It's 1925. Please give me a defense of segregation.

[brickbacon]

@The_Flying_Dutchman

here’s the rub. I don’t think anyone, particularly white people everywhere of that time thought to challenge segregation on a legal or moral basis. I wonder if even the most ardent anti-slavery advocate regarded blacks as having possessed, or capable to possess the finer qualities attributed to whites.

We have segregation today and no one really challenges it. Fat chance to build a 1400 square foot home amongst 6000 square foot mansions. We have neighbourhoods of people with comparable incomes. Everone knows the rich bitch area where you might be able to drive by, but feel out of place by getting out of your 1993 Ford Escort.

You won’t find this segregation within aboriginal communities.

And what about these native reservations?

Segregation is still alive and well.

Exactly. Even today, we don’t have a problem with segregation or discrimination along socially acceptably, or legally defensible lines. Some people today live in gated communities, send their kids to prestigious private schools, or belong to private clubs or fraternities. Some jails used to segregate people by race until very recently.

We also still have many educated people on this board who will never miss an opportunity to point out the inherent inferiority of Blacks and other minorities, yet few will call them out on their racist, backwards notions. Here are a few of my favorites:

From a thread about the difficulty of getting into med school:

@Chief_Pedant

I sat on the admissions committee for a US Med School for a number of years in the early 80’s.

[SNIP]

Underrepresented minorities were placed in a separate category (and still are) because their performance on standardized exams and high grades in quantifiable disciplines such as sciences were so far below everyone else we would have ended up with no minorities unless we handled them separately. http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/mcatgparaceeth08.htm

From a thread about how we should combat modern racism:

@Chief_Pedant

I’m in too remote a part of the world to really jump into this fray, but I don’t think Mr Obama should have any discourse at all, and I think the notion that there is some sort of national discourse which can be changed through some sort of centralized effort is sort of silly and pollyannish.

It seems to me there are obvious average differences among races, both culturally and genetically. So what? What is it about a race classification that has any more meaning for defining a given individual or their potential than, say, gender?

We should stop pretending all groups are the same and stop pretending that grouping people has much value.

It’s unlikely that we will do that, but that is what we should do.

It is a personal observation of mine that the determination to classify citizens along race-based cohorts is at least as much driven by minorities who feel underrepresented in society as it is by middle class whites who feel put upon.

But you can’t have it both ways: if you want to plead that your group is underrepresented because of unfair social policies or racism, you must be willing to show that your group will perform on par if given equal opportunity. To date that has not been the case, particularly along black-white lines, either in the United States or any other country.

There was another (by another poster) I cannot find at the moment that speculated that the relatively recent influx of Dominicans (and other Hispanics) in professional baseball and boxing was not due to culture or economics, but rather their innate superior hand speed. :dubious:

When their racial witnessing is interrupted by contradictory facts and logic, they double down on stupidity. When you have educated people who believe such things today, it is any surprise that people years past would think that such conclusions justified de jure segregation (or even slavery)? In fact, I’d go one step further in saying that if you honestly believe Blacks and others are inherently inferior, why would you want to have desegregated schools, et. al.? Maybe, we should acknowledge the fact that many people are no “less racist” than people were in the past, they just lack to courage and conviction to publicly advocate that the government or powers that be actualize and enforce their positions on race.