Posted on 05/04/2008 1:30:25 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
I disagree. A multi-racial society doesn't necessarily lead to a multi-cultural one as long as it occurs over a long period of time and there is assimilation.
What do you mean by assimilation? If you mean people inter-marry until the racial differences are eradicated, then you've eliminated the multi-racialism. If you mean that people of two distinct races can live without conflict in the same society as long as they adopt the same culture, you might be correct in theory but that can't happen if both races have large population numbers. It can happen if one race is 97% of the population and the other is 3%, but it can't happen if they are 68% and 32% respectively. A minority as large as 32% would have many enclaves where they are the majority, thus they would preserve their culture there and defend it at the ballot box. Imagine if America's large black and Native American populations had been allowed to vote at our nation's founding and had had proportional representation at the Constitutional Convention.
Our current problems are associated with an unprecedent influx of immigrants, legal and illegal.
No disagreement there.
You can't maintain a national identity and shared sense of endeavor with such a rapidly changing demographic.
Exactly, but suppose the demographic changes occurred more slowly. Suppose a nation that was 100% of one race (we'll call it race X) admitted a handful of people every year from another race (race Y). You would say that would be okay as long as they assimilated. But if by assimilation you mean inter-marrying and being absorbed into the majority population, you would be eliminating the racial differences from day one so you would never really end up with a multi-racial society. If they didn't inter-marry, you'd still end up with a large racial minority in your country, though more slowly than if you admitted them in mass numbers. Once there were enough of them, they would flex their political muscles and begin making racial demands, which would also be cultural demands, and the majority would have to either defer to them or vote as a racial pack themselves to thwart them.
The mistake the Canadians did was to allow Quebec to maintain a separate language and culture and to give it a degree of autonomy. They are now stuck with a problem that may only be solved through Quebec becoming a separate nation, in much the same way that we have seem many more countries emerge around the globe. It has more to do with culture than race.
Well, in my original post, I asked what it would be like if Canada had a Muslim majority or a black majority province. Let's take the black majority province as an example because you might argue that Islam is a religion, not a race. So let's suppose Quebec has a black majority, and let's further say that they speak English and are Protestant and have been versed in Anglo-Canadian culture. Do you really think it wouldn't make any difference in how Quebec was governed? That other than the skin color of the majority, it would be just like every other province? There would be no difference in the educational standards, crime rates, and so forth? That if a war broke out against a foreign land, Quebec wouldn't have to be dealt with in some special manner because the black majority there might not want to fight a "white man's war", for example?
Aside from slavery, America was able to assimilate these many immigrants because they shared essentially the same culture and values. And we had a government that imposed those values on our institutions. The immigrant had to adjust to the country and not the other way around. For example, there were no ESL courses in schools. And we didn't have social welfare systems to take care of the immigrants. As a result, many went back home.
But suppose the immigrants flooding into Ellis Island had been Africans or Chinese or Arabs. Would we have been able to absorb them the way we absorbed Italians and Poles? What human experience of the past would make you believe that would be possible?
Demography is destiny.
Which is another way of saying that race matters and that a multi-racial society will inevitably be a multi-cultural one. Either you maintain a homogeneous society, admit a few racial minorities and then inter-marry with them and genetically absorb them, admit a few racial minorities and operate as a racial pack, outvote them, and force them to concede to the majority, or admit racial minorities (in whatever numbers) and defer to them. All of those alternatives involve either eliminating racial differences or operating according to them. What is your recipe for a multi-racial society that is not multi-cultural? It seems to be demanding that racial minorities adopt our culture, but how do you do that if the minority is large and can vote?
You can't compare the black experience with the current hispanic invasion. Segregation and discrimination helped form a separate black culture.
No, it did not. Slavery and Jim Crow forced blacks to conform to our culture. When there is a large racial minority in a nation they will form a separate culture unless they are forced not to. Blacks were not openly anti-American back in the days of Jim Crow. Today we have a black candidate running for president whose only experience with discrimination was when his grandmother was frightened by an aggressive black panhandler. He's married to a black woman who got into Princeton via affirmative action and got a six-figure cushy job the same way. Yet she stays in a constant state of rage and was only truly proud of America when her husband began winning presidential primaries. And the wealthy pastor at his church screams hatred for America and for whites from the pulpit weekly, even as he moves into an expensive home in a white neighborhood.
Therein lies the problem. Race doesn't matter if you share the same culture. The reality is that we have celebrated multiculturalism, which will lead to the downfall of this country. It will be taken down using our own democratic process and institutions.
True, but what would lead you to believe multiple races will voluntarily share the same culture? Suppose you're the king of a racially homogeneous nation of 10 million people. You have a lot of unpopulated territory, and would like to boost your population to 15 million because it would increase your industrial output. So you agree to admit 5 million people of another race. But you do so slowly, a few at a time over many, many years. By the time the project is finished, your grandson is the king. What will have happened? Well, if the people inter-married, then you'd still be a homogeneous society. If they didn't, you'd have a problem. Because even if you admitted them in a trickle, they'd now be a third of the population. Even if you taught them your culture from day one, they'd feel themselves different and would bond with their own kind against the majority. Where on earth has it ever been otherwise? And what if your nation went to war against the nation of this minority's origin? Remember, they're a third of the population. What if your grandson decided that 15 million people is enough and decided to shut off the immigrant trickle? He's a king, so maybe he could pull it off, but what if your nation was a democracy where everyone votes? Wouldn't that minority object to the immigration being stopped? Wouldn't they form a racial voting block and wouldn't politicians start pandering to them? What if a modern strain of liberalism arose and decided to declare war on traditional culture? Even if this minority group wasn't particularly liberal, the liberals would court them for no other reason than that they are a threat to the dominant traditions of the nation. Look how the socialists have courted Muslims in Europe, despite Islam being anti-homosexual and anti-feminist.
How would it be possible to maintain a mono-cultural society with a racial minority that is one-third of the population?
The aboriginals could have said the same thing of the Europeans I reckon, so how far do you want to go with it?
Lets talk about the American Indians. Either they resisted European settlement and lost. Or they welcomed Euros and lost their “country”. Either way, why should we repeat their mistakes?
We shouldn't. So we need to control immigration (especially the rate of it) to preserve our more or less established common language, culture, and especially values. These things will continue to evolve, no doubt, and what is happening now is plenty of evidence that the immigration system, or lack thereof, needs to change. But to total separatism, no way.
Assimilation doesn't necessarily mean intermarriage. That could be the result of assimilation. By assimilation, I mean adopting the culture, language, and mores of the country. In a few generations, the people who haves assimilated are indistinguishable from others who have been there for many generations, i.e., the "native" population. And racial differences are no more significant than the color of one's eyes or hair.
If you mean that people of two distinct races can live without conflict in the same society as long as they adopt the same culture, you might be correct in theory but that can't happen if both races have large population numbers. It can happen if one race is 97% of the population and the other is 3%, but it can't happen if they are 68% and 32% respectively.
Where did you come up with those figures? And what constititutes race? The legacy of slavery and segregation has been to accept the "one drop" rule in terms of who is "black" in this country. The problem isn't racial percentages but whether race marks any cultural differences. If you look around the world at the causes of internal discord, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences are more of a problem than racial divisions.
A minority as large as 32% would have many enclaves where they are the majority, thus they would preserve their culture there and defend it at the ballot box. Imagine if America's large black and Native American populations had been allowed to vote at our nation's founding and had had proportional representation at the Constitutional Convention.
If pigs had wings, they could fly. As Huntington states,
"America was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant. Their values, institutions, and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries. They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. Then, in the 18th century, they also had to define America ideologically to justify independence from their home country, which was also white, British, and Protestant. Thomas Jefferson set forth this “creed,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called it, in the Declaration of Independence, and ever since, its principles have been reiterated by statesmen and espoused by the public as an essential component of U.S. identity.
By the latter years of the 19th century, however, the ethnic component had been broadened to include Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, and the United States' religious identity was being redefined more broadly from Protestant to Christian. With World War II and the assimilation of large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants and their offspring into U.S. society, ethnicity virtually disappeared as a defining component of national identity. So did race, following the achievements of the civil rights movement and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Americans now see and endorse their country as multiethnic and multiracial. As a result, American identity is now defined in terms of culture and creed.
Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a “city on a hill.” Historically, millions of immigrants were attracted to the United States because of this culture and the economic opportunities and political liberties it made possible.
Contributions from immigrant cultures modified and enriched the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. The essentials of that founding culture remained the bedrock of U.S. identity, however, at least until the last decades of the 20th century. Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil."
Exactly, but suppose the demographic changes occurred more slowly. Suppose a nation that was 100% of one race (we'll call it race X) admitted a handful of people every year from another race (race Y). You would say that would be okay as long as they assimilated. But if by assimilation you mean inter-marrying and being absorbed into the majority population, you would be eliminating the racial differences from day one so you would never really end up with a multi-racial society.
Again, assimilation is not synonomous with intermarriage. As long as one's race does not imply any significant difference aside from physical appearance, it is meaningless. I consider asians to have done a far better job of assimilating into our cultural than blacks or hispanics. There are a number of reasons why that has happened. Despite being a minority, they are usually not the beneficiary of USG supported racial preferences. In fact, they are treated like whites in many ways because they have successfully assimilated into our society. This is not to say that they have not been the victims of racism or that they still live in groups.
Do you really think it wouldn't make any difference in how Quebec was governed? That other than the skin color of the majority, it would be just like every other province? There would be no difference in the educational standards, crime rates, and so forth? That if a war broke out against a foreign land, Quebec wouldn't have to be dealt with in some special manner because the black majority there might not want to fight a "white man's war", for example?
As long as the only difference was the melanin content of their skin, I don't see the conflict or cultural identification that you suggest. Mississippi is about 50% black. The vast majority of blacks still entered the draft during WWII. I just don't buy the premise that most people see things thru a racial prism.
But suppose the immigrants flooding into Ellis Island had been Africans or Chinese or Arabs. Would we have been able to absorb them the way we absorbed Italians and Poles? What human experience of the past would make you believe that would be possible?
At the time no. Immigrants coming to America were predominantly European and shared much of the same history and values of Western Civilization as our founders did. They were English Protestants. It is more about culture than race.
Demography is destiny. Which is another way of saying that race matters and that a multi-racial society will inevitably be a multi-cultural one.
No that is not what demography is destiny means. Race only matters if it marks a difference in culture and shared values. Multiracial and multicultural are two different things. They are not synonomous.
Either you maintain a homogeneous society, admit a few racial minorities and then inter-marry with them and genetically absorb them, admit a few racial minorities and operate as a racial pack, outvote them, and force them to concede to the majority, or admit racial minorities (in whatever numbers) and defer to them.
Your world view is much different than mine. I don't see race the same way you do.
What is your recipe for a multi-racial society that is not multi-cultural? It seems to be demanding that racial minorities adopt our culture, but how do you do that if the minority is large and can vote?
We are already a multiracial society. The problem is for the last 45 years we are trying to be a multicultural one, which undermines the basic values and ideals that this country was founded on. Our laws, politicians, media, etc. have emphasized the differences between us and equated inferior cultures and values to be on the same plane as those that were the foundation of this country and Western Civilization.
We need to reduce the current level of legal immigration to about 300,000 a year down from the current 1.2 million. We need to go to a merit based immigration system [as opposed to the current kinship system.] Birthright citizenship should be eliminated. English should be the OFFICIAL language and no ESL courses in public schools and no ballots in languages other than English. And we need to secure our borders, fully implement the US VISIT program, and penalize employers to cut down the numbers of illegals.
Slavery and Jim Crow forced blacks to conform to our culture. When there is a large racial minority in a nation they will form a separate culture unless they are forced not to. Blacks were not openly anti-American back in the days of Jim Crow.
We will agree to disagree. Whatever outward appearance was seen during the days of Jim Crow just masked the seething rage most felt towards their oppressors. When you segregate and discriminate, you create a separate culture, I don't care what race you are. The Catholics in Nothern Ireland and the Irish in Ireland itself had a separate culture from their English masters.
How would it be possible to maintain a mono-cultural society with a racial minority that is one-third of the population?
Again, it is culture not race that makes the difference. Most Hispanics are white, the same race as the majority of this country. They are a diverse population that includes Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc. They share a similar language and culture, which is why they present a unique challenge to this country. I suggest you read the Huntington article from Foreign Affairs that I linked to you.
Suit yourself. You wouldn’t happen to be one of the millions of Californian refugees would you? Mexifornia will be coming to your neighborhood soon too.
” And racial differences are no more significant than the color of one’s eyes or hair.”
I stopped reading as soon as I saw this. Racial differences are not “no more significant than the color of one’s eyes or hair”. There are huge racial differences between the average white and black person in America whether they share the same “culture” or not.
Lips get tired? This is what I said in context. It is about the definition of assimilation.
"Assimilation doesn't necessarily mean intermarriage. That could be the result of assimilation. By assimilation, I mean adopting the culture, language, and mores of the country. In a few generations, the people who have assimilated are indistinguishable from others who have been there for many generations, i.e., the "native" population. And racial differences are no more significant than the color of one's eyes or hair."
There are huge racial differences between the average white and black person in America whether they share the same “culture” or not.
What are those "huge" racial differences?
I stopped reading because when I see something so blatantly untrue I respond. There are huge differences in intelligence and personality (the MMPI) personality test was phased out because it produced politically incorrect results such as that blacks were much more likely to be psychopaths than whites.
I honestly can't think of a single place on earth where people literally of another race have assimilated in the manner you describe. People of different ethnicities, perhaps, but of a totally different race, no.
Where did you come up with those figures? And what constititutes race?
The figures were a "guesstimate". My point was that a small number of people from other races can assimilate into a society. They have no choice because they're outnumbered and outvoted by a wide margin. But once a minority becomes large enough it begins to make racial demands and the majority will either begin to concede to them to keep the peace, or go the opposite extreme and subjugate them. It's impossible to imagine, for example, Japan being 32% black, and those blacks regarding themselves as Japanese, throwing aside their heritage and ancestry and saying "We're Japanese now". It's impossible to imagine a scenario in which blacks become a majority in Japan and it has no impact on Japan. That is, Japan continues onward as if nothing had happened, exactly as it would have if racially Japanese people had remained 98% of the population.
A race is a group that through genetic isolation has developed observable traits. No one is demanding racial purity, BTW.
The legacy of slavery and segregation has been to accept the "one drop" rule in terms of who is "black" in this country. The problem isn't racial percentages but whether race marks any cultural differences. If you look around the world at the causes of internal discord, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences are more of a problem than racial divisions.
So the French and English might not always get along, but the English and Somali Bantu would get along just fine? Ethnic conflicts are racial conflicts on a minor scale. Cultural differences are racial and ethnic in origin. Religion can cut across racial lines, but even it has some racial attributes. Check out the Jewish vs. Muslim conflicts in the Middle East.
"America was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant. Their values, institutions, and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries. They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. Then, in the 18th century, they also had to define America ideologically to justify independence from their home country, which was also white, British, and Protestant. Thomas Jefferson set forth this “creed,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called it, in the Declaration of Independence, and ever since, its principles have been reiterated by statesmen and espoused by the public as an essential component of U.S. identity.
It may be an essential component of U.S. identity but it's also a racial one because only people of European ancestry would ever have created the type of nation we have. If our Founding Fathers had decided to be generous and invited African slaves and Native Americans for their input, and our Constitution had been a compromise between these three racial groups, it wouldn't have even remotely resembled what we got.
By the latter years of the 19th century, however, the ethnic component had been broadened to include Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, and the United States' religious identity was being redefined more broadly from Protestant to Christian. With World War II and the assimilation of large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants and their offspring into U.S. society, ethnicity virtually disappeared as a defining component of national identity. So did race, following the achievements of the civil rights movement and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.Americans now see and endorse their country as multiethnic and multiracial. As a result, American identity is now defined in terms of culture and creed.
Then why is the political landscape dotted by groups such as La Raza, the NAACP, and CAIR? Why does Obama get 90% of the black vote and why does he have a pastor who hates America? For that matter, why isn't there universal agreement that we need to stop the flow of illegal aliens into the country? The reason isn't just the desire for cheap labor. The Congressional Black & Hispanic Caucuses are full of socialists. They should be against cheap labor. But they're for flooding the country with illegals because it's changing the racial demographics of the country. Quite simply they're trying to drive down the white population. If they were as American as apple pie they wouldn't side with illegal border crossers against their fellow Americans, but they do because they want to seize racial spoils from the white population. You can argue till you're blue in the face that it wouldn't make any difference if the white majority in America is lost as long as the new majority adopts American values and culture, but they don't have to adopt those values if they're the majority. Who's going to make them? We don't even the political will to force a minority to adopt our culture when they're barely above 10% of the population.
Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a “city on a hill.” Historically, millions of immigrants were attracted to the United States because of this culture and the economic opportunities and political liberties it made possible.
I'm not sure about the heaven on earth part, but no problem otherwise.
Contributions from immigrant cultures modified and enriched the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. The essentials of that founding culture remained the bedrock of U.S. identity, however, at least until the last decades of the 20th century. Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil."
Exactly.
Again, assimilation is not synonymous with intermarriage. As long as one's race does not imply any significant difference aside from physical appearance, it is meaningless.
Well, there are average IQ and temperament differences between races which determine the type of culture they create. It's not PC to say that, but it's true.
I consider asians to have done a far better job of assimilating into our cultural than blacks or hispanics. There are a number of reasons why that has happened. Despite being a minority, they are usually not the beneficiary of USG supported racial preferences. In fact, they are treated like whites in many ways because they have successfully assimilated into our society. This is not to say that they have not been the victims of racism or that they still live in groups.
You can pretty well determine how a racial group will behave in your own nation by how they behave back in their homeland. Asians created great civilizations with strong work ethics long ago. They developed technology and writing systems. They created cultures different from ours in outward appearance and interpersonal relationships, but not totally antithetical to ours. Even so, if the Japanese were to become a majority in America, there would be some notable changes, among them less concern with individual rights and more with conformity, for example.
As long as the only difference was the melanin content of their skin, I don't see the conflict or cultural identification that you suggest. Mississippi is about 50% black. The vast majority of blacks still entered the draft during WWII. I just don't buy the premise that most people see things thru a racial prism.
Last time I checked, every precinct in the U.S. with a black majority is run by leftist Democrats and sends an anti-Iraq War member to Congress. They also elect only blacks to office, unless there's a fluke election such as in Tennessee's 9th district, in which case the winning white immediately comes under racial attack and an organized effort is begun to oust him in the next election. If Quebec had a black majority, it would elect only the hardest of hardcore socialists. It would elect only blacks except in local precincts where whites are the majority. Its representatives in parliament would constantly be blaming the poor conditions in Quebec (and they would be a poor province, by the way) on the white majority elsewhere in Canada.
No that is not what demography is destiny means. Race only matters if it marks a difference in culture and shared values. Multiracial and multicultural are two different things. They are not synonomous.
Gender and upper body strength aren't synonymous either, but we know men on average have more upper body strength than women. There are exceptions, of course, but if the NFL was half female, it would change things. If America was half black, it would change things. Yes, we all honor Walter Williams and Clarence Thomas. But we also know that every single jurisdiction in our nation with a black majority elects leftist Democrats and has a culture that is obviously different than the European culture that was the foundation of our country.
Your world view is much different than mine. I don't see race the same way you do.
Agreed! :-)
We are already a multiracial society. The problem is for the last 45 years we are trying to be a multicultural one, which undermines the basic values and ideals that this country was founded on.
This would have happened a long, long time ago if blacks and Native Americans had been able to vote and if the Mexican population had been large and politically empowered. We would have become a multi-cultural society in 1789, if not before.
Our laws, politicians, media, etc. have emphasized the differences between us and equated inferior cultures and values to be on the same plane as those that were the foundation of this country and Western Civilization.
I don't necessarily view other cultures as inferior. What works for us might not work for someone else. I don't have the Wilsonian zeal to expect every nation on earth to be a pure democracy with pluralism and "tolerance" and that it implies. It's the height of arrogance for us to presume that everyone on earth will view our Founders as having created such a great system that everyone should be willing to conform to it. They won't. And that includes people who have lived here their entire lives and who have ancestries here that go back generations.
We need to reduce the current level of legal immigration to about 300,000 a year down from the current 1.2 million. We need to go to a merit based immigration system [as opposed to the current kinship system.] Birthright citizenship should be eliminated. English should be the OFFICIAL language and no ESL courses in public schools and no ballots in languages other than English. And we need to secure our borders, fully implement the US VISIT program, and penalize employers to cut down the numbers of illegals.
Fully agree.
We will agree to disagree. Whatever outward appearance was seen during the days of Jim Crow just masked the seething rage most felt towards their oppressors. When you segregate and discriminate, you create a separate culture, I don't care what race you are. The Catholics in Nothern Ireland and the Irish in Ireland itself had a separate culture from their English masters.
Is there anyplace on earth where different races don't maintain different cultures, unless forced to do otherwise? Sweden never oppressed blacks or Middle Easterners, but they showed up in Sweden, formed separate communities, declared Swedish girls to be whores for wearing short skirts, and began making racial demands on the majority Swedish population.
Again, it is culture not race that makes the difference. Most Hispanics are white, the same race as the majority of this country. They are a diverse population that includes Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc. They share a similar language and culture, which is why they present a unique challenge to this country. I suggest you read the Huntington article from Foreign Affairs that I linked to you.
I've read it, and there's a lot that's worthy in it. But as long as we maintain that it doesn't make any difference what the racial make-up of the country is, because every race is equally desirous of "American values", we're doomed. I love Japanese culture and the Japanese people. I could live there and probably adapt pretty well. But if millions and millions of whites moved to Japan, it's inevitable that most would be there for some reason other than love of the country. Whether they came there for job opportunities or for the generous welfare programs, they wouldn't particularly have any kind of emotional attachment to Japanese culture and traditions. Over time, they'd start "Westernizing" the country. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but the fact that they'd do it is a certainty. That many non-Japanese people could never become Japanese in the traditional sense of the word. Japan would have to change to accommodate them, and if whites became the outright majority things would certainly change. The idea that America is somehow unique, a so-called proposition nation rather than one based on common blood ties, is fashionable but not workable.
Good discussion, BTW!
Accepted and agreed to.
I want to commend and thank you both for an excellent discussion that, among other matters, bears directly on the greatest issue of our time, the relentless and effective degradation of American culture resulting both from neglect, as well as assault, with the latter prosecuted both from within and without.
And this is not simply a matter for passing intellectual curiosity, but rather one of such import that it will determine not just the direction in which our nation will travel, but whether we will continue to exist as a nation at all. In the realm of earthly pursuits, the stakes could not be higher; and the time is late.
And yet, almost no one is discussing this and related issues.
For various reasons, I can’t engage the debate in an extended way at this time other than to say that the differences between you may well be due to a difference in your understandings of precisely what culture is. Beyond that and in principle, I tend to agree with kabar’s point of view. However, to the extent that the world of the dialectic is forced to deal with the real world, I think that puroresu’s points may have to be given serious consideration. Much more needs to be considered here.
I’ll save this link and hope to revive the debate sometime in the future.
By assimilation, I mean adopting the culture, language, and mores of the country. Brazil. Cuba. Japan [Ainu]. US in most cases.
My point was that a small number of people from other races can assimilate into a society. They have no choice because they're outnumbered and outvoted by a wide margin. But once a minority becomes large enough it begins to make racial demands and the majority will either begin to concede to them to keep the peace, or go the opposite extreme and subjugate them.
Again, you continue to equate race with culture. If people are assimilated per the definition I provided, then race is irrelevant. You seem to believe that the descendents of someone who came to the US from China to build the railroads has some inherently different views about America than a white Italian whose family immigrated in the early 20th century. Race is not a predictor of how one views the world or how "American" they are. A racial minority will not make demands if race is neutral in terms of how citizens are treated by the majority.
It's impossible to imagine, for example, Japan being 32% black, and those blacks regarding themselves as Japanese, throwing aside their heritage and ancestry and saying "We're Japanese now". It's impossible to imagine a scenario in which blacks become a majority in Japan and it has no impact on Japan. That is, Japan continues onward as if nothing had happened, exactly as it would have if racially Japanese people had remained 98% of the population.
Assuming that the blacks were admitted into Japan legally over a long period of time with the approval of the Japanese people, they will be assimilated and become Japanese by adapting to and participating in the culture. If you substitute ethnicity for race, you can come up with similar scenarios, e.g., Koreans or Chinese becoming a large minority within the country.
Historically, the US has done an excellent job of assimilating people of different ethnic origins. Racial divisions are more the result of historical events than racial origins. Hispanics come in all colors. It is their numbers and cultural and linguistic differences that threaten to tear the fabric of this country and sense of national indentity. Most Hispanics are white.
A race is a group that through genetic isolation has developed observable traits. No one is demanding racial purity, BTW.
I have problem with the word "traits." You are beginning to sound like Pastor Wright and his Left/Right brain views about learning. Whatever the small genetic differences exist between races or ethnic groups, they have very little to do with how people can be assimilated into a culture. My niece adopted a two year old baby girl from China. She is being raised as an American. She is not prewired to be Chinese in her behavior or world view.
So the French and English might not always get along, but the English and Somali Bantu would get along just fine?
I don't know what you mean by get along, but there are significant cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences in addtion to race that would make assimilation difficult initially for Somali Bantus into the UK or vice-versa. My point is that race is just one factor among many in terms of assimilation and possible conflict.
Ethnic conflicts are racial conflicts on a minor scale.
Now you are changing the meaning of words. Was the Irish-English or English-Scottish conflicts a matter of race? Your logic is flawed.
Cultural differences are racial and ethnic in origin.
No, cultural differences can be strictly related to ethnicity and history and geography. For example, the differences between the Basques and the rest of Spain, the Czechs and Slovaks, the Poles and Russians, the Tutsi and Hutu, etc.
Check out the Jewish vs. Muslim conflicts in the Middle East.
Jews and Arabs are semitic people. They share the same race for the most part aside from some racial minorities that have settled in the region. The conflict is about religion, not race.
It may be an essential component of U.S. identity but it's also a racial one because only people of European ancestry would ever have created the type of nation we have.
They were by and large Protestant Englishmen. If the French or Spanish had settled this country, we would have a far different form of government. So it has more to do with being English than European. There is a cultural difference.
If our Founding Fathers had decided to be generous and invited African slaves and Native Americans for their input, and our Constitution had been a compromise between these three racial groups, it wouldn't have even remotely resembled what we got.
Without getting into tautology, why would they include slaves and native Americans into the discussions about our Constitution? If you read the Federalist Papers, you will see that slavery and indians did play a role in the discussions about the formation of this country and the Constitution, i.e., the three-fifths compromise [Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3.]
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Then why is the political landscape dotted by groups such as La Raza, the NAACP, and CAIR?
Historically, there have always been such groups based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Hibernians, AIPAC, YMCA, Knights of Columbus, JDL, etc. I could go on and on about such groups.
Why does Obama get 90% of the black vote and why does he have a pastor who hates America?
History and culture. Segregation and discrimination. Living patterns and education. Political polarization. Kerry got 90% of the black vote and 76% of the Jewish vote. Johnson got 90% of the Jewish vote in 1964.
For that matter, why isn't there universal agreement that we need to stop the flow of illegal aliens into the country? The reason isn't just the desire for cheap labor. The Congressional Black & Hispanic Caucuses are full of socialists. They should be against cheap labor. But they're for flooding the country with illegals because it's changing the racial demographics of the country. Quite simply they're trying to drive down the white population. If they were as American as apple pie they wouldn't side with illegal border crossers against their fellow Americans, but they do because they want to seize racial spoils from the white population.
You left out the US Chamber of Commerce, the WH, the Catholic Church, the Dem Party, labor unions, La Raza, the ACLU, etc., who have all combined to keep our borders open and to encourage as much immigration as possible. They all have their reasons. I would not describe it as racial. In fact, blacks have the most to lose if this invasion of low skilled, uneducated labor continues. The current black unemployment rate is 8.6% in April down from 9% in March. There is what is called "ethnic cleansing" going on in LA as Meixcan and black gangs clash over turf.
We don't even the political will to force a minority to adopt our culture when they're barely above 10% of the population.
What group are you referring to?
Well, there are average IQ and temperament differences between races which determine the type of culture they create. It's not PC to say that, but it's true.
The differences in IQ are really not that significant. If there is a pecking order, I guess Asians come out on top in that arena. And even if you accept the Bell curve, about 20% of blacks have a higher IQ than the average white. There is plenty of controversy on the subject incuding how much is genetic versus environmental, but we are headed down the wrong path if we start using it as factor in our immigration and educational policies. It is a divisive issue. It is worth noting that immigrant blacks are more successful than native born blacks, which seems to indicate that there are cultural factors at work.
Even so, if the Japanese were to become a majority in America, there would be some notable changes, among them less concern with individual rights and more with conformity, for example.
Such examples have no basis in fact. You continue to link race with behavior. You seem to believe that someone whose family has been in this country for more than 100 years will inherit social characteristics based on their ethnic origins. The success of asians in this country is based on education and a strong, supportive family. In contrast, blacks have a 68% out of wedlock birth rate and Hispanics 45%. This is the social pathology for failure no matter what race you are.
I do find your assertion that Japanese-Americans are less concerned about individual rights to be racist and repugnant.
Last time I checked, every precinct in the U.S. with a black majority is run by leftist Democrats and sends an anti-Iraq War member to Congress. They also elect only blacks to office, unless there's a fluke election such as in Tennessee's 9th district, in which case the winning white immediately comes under racial attack and an organized effort is begun to oust him in the next election.
I don't find that to be unusual. First, the gerrymandering of districts has created many of these "safe" black districts. Second, given the history of black participation in the political system, I think it is understandable that blacks want to be represented by blacks because they believe their interests are best served that way. I am sure that if you looked at districts with large Jewish populations, you will find that it is represented by a Jewish congressman. It is interesting to note that despite the huge population difference, the black caucus has 44 members in Congress and there are 43 members of Congress who are Jewish. The same holds true for the growing number of members of the Hispanic Caucus
But we also know that every single jurisdiction in our nation with a black majority elects leftist Democrats and has a culture that is obviously different than the European culture that was the foundation of our country.
Leftist democrats come in all colors, religions, and ethnicities. What do Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, Howard Waxman, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Russ Feingold, Joe Baca, etc. have in common? It certainly isn't race.
This would have happened a long, long time ago if blacks and Native Americans had been able to vote and if the Mexican population had been large and politically empowered. We would have become a multi-cultural society in 1789, if not before.
If pigs have wings, they could fly. Youy are creating a phony strawman. Our current problem is an unprecedented influx of mostly Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, who cannot be assimilated given the huge numbers that threaten to Balkanize this country along cultural and linguistic lines. Race isn't the issue.
I don't necessarily view other cultures as inferior.
As someone who has lived 25 years of my adult life abroad in 9 different countries and traveled to 60 more, I do view some othe cultures as inferior. I am not someone who sees all cultures as equals.
What works for us might not work for someone else. I don't have the Wilsonian zeal to expect every nation on earth to be a pure democracy with pluralism and "tolerance" and that it implies. It's the height of arrogance for us to presume that everyone on earth will view our Founders as having created such a great system that everyone should be willing to conform to it. They won't. And that includes people who have lived here their entire lives and who have ancestries here that go back generations.
I am not in favor of imposing our version of democracy on the world, but I do want democracy to be the dominant political system on the globe. Western Europe, Japan, Korea, some countries in Latin America, all have their own forms of democracy. It is a superior system to every other form of government.
Is there anyplace on earth where different races don't maintain different cultures, unless forced to do otherwise? Sweden never oppressed blacks or Middle Easterners, but they showed up in Sweden, formed separate communities, declared Swedish girls to be whores for wearing short skirts, and began making racial demands on the majority Swedish population.
Initially, this is true of all immigrant populations. It was true in our own country where living patterns were based on culture and ethnicity. Entire communities were formed by immigrant groups. Lety's see what Sweden looks like 100 years from now in terms of assimilation and integration. What is going of today is a recent phenomenon. FYI: The "Middle Easterners" are predominantly white.
I've read it, and there's a lot that's worthy in it. But as long as we maintain that it doesn't make any difference what the racial make-up of the country is, because every race is equally desirous of "American values", we're doomed.
If you read it, that is not what Professor Huntington is saying. In fact, he is saying just the opposite. I suggest you reread it.
The idea that America is somehow unique, a so-called proposition nation rather than one based on common blood ties, is fashionable but not workable.
You appear to view things thru a racial prism. From its very founding, America has never been based on "common blood ties."
"In the final decades of the 20th century, however, the United States' Anglo-Protestant culture and the creed that it produced came under assault by the popularity in intellectual and political circles of the doctrines of multiculturalism and diversity; the rise of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender over national identity; the impact of transnational cultural diasporas; the expanding number of immigrants with dual nationalities and dual loyalties; and the growing salience for U.S. intellectual, business, and political elites of cosmopolitan and transnational identities. The United States' national identity, like that of other nation-states, is challenged by the forces of globalization as well as the needs that globalization produces among people for smaller and more meaningful “blood and belief” identities.
In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives. Americans like to boast of their past success in assimilating millions of immigrants into their society, culture, and politics. But Americans have tended to generalize about immigrants without distinguishing among them and have focused on the economic costs and benefits of immigration, ignoring its social and cultural consequences.
As a result, they have overlooked the unique characteristics and problems posed by contemporary Hispanic immigration. The extent and nature of this immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).
The impact of Mexican immigration on the United States becomes evident when one imagines what would happen if Mexican immigration abruptly stopped. The annual flow of legal immigrants would drop by about 175,000, closer to the level recommended by the 1990s Commission on Immigration Reform chaired by former U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Illegal entries would diminish dramatically. The wages of low-income U.S. citizens would improve. Debates over the use of Spanish and whether English should be made the official language of state and national governments would subside. Bilingual education and the controversies it spawns would virtually disappear, as would controversies over welfare and other benefits for immigrants. The debate over whether immigrants pose an economic burden on state and federal governments would be decisively resolved in the negative. The average education and skills of the immigrants continuing to arrive would reach their highest levels in U.S. history. The inflow of immigrants would again become highly diverse, creating increased incentives for all immigrants to learn English and absorb U.S. culture. And most important of all, the possibility of a de facto split between a predominantly Spanish-speaking United States and an English-speaking United States would disappear, and with it, a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity."
BTT!
I just got a GOP fundraiser and survey. Not much about immigration. I sent them a McCain GOP Peso.
Ole-——LOL.
I been writing them little “love notes to Juan” in the space where you’re supposed to ink in your donation.
By assimilation, I mean adopting the culture, language, and mores of the country. Brazil. Cuba. Japan [Ainu]. US in most cases.
You might want to do a little research on this. The Ainu are a tiny minority who have no choice but to assimilate. In fact, there is a fear among some Ainu that they'll eventually be lost as an identifiable group. As for Brazil, do a google search for "Brazil, affirmative action". The country is in racial turmoil because of rigid new race quotas demanded because (surprise!) the whites in Brazil earn more money, pass the entrance exams to get into college, commit less crime, etc. than the blacks and browns. Some rich whites in Sao Paulo even travel to work by helicopter because of the danger they're in when they go out on the streets in their car. As for Cuba, it's a dictatorship so everyone has to behave and conform. The reason the Cuban community in Florida is largely white and is probably the only Latino community that votes mostly Republican is because it was the educated, successful Cubans who fled when Castro took power. The black & brown Cubans supported Castro, as their counterparts support Chavez in Venezuela. Just watch the news next time there's video of an anti-Chavez protest and see how white the participants are.
Again, you continue to equate race with culture. If people are assimilated per the definition I provided, then race is irrelevant.
For someone who likes to use the term "when pigs fly" that's a bold statement to make.
You seem to believe that the descendents of someone who came to the US from China to build the railroads has some inherently different views about America than a white Italian whose family immigrated in the early 20th century.
It depends on how big a minority group is and how at odds they are with the general population. The Chinese have always been a small minority here. They do fine academically and economically because they come from a successful culture in the first place. Any city that has a Chinatown bills it as a tourist attraction. In other words, it's a safe and fun place to go to see a bit of another culture. Name a city where the black neighborhood or the barrio is a tourist attraction. In most places they're a no-go zone for people of other races.
Having said that, if the Chinese were a very large minority here, or the majority, they would force changes on our nation and our culture. Just as white Anglos would force changes on Taiwan if we were a large part of the population there. A large white presence would have the same effect on mainland China if it wasn't a dictatorship. BTW, some of the changes the Chinese would make here might be good. If they were in charge, I don't think they'd stand for a minute for Mexicans sneaking across the border. Unlike whites, they haven't been racially "whipped" and would start deportations immediately. On the other hand, they'd likely throw the borders wide open for their fellow Chinese.
Race is not a predictor of how one views the world or how "American" they are.
It's not a predictor for any individual but for a group it certainly can be. I can't tell you how any individual black or Jew or whatever will behave, but I don't walk through black neighborhoods in big cities. I don't fear walking through Jewish neighborhoods at all. That's a reasonable judgment I make based on the likelihood of getting mugged or killed. Can you honestly tell me that you don't make group judgments such as that?
A racial minority will not make demands if race is neutral in terms of how citizens are treated by the majority.
You must be living in a parallel universe on this one because minority racial demands have increased exponentially since the Civil Rights era. I can give you plenty of examples, but here's just one: Martin Luther King is often cited around here as being a conservative (which he wasn't) because compared to the demands of the black community today, his demands seem downright modest.
Assuming that the blacks were admitted into Japan legally over a long period of time with the approval of the Japanese people, they will be assimilated and become Japanese by adapting to and participating in the culture. If you substitute ethnicity for race, you can come up with similar scenarios, e.g., Koreans or Chinese becoming a large minority within the country.
Absolutely ridiculous. If blacks were the majority population of Japan it would not even remotely resemble Japan if it had remained overwhelmingly Japanese. How could it? Do you really think that anything other than Mt. Fuji would remain unchanged under such an eventuality? Would Japan remain a leader in high tech, robotics, engineering, and computer science? Would the educational system remain top flight? Would Japan's low crime rate remain? Would a black majority Japan continue to celebrate annual Shintoist or Buddhist festivals? Would they give a damn about Japanese holidays or the status of the Emperor? Blacks are only abut 13% of our population and we've had to downgrade Washington's & Lincoln's birthday to make way for MLK day, and we can hardly mention Christmas without including Kwanzaa. Can you imagine what would happen if Japan was 53% black and 47% native Japanese and they gave a tough entrance exam to determine admission to the universities? What would happen when (not if, when) about 94% of the people passing turn out to be Native Japanese?
Historically, the US has done an excellent job of assimilating people of different ethnic origins.
Generally true, but only because most of the groups most difficult to assimilate have been marginalized politically. Now that they aren't marginalized, they're flexing their political muscles and creating a multi-cultural society and demanding open borders so that more of their racial brethren can enter the country and outvote and outbreed us.
Racial divisions are more the result of historical events than racial origins. Hispanics come in all colors. It is their numbers and cultural and linguistic differences that threaten to tear the fabric of this country and sense of national indentity. Most Hispanics are white.
We don't have very many white Hispanics entering the country right now. If the illegals sneaking across our border were white, La Raza wouldn't care all that much about them.
I have problem with the word "traits." You are beginning to sound like Pastor Wright and his Left/Right brain views about learning.
So saying that different races possess different traits (demonstrably true) is comparable in your mind to Wright's left/right brain views (demonstrably untrue)? BTW, the presence of Pastor Wright is all the proof you need that your pie-in-the-sky vision of a kum-ba-ya rainbow coalition America is absurd. And if Japan had a black majority, millions of them wouldn't be attending Shinto festivals in Kobe, they'd be attending churches where guys like Wright would be accusing the "Japs" of inventing AIDS.
Whatever the small genetic differences exist between races or ethnic groups, they have very little to do with how people can be assimilated into a culture.
Then there should be no great distinction between any two cultures on earth.
My niece adopted a two year old baby girl from China. She is being raised as an American. She is not prewired to be Chinese in her behavior or world view.
Individually, you are correct. An individual of any race can assimilate and become an American, a Frenchman, etc. But large numbers change things, don't they? Obama was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. If America had no significant black population, he likely wouldn't have gravitated to his "black roots", wouldn't have worried about obtaining "cred" with his fellow blacks, wouldn't have sought out someone like Wright. But since blacks are a significant minority, he did all those things. If we had a large Chinese population that was at odds with our traditional culture, little Chinese kids in America would be under a lot of pressure.
God bless your neice, BTW, for her kindness. So many baby girls in particular are in need of homes in China.
I don't know what you mean by get along, but there are significant cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences in addtion to race that would make assimilation difficult initially for Somali Bantus into the UK or vice-versa. My point is that race is just one factor among many in terms of assimilation and possible conflict.
Well, we're making progress! You know that race is a factor in assimilation or the lack of it.
Now you are changing the meaning of words. Was the Irish-English or English-Scottish conflicts a matter of race? Your logic is flawed.
Not at all. Differences between ethnic groups within racial groups do exist, but they are not as great as the differences between racial groups.
No, cultural differences can be strictly related to ethnicity and history and geography. For example, the differences between the Basques and the rest of Spain, the Czechs and Slovaks, the Poles and Russians, the Tutsi and Hutu, etc.
Those are ethnic divisions. When people repeat the cliche that "diversity is our strength", I always ask them to name a place where there's conflict because of a lack of diversity.
Jews and Arabs are semitic people. They share the same race for the most part aside from some racial minorities that have settled in the region. The conflict is about religion, not race.
You might wish to check with the Wiesenthal Center on that one. Hitler didn't just wish to exterminate the Jews because of their faith. He didn't just try to force them to convert, as the Spanish Inquisition did. He sought to racially exterminate them. He didn't care if a Jew was religious or not. Likewise, I don't think Hamas would spare secular Jews (and there are a lot of them in Israel). They want to exterminate the Jews as a people.
They were by and large Protestant Englishmen. If the French or Spanish had settled this country, we would have a far different form of government. So it has more to do with being English than European. There is a cultural difference.
Granted, which shows that ethnic divisions exist as well as broader racial divisions. BTW, where do you think culture comes from? Do "good cultures" just happen to drop from the sky on some fortunate lands while "bad cultures" drop on others? Aren't cultures the products of the people who live in a particular area?
Without getting into tautology, why would they include slaves and native Americans into the discussions about our Constitution?
I stated that **IF** the Founding Fathers had invited them to the Constitutional Convention our Bill of Rights would be very different. Do you disagree?
If you read the Federalist Papers, you will see that slavery and indians did play a role in the discussions about the formation of this country and the Constitution, i.e., the three-fifths compromise [Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3.]
I really don't see what your point is. I think we're all aware that such issues were discussed by the Founders, but that isn't disputed by anyone, is it?
Historically, there have always been such groups based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Hibernians, AIPAC, YMCA, Knights of Columbus, JDL, etc. I could go on and on about such groups.
Well, AIPAC has some clout, I suppose, but politicians don't tremble in fear of a negative rating from the Hibernians or go out of their way to pander to the Knights of Columbus (half the "Catholics" in Congress thumb their noses at them). The NAACP & La Raza have a lot more clout, though, don't they? And it's because of the racial block vote they represent.
History and culture. Segregation and discrimination. Living patterns and education. Political polarization. Kerry got 90% of the black vote and 76% of the Jewish vote. Johnson got 90% of the Jewish vote in 1964.
Hillary and her husband have pandered to blacks their entire lives. Bill was even called the "first black president". But an inexperienced black guy runs against Hillary and he gets almost all the black vote. And you probably still think it won't matter what the racial make-up of the country is because we'll all have the same "culture".
You left out the US Chamber of Commerce, the WH, the Catholic Church, the Dem Party, labor unions, La Raza, the ACLU, etc., who have all combined to keep our borders open and to encourage as much immigration as possible. They all have their reasons. I would not describe it as racial.
You have to be kidding. The Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal perhaps don't care about race (just cheap labor), but the Democrats, the ACLU, La Raza and others are pushing for open borders precisely to change the racial make-up of the country.
In fact, blacks have the most to lose if this invasion of low skilled, uneducated labor continues. The current black unemployment rate is 8.6% in April down from 9% in March. There is what is called "ethnic cleansing" going on in LA as Meixcan and black gangs clash over turf.
That's exactly right, and yet the entire black leadership in America, from the NAACP to the Congressional Black Caucus to Obama to Sharpton & Jackson are all for open borders. Why? Because open borders reduces the percentage of the U.S. population that is white. Even if blacks suffer, the primary goal is to eliminate the white majority in America by any means necessary. Why else would these black groups and leaders support open borders?
What group are you referring to?
Mexicans are one obvious minority that we don't have the will to force to assimilate. Do you disagree?
The differences in IQ are really not that significant. If there is a pecking order, I guess Asians come out on top in that arena. And even if you accept the Bell curve, about 20% of blacks have a higher IQ than the average white. There is plenty of controversy on the subject incuding how much is genetic versus environmental, but we are headed down the wrong path if we start using it as factor in our immigration and educational policies. It is a divisive issue. It is worth noting that immigrant blacks are more successful than native born blacks, which seems to indicate that there are cultural factors at work.
Suffice it to say I don't agree. If you look around the world, the racial make-up of a nation or region is a pretty good indicator of how it will perform. Again, that's not PC but it is true. It's not the only factor. Communism will ruin any country, for example.
Such examples have no basis in fact. You continue to link race with behavior. You seem to believe that someone whose family has been in this country for more than 100 years will inherit social characteristics based on their ethnic origins. The success of asians in this country is based on education and a strong, supportive family. In contrast, blacks have a 68% out of wedlock birth rate and Hispanics 45%. This is the social pathology for failure no matter what race you are.
We're going around and around again. Cultures don't just drop out of the sky.
I do find your assertion that Japanese-Americans are less concerned about individual rights to be racist and repugnant.
Then you'd better take your repulsion and your PC racism charge up with my Japanese friends, because they're the ones who have assured me that any country run by them would place less emphasis on individual rights and more on social conformity. As they tell me, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.
I don't find that to be unusual.
You said that in response to my assertion that black majority precincts only elect blacks. I don't find it unusual, either. But then, I don't think "race doesn't matter".
First, the gerrymandering of districts has created many of these "safe" black districts. Second, given the history of black participation in the political system, I think it is understandable that blacks want to be represented by blacks because they believe their interests are best served that way. I am sure that if you looked at districts with large Jewish populations, you will find that it is represented by a Jewish congressman. It is interesting to note that despite the huge population difference, the black caucus has 44 members in Congress and there are 43 members of Congress who are Jewish. The same holds true for the growing number of members of the Hispanic Caucus
All of that is indeed to be expected. Which is why I know that a black majority in Japan would change Japan into something other than what it is now, just as a Japanese majority would change Nigeria into something else. This is one of the most baffling and frustrating things to deal with when confronting Political Correctness. We're told that race doesn't matter by the same people who throw a tantrum if the percent of Latinos elected is three-tenths of a percent less then their overall population numbers. We're then told that we need more racial gerrymandering so that people can vote for their own kind, because their own kind will represent their racial interests. These people then assure us that it won't make any difference if whites lose their majority in America because, hey, race doesn't matter.
Leftist democrats come in all colors, religions, and ethnicities. What do Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, Howard Waxman, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Russ Feingold, Joe Baca, etc. have in common? It certainly isn't race.
Well, race is part of it, because they probably all got 90% of the black vote.
If pigs have wings, they could fly. Youy are creating a phony strawman. Our current problem is an unprecedented influx of mostly Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, who cannot be assimilated given the huge numbers that threaten to Balkanize this country along cultural and linguistic lines. Race isn't the issue.
You keep repeating that mantra as if the history of the world somehow confirms your assertion. You act as if the norm throughout history has been for different races to get along just wonderfully when living in the same territory. They think of each other as brothers and their loyalty is to a common creed, not race. If someone suggests that race is an issue they've erected a strawman and deserve an "if pigs had wings they could fly" retort. Yet the failure of races to live peacefully together is one of the most prominent factors in human history. It's virtually universal that races don't live together in harmony. Do you think it's just a coincidence that multiculturalism is on the rise as the minority population increases and as previously disenfranchised groups gain electoral clout?
As someone who has lived 25 years of my adult life abroad in 9 different countries and traveled to 60 more, I do view some othe cultures as inferior. I am not someone who sees all cultures as equals.
Well, I could feign horror at your "bigotry" here if I wanted to be PC, but I won't. I understand your view. I try to keep an open mind about other cultures and to accept that they won't all be like ours. Some are quite unsavory, obviously.
I am not in favor of imposing our version of democracy on the world, but I do want democracy to be the dominant political system on the globe. Western Europe, Japan, Korea, some countries in Latin America, all have their own forms of democracy. It is a superior system to every other form of government.
Well, I won't argue with you on this. No need to invoke the Greeks in an already diverse discussion!
Initially, this is true of all immigrant populations. It was true in our own country where living patterns were based on culture and ethnicity. Entire communities were formed by immigrant groups. Lety's see what Sweden looks like 100 years from now in terms of assimilation and integration. What is going of today is a recent phenomenon. FYI: The "Middle Easterners" are predominantly white.
You seem to be pretty nonchalant about the Islamization of Europe. You might want to reconsider that position. Or at the very least, if you visit Stockholm or Malmo, avoid the sections of town that are no-go zones for whites. As someone who's had discussions with you here before, I'm astonished that you shrug off the events taking place in Europe as no different than, say, our experience here in America with Norwegian immigrants settling in Minnesota.
If you read it, that is not what Professor Huntington is saying. In fact, he is saying just the opposite. I suggest you reread it.
If he's saying the opposite, then he's saying race does indeed matter, so why are you endorsing him?
You appear to view things thru a racial prism. From its very founding, America has never been based on "common blood ties."
I'm gonna provide you with a link in another post coming up.
"In the final decades of the 20th century, however, the United States' Anglo-Protestant culture and the creed that it produced came under assault by the popularity in intellectual and political circles of the doctrines of multiculturalism and diversity; the rise of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender over national identity; the impact of transnational cultural diasporas; the expanding number of immigrants with dual nationalities and dual loyalties; and the growing salience for U.S. intellectual, business, and political elites of cosmopolitan and transnational identities. The United States' national identity, like that of other nation-states, is challenged by the forces of globalization as well as the needs that globalization produces among people for smaller and more meaningful “blood and belief” identities.
This is a circular argument. The nations of Europe and their progeny were historically either virtually all white or, if they had signficant minorities, those minorities were disenfranchised. The Dutch didn't have to worry about accommodating people of different races from distant lands because there essentially weren't any there (oh, maybe a few, but you know what I mean). This sounds like Bill Moyers arguing that America has moved radically to the right because back in the fifties you didn't see people trying to ban condoms in school or ban same-sex marriage. But you didn't see that because those things were banned already back then. You didn't have racial identity politics very much in Australia back in 1955 because the only significant minority was the Aborigines, who were basically isolated on reservations. Now, the Aborigines are full citizens with affirmative action benefits, plus there have been a bunch of immigrants from Asia and the Islamic world, so the country is now seething with racial identity politics.
Again, I repeat, one of the most frustrating things in dealing with PC is that people have to pretend not to see the obvious, even conservatives such as yourself and Huntington. You act as if racial identity issues are some new phenomenon. They don't conform to your worldview that "race doesn't matter", so you have to blame them on some outside force such as globalization or liberalism. But what globalization has done is move more people of other races into lands that were previously nearly all white, and liberalism then took advantage of the natural desire of racial groups to operate as a single unit to force changes on our societies.
Forty years ago, Enoch Powell gave his famous "rivers of blood" speech in which he predicted that widespread immigration of people from other races into England would lead to bloodshed and loss of the traditional British culture. He was shouted down and his political career destroyed by people who called him a racist. As long as they come in legally, and agree to become "Englishmen", what difference should their race make? Or so everyone said. Of course, after a couple of decades of legal immigration by people who pledged to become Englishmen, there were enough of them to form racial voting blocks. That meant they could scream racism whenever anyone suggested they give up some of their less enamoring old world customs. It meant they could scream racism when anyone tried to crack down on illegal immigration. It meant no-go zones for whites. It meant history texts rewritten to include more discussions of African warlords and Muslim khans and less discussion of the Magna Carta. It meant churches stopped putting up Christmas displays so as not to offend Muslims, and it meant Muslim prayer calls in Oxford. It meant terrorists blowing up subway cars and buses.
A few weeks ago, on the 40th anniversary of Powell's speech, a candidate in England suggested that old Enoch had been right. He was shouted down, forced to apologize, and forced to withdraw his candidacy by the conservative party (!). If that doesn't tell you that maybe you're on the wrong track here, nothing will.
Here’s a good essay by Lawrence Auster, followed by a free-wheeling discussion:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001631.html
BTW, do you like Asian cinema? If so, we might at least come out of this agreeing on something! :-)
I have visited Hokkaidō and am familiar with the Ainu. The point is that they are a separate race but they have been assimilated. They are not caucasian as has been previously believed.
As for Brazil, do a google search for "Brazil, affirmative action". The country is in racial turmoil because of rigid new race quotas demanded because (surprise!) the whites in Brazil earn more money, pass the entrance exams to get into college, commit less crime, etc. than the blacks and browns. Some rich whites in Sao Paulo even travel to work by helicopter because of the danger they're in when they go out on the streets in their car.
Racial turmoil? "Brazil is divided over new government policies to begin closing the yawning gap between rich and poor by establishing rigid quotas for college admissions, contracts and jobs. But in this blended population of 180 million, where virtually everyone claims an ancestor who is either much lighter or much darker, Brazilians are struggling to answer a question that is central to affirmative action: Who, and what, is black?"
As this article indicates, it is much more complex situation than the US. "The result is a country in which census forms contain more than 100 classifications focused on skin color; one category is "coffee with cream." Only 6 percent of the population chooses the darkest classification, "black," but nearly half of all Brazilians identify themselves as either black or pardo, the term used here for mixed race."
Name a city where the black neighborhood or the barrio is a tourist attraction. In most places they're a no-go zone for people of other races.
I live in the DC area. There are plenty of neighborhoods, black and Hispanic [Adams Morgan area}, Ballston, etc. where there are ethnic concentrations of all kinds. 25% of Fairfax County is foreign born. You continue to equate Hispanics as a race. They are not.
Having said that, if the Chinese were a very large minority here, or the majority, they would force changes on our nation and our culture.
This is the crux of our disagreement. If the Chinese have been in America for generations and have been assimilated, they are no longer Chinese. You seem to believe that people are hard wired based on race.
Can you honestly tell me that you don't make group judgments such as that?
Those group judgments are based on neighborhoods, not the race of the group. Even Jesse Jackson expressed fear about being in certain black areas. Black on black crime is a reality. There are poor white neighborhoods I wouldn't want to go through. I grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Jersey City.
You must be living in a parallel universe on this one because minority racial demands have increased exponentially since the Civil Rights era.
In terms of time, it has been a blink of an eyelash. As someone is 65 years old, I have witnessed remarkable progress and change in race relations in this country. I see these "demands" reflecting progress.
Absolutely ridiculous. If blacks were the majority population of Japan it would not even remotely resemble Japan if it had remained overwhelmingly Japanese. How could it?
There you go again. You create these phony strawmen based on race. If you read what I wrote, namely that the Japanese approved the legal entry of blacks on a long term basis and they were assimilated, then race is not an issue.
Would Japan remain a leader in high tech, robotics, engineering, and computer science? Would the educational system remain top flight? Would Japan's low crime rate remain? Would a black majority Japan continue to celebrate annual Shintoist or Buddhist festivals? Would they give a damn about Japanese holidays or the status of the Emperor?
If blacks were fully assimilated, yes they would observe their national holidays. Regardless of race, they would be Japanese. If you are suggesting that blacks are intellectually inferior, then you are headed down the wrong path.
We don't have very many white Hispanics entering the country right now. If the illegals sneaking across our border were white, La Raza wouldn't care all that much about them.
What race are they if not white or black? Most of the Hispanics entering this country are from Mexico. They are officially classified as white. I realize that many have some Indian ancestors, but that is not the way they are categorized. La Raza makes no distinction on the basis of what color they are.
So saying that different races possess different traits (demonstrably true) is comparable in your mind to Wright's left/right brain views (demonstrably untrue)?
It depends on what "traits" you are referring to. You are beginning to sound like a racist. How do you classify those who are of mixed race, like about 80% of all blacks in the US?
BTW, the presence of Pastor Wright is all the proof you need that your pie-in-the-sky vision of a kum-ba-ya rainbow coalition America is absurd
Although he admits to being one-third Welsh, Wright is a black racist. We have white racists. They come in all colors. I am not providing any pie-in the sky vision of this country. As I have stated a number of times, the black experience in this country has been shaped by slavery, segregation, and discrimination for more than three hundred years in this country. The result has been for many the formation and adoption of a different culture. Integrating races is far easier than trying to integrate cultures.
And if Japan had a black majority, millions of them wouldn't be attending Shinto festivals in Kobe, they'd be attending churches where guys like Wright would be accusing the "Japs" of inventing AIDS.
That is just plain silly. If Japan had a black AMERICAN majority, you would have a different dynamic like you are trying ineptly to make. If they were black JAPANESE, they would be integrated culturally. Again, you are trying to ascribe behavior and political views to a race no matter how much they have been integrated and assimilated into a culture.
But large numbers change things, don't they? Obama was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. If America had no significant black population, he likely wouldn't have gravitated to his "black roots", wouldn't have worried about obtaining "cred" with his fellow blacks, wouldn't have sought out someone like Wright. But since blacks are a significant minority, he did all those things. If we had a large Chinese population that was at odds with our traditional culture, little Chinese kids in America would be under a lot of pressure.
There you go again. The black experience in the US is not the foundation to base your hypothesis on. Blacks have developed a separate culture for the reasons I indicated. That is the reason there has been friction and difficulties in fully assimilating. That said, Wright is not representative of the 35 million "black" people in this country.
Not at all. Differences between ethnic groups within racial groups do exist, but they are not as great as the differences between racial groups.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "not as great." Tell that to the millions who lost their lives in WWI and the many millions more who lost their lives in WWII. These "differences" resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million.
You might wish to check with the Wiesenthal Center on that one. Hitler didn't just wish to exterminate the Jews because of their faith. He didn't just try to force them to convert, as the Spanish Inquisition did. He sought to racially exterminate them. He didn't care if a Jew was religious or not. Likewise, I don't think Hamas would spare secular Jews (and there are a lot of them in Israel). They want to exterminate the Jews as a people.
If you subscribe to Hitler's definition of race, then Jews are a separate race. I don't. The current Arab-Israeli differences are based on religion and Zionism. It is not about race.
Granted, which shows that ethnic divisions exist as well as broader racial divisions. BTW, where do you think culture comes from? Do "good cultures" just happen to drop from the sky on some fortunate lands while "bad cultures" drop on others? Aren't cultures the products of the people who live in a particular area?
We are discussing the impact of culture versus race. You view race to be THE factor in terms of how people behave and view the world. I see culture as being the bigger factor, especially as it affects assimilation into a country.
I stated that **IF** the Founding Fathers had invited them to the Constitutional Convention our Bill of Rights would be very different. Do you disagree?
Disagree about what? You make up a ridiculous example and ask for my opinion.
Well, AIPAC has some clout, I suppose, ...
LOL.
but politicians don't tremble in fear of a negative rating from the Hibernians or go out of their way to pander to the Knights of Columbus (half the "Catholics" in Congress thumb their noses at them). The NAACP & La Raza have a lot more clout, though, don't they? And it's because of the racial block vote they represent.
Various groups and lobbies have power. If I were to rank them AARP and AIPAC would probably be at the top of the list. La Raza doesn't represent a racial block. It is more cultural and linguistic.
Hillary and her husband have pandered to blacks their entire lives. Bill was even called the "first black president". But an inexperienced black guy runs against Hillary and he gets almost all the black vote. And you probably still think it won't matter what the racial make-up of the country is because we'll all have the same "culture".
In the primaries, Dems will vote along racial lines, but in the general election they vote according to party, i.e., Dem. For example, when Ben Cardin [a white Jew] challenged Mfume [black NAACP head and former congressman] to replace Sarbanes, the voting was along racial lines. In the general election against Michael Steele, a black Rep, the black vote went overwhelmingly for Cardin. Similar voting patterns were found in the Swann and Blackwell races.
but the Democrats, the ACLU, La Raza and others are pushing for open borders precisely to change the racial make-up of the country.
The Dems want votes and permanent power even if it changes the racial/ethnic make-up of the country. It is about power not race. Hispanics come in all colors.
That's exactly right, and yet the entire black leadership in America, from the NAACP to the Congressional Black Caucus to Obama to Sharpton & Jackson are all for open borders. Why? Because open borders reduces the percentage of the U.S. population that is white. Even if blacks suffer, the primary goal is to eliminate the white majority in America by any means necessary. Why else would these black groups and leaders support open borders?
Simple, it is about personal political power. Why do you think black leaders oppose school vouchers? They will sell their own people down the river in order to feather their own nests.
Mexicans are one obvious minority that we don't have the will to force to assimilate. Do you disagree?
It depends on what you mean by force. I think we have been too accommodating to all immigrants. It is the result of multi-culturalism, not race.
If you look around the world, the racial make-up of a nation or region is a pretty good indicator of how it will perform.
What racist nonsense.
Then you'd better take your repulsion and your PC racism charge up with my Japanese friends, because they're the ones who have assured me that any country run by them would place less emphasis on individual rights and more on social conformity. As they tell me, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.
Some of your best friends.... Yeah, right. If these are Japanese- Americans, I find this hard to believe. They are certainly not represented of most Japanese-Americans who do believe in individual rights. The legacy of internment camps provides a perspective that many Americans cannot relate to.
All of that is indeed to be expected. Which is why I know that a black majority in Japan would change Japan into something other than what it is now, just as a Japanese majority would change Nigeria into something else.
There you go again. You are confusing race with culture. If you mean by a black majority in Japan, black Americans, or a Japanese [from Japan] majority in Nigeria, you are really talking about different cultures, not race. And the examples are really ludicrous.
Yet the failure of races to live peacefully together is one of the most prominent factors in human history. It's virtually universal that races don't live together in harmony. Do you think it's just a coincidence that multiculturalism is on the rise as the minority population increases and as previously disenfranchised groups gain electoral clout?
Hispanics are not a race. We live generally in harmony in the US in terms of race. The problem is culture, not race. You make my point. Multiculturalism is on the rise as the minority population increases. It is our real problem, not a multiracial society. Lord Multiculturalism by Victor Davis Hanson
You seem to be pretty nonchalant about the Islamization of Europe.
I have lived a total of 13 years in five European countries and have travelled to almost all of them. When it comes to protecting their cultures, I think the Europeans will do a far better job than us. There is a reason why there still so many countries and languages in Europe despite hundreds of years of war and conquest. The Europeans will be ruthless in maintaining their cultures and they won't have groups like the ACLU trying to stop them. There is already been a backlash, which explains why the Right is winning elections again in country after country.
If he's saying the opposite, then he's saying race does indeed matter, so why are you endorsing him?<./p>
LOL. You didn't read it.
You act as if racial identity issues are some new phenomenon. They don't conform to your worldview that "race doesn't matter", so you have to blame them on some outside force such as globalization or liberalism.
I didn't say that race doesn't matter. What you ascribe to race, I ascribe to culture and ethnicity. I don't mind a mutiracial America, I just don't want a multicultural one, which is why the current Hispanic invasion of this country reprsents such a challenge to the survival of this nation and its values and founding principles.
As long as they come in legally, and agree to become "Englishmen", what difference should their race make?
It is about culture, not race.
A few weeks ago, on the 40th anniversary of Powell's speech, a candidate in England suggested that old Enoch had been right. He was shouted down, forced to apologize, and forced to withdraw his candidacy by the conservative party (!). If that doesn't tell you that maybe you're on the wrong track here, nothing will.<
Here is the full text of the speech It is about immigration and culture, not race.
In terms of time, it has been a blink of an eyelash. As someone is 65 years old, I have witnessed remarkable progress and change in race relations in this country. I see these "demands" reflecting progress.
That says it all right there. Fifty years ago black leaders wanted equal opportunity and an end to segregation. Today they want quotas and insist that blacks-only dorms, neighborhoods, etc. are okay but whites-only facilities aren't. Fifty years ago blacks preached about judging others by the content of their character, today many routinely attack "honkies" and accuse us of inventing AIDS. Fifty years ago blacks wanted to move beyond slavery, not dwell on it and get reparations for it. The fact that you see these changes as "progress" shows how totally whipped you are on this issue.
If blacks were fully assimilated, yes they would observe their national holidays. Regardless of race, they would be Japanese. If you are suggesting that blacks are intellectually inferior, then you are headed down the wrong path.
You might want to again heed your "when pigs have wings" slogan.
As I have stated a number of times, the black experience in this country has been shaped by slavery, segregation, and discrimination for more than three hundred years in this country.
The current black experience is shaped by people like you who make that claim. The Obamas never experienced any of that stuff. In fact, both have experienced preference because they are black. They've likely never had any involvement with a white who was anything less than totally deferential to them, who walked on eggshells, and who was willing to accuse anyone who failed to defer to them of "racism". And the result is racism (the real kind, not the artificial kind you're trying to frame on me) and Pastor Wright.
That is just plain silly. If Japan had a black AMERICAN majority, you would have a different dynamic like you are trying ineptly to make. If they were black JAPANESE, they would be integrated culturally. Again, you are trying to ascribe behavior and political views to a race no matter how much they have been integrated and assimilated into a culture.
And if men could have babies they could begin the process of assimilating into the female population. Your argument is just as nonsensical. You suggest a level of assimilation that never is observed to occur anywhere, and assure us that if it did happen we'd have race-blind societies.
Disagree about what? You make up a ridiculous example and ask for my opinion.
You're just playing games here. Anyone reading this thread can follow it back and see what it was that led to this.
What racist nonsense.
Yeah, whatever.
Some of your best friends.... Yeah, right. If these are Japanese- Americans, I find this hard to believe. They are certainly not represented of most Japanese-Americans who do believe in individual rights. The legacy of internment camps provides a perspective that many Americans cannot relate to.
Are you finished playing the race card yet? You've nearly used up the entire deck.
I have lived a total of 13 years in five European countries and have travelled to almost all of them. When it comes to protecting their cultures, I think the Europeans will do a far better job than us. There is a reason why there still so many countries and languages in Europe despite hundreds of years of war and conquest. The Europeans will be ruthless in maintaining their cultures and they won't have groups like the ACLU trying to stop them. There is already been a backlash, which explains why the Right is winning elections again in country after country.
Europe is further down the road to destruction than we are. We still have a degree of free speech here thanks to the First Amendment but in both Europe and Canada it's becoming a thing of the past. I could give you some interesting links, if you wish.
LOL. You didn't read it.
Of course I did. It's just that I understood it. You might also try reading the link I provided to you in the post above.
It is about culture, not race.
Have you repeated that mantra enough now? It's simply a Pavlovian response, a form of imprinting to avoid being falsely accused of racism.
Here is the full text of the speech It is about immigration and culture, not race.
Unbelievable.
Well, you can have the last word if you wish. But you never did answer my inquiry about Asian cinema. Are you a fan? :-)
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