Is Australia trying to follow the US on race? Steve Sailer describes the arc of race relations in the US for the last 60 years. The parallels with Australia (and the Voice) are obvious.
I think a lot of 1970s Americans who backed racial quotas had similar hopes: Sure, blacks are behind today, but many grew up with their parents picking cotton in the Jim Crow South. If we show them that the bourgeois world welcomes them, they’ll become more bourgeois.
And to some extent that indeed happened. There are more bourgeois blacks in Georgia today than in 1970.
But, my impression is, the trend toward competence convergence appear to have petered out in the later 20th Century, and today, nobody really expects convergence anymore.
The last time anybody seemed to take seriously the idea that with just one more generation of affirmative action, blacks should be able to catch up was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor putting a 25 year time limit on race quotas in her 2003 Grutter decision. …
But nobody believes blacks will have caught up to whites by 2028 anymore. (And the ongoing Asian tidal wave has put blacks even further behind in competing on merit for the good colleges and jobs than in 2003.) Or any other date they’d specify (absent genetic engineering).
Crushed hopes of equality led to calls for reparations forever:
Instead, we see the rise of Ibram X. Kendi’s demands for discrimination against whites to subsidize blacks for, roughly, ever.
E.g., the SF reparations commission called for 250 years of massive income subsidies for blacks in San Francisco.
Thus, contemporary mainstream discourse on race has become ever more antiquarian to cover up the last 54 years of affirmative action. Instead of thinking about the last 54 years, which is pretty much a blur in the NYT, we are told to obsess over FDR’s redlining, Tulsa, Emmett Till, slavery, etc. Follow The Science: Redlining in 1938 is why blacks don’t score high on the SAT in 2023!
So, respectable opinion on race is focused more and more on subsidizing backs forever: when reparations fail to Close the Gap, that will be seen as proof that Systemic Racism is so insidious we need more reparations. Reparations Now, Reparations Tomorrow, Reparations Forever!
But, whites participating in respectable discourse aren’t supposed to notice this huge shift in the premises behind affirmative action since 1970. Whites’ model of the world is supposed to still be the one that seemed fairly plausible in 1970: we will have race quotas to help blacks catch up for some limited time.
You don’t think some of these differences are the product of 70,000 years of separate evolution, do you? That’s racist!
We are supposed to testify we believe that the reason blacks remain behind whites in 2023 (and don’t mention the Asians) is purely environmental … Thus, those who are skeptical of the conventional wisdom’s 100% environmental explanation for why blacks are behind must be driven out of respectable discourse because their data and logic subvert the case for expanded and eternal quotas/DEI/reparations.
After all, we are talking about Real Money here.
Australian Aboriginals who have assimilated seem to be doing pretty well. Keeping a small minority living unassimilated in remote and poor conditions seems to suit the goals of activists and service providers, but otherwise isn’t doing anyone any favors.
What if we realized that race is a distraction from class? Look at this video from the US, where the elite’s worst nightmare is Black Lives Matter activists and Trump Supporters finding common ground.
