If you live around a lot of diversity, you learn how to recognize others who live around a lot of diversity. It’s like the difference between the world traveler and the provincial who never left home. The change in perspective results in a change in demeanor. I’m comfortable in alien places because I’ve been around a lot of people not like me on a daily basis for a long time. I just don’t think it is strange to be the guy who sticks out like a sore thumb.
One of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time around non-whites is that not all white people are the same. That sounds odd, but it works like this. You get to know a lot of “Hispanics” for example and you quickly see that they are not a singular race and they often don’t speak the same language. Guatemalans are a different breed of cat from Cubans or Dominicans or Mexicans from El Norte. Lumping all these people into the bucket called “Hispanic” is mostly worthless.
That revelation leads to rethinking what it means to be white, black or Asian. Italians and Spaniards are called white, but they are not Germans or Swedes. Travel around America and you see that a place like Indiana is part Yankee New England and part Appalachian hick. The term “Hoosier”, by the way, was an insult for Virginia hillbillies. Head a few clicks north and you are into a different population of honkies altogether.
From an anthropological perspective, the old categories of race are falling apart. If you read Nick Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, it becomes rather clear that race classifications based on skin tone don’t hold up. It’s better to think of people as belonging to large extended families. There’s lots of cross pollination between these large extended families, but at the edges where they interface. Swedes share a lot with Germans, but very little with Bantus.
The fact is, skin, eye and hair color are just one part of it. There are character differences that are just as rooted in biology as skin color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. Swedes are built for a culture built for the environment of Sweden, which is different from the Bantus, who were built for a culture built for flourishing in Africa.
The trouble with discussing any of this is that there’s a another part of the puzzle. Humans are built to distrust those who are not their kind. While it is as natural as left handedness, our culture eschews anything that even hints at racism. This is not illogical as we in the West live in multi-ethnic societies. Keeping the peace means suppressing the instinct to not like the “other” or the foreign. The argument from race realists is that you can take this too far and when you do the results are worse than naked racism.
I have no way of knowing if that is true, but I think it is probably time for people calling themselves “race realists” to simply drop the term in favor of something more biologically correct and less provocative. I’ll refer to myself as a biological realist, for example, because I think you cannot overcome biology with wishful thinking. This has the added benefit of handling the feminist lunacies.
“Fixing the schools” is a waste of time because 80% of education is the IQ and character of the student. Another 10% is family life and the rest is the community in which the school exists. Maybe the school has 2% of an impact and I may be generous here. Put the ghetto boys into a nice prep school, but somehow maintain the ghetto home and community life, and you get the same result as you get from the local public school. Maybe one or two end up better than otherwise.
Similarly, the people who left the Borderlands of England for the New World ended up in Appalachia. They recreated their culture from home, without the interference of the Crown. When those people migrated into the Midwest, they recreated their mountain culture in the new lands. Southern Illinois is not like West Virginia by accident. There’s a strong Scandinavian flavor to the upper Midwest for a reason.
It’s why America can never be a land dominated by a central government imposing a universal culture on the whole nation. The differences are simply too big between the people of Vermont and the people of Texas. No amount of hooting and bellowing from Progressive loons will change biology and culture. It’s another area where biological realism could gain some traction. You can shame the Yankee busy-body out of trying to impose his values on the world. Mention race and he loses the ability to feel shame.
That’s why HBD and race realist people need to free themselves from the plain old racists. The people attracted to your movement for the racism are mostly idiots who will cause you nothing but trouble. That and white nationalism is about the dumbest thing going, given the ethnic and cultural diversity among people who call Europe their ancestral home. The crackers from the hills have as much in common with the German low-landers as they do with Arabs.
That said, it’s probably easier said than done. Saying you don’t like black culture is fine, but most people will call you a racist, even if you are married to a black person or are actually black. Racism used to be an action. Then it became words, then thoughts and is quickly becoming a lack of enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic enough in your praise for non-whites, you’re called a bigot.
Thinking about it, the image that comes to mind is of a train slamming into a mountain. Whatever distance and uniqueness there is between the cars, the collision eliminates it, leaving a pile of twisted metal. That’s what has happened with public discussion of anything that relates to ethnicity. It’s slammed into the wall of Cultural Marxism and you can no longer tell the racist crackpots from the Progressive loons.
I’ve been going to the same 7-11 each day for many years to get my $1 coffee refill. It’s my real life non-internet continuing education, especially since they began accepting EBT cards. I know the clerks pretty well. They see it all, but they don’t talk about it. It’s like working for the NSA and signing the Official Secrets Act. You hardly even see an eye roll. They’re stoic, even to the regulars.
This morning I put my buck on the counter and my clerk, a long timer, said it. “I hate niggers.” I don’t think he meant it though. He meant to say he loathed them. I heard the event that precipitated this outburst ahead of me, but multiply this dozens of times each day. The clerk isn’t white. None of them are, currently. The last white man to work there was an eighty year old Cuban who refused to show fear to three armed chimps. They beat him to death, or so they thought. Roberto survived, barely. I guess he’s seen worse.
Section 8 EBT behavior is unsustainable–because by it’s nature there is no bottom to it. The people who always get up on time, do split shifts, and make ten dollars an hour detest the user class and everything they represent.
This is all an explosive mix waiting for a spark. I don’t think it will happen but it would be better if it did.
Most people, at least in my experience of life in the west, usually show that we can get along reasonably well providing the other people around us more or less fit into the generally accepted framework of society. When I was at school there were, as it happened, no black kids but there were handful of Jewish boys and girls. No one cared much about that because while the Jews didn’t attend the daily assembly (or at least the religious part) they fitted in perfectly well with the rest of us. Their skin tones may have have been marginally darker but they spoke English and acted as if they were English. No one cared that they didn’t worship Jesus; in fact we were pretty envious they didn’t have to sing hymns each morning and instead went in the school dining room to finish their homework. One Jewish lad was a friend of mine and while he irritated me in lessons by constantly drumming on the edge of the desk behind me, it was (largely) a good natured irritation.
At this point I could say there was no racism because there was no difference to notice. Gradually I began to see more and more brown and black people in the UK (we are going back nearly 60 years) and slowly became aware of increasing differences. At about this time I began — and this was the shock — to grasp that some of the people who looked different were utterly different. Their looks were immaterial, but the fact they didn’t like the society they lived in and who made it clear they didn’t want to comply with what I thought were reasonable conditions of acceptance into society began to worry me. I had no trouble with people who didn’t like England, but I thought as England was beginning to bend over backwards to try and make them feel welcome — though it was apparent soon enough that it was never going to be enough — they ought to make an effort. or, failing that, leave for where they would be happier.
But at the same time I began to be told by the great and good I had to accept them. I had to act as if they were okay when some of them were manifestly not okay. Forty years ago it was possible to say “I don’t like what I am seeing and hearing” but another twenty years on and there were frowns that you had such a view. Then laws were passed by people I had mistakenly voted for, who said that my thoughts could be punished, and at the same time the lawmakers opened the nation’s boundaries to more and more people who didn’t like the society they arrived in.
Men with shaggy beards and dressing as they would be happier in the desert thundered loudly that we British had to change, or else there would be trouble. Meanwhile, more laws were drafted to make sure I never said anything about this or if I dared think an ‘unapproved’ thought I better keep my mouth shut. As for the lad who drummed on the desk behind me, his life went in a different direction to mine and we lost touch. I can’t help wondering if he is still with us whether his Jewish background may yet be a problem for him and his family.
But on reflection he was too much like the rest of us, and though he was being English in a time when it wasn’t a penalty, he will no doubt be as aware as me that times they do indeed a-change.
>One of the great, unspoken truths about life here is that we really all get along pretty darn well.
I beg to disagree, just illegal aliens account for nearly 37 percent of federal sentences, that isn’t what i call getting along… Hell, the black on white casualty rate dwarfs even Americas loses in Vietnam, the Viet Cong could only dream of a daily body count that high. Statistically it’s safer for a White person to serve a tour of duty overseas, patrol the streets of Kabul, than it is to walk his dog in Philadelphia. Just going by numbers makes the current black on white race-war Americas deadliest conflict since WW2!
That’s the great difference between the US and the UK. We have a large population of people with outlandishly high crime rates. That changes the math of diversity. Immigrants to the UK are at the top of their crime problem, but they have nothing like Detroit.
I’m talking about Los Angeles, CA. Of course there are no-go neighborhoods, gangs, individual assholes, and all the crap that goes along with urban life. My point is that by and large people *here in LA* get along pretty well. I am no kumbaya chanting moonbat. I live here. I know whereof I speak.
JWM
A town with no-go areas counts as ‘getting along pretty darn well’? Sounds more like a state of tension just short of open conflict.
What do I know? I’ve only lived here since 1963.
JWM
Fine, everyone gets along–provided certain people remember to never enter the Forbidden Zone.
Perhaps you’re not so much getting along, as you are accommodating yourself to challenging conditions?
Good luck to you in any case.
Rule #1 of internet arguments: Nothing you can say will prove your point to my satisfaction. Now please tell me why you think you are right. You win. It’s a war zone here. Don’t get within a hundred miles of the joint.
JWM
I spotted a small contradiction between asserting that people got along well with each other, and the existence of no-go areas.
This dead horse sure looks dead to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJC4R1uXDaE
The corruption of language is part of the trainwreck. Racism has been conflated with bigotry. This destroys any possibility of a frank discussion on the matter in the public square. Racism is the second hand smoke of human evil. Out and out Bigotry is (from my experience in 60 some odd years) really pretty rare. For the record, I live in the Los Angeles area. You can’t live here happily if you try to bean-count all your friends, acquaintances, and co-workers by race. One of the great, unspoken truths about life here is that we really all get along pretty darn well.
JWM
Something either is or isn’t true. The idea that something shouldn’t be true, and won’t be true if we pretend it’s not, doesn’t stand up to logical examination. But the very fact that you would put it up to logical examination, means you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is pretending something is true, to make it true.
There’s really no dodge around the concept of racism. If you are not willing something to be true, rather than trying to establish objective reality, then you are evil.
definitely a ‘badder thoughts’ post