregation, red-lining, binding covenants, and probably ten other obscure legal discriminatory practices, laws and policies. Pointing out white privilege is not to say that one should not have it, it's to say that all should have all privilege. So some guy can't talk about the subject because he lives in a predominantly same-"race" neighborhood? That's absurd. What are "white" "libruls" supposed to do, "gentrify"?

Ideally, yes. I'd like for people who talk about diversity, racism and white privilege to have more than a single token black guy in their neighborhood. They don't preach poverty, they preach diversity, compassion and unity. In my view too many white progressives are "not in my back yard" types that love to feel noble by supporting the homeless and championing affordable housing... just not within several miles of their own neighborhood.

[NeonLX]

well, last I checked, the goal of ending things like Segregation, red-lining, binding covenants, and probably ten other obscure legal discriminatory practices, laws and policies. Pointing out white privilege is not to say that one should not have it, it's to say that all should have all privilege. So some guy can't talk about the subject because he lives in a predominantly same-"race" neighborhood? That's absurd. What are "white" "libruls" supposed to do, "gentrify"?

Ideally, yes. I'd like for people who talk about diversity, racism and white privilege to have more than a single token black guy in their neighborhood. They don't preach poverty, they preach diversity, compassion and unity. In my view too many white progressives are "not in my back yard" types that love to feel noble by supporting the homeless and championing affordable housing... just not within several miles of their own neighborhood.

That aligns with my observations quite well. And yes, I do live in a diverse neighborhood. Not many high-end vehicles sporting liberal slogans in the apartment complex's parking lot.

[Luther Blissett]

…Regardless, the real point, as in the OP, is that the ideological foundations underpinning progressiveness are faltering in an ironic way. …

I fundamentally disagree. The "good old days" are this hour and the next, with civilization stumbling more towards what we would generally acknowledge as "enlightenment" with a few bumps along the way. There are two converse trends in this era of the democratization of global communication, with people on one side becoming less violent, more understanding, more empathetic, desiring to live more in tune with nature, and more capable of sharing than at any point in recorded history; on the other, institutional power hoards more wealth and resources, is becoming more paranoically violent, resistant to equality, and demanding of full fealty and obedience. I feel like all of the "big problems" addressed here at rigorous intuition are the result of actions taken by the global power elite. This is the reason why a thread about an existential threat coming up at us from historically oppressed groups seems out of place to me. I still don't know what it is that I'm supposed to fear (especially given that I live in a ~55%+ black neighborhood!) whereas the threats in threads about Gladio, Brzezinski, Fukushima, or Morgan Stanley are pretty clear.

I'm not going to start fearing a conspiracy if a small group of non-white people start meeting in secret the same way I fear small groups of billionaires meeting in secret to actually conspire to harm you and I. It would take a herculean effort to make me believe that the former group wants something different than what I want.

Let me just state for the record here that if revolution comes, I fully intend to be on the side of the people.

[seemslikeadream]

OCTOBER 21, 2015
Separate and Impoverished: America’s Black Poor
by JESSE JACKSON


Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate for president, shocked people when he noted that 51 percent of African-Americans aged 17 through 20 who have graduated high school or dropped out of high school are unemployed.

PolitiFact.com confirmed the statement as “mostly true,” suggesting that the numbers might even be worse than Sanders suggested.

This level of unemployment is a death sentence for a generation — representing for too many the dying of hope, of potential and even, in an age of mass incarceration, of freedom.

The figure is shocking, but the reality cannot be denied. For all the progress we have made on race in this country, there is still a stark difference between black and white poverty. As Emily Badger reports in the Washington Post, “The poverty that poor African-Americans experience is often different from the poverty of poor whites.” A poor black family is much more likely to live in an impoverished neighborhood. The concentrated poverty, as Badger writes, “extends out the door of a family’s home and occupies the entire neighborhood around it, touching the streets, the schools, the grocery stores.”

A new report on the “Architecture of Segregation” by Paul Jargowsky for the New Century Foundation details the stark differences that exist in cities across the country. In metropolitan Chicago, for example, more than one in three poor African-Americans live in what are called high-poverty census tracts (neighborhoods where the poverty rate is above 40 percent). That is 10 times the rate for poor whites. And it has gotten worse, not better, in cities across the country over the course of this century.

Separate and impoverished. We know the effects. Infants suffer bad nutrition, grow up surrounded by lead paint. Children navigate mean streets to go to impoverished schools. They lack after-school and summer programs. Families break apart. Guns and drugs come in; jobs go out. There’s no affordable transportation to get to where the jobs are. Houses are abandoned. Hospitals close. Decent grocery stores are nowhere to be found.

As Jargowsky says, this isn’t really an accident. It is the product of systemic discrimination, of zoning laws that shield off wealthy areas from the poor, of public housing that is concentrated in a few neighborhoods. Isolation in poor neighborhoods is an imposition, not a choice.

This could be different. In London, for example, every region must have some social housing for poor and working class people. Imagine if every suburb were required to provide a proportionate amount of housing for the poor and the lower-wage workers. Suddenly the poor would have access to better schools, better health care, safer streets, more role models and healthier (and less expensive) food stores.

This takes a plan, a plan that will meet great resistance. Dozens of Chicago’s wealthy suburbs, Badger notes, have ignored state deadlines to produce affordable housing plans.

Poor African-Americans are penned up, in poor neighborhoods and too often literally in jails and prisons. This is an imposition, not a fate, a policy choice that is morally indefensible and socially explosive.

[General Patton]

…Regardless, the real point, as in the OP, is that the ideological foundations underpinning progressiveness are faltering in an ironic way. …

I fundamentally disagree. The "good old days" are this hour and the next, with civilization stumbling more towards what we would generally acknowledge as "enlightenment" with a few bumps along the way. There are two converse trends in this era of the democratization of global communication

I see the future as being very, very open to change. Cities can be built with walls. Until recently Western societies have avoided walls in favor of economic segregation. But the whole "build more walls" concept will be coming up a lot in the next decades, it won't stop with this or that politician that is used as a totem.

with people on one side becoming less violent, more understanding, more empathetic, desiring to live more in tune with nature, and more capable of sharing than at any point in recorded history

What if people becoming less violent was just a short reprieve before we started stabbing each other again?

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/21/8635369/pinker-taleb
Taleb and Cirillo's core argument is that looking at raw numbers alone — casualty counts from different wars — is misleading. In order to understand the actual risk of large wars over time, they argue, you need some more complex statistical tools. Their paper uses a method called "extreme value theory": a type of statistical analysis specifically designed to assess the probability of rare but extremely significant events, such as a world war.

Taleb and Cirillo conclude that there are two major flaws in Pinker's theory. The first is that their analysis suggests huge conflicts (on the scale of 10 million casualties) only happen once a century, but Pinker's "long peace" only covers 70 years. That could mean that what looks like a decline in violent conflict is merely a gap between major wars.

They also conclude that Pinker has underestimated the actual average casualty numbers in major wars by about three times, and that the real numbers don't actually show a decline over time. If that's right, his measurements of the apparent decline of war are overly rosy.

For a longer treatment:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf

I feel like all of the "big problems" addressed here at rigorous intuition are the result of actions taken by the global power elite. This is the reason why a thread about an existential threat coming up at us from historically oppressed groups seems out of place to me.

It's not about oppression or existential threats, it's more insidious. It's about moral decay and whether any of this qualifies as such.

Let me just state for the record here that if revolution comes, I fully intend to be on the side of the people.

The problem with revolutions is that the people will be fragmented into dozens if not hundreds of warring sub-factions. It requires a great deal of leadership to unite them, an American Genghis Khan would be required. And to be entirely honest, I don't trust a community that is brought together in easy-going times. Conflict clarifies alliances, it requires sacrifice and commitment that weeds out the yes-men.

[Elvis]

The problem with revolutions is that the people will be fragmented into dozens if not hundreds of warring sub-factions. It requires a great deal of leadership to unite them, an American Genghis Khan would be required.

...or perhaps an American Mahatma Gandhi?

[Luther Blissett]

There is no moral decay. The one "belief" that I'll allow myself is that people are inherently good, and studies have shown that violence is not an inherent trait of human nature. A vast proportion of violence that wasn't related to scarcity of resources in early civilizations increased with the notion of debt. I see violence as a product of capitalism.

One of the beautiful aspects of this era of global communication, the external transmission phase of human development / evolution or whatever you want to call it, is that the people don't necessarily need to be fragmented into internecine conflict. I don't necessarily understand or anticipate a global paradigm shift, but that's the aspiration and I already see evidence of it all around as long as one doesn't listen to the mainstream media narrative.

Out of the many distinctly unique conditions of the contemporary era, I see two as important and binding for 99.5% of humanity: the mass accumulation of wealth, resources, metadata, surveillance, technological military might, and control of the food chain by a tiny global elite (or cabals of elites fighting amongst themselves for control); and the climate crisis perpetuated mostly by the elites, just beyond the grasp of 99.5% of humanity. I don't think a farfetched "paradigm shift" will even be necessary for a peaceful revolution to occur. People are recognizing these factors more and more and are getting fed up with them, especially younger people. In the states, millennials are the first generation since something like the Civil War to not do better than their parents'. Right now we are in a moment when their students loans are coming calling while the power of the dollar for the middle class is dropping and the jobs just aren't there. This is triggering a massive generational awakening, general distaste for the system and the powers that be, joining the middle class young people with the working poor and people in poverty. It's a large generation too, and the vast majority are angry. Most importantly, they know why they're angry too.

[Iamwhomiam]

It's interesting how the arguments in this thread are developing. I'll be back to offer my comments, but for now, it seems this news was missed:

Confrontation With Black Partygoers Leads to Gang Charges for White Group

By RICHARD FAUSSET OCT. 12, 2015

A cellphone video*** of part of a confrontation in Douglasville, Ga., on July 25 shows several white men driving away from a party in a convoy of pickup trucks with the Confederate battle flag.
Publish Date October 12, 2015. Photo by via Southern Poverty Law Center.
Watch in Times Video »***

DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — In an unusual legal maneuver, the district attorney in this suburb of Atlanta said Monday that he had won indictments against 15 supporters of the Confederate battle flag, accusing them of violating the state’s anti-street-gang statute during a confrontation with black partygoers in July.

Prosecutors say that members of the group, which calls itself Respect the Flag, threatened a group of blacks attending an outdoor birthday party on July 25. A cellphone video of part of the episode shows several white men driving away from the party in a convoy of pickup trucks with the Confederate battle flag and other banners, including American flags, fluttering from the truck beds.

The partygoers contend that members of the flag group yelled racial slurs and displayed a crowbar, a knife and either a rifle or a shotgun, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group in Montgomery, Ala., that is representing some of the accusers.

The Douglas County district attorney, Brian Fortner, a white Republican elected to the office in 2014, announced the indictments in a news conference Monday morning. Each of the 15 was indicted on one count of making terroristic threats and a second count of unlawfully participating in “criminal gang activity.”


Images from a cellphone video show members of the group Respect the Flag who had a confrontation with black partygoers in Douglasville, Ga., in July.
Credit via Southern Poverty Law Center

Mr. Fortner, whose county has transformed from predominantly white to decidedly mixed over the past two decades, said that the Georgia statute upon which the second charge is based, the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, was “worded very broadly to deal with any type of activity that occurs with a group that’s organized that commits a crime.”

None of the accused had been arraigned as of Monday, and it was not clear if they had lawyers representing them. By Monday afternoon, none of them had applied for representation with the county public defenders’ office. But a member of the group told a local newspaper that the black partygoers started the confrontation.

Several criminal lawyers and legal scholars said Monday that they could not recall other instances in which a state anti-gang statute had been used to prosecute a Confederate heritage group in the Deep South. The first version of Georgia’s anti-gang law was passed in 1992 at the behest of Atlanta’s police chief at the time, Eldrin Bell.

The state’s General Assembly, in the law’s statement of intent, noted that citizens retained their rights to freedom of expression and association. But it also declared that Georgia was in a “state of crisis which has been caused by violent criminal street gangs whose members threaten, terrorize and commit a multitude of crimes against the peaceful citizens of their neighborhoods.”

Pickup trucks flying Confederate-themed flags have become a regular sight in many parts of the South since June, when a white gunman, apparently influenced by racist doctrine, massacred nine black worshipers at a Charleston, S.C., church. A subsequent effort by some elected officials in the region to remove Confederate symbols from public spaces has provoked a strong negative reaction from some white Southerners, who argue that the symbols are a part of their history and heritage.

The indictments were handed up Friday by a grand jury in Douglas County, a fast-growing county a few miles west of Atlanta that is about 52 percent white and 44 percent black. Suburban sprawl and the steady migration of blacks out of the city’s core have caused striking social and demographic change here: In 1990, blacks made up only about 8 percent of the population, according to census figures.

The anti-gang law defines a “criminal street gang” as “any organization, association or group of three or more persons associated in fact, whether formal or informal,” that engages in or conspires to commit a defined set of serious criminal acts. The law gives prosecutors numerous ways to define the existence of a gang, including sharing signs, symbols, tattoos, graffiti or “common activities.”

Critics challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, but it was upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court in 2009. Ronald L. Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said that Georgia’s law was generally “in line” with other state anti-gang statutes around the country.

But Mr. Carlson also said that he expected lawyers for the defendants to file pretrial motions to dismiss the counts and argue that the identification of their clients as gang members was a stretch.

LeeAnne Lynch, a public defender in DeKalb County, Ga., who was among the lawyers who unsuccessfully challenged the law’s constitutionality, said Monday that she continued to believe that the law was overly broad. She said small groups of people could be defined as a gang just because they were “wearing certain types of clothes or have a group motto that they share.”

Ms. Lynch said that the law had been used to prosecute members of rap groups who have some affiliation with criminal gangs, but are not gang members themselves. Prosecutors, she said, often use the statute to “load up” charges on defendants to pressure them to agree to a plea deal.

Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its chief trial lawyer, could not recall seeing an anti-gang statute used against this kind of group in the past. But he said it was “a very good use” of the statute. “I don’t know why it hasn’t been used before,” he said.

Mr. Fortner said that some of the men involved in the episode had been arrested, and others would be arrested soon. In a July 27 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a member of the group who was named in the indictments, Levi Bush, said that the partygoers yelled at some members of his group as they drove by. Partygoers then threw rocks at his truck, he said.

Mr. Bush, in a brief phone interview on Monday, denied that he had broken the law. “I speak for me and everybody else — we are not guilty in these charges,” he said. He declined to elaborate.

Two members of the group, Joe Eric Hood and Thomas Summers, were each also indicted on an unrelated count of battery stemming from an episode at a gas station called the Corn Crib. Mr. Fortner said the accuser was white, but declined to comment further.

The party occurred on a Saturday at the home of Melissa Alford, 44. On Monday, Ms. Alford showed the side street where, she said, the trucks had pulled over and begun to harass her guests. She said she saw one of them with a rifle or shotgun, and heard one racial epithet used. She said that none of her guests threw rocks.

Ms. Alford said that she worked with at-risk youth as part of a nonprofit she founded. Some of them, she said, have been identified by the authorities as gang members. She said the men in the trucks deserved the same treatment.

“Just like the Crips,” she said, “if they’re out there doing some foolishness like this, they’re going to get charged.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/us/confederate-flag-supporters-georgia-indicted-clash-black-partygoers.html?_r=1

[Iamwhomiam]

Right above the odd image the General had handy to post on page 6, he wrote:

If you're abused as a child does that give you right to abuse children?

Certainly not. It does, however, give one the right to detest their abuser.

Then you wrote,

I was going to elaborate on why Arab or African cultures that have enslaved others for endless generations would never entertain this train of thought, but I'll just skip it and say they don't celebrate victimhood in the way western societies do.

Let me fix that for you...

"I was going to elaborate on why Arab or African cultures that have enslaved others for endless generations would never entertain this train of thought, but I'll just skip it and say they don't celebrate victimhood in the way western societies I do."

Just a bit more accurate now, don't you think?


On page 7, 4thB wrote,

Okay, so, in America, only Uncolored People are racist, and everyone else can only ever be "prejudiced", right?

Sorta. Well, everybody's prejudiced to a certain degree about everything and everyone. But yes, for sure only uncolored people can be racist in America. A culture that treats it members differently according to their color is what we are, unfortunately. People who are not uncolored can be bigoted against members of the domineering white class who seek to suppress their every movement.

Were we minorities living in a country not dominated politically or by populace of uncolored peoples we might also find those roles, who in that culture is the oppressed minority, reversed from our current state of affairs.

And, somehow, that in itself is not racist, despite the fact that ethical standards are being segregated and hierarchized according to race?

No, not really, not necessarily. It is supremacist, though.

Very well said, kool maudit.

And the same to you, Luther in what you wrote here.

Oh, General! What are we to do to ease your fears? Tell me, did this all begin after your community theater passed you over for the lead in their production of Harriet Tubman?

But there's more...

I think you're robbing racists and discriminators of their agency here just a tad.

Damn! If that isn't an example of the Pot calling the Kettle "black!"

I've more reading to do before commenting again.

[General Patton]

Let me fix that for you...

"I was going to elaborate on why Arab or African cultures that have enslaved others for endless generations would never entertain this train of thought, but I'll just skip it and say they don't celebrate victimhood in the way western societies I do."

Just a bit more accurate now, don't you think?

No not really

Oh, General! What are we to do to ease your fears? Tell me, did this all begin after your community theater passed you over for the lead in their production of Harriet Tubman?

Listen here Mr. Smug, I'll have you know that I got my 23 and me results back and I am .1% East African. According to the one drop rule I am entitled to my black identity. I've begun buying various products to affirm my blackness to the world, such as the following:

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTf1GFjCd8

[Iamwhomiam]

Cool! You're Italian. I like Italians.

I actually like many of the people I meet from different cultures.

But then, I suppose there are those who would like to build a wall around Little Italy.

Once we rid the world of its Gung-Ho tribal territorialism and everywhere become citizens of equal status of the planet Earth, we'll have no need for walls. If ever we did. We must learn to share and not to hoard in caves protected by walls our wealth.