I just switched jobs and was working out of my new office. While, theoretically, I should be sitting on some fat internet pipes I think the internet there cycles me off the board on a semi-regular basis. Which means that this is version 3.5 of this post, with previous versions (and a draft) having been eaten by the internet gods. This is probably the first time that’s happened to me on this board in a decade, and was incredibly frustrating, so I left this aside.
Anyway, the second half of my response to Rogue.
Rogue 9 wrote: ↑2019-08-01 07:13pm
Sounds subject to equal protection lawsuits, but it's an interesting idea. You'd need to define suppressed, though. Also, if a population's voting is suppressed, and it remains so, how many votes that population gets at the ballot box isn't material if they continue to be kept from the ballot box. The remedy lies in the courts and in Congress, and the way to do that is to not just defeat but marginalize the Republican Party as it's currently constituted. Demographic change means that's coming; the only question is how soon.
Defining suppression is an easily surmountable task (and one that has been done in multiple cases. The problem that I outline is that there is no remedy in the courts. The courts don't have a way to help someone make up for a suppressed vote. It can be fixed going forward but as legal concept there is no remedy for past acts of suppression.
Well, on the one hand, it's an interesting idea that isn't entirely without merit. On the other, you shouldn't be surprised at counter-offers. For instance, how you reacted to Vendetta when he made one was telling; the fact he had a different but similar idea (spread out over a longer timespan) seemed to make you think he was proving your point, but someone intent on keeping the black man down would just tell you to fuck off and not even entertain the idea. His rationale was faulty (gerrymandering is powerful, but it's not so powerful as to trivially overcome a 20:1 vote to population ratio on the part of the minority), but you didn't even touch on that; you just started exhibiting his posts to me as evidence of your point.
As a core point, Vendetta's idea was not similar. It missed the entire point of the exercise as I laid out in the original post: making White folk an absolute minority in terms of the vote as opposed to a Black majority. Simply increasing the amount of black votes doesn't do that, and negotiating black voting power in the manner described rather underlines the point I was going for in the original post: White folk view that idea as fundamentally antagonistic to their existence despite that power imbalance being descriptive of how White folk gained, maintained, and have deployed that power against Black folk. Put another way, white folk view other people having power over them as inconceivable or oppressive but don't think the same about the reverse. As an intellectual exercise it is easier for people to imagine the United States abolished than it is to imagine it racially transformed in that manner, and that says a lot about the fundamental makeup of the United States.
You know my field of study; it's essentially impossible to study antebellum politics and not be aware of the horrors and atrocities of both slavery and Indian policy. Reparations are owed, in money, education, and opportunity. I wouldn't dream of denying that, and will consider and support any reasonable plan.
We'll put a pin in this. (I had a larger reply typed out here, but it being eaten twice has sapped me of the will to retype all of it. This will come back.)
That... is an extremely, not to say outrageously, pessimistic assessment. I won't question the basis of the fear; inner city black folk obviously have every reason to distrust the police, but the idea that the police would embark on a full scale pogrom, to say nothing of politicians letting them get away with it, seems far-fetched. They seriously believe that if they get a real shot at political power the cops would respond by going door to door shooting people en masse for being black, and then that nothing would be done about it? That didn't happen when Obama was running and looked set to win; if there was a time to do that, it would have been then. Urban populations regularly elect representatives of color and they don't get purged for doing it.
Obama winning didn't represent a fundamental shift in the nature and control of the American political system. He was very much a product of the political system and represented those desires writ large. The sort of break being imagined here would be a fundamental one that would drastically reshape the racialized nature of policing in ways that it's not set up to cope with. As for the death of activists, it already happens in smaller scale situations. See, notably, the repeated history of racialized policing in Baltimore and the overt targeting of black activists (coupled with their response to there even being prosecution in the Freddie Gray case), the string of deaths of black activists in Ferguson after the protests there, or the NYPD's response to the coverage around Eric Garner.
To touch on the Urban centers point for a moment, every predominantly Black urban center exists inside a state that has a white majority, and those states all have histories of enforcing a paternalistic will on the behaviour of those cities. Detroit, Baltimore, and even New York City have each had times where the state power apparatus cracked down on the cities in question to help the white minority with policy proposals that they didn't like (usually, school integration).
As for the system never changing, I refer you to the Reconstruction Amendments. The system is set up to change, and indeed it has. It can change again, for good or ill.
Yeah, post-reconstruction those were largely ignored until well into the 1960s and since then we've seen every attempt to actually implement them fought tooth and nail, usually with a great deal of success. The most recent example of this was the Roberts court gutting the VRA, but the previously posted statistics about school integration really speak for themselves in this regard for what is usually touted as the greatest success of the reconstruction amendments post-Civil War.
As for change, no. The system is explicitly set up to prevent change, especially the kind of fundamental radical change that everyone seems to recognize as being necessary here. Power is explicitly divested so that small recalcitrant groups can throw spanners in the works to their hearts content with no structural counter-balance. The only time something that even came close to the systemic reform being imagined was put into place involved the disenfranchisement and military occupation of half the country.
Straha wrote: ↑2019-07-29 12:36am
Rogue 9 wrote: ↑2019-07-28 09:58pmIt's late and I don't have time for a complete response at the moment, but to touch on this, from my position that's bonkers. I'm more than willing to discuss reparations and assent to any reasonable plan. I'm drawing the line in two places. First, at legitimating the longstanding charge leveled by autocrats the world over, and yes, most recently by Vladimir Putin: That people are not fit to govern themselves, and that republics must fail, which the implosion of the United States would do. Second, at responding to blood with blood, or to human rights violations with human rights violations.
I find your first point interesting because it seems to foreclose governments changing themselves. The French are on their Fifth Republic, is that a reason to believe Republics always fail? If not, why can't the United States change its government too? If we are to hyper-fixate on the idea of recognizing Republics and not their failures, are we to tell the UK that to ditch Bess and return to the Cromwellian Commonwealth? Or is the US to throw out the constitution and restore the Articles of Confederation? If not, why can't the people of the United States decide that this current government is bad and replace it with another?
The French are on their Fifth Republic because their republics
have failed and been overtaken by autocrats and military revolts, repeatedly. Meanwhile, the Constitution of the United States has had twenty-seven amendments with no closure to amending it further or even calling a Constitutional Convention to completely replace it (though doing so now would be disastrous given the current makeup of the state governments). Using those mechanisms does not constitute the downfall of the United States. France is no refuge for your argument, and the constitutional history and mechanisms of the United States directly contradicts your characterization.
Right, you're missing the point. The democratic nature of the transition between the Fourth Republic to the Fifth Republic doesn't operate as a counter-argument to the validity of democracy, because
the nature of the transition was democratic, ditto the changes between Articles of Confederation and the Constitution or, say, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Sometimes the will of the people is one that calls for the dissolution of a state, that should be allowed.
(A thought: if we’re going to posit the partial dissolution of democracies as problematic, then the American revolution was certainly unjust by modern American standards. The colonies had greater political and social autonomy, and arguably greater support, from Great Britain than significant portions of America’s modern colonial/imperial structure like Guam and Puerto Rico. Yet the United States has made clear that it will never let those territories separate, on the basis of national integrity. Which sort of begs both the question of the logic of the original secession and your ‘dissolution undoes democracies’ thought.)
What is more troubling is your spotting the core claim that your imagined Putin makes: that stability is a fundamental sign of legitimacy. Not to go all Derridean here, but the nature of democracy is one that always change through self-rule and input as a necessity, which means that the present and past is always flawed. To say that trans-historical narratives and continuity are signs of legitimacy doesn’t just hem in what democracies can legitimately try and change but undermines the very promise of democracy, that of a better future than the present.
To the second, enough to elevate the oppressed to equality of opportunity. As I alluded to earlier in my response, reparations are due in non-monetary ways as well. As for what that may take, fiat justitia ruat caelum. I'm not starting with the destruction of the country as the goal, though.
And if land has been taken unjustly, can that not be given as reparations?
We do not live in an ethnostate. The vote is not legally restricted on the basis of race, and neither is membership in the representative bodies. Perhaps people freak the fuck out because you are alleging things that are transparently untrue and then telling them they need to sacrifice to amend the untruth.
Want to know why? Here's why.
Constitution of the United States, Amendment XIV wrote:All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
People find limited ways around it. But that doesn't make this an ethnostate. It means corrupt politicians are adept at finding ways to leverage electoral advantage,
and that is something we can fix.
So there are two claims being advanced here:
1. That we’re not in an ethnostate.
2. That even if we were, the reconstruction amendments represented fundamental shifts away from ethno-statedom.
To the first, the simple question is what happened to the Native Tribes that lived on the land before? Their land was taken, their laws ignored, and their people genocided all in the claim of Settler Superiority. The United States cannot exist as a legal and historical proposition without the
explicit logic of racial inferiority of Natives and Black folk and a similar claim towards the superiority of White Folk.
To the second, I’m going to do some work here that sets up what’s going to come in the following section. But, in its simplest form, you’re reading the Fourteenth amendment wrong. The fourteenth amendment was not written to set up racial equality in the States (indeed, with the active military confinement and genocide of Native Folk, it could never do that, and the amendment was explicitly read as not giving citizenship to Native folk who were born in US territory), its purpose was to hem in the power that states had previously held to suppress rights of people who lived inside them. Prior to the 14th amendment the Bill of Rights
only applied to the Federal Government, States could run imprison people without trial (subject to common law), restrict basic liberties, or do whatever the hell else they pleased in many aspects. The framers of the 14th Amendment wanted to explicitly break the power of the states in this regard and give the Federal Government a way to legally control the states. Which is why every clause is written so that it is being applied directly to the States, and why most law around the 14th amendment in the modern era revolves around the incorporation of rights. While the framers of the amendment certainly intended to use it as a tool to give congress the ability to protect Black rights in the country, the actual granting of rights and protections happened elsewhere. Which is an important and key distinction because those rights then became ones that were not, and would never be, enshrined in the Constitution.
The application of this as a question of blanket Racial equity was flat rejected by both the Government and the Courts a number of times. Asian folk were, for instance, explicitly banned from immigrating to the United States for almost seventy years, and in questions of naturalization
were explicitly barred from naturalizing even when they were
recognized as being White (but not White enough). (Both those cases, btw, less than a hundred years old. Similar, earlier, cases with regards to Chinese immigrants regarding entry and the loss of due process still form the foundation of modern American immigration law.) As for Black equality (something that was, at least partially, intended by the amendment), racial segregation was a fixture of the American civic infrastructure until the mid-point of the 20th Century, and with zoning laws, white flight, and increased incarceration it absolutely still is, we’ve just gotten very very good at saying the loud part quiet.
Finally, I think a little contextualization in the context of Trump is useful. If you read the public statements and official briefs about the Federal Government’s actions with things like the Civil Rights Amendment, immigration reform in the 60s, and desegregation (most starkly, Brown V. Board of Ed), the rhetoric is absolutely not one of equality or righting past injustices. Almost all of it boils down to a simplistic line based on foreign policy: The Soviet Union is using American racism as propaganda with third world countries, and it is incredibly hard to sell America’s good intentions to them as long as this continues. The moves towards substantive racial equity were absolutely opportunistic moves done for political benefit, and it’s no coincidence that the moment that America was freed from needing to justify its existence overseas because of the end of the Cold War and the fizzling out of the War on Terror is the same moment that White Nationalism re-enters the public discourse full bore.
As you like to say, hoo boy, lot to unpack here.
This is a direct admission that, in fact, the entire underlying ideology behind this massive threadjack is fundamentally racist. Explaining why is easy and shouldn't even have to be done, but since you evidently don't get it, here goes. There is active debate out whether or not Asian folk, as a homogeneous group, are settlers. Arguing that they are is obviously a racist position; it seeks to impart to a whole swath of people (of a whole swath of different ethnicities, to boot) a derogatory status because of the color of their skin and land of their ancestry. Reacting to that with anything other than an eyeroll or perhaps a strong telling-off is also a racist position because it's taking the idea seriously - meaning that the person so doing is perfectly willing to do that to whole groups of people because of the color of their skin and lands of their ancestry and the sticking point is whether to do it to this particular racial group. Everything about this is about ethnicity and race; you are fundamentally arguing that ethnicity creates ties to land and confers right to rule on that land and rule whoever else happens to be on that land. I don't see that as an improvement; rather I see it as an ideology that would vindicate the Nazis' claim to a German homeland. I know you don't see it that way and I'm not accusing you of being a Nazi, but come the fuck on, the construction is nearly identical, with the difference lying in the proposed courses of action.
Other people have explained how you missed the boat on basic definitions here. I’m not going to relitigate any of that. Rather, I’m just going to give a precis on the debate for those who are interested in it.
At the simplest level the Settler-Colonial structure separates people into three different categories:
- The Native who exists on the land before the Settler arrives, and whose ties to the land and existence are viewed as unimportant in the face of the arriving Settler. (Important to note that this category can only comes into existence out of an almost Levi-Straussian Cooked food/Raw Food imposition).
- The Settler, whose legal claims and political existence are read to extinguish any others in existence.
- The Slave, who engages in the labor that enables the Settler to create political and social structures free of the burden of work.
These categories can be porous at times, and they are not always racially categories. However, in North America by the mid-17th century they were some of the most rigid and racially coded in human history, and would only become more so after the United States came into existence based on the Indian/White/Black triad.
So, the question then becomes, how do non-White folk fit into this strictly racially coded system? And, in the example I gave, how do Asian folk fit in?
At the simplest level it would appear to be that they’re Settlers. The ability to enter the land using the laws and doctrines of the United States, the willingness to engage in commerce regulated by it, and the trade of land resources by the same would indicate that they are part and parcel of the US Settler regime.
Not so, say a number of historians and theorists. They point to the long history of Asian folk being banned from entering the country (see previous section), segregated when they were in it, and the legal and social regimes that separated them from engaging in businesses that were white dominated as signs that there was a clear distinction between White Settlers and Asian folk. Asian claims to land were often tenuous and broken by a variety of legal mechanisms on the West Coast, with the denouement of those actions being the seizing of Japanese land after Pearl Harbor during the process of internment. At the same time Asian folk were often legally or forcibly barred from engaging in labor that wasn’t either seen as fundamentally demeaning (laundry, cooking) or dangerous (railroad construction). Even modern admission, some of these theorists argue, is often contingent on a notion of Asian immigrants performing to a higher and distinct standard from White folk, most notably epitomized in the widespread ‘Model Minority’ myth. Ergo, they conclude, to call Asians settlers is to explode the category of settler as to no longer be useful.
But a number of theorists, mainly those from African-American/Blackness studies background, take issue with this. As a starting point, being able to own land that is not yours originally is the hallmark of being a settler, everything around that is window dressing. Second, they say that most of the legal categorization and restriction were not done to target Asian folk, but rather side-effects of being able to target Black folk with discriminatory law and policy. Even the model minority myth, some argue, is something that is used to target Black folk especially when it comes to questions like school integration (the New York City school system representing this at its peak.) Finally, they argue that the denial of rights, including voting, property ownership, contingent presence, and right to work in a field of own’s choosing, does not discount someone from being a Settler, indeed White Women were absolutely settlers but often lacked all these rights and more. The most compelling of these theorists argue that based on contemporary racial theories Asian folk were gendered as feminine as opposed to the racially innate categorization that Black and Native folk, for instance, had placed on them.
The debate is longer than this, obviously, but I’m going to cut it short here because it only becomes useful if people are interested in exploring it.
That said, let’s go back to one part of your statement that is worth exploring in a different light:
you are fundamentally arguing that ethnicity creates ties to land and confers right to rule on that land and rule whoever else happens to be on that land. I don't see that as an improvement; rather I see it as an ideology that would vindicate the Nazis' claim to a German homeland.
If the notion that ethnicity creates ties to land and confers right to rule is so deeply problematic that it must be opposed, then what’s your defense of the United States? The entire basis of the United States’ existence is that White Folk have a superior claim to the land than any other people who precede them, and that that claim gives them right to rule over anyone else who has presence on that land, including Natives and imported chattel black folk. If this is so deeply objectionable as you say it is, then there is no possible legitimacy for the United States. It is not coincidental, btw, that Mein Kampf and Nazi racial theorists often cited America favorably in their designs for both eugenics and racial separation in Europe, they viewed the United States as an example to follow. >insert the ‘I learned it from you’ PSA here<
(If the argument is going to be ‘Well, that was then, and this is now, and things are different. Then… that’s an argument, but I want the exact date you think this changed. Give me the date that the US ticked over from ‘illegitimate ethnostate’ to ‘bastion of democracy which cannot collapse’.)
'After 9/11, it was "You're with us or your with the terrorists." Now its "You're with Straha or you support racism."' ' - The Romulan Republic
'You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)' - Darth Yan
