New Mexico and Texas aren’t separate states because of racial issues.
What you’re proposing is nothing less than apartheid. Tell me, how did it work out for black South Africans when they were given their own “black states” where they didn’t have to contend with “white rule”?
That’s not a fair characterization of what the OP is proposing. The Blacks in South Africa were not citizens of South Africa. The Blacks in the OP’s states would be full citizens of the US in every sense of the word. The clarification that we would just be moving boundaries also addressed the issue of forcible removal of people, even if it doesn’t address the issue of people being violently angry about suddenly being part of a new state that they did not voluntarily move to.
I was doing what you claimed to want to do: focus in on the problem OP thinks he has identified. There are already states where blacks, by sheer numbers, should have much political power – why don’t they? Surely it isn’t hard to connect the dots between OP’s concern and my questions.
Yes, I know many Dopers complain when OP doesn’t lay out a complete thesis unassisted. Some of us treat the SDMB as a debating competition; others treat it as a forum for pursuing policy issues.
My “take their ignorant questions to the pit” was addressed specifically (as was clear in the post) to those who would counter any claim that a majority of the blacks of Mississippi “should” vote (D) in their self-interest, with the counterclaim that whites of Mississippi “should” almost all vote (R). Such a counterclaim would hijack this thread, but there are some (not mentioning any names 
) who would pounce on my assumption, whether they agreed with its validity or not, just because they’d think of it as a logic error they could score debating points with.
HTH.
It would be if you’re telling people of some races they can’t move from Texas to New Mexico or vice versa.
That’s the “usual refrain”? From who?
That’s not what I claimed. I said I was trying to get the OP to clarify what specific problem he or she was trying to solve. It’s difficult to focus on something that is unfocused to begin with. So maybe we aren’t quite on the same page there after all.
But yes, I agree that jumping to a solution without focusing on the problem is not a good strategy. I think a lot of people here have a difficult time understanding that there are lots of folks out there who don’t share their world view, and so they think they can just skip that whole part since “we all know what the problem is”. Generally, we don’t all know that.
Uhm… OK.
Well, I subscribe to the quaint idea that people should vote for what they think is best for the country, not for what is best for people who share their skin tone. So, no, it did not appear you were interested in an open discussion with someone like me. Seriously, don’t poison the well if you want to engage in open debate.
But since I like you so much, here’s may take on your analysis: The 2012 election was noted for very low voter turn-out everywhere in the country. Low voter turn-out usually means especially low-voter turn-out for poorer and minority voters. Rather than doing a thought experiment about why one particular election went one particular way, it would be better to offer some actual evidence of why you think “X” is the reason. I’m guessing you want us all to select “b”. Is that right?
Yes, mobility and the constitutional right to travel is likely to mean that any “ethnic homelands” may not remain as such for very long. This happened to some of my ancestors - one Irish branch started out in a heavily Irish area, but then moved out to the Midwest to find cheap land to farm. Another branch was part of the ethnic German population of Pennsylvania (i.e. “Pennsylvania Dutch”) who left the state in the early 20th century looking for better opportunities and ended up in New Jersey, marrying into the aforementioned Irish family, who had gotten tired of farming in the meantime and decided that Newark, NJ was just an awesome place to be (which it was, in the 1940’s when factory work was plentiful).
Yes, there are hundreds of towns around the country that were primarily founded by members of a specific ethnicity. Some of these towns remained predominantly non-English speaking until the 20th century. There are lots of “historically German” communities in Virginia where the German heritage has largely been washed away by the arrival of massive numbers of people from all over the place.
No. In fact I’d guess (a - black voter apathy) is a bigger problem than vote suppression, but my goal was not “for all of us to select anything.” (:eek: :smack: ) It was to find out the answer, or rather distribute the “blame” among the reasons in correct portions. I’d like to Google and learn how black and white turnouts compare, what percent are felons and can’t vote, and how united the “racial blocs” are – but I’m not good at Googling.
It seemed to me that OP is concerned that blacks lack political power commensurate with their numbers. That such a problem exists is very clear – consider the mostly-black town of Ferguson run mostly by whites. His solution seems very extreme and farfetched. I think we should understand the problem better, and then see what solutions, if any, make sense.
It is obviously unworkable but the question is would it have any benefits. The answer to that is “No”
The unspoken assumption is that political power leads to tangible benefits. This is untrue. Detroit, Miami Gardens Florida, and Jackson Mississippi all have over 75% black population and all the political power. Do black people in these cities live better than other cities? No, Detroit is well known as a monument to horrible government and urban decay. Miami Gardens was last in the newsfor its racial profiling accusation. Baltimore is almost two thirds black, they have a black mayor, black police chief, black city council, a mostly black police force, and they just a had a riot that showed how poorly the city is run.
By contrast the minority group that has done the best economically, Indian Americans, has one mayor in the entire country of a city that has less than two thousand people.
Good government helps a population regardless of who makes up the government and who makes up the population. Look at Hong Kong, it had a chinese population and a british government for centuries and it prospered while the chinese in China floundered under horrific governance.
OK, my bad then on that part.
Agreed. I’d also add that OP is completely ignoring any problems his solution would create, and asking whether those problems might be worse than the one he or she is trying to solve.
As another alternative, we could look at the large cities that are majority black and ask ourselves if blacks are more secure and better off in those cities than they are elsewhere. If not, then the OP’s “solution” doesn’t look very promising. From wikipedia:
Places with over 100,000 people
Atlanta (54.0%)
Augusta (54.7%)
Baltimore (64.3%)
Baton Rouge (50.2%)
Birmingham (73.5%)
Cleveland (51.0%)
Detroit (82.70%)
Flint (53.3%)
Jackson, Mississippi (79.40%)
Memphis (61.4%)
Miami Gardens, Florida (76.3%)
Montgomery (56.6%)
New Orleans (60.2%)
Newark (53.5%)
Portsmouth (50.6%)
Richmond (57.2%)
Savannah (55.0%)
Shreveport (50.8%)
St. Louis (51.2%)
Why create new states when you could just utilize different voting systems that would make voting more representative? I assume that’s the problem you are trying to fix (as it’s about the only non-racist one I can think of). You suspect that minority interests are not represented because the people they vote for aren’t in any position to do so.
No, a minority will never have a majority of the power–that’s not how a democracy functions, and is ultimately racist towards the majority (as their votes count less.) But you can try to make an unequal system more equal.
Even that’s a pretty suspect premise. Why assume that people can’t be fairly represented by an elected official who’s a different race than they are? It seems pretty racist to me to suggest that black people should only vote for other black people and white people should only vote for other white people and our political system should be redesigned to encourage this.
In the 1970s, there was a novel titled Siege that involved a black US general seizing Manhattan with the aim of forcing the US to give him New Jersey as a black homeland.
About ten years later, Spider Robinson wrote a novel about a black religious leader who seized Manhattan with the aim of forcing the US to carve out a black homeland. (Besides the plot similarity, there are just enough echoes in the latter of the former to make it clear where the inspiration came from…)
The only really funny thing in the SR novel is that another character says, “We should make the US give us New Jersey!” to which the saintly-but-sensible leader responds, “They can’t. It doesn’t belong to them.”
Useful point here, both books do go into the thinking about separatism at the times they were written.
In the 1970s, there was also a Black Nationalist group that wanted the U.S. to cede some large portion of the Carolinas to the Black Nation as a separate country that would act like an Israeli inspired shelter nation for blacks in North America. I never heard of anyone outside that specific group actually embracing the idea.
Some folks have characterized you as wanting to get rid of your black neighbors. THat’s completely unfair.
So is this.
The objection isn’t that posters want to go to ethnic cleansing. The objection is that your proposal’s terms are so vague that people can’t tell whether you’re calling for ethnic cleansing.
I know you’ve said you want to explore whether it’s a good idea before you go into specifics. That’s precisely the wrong order (and I’m gonna troutslap the first person who references Nancy Pelosi here). We can’t know whether it’s a good idea until we know the specifics.
In general, it’s a terrible idea. As an ends, it’s no good at all. Why would we seek a way of achieving the end of increasing segregation? That’s not gonna make things better.
As a means to an end, it might be worth discussing. But we need to be clear on what the end we’re trying to achieve is. My suggestion: we want to achieve a society in which everyone, regardless of race and ethnicity, is adequately represented by their government and does not live in fear of unjust violence from their government. Sound good?
If that’s the end you’re trying to achieve, you need to offer specifics on how your proposal is the best means to achieve that end. Currently it looks to me as though it would not work and would have lots of awful unintended consequences (e.g., encouraging ethnic cleansing).
I find this to be pretty ridiculous and shit like this is why I barely bother coming here.
Then you should probably refrain from coming here, rather than threadshitting.
If you choose to post, dial back the hostility and make an attempt at a coherent argument.
[ /Moderating ]
John Mace asked for a black poster’s opinion and I offered one ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ahh. I have to admit that when I read your post I assumed you were talking about mine, not about the idea proposed in the OP.
Yeah, I can see that. Your post is fine, but sometimes it’s annoying when, I would guess, mostly white people are discussing this “black issue” and then as an after thought think to ask black folks their opinion. That’s not your fault though.
Anyway, in my official opinion as a black poster of this board, the OP is ridiculous and I find that these topics are what keep me from visiting here. Hmm, now that I think about it, I do prefer to conduct my internetting on a predominately POC board/blog thing. Then again, we just got invaded by racist trolls. So an all black state would be nice in a safety sense, but I doubt white people would ever leave us alone. So, again, the OP is a ridiculous idea.