Black Nationalism (Split from Zimmerman Trial)

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I might add that nowhere have I proposed anything which would harm any group objectively, which forcibly resettling 200 million white people to Europe would do. On the other hand, resettling 20 million white people from lightly populated parts of the US to other lightly populated parts of the US would possibly increase their average prosperity by giving them new chances for industry, innovation, and employment in denser regions. So, there's also the relative harm factor: Depopulating white people from North America would cause active harm, whereas making white people in a suburb of Atlanta move to a new suburb of Richmond would scarcely inconvenience them if government compensation was involved.

[Channel72]

That is such an absurd simplification of the importance of cultural identity in psychological health, life purpose, human functionality, and acceptance of the human condition as to be truly pathetic. It is a true sign of a strict integrationist who wishes to exterminate other cultures and deny them the right to set their own laws and their own collective goals in existence.

Please prove that ethnic identity is actually important to human health. Yes, we're wired with tribalistic inclinations, but there's no evidence that dividing up the population into multiple separate ethnic "enclaves" is in anyway beneficial to the human condition. There is, however, quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

What have we achieved since the 1960s? Oh, right, the total destruction of black family life, black community, and black social institutions. For which we've seen a modest uptick in black employment in the government and high-end jobs, while the black prison population has vastly increased, including conditions of outright slavery in private prisons.

Oh stop. What do you mean by "black family life"? Out-of-wedlock pregenancies? Divorce rate? That has increased across the board since the 1960s, and is not unique to the black population. Meanwhile, the average income of African Americans has improved dramatically since the 1960s. The idea that we're not making any serious progress here is patently absurd.

[Ultonius]

Could the reservation system be a compromise solution to giving minority linguistic/ethnic groups more autonomy without breaking up the USA? Minority groups could petition the federal government for recognition as a 'tribe', and the right to designate areas that they regard as 'homelands' where they are the majority as reservations. This could give them autonomy in areas such as civil law and education, while they could still rely on the federal government for defence and the maintenance of infrastructure. The creation of relatively small enclaves with limited sovereignty instead of fully sovereign states would hopefully reduce migration of non-group members out of and of group members into them, which would probably be a major obstacle otherwise. The reservations could probably also have a smaller minimum size than full sovereign nations, which would allow both large minorities like black Americans or Hispanic Americans and small ones like Amish or Hutterites to have some autonomy. The latter two groups already live in close-knit, somewhat self-governing communities (settlements and colonies respectively), so the reservation model would require little adjustment on their part.

[Thanas]

The semi-nomadic non-land-ownership based nature of the very lightly settled Americas before the arrival of white colonizers would have made some white settlement legitimate. Essentially, show up, establish colonies without attacking or enslaving native groups, negotiate for fixed areas of settlement, and henceforth abide by the results of those negotiations.

That argument only works for tribes on the great plains. Almost everywhere else there was very much fixed locations.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Even then Thanas the land use wasn't intensive enough outside of some areas of the Mississippian culture to completely occupy all of the available land even with the farming techniques available to the native peoples (so we're assuming they're not being required to adapt to western ways). The only areas where settlement was unambiguously genocidal was where it required the enslavement or starvation of the local population. Light coastal settlement in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states with slow colonization of the interior up major rivers and the use of steel tools to turn land that the Indians could not cultivate into farmland could have, in a strictly hypothetical sense, allowed for a population of millions without achieving genocidal conditions toward the local population.

I also don't really believe that is the only argument I have, anyway. I would say I made another one: That large-scale land restoration (like the Great Sioux reservation, for one example I linked to) could be accomplished with minimal disruption to people who had no part in the original seizure, whereas the wholescale repatriation of whites would involve massive human suffering. Likewise a black nation could be created by relocation of a population to another part of the country they are citizens of with minimal disruption to their way of life.

So, I am proudly and wholeheartedly in favour of white removal (with the other option being that people remain there voluntarily under tribal jurisdiction) from some lightly settled areas to restore enough land to indigenous tribes so that they can establish a proper livelihood, and I at least respect and understand where Saxtonite is coming from and worry he may very well be quite right--and certainly think the argument that America has failed at integration has merit.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Please prove that ethnic identity is actually important to human health. Yes, we're wired with tribalistic inclinations, but there's no evidence that dividing up the population into multiple separate ethnic "enclaves" is in anyway beneficial to the human condition. There is, however, quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

No, there's plenty of evidence I'm right and you're wrong

We should also reference Spengler in any case, both with the broad theories of cultural decline, but let's focus more on the fact-based things, like this source:

Guarani-Kaiowa: Despair and Suicide

Perhaps the starkest example of the crisis of Indian lands in Brazil is the case of the Guarani-Kaiowa territory in the southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where over the past decade, over 300 Indians have taken their own lives in despair. Poverty, expulsion from traditional territories in recurrent disputes with wealthy ranchers, and the overpopulation of the remaining lands are the main factors leading this unique people to slow extinction. Today, over 22,500 Guarani-Kaiowas are pressed into a fraction of their original territory-22 recognized areas near Dourados, a city on the Paraguayan border. In one village called Bororo, 3,700 are packed into 3,600 hectares, a veritable death sentence for a people accustomed to utilizing vast expanses of land for their sustenance.

Several areas of the Guarani-Kaiowa territory have been the site of intense and at times lethal struggles for land. The area of Sete Cerros, for example, was heavily contested by an agro-industrial company by the name of Sattin Agropecuaria S.A, which has made full use of Decree 1775 and sued the state, claiming title to the land. As a result, Minister of Justice Jobim has targeted the area for revision, along with seven other Indigenous areas.

In another village known as Jarara, the Guarani-Kaiowa reoccupied their lands in March 1996, stating that "We are returning to our Jarara village because we Indians cannot live anymore on the periphery of the city because we cannot even practice our cultural traditions." The 247 Guarani-Kaiowa-Nandeva people had seen their 590 hectare reserve officially legalized under Brazilian law. But, in 1993, Miguel Subtil de Oliveira, a rancher who also claimed the area, succeeded in having a judge issue a restraining order forbidding the Indians from occupying their own land. After a campaign of support from Brazilian entities and international NGOs combined with the threat of more suicides, Judge Theotonio Costa, of the Regional Federal Court in Sao Paulo, revoked his previous ruling authorizing the eviction of Jarara's inhabitants.

Recently, in another village known as Sucuriy, 53 Guarani-Kaiowa were illegally evicted by armed civilians. The 14 Guarani-Kaiowa families are now camped on the roadside about two kilometers outside Maracaju, and awaiting a judicial decision that would allow them to return to the area, which ironically has already been demarcated.

Or to put it quite simply, the end of your way of life and culture and forced homogenization into an over-Empire makes you depressed and then you die. And it happens in western ways of life like farming and fishing that have been threatened by industrial processes and formed tight-knit subcultures just as much as it does in completely "alien" indigenous cultures. And it's for that reason that we need to fight very hard for broad indigenous autonomy, and give strong thought to the prospect of extending it to the black nation in the United States.

Oh stop. What do you mean by "black family life"? Out-of-wedlock pregenancies? Divorce rate? That has increased across the board since the 1960s, and is not unique to the black population. Meanwhile, the average income of African Americans has improved dramatically since the 1960s. The idea that we're not making any serious progress here is patently absurd.

Ah yes, this completely awesome progress which melted into nothing the moment the recession has hit. Can you really say that paragraph above with a straight face in the context of THIS fact? :

The Pew Research Center reported last summer that the median wealth of white households in the wake of the recession was an astonishing 20 times that of black households.

Yeah, median income of black families is 5% of that of white families. Sure we've made a lot of progress since the 60's. Sure.

[Simon_Jester]

Duchess, you need to distinguish between median income and median wealth. Median income is the income of the 50th percentile; median wealth is the net worth of the 50th percentile.

If median income of black households was 5% that of white households, they'd be dead; that's nowhere near enough to live on. But median wealth measures something else significant: accumulation of property. For example, a man who buys a house and pays a mortgage for thirty year period accumulates wealth- the price of a house. A man who rents for the same length of time accumulates nothing.

So it's interesting to reflect that if the economic well-being of blacks in America has been steadily rising since 1970... why does the 50th percentile of blacks have one-twentieth as much much money?

The median white household in America probably owns some kind of property, probably has money stored in the bank for retirement, if not very much. The median black household... do they have those things? If not, economic equality is a hell of a long way off.

Saxtonite is fixated on the american South because he got it in his head that afro-americans somehow colonized that area first. That's a historically revisionist view of it to say the least.

I know Simon Jester already tackled this a bit, but I find it funny that you immediately jump onto the idea that this is historical revisionism when the vast majority of history taught about America is at best misleading and often outright lying so as to present a narrative in favour of the existing power structure. The idea that Europeans and their descendants did all the heavy lifting during the colonisation of America is the actual historical revisionism, and of the worst kind since it supports and is supported by those in power.

The problem is simply that Metahive is ignorant of the details of how the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was colonized, and probably has a nice simple narrative in his head like "The evil white Americans killed all the poor Indians then shipped in the black slaves." Since that is good enough to suit his purposes, any person who shows knowledge of details that contradicts his narrative can expect to be met with derision: "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts!"

Who cares? Nobody has much of a choice regarding where they are born and what language becomes their mother tongue. I didn't "choose" to speak English either. I was just born in the US.

And you personally weren't hauled off in chains as cargo in some triangle trade slave ship any more than I was personally thrown in Auschwitz or enslaved in Egypt (I'm Jewish.)

Who gives a shit what happened to your ancestors? Right now we have 21st century problems to deal with, and nobody has time for your misguided, grandiose ideas about creating a separate "black" nation. Why do you care so much about one particular race/ethnic group anyway? I couldn't care less about supporting Israel or helping out Jewish causes. It's much more interesting to work towards a better future for everyone. I'm sorry if that sounds saccharine or whatever, but it's true.

Actually, you have completely missed Saxtonite's point. He argues that there is ongoing suffering by blacks because of the white-dominated power structure in America, that the American legal and economic systems remain permanently set against blacks no matter what he does.

He then asserts that the best way to fix this and make things right in the future is to give the blacks their own country, free of the prejudices and harm caused by the white majority. That assertion has nothing to do with anything bad that happened to blacks in the past. It has to do with what is happening now. If Saxtonite were satisfied that black people were no longer suffering in America for being black, I suspect he would not be a black nationalist.

Now, Saxtonite's choice of where to put this proposed black homeland has something to do with historical rights and wrongs. But at the same time it also has to do with demographic realities of where blacks actually live in the present day, so even there it is not all about some kind of "pay us back" ideas.

You want him to concentrate on how to make things better in the future? That is exactly what he's trying to do. I may think he's wrong, but it's clear to me that he's trying to base his views on current events, not just past ones.

I don't see why Natives should only be restricted to territory that the Europeans deigned to give to them at one time.

Honoring the treaties we signed with Indian tribes in the past, and actually giving them ALL the land they were promised in those treaties, would be a good intermediate step between "give them back all the land, figure out how to resettle 200 million people" and "give them no land, let them remain poor and miserable while we enjoy the fruits our our theft."

As far as fairness goes, it would give those Indian tribes about all the land they can profitably use on short notice, given their actual population, and would be a huge improvement for them compared to the current situation. Anything further would be hard to implement without causing even more mass suffering, so why not start with the easy step first?

...Meanwhile, the average income of African Americans has improved dramatically since the 1960s. The idea that we're not making any serious progress here is patently absurd.

Two questions: are those figures in constant dollars?

Also, those are figures for households. Therefore, they do not reflect the fact that a huge number of households have been replaced by single mothers trying to raise multiple children... and fathers thrown into jail, who aren't even counted here because a jailbird doesn't count as a "household."

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I had meant for the point to be about wealth as you said it, Simon, but said income strictly as a misspoken term. My apologies.

[une]

Has integration really been such a failure that we need to make a complete 180 and create separate nations for the different races?

I agree that integration hasn't worked as well as most of would have liked, but it's still had some successes and I genuinely think that it has been a positive for black Americans. There is still a lot of progress to be made, but wouldn't it be better to try and fix the problems with our current approach to integration instead of completely throwing it away in favor of racial separatism?

[Starglider]

Yeah, median income of black families is 5% of that of white families. Sure we've made a lot of progress since the 60's. Sure.

A few posts up you were saying that money is the worst possible indicator of success, we are all too concerned about wealth, your favourite place on earth is a community with vastly lower per-capita income than the US etc. So surely on your own anti-materialist terms, this is at worst of no concern and even possibly a good thing?

This thread is in general a throwback to the state sanctioned ethnic cleansing and invention of borders in smokey embassy rooms of 100 years ago, hidden under a thin patina of so-called 'social justice'. Fortuantely the appetite for massive scale forced relocation and reeducation has been steadily decreasing for the last few centuries.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

A few posts up you were saying that money is the worst possible indicator of success, we are all too concerned about wealth, your favourite place on earth is a community with vastly lower per-capita income than the US etc. So surely on your own anti-materialist terms, this is at worst of no concern and even possibly a good thing?

I would say it is irrelevant in those terms. What I was using it for is as a signifier of the relative success of integrationist policies. The objectives of the capitalist-materialist economic system may be wrong, but certainly even if we agree on that or disagree on that or what not, we can use the relative economic performance of two social groups to compare how well they are actually integrated into society? I think the figure--even though wealth is largely irrelevant to happiness--is useful because it shows that integration of blacks has failed and that they remain a distinct community, since it is unambiguous that such a large difference is statistically significant.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Has integration really been such a failure that we need to make a complete 180 and create separate nations for the different races?

I agree that integration hasn't worked as well as most of would have liked, but it's still had some successes and I genuinely think that it has been a positive for black Americans. There is still a lot of progress to be made, but wouldn't it be better to try and fix the problems with our current approach to integration instead of completely throwing it away in favor of racial separatism?

I think integration is generally to be preferred but the problem is that in the specific case of the United States it has failed so disastrously that it there are very few choices except to at least consider separatism. This is entirely the fault of whites, of course.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

This thread is in general a throwback to the state sanctioned ethnic cleansing and invention of borders in smokey embassy rooms of 100 years ago, hidden under a thin patina of so-called 'social justice'. Fortuantely the appetite for massive scale forced relocation and reeducation has been steadily decreasing for the last few centuries.

Ironically if you'd read more carefully I still want the United States to exist, just as a confederacy of ethnolinguistic (regardless of skin colour) groups with their own tight constitutions under a loose confederal super-constitution. I actually see it as more of a federal entity in the style of the proposed Donaumonarchie reformation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire than anything else, that being the aspiration, at any rate. So it actually sort of stands against the tide of ethnic division in the 20th century while still acknowledging that the "strict integration" in practice in France and the United States has failed.

[une]

Has integration really been such a failure that we need to make a complete 180 and create separate nations for the different races?

I agree that integration hasn't worked as well as most of would have liked, but it's still had some successes and I genuinely think that it has been a positive for black Americans. There is still a lot of progress to be made, but wouldn't it be better to try and fix the problems with our current approach to integration instead of completely throwing it away in favor of racial separatism?

I think integration is generally to be preferred but the problem is that in the specific case of the United States it has failed so disastrously that it there are very few choices except to at least consider separatism. This is entirely the fault of whites, of course.

I would disagree with the idea that it's been a disastrous failure. Black income gains haven't been great, but the acceptance of black people within American society is at an all time high. Racism still exists, in more places than most care to admit, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it was back in the 1950's or 60's. Things have improved for those of us of color.

Could you please elaborate on why you think integration has been such a failure?

[Simon_Jester]

Has integration really been such a failure that we need to make a complete 180 and create separate nations for the different races?

I agree that integration hasn't worked as well as most of would have liked, but it's still had some successes and I genuinely think that it has been a positive for black Americans. There is still a lot of progress to be made, but wouldn't it be better to try and fix the problems with our current approach to integration instead of completely throwing it away in favor of racial separatism?

Me, I think "yes," let's stick with integration, I think creating an American Bantustan would be deeply counterproductive and harmful for all concerned. But I can see how after forty years some people are starting to lose patience.

In Duchess's case she appears to think the US should probably subdivide anyway on general principles, and that the Indian tribes got grossly cheated in a way that put them at a permanent disadvantage that could be partly fixed by giving them back land they were already promised. And she then seems to see the black-nationalism idea in that context

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Though never formalized, I see massive land redistribution in favour of blacks within the existing system as originally proposed in the Civil War (40 acres and a mule) in combination with the proposed formation of black-majority states by some officers and legislators of the time that would write their own constitutions in the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi as well as part of Florida and possibly Texas, as well as accepting the application of Haiti to become a US state. Collectively 3 - 5 decisively black majority states that could not be disenfranchised under the constitution, under arms with their own state militias and naval militias, supported by a strong class of black landowning farmers throughout the rest of the south, would have guaranteed the success of the Reconstruction effort and been a successful integration of the black population into the United States in the wake of the Civil War.

I have seen Saxtonite's arguments and regard them as very persuasive, and on reflecting on the total failure of the Obama administration to do anything to change the abject criminalization of being black in the United States, think that his proposals.. At the least, have great merit, in the same context as the need to expand Indian reservations to address their legitimate rights and grievances.

[Simon_Jester]

I would very much be interested to get a parallel-universe look at what would have happened if people had done what you outline in 1866.

As for today, I think the problem is that Obama being black does very little good for anyone, because he's so coopted that at heart he is neither black nor white nor Asian nor anything else, he is The Man. Fixating on the color of the skin of the man in the suit sometimes overlooks what he has to do to become the man in the suit.

What is needed is a more sensitive, intelligent, and responsible approach by society toward poverty and the hard-working people of the country as a whole. Everyone needs it; blacks just need it more than average.

[Guardsman Bass]

Got lured back in, oh well.

The disparity in wealth is mostly a reflection of white households being far more likely to own their home than black households (since most of the "wealth" is the equity value of their home). That's largely a relic of post-World War II disparities in GI bill and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac assistance, so I'd be more than happy to do some massive subsidies designed to boost black household homeownership.

In fact, it could kill three birds with one stone. You'd greatly boost the wealth of your average black household, buy out some of the issues with housing supply in cities like New York caused by rent control in a way that didn't impoverish tenants, and also mitigate the downsides of gentrification for existing tenants in urban areas. In fact ,they'd stand to gain a ton of wealth if they sold their new homes in gentrifying neighborhoods, or if they used some of the equity as business capital.

[General Mung Beans]

One question for either Saxtonite or Duchess of Zion: Should other peoples be compensated for slavery? For example should Brazil cede a large portion of its territory to its blacks considering that its slavery lasted longer and was deadlier than slavery in the American South? For that matter should the states of North Africa give up say Oran and Benghazi to Spain and Italy to compensate for the Barbary Coast raids which took place into the early 19th Century?

Also despite the talk of there being "racial reconciliation" in South Africa, by all metrics (income, life-spans, crime-rates etc.) blacks in that country are far worse-off than those in the United States. BTW, average life-spans for black females is above that of white males in the United States.

[Metahive]

In 1919 Poland was reconstituted as an independent nation and bits and pieces of land carved out of Germany and Russia to make this happen. As a result both nations fumed with anger and revanchism and at the first opportunity formed a pact to take back what they had lost and more violently. In fact, Russia already tried this on the very eve of Poland's reconstitution.

So, do the math to what would have happened had the American Civil War ended on a similar note.

Also, Simon, this is Duchess proposal:

Obviously only the force of demand of black nationalism and the right of blacks to their chunk of the country would make such a reorganisation possible in the first place. And it's obvious it has to come at the expense of flat-land southern whites: They're the people who have to lose to make this work. Fortunately they're also the descendants of the people who had the most direct involvement with slavery in the first place, and who were never adequately punished (nor were slaves adequately compensated in that area) for slavery in the first place. Sort of like if we all agreed that Israel was morally wrong and the whole country had to be handed back to the Palestinians, the highest nation on the list for getting a pound of flesh extracted to re-settle the Jews of Israel is going to be Germany even if nobody alive in Germany by that point was directly responsible for the holocaust.

So, white american southerners are all guilty for the sins of their ancestors (although slave-owners were a distinct minority) and therefore must collectively atone by getting forcefully relocated. Same for Germany, although there are now Germans, including me, who's ancestors didn't even reside in Germany during the Third Reich. I find it bitterly ironic that in another thread you were indulging in "righteous" anger at me for supposedly treating politics not with the required seriousness but see no problem with a proposal as simple-minded as this which at the least already requires copious amounts of violence to be made happen in the first place and will result in lots and lots of resentment and very likely even more violence.
You are a hypocrite.

EDIT:
And the reason why I reject Duchess' proposal to give Native Americans only treaty-bound land back is the double standard. White Southerners and Germans have forfeited the right to decide about their borders because of collective guilt for their ancestors wrongdoing? Then I must ask why not Americans as a whole?

[Grumman]

The disparity in wealth is mostly a reflection of white households being far more likely to own their home than black households (since most of the "wealth" is the equity value of their home). That's largely a relic of post-World War II disparities in GI bill and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac assistance, so I'd be more than happy to do some massive subsidies designed to boost black household homeownership.

Could you at least wait until we recover from the 2008 economic crisis before trying to create the next one?

[Guardsman Bass]

The disparity in wealth is mostly a reflection of white households being far more likely to own their home than black households (since most of the "wealth" is the equity value of their home). That's largely a relic of post-World War II disparities in GI bill and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac assistance, so I'd be more than happy to do some massive subsidies designed to boost black household homeownership.

Could you at least wait until we recover from the 2008 economic crisis before trying to create the next one?

I'm not talking about subprime mortgages or other such chicanry (most of which were re-finances anyways in the last crisis, not original loans). Just regular, fixed-rate loans with some subsidies to help make them much more affordable, combined with some kind of program designed to help the large population of urban black tenants to buy/acquire their apartments outright (which might entail a combination of eminent domain and compensation).

[Metahive]

I must also say that Duchess' solution for the supposed "failure" of integration is forced relocation and carving the whole US up into separate ethnic constituencies strikes me as akin to someone trying to heal colon cancer with copious amounts of ass-kicking.

[Channel72]

Or to put it quite simply, the end of your way of life and culture and forced homogenization into an over-Empire makes you depressed and then you die. And it happens in western ways of life like farming and fishing that have been threatened by industrial processes and formed tight-knit subcultures just as much as it does in completely "alien" indigenous cultures. And it's for that reason that we need to fight very hard for broad indigenous autonomy, and give strong thought to the prospect of extending it to the black nation in the United States.

Absurd. The Guarani-Kaiowa are being driven to extinction by many factors including "poverty, expulsion from traditional territories, overpopulation, etc". This has no bearing on whether or not they could be successfully integrated into Brazilian society over the next half century.

To compare this situation with blacks in the US is beyond preposterous. African Americans, while suffering from disproportionate poverty as a result of the historical legacy of slavery, are much more integrated into Western society than the Guarani-Kaiowa. In fact, it could be argued that their failure to integrate with 21st century Brazil ultimately led to this disaster. In contrast, the median income of the black population has been steadily rising, programs like affirmative action have reduced unemployment, and the average number of African Americans with a college degree has also steadily risen since the 60s.

In other words, you're full of shit.

Ah yes, this completely awesome progress which melted into nothing the moment the recession has hit. Can you really say that paragraph above with a straight face in the context of THIS fact? :

The recession affected everyone pretty badly. So what? Obviously, poorer neighborhoods are going to feel the sting of the recession harder than suburban, white America.

Yeah, median income of black families is 5% of that of white families. Sure we've made a lot of progress since the 60's. Sure.

Are you paying attention? I'm NOT arguing that we've reached economic parity between whites and blacks in this country - far from it. The point is, since the 1960s we've gotten closer to economic equality, and there's no reason to think that this trend won't continue over the next century. Setting up a separate "black nation" would be totally pointless, and probably disastrous.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You're being ridiculous. I said the objective was to try and fix past wrongs with a minimum amount of suffering for all involved, and that compensated relocation from one American cookie-cutter suburb to another fits within that qualification whereas the removal of an entire population and country does not. Nowhere did I propose the relocation of the entire German race, or even the replacement of the entire South with Saxtonite's New Afrika. You are simply attempting a truly giant golden mean fallacy without picking apart the relevant merits of your counter-proposal, in an effort to make me look bad because, let's be honest, you don't like me.

Now, at any rate, the point is that integration is preferable. And integration is arguably working better in Brasil than in the United States: "Money whitens" is the order of the day there, and we'd call it racist up here but the truth is, of course, that the successful black man in Brasil is treated like a member of respectable society, whereas even Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell are still black men in the United States, even a Harvard professor like Gates--still subject to arbitrary profiling and detention by the police. So the point is that US integration has failed on a fundamental level in that we still treat black people as inferiors subject to belonging to this undesirable "black class" in society with reduced rights even when they're very successful, whereas other societies with large black populations in the Americas can at least acknowledge that a black individual with the monetary signifiers of success in western culture is, in fact, their equal. We cannot.

That is the fundamental gap which 40 years of integration hasn't breached and which is why, one has to say, Saxtonite's ideas have some real merit. And I have to question the relative racism of people who bleat to the contrary in a country where being black, 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the collapse of the segregation regime, is still an arbitrary death sentence for the cops in urban areas to dispense 100 rounds of justice in a state of apopletic racial paranoia which fuels the militarisation of the nation and the loss of rights for ALL of us.