RangerDave wrote:
Again, I don't disagree that the anti-racism of the left has jumped the shark in recent years. I do think you massively overestimate the degree to which racism was over in the 90s (again, in 1994, half the country still thought interracial marriage was wrong), but I still agree that the tipping point was reached in that decade and rapid progress has been made since then.
And yet, interracial marriage was quite legal in 1994, and that was not going to be reversed.
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So lets focus on that 1965 to 1985 period, since that's where I think we're the farthest apart. You say, "It isn't just that it became less acceptable to be overtly racist, it's that people actually became a lot less racist, very rapidly - because over that period of 1965 to 1985 an entire generation learned that the sky wouldn't fall in because things changed." That's true. However, it's just a little too coincidental, don't you think, that white voters on the right during that era just happened to move, en masse, to the party that made fighting crime, drugs and welfare key parts of its platform and just happened to enthusiastically embrace talk radio and its resentment-filled rants against Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, political correctness, the race card, etc.?
I don't know why that would be coincidental, since it wasn't until that period that those issues became current, or - in the case of crime - had been ongoing long enough that people truly regarded it as an epidemic - and as for talk radio and their rants, that was really more of a 1990s arrival and given Sharpton and Jackson's behavior, resentment directed at them personally was and is justified regardless. Just because they are black leaders does not make all - pr even very much - resentment targeted at them evidence of racism in general. Keep in mind that they were already part of the nascent stage of the "fabricate a crisis" approach with Tawana Brawley, and their entire career path has been to fan the resentment of black people, heavily using religious techniques to do it - religious techniques that are heavily forwned upon by the left when they appear in public debate for almost any other reason.
Furthermore, a lot of those people are people that were never regarded as racist before - nothern, midwestern, and western whites who had looked askance at the South and Jim Crow for decades, and suddenly found themselves lumped in with those people for the political convenience of the left.
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In your telling, you seem to be portraying white, blue collar voters as having undergone some rapid conversion on the road to Damascus after the Civil Rights era and then only becoming resentful over time because their conversion wasn't properly acknowledged and they were constantly harangued by the arrogant left. You don't find that narrative a bit suspect? Isn't a much more reasonable narrative that folks gradually realized that flat-out racism wasn't ok, but still had a lingering sense of tribalism and prejudice that political elites on the right stoked for electoral gain and ratings/profits by focusing on issues that, while legitimate concerns, nevertheless had clear racial divides built in?
I'm not sure where you're getting this "Road to Damascus" thing from, other than maybe that it's your continued insistence on conflating Southern whites, particularly from the George Wallace states with working-class whites in general, which is neither fair nor accurate.
Furthermore, in that time, the left and black leaders in particular have stoked Black people's fears and resentments to a far greater degree than the right has of whites. If anything, the right has been guilty of being clumsy in its approach to economic matters, and continuously puts forth proposals that are economic in nature but which (allegedly) will have a "disproportionate impact" and then failing to address it when the left claims this is because of racism, rather than being the opposition to greater government interventions, greater government spending, and more lately outright socialism, that it actually is. The right has had 50 years to figure out how to counter this and has so far failed to do so, which only leads me to the conclusion that the top of the right really doesn't care very much if it's called racists and is only now figuring out that their voters do not like it at all.
The really suspect narrative, therefore, is this excessive concern over racial divides, disproportionate impacts, and unverifiable suspect racial attitudes of whites while giving blacks (and, for that matter, other minorities and women) free passes to engage in their own forms of tribalism. Excusing this by pointing to ongoing inequalities, as the left ahs repeatedly done, only confirms the insincerity of the desire to remedy inequality.
What you're running into face-first is that the selling point of the civil rights movement was "the content of their character" versus "the color of their skin." That line basically is what every white person that was really not on board with the South's treatment of blacks - and quite a few Southerners too, once they realized they'd lost - had bought into and said "ok this seems like a fair deal." given the content of America's founding documents. The situation in the South was presented as unfair and untenable and the advocates of change claimed a pretty clear moral high ground based on that "equality" stance.
That, however, never occurred. It was almost immediately abandoned in favor of trying to arrange special privileges for blacks, women, and eventually various other minority groups, and while the first decade or two of this could be passed off as well-intentioned legislative ham-fistedness of necessity it's very hard to excuse the second 25 years of continuing the same thing in view of its ineffective and open-ended nature. White people rightly wonder at what point the left and blacks will actually be satisfied and "content of their character" will become the actual standard and the answer - it is increasingly obvious - is "never, as long as it keeps black people voting for Democrats." It's only confirmed in the case of women, where women are rapidly surpassing men in many beneficial areas and yet there's no sign of a slowdown in demands for new efforts to help women, much less any effort to eliminate special benefits for them, particularly when it comes to education or largesse from public coffers.
This is something you've completely ignored and failed to address so far in your eagerness to re-iterate your suspicions about white racial attitudes and your token attempts to make the other side go away by agreeing that some elements of protest have jumped the shark. You're not holding all sides of the debate to the same standards. If you complain that someone else is engaing in objectionable behavior, you can argue that it's therefore ok to do the same yourself, or argue that they should stop, but you can't do both. The left has tried to do precisely that to whites (while attributing the behavior of one section of them to all) for 50 years now, and tried to shout down any pointing out of this with cries of racism.
And all you're doing here is ignoring this, hoping it will go away if you don't acknowledge it. Like I said, it's time for the left to understand it isn't the arbitrator of acceptability and hasn't held the moral high ground here in a very long time now.