History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

For reference, members of the American Nazi Party attending a Nation of Islam meeting. Because the NoI and the American Nazi Party both believed in race-separatism.

I think the word is segregation. Which only goes to show that racism is all-round, I guess. As a footnote it should be mentioned that segregation didn't work as a policy - anywhere.
 
I think Lexicus is making a distinction between segregationists - who want/wanted laws to keep other races out of certain places, but otherwise to live more-or-less alongside them - with separatists, who wanted to take their own race somewhere else to carve out a homeland for it. The NoI didn't want to have separate toilets and taxis for whites and blacks: they wanted separate countries.
 
I think the word is segregation. Which only goes to show that racism is all-round, I guess. As a footnote it should be mentioned that segregation didn't work as a policy - anywhere.


How did it not work? The US is still heavily segregated, and blacks are much poorer because of it than they would be otherwise.
 
How did it not work? The US is still heavily segregated, and blacks are much poorer because of it than they would be otherwise.

Not to say you're wrong but in fact black people have become poorer relative to whites since the end of legal segregation in the US.
 
Not to say you're wrong but in fact black people have become poorer relative to whites since the end of legal segregation in the US.


What makes you think segregation has ended? Or even reduced all that much?
 
A pointless modifier. It distracts from reality, rather than describing it.

Tell that to someone who had to go to the colored bathroom, drink at the colored water fountain, and ride in the back of the bus. Residential segregation is bad. Residential segregation plus Jim Crow was worse.
 
Tell that to someone who had to go to the colored bathroom, drink at the colored water fountain, and ride in the back of the bus. Residential segregation is bad. Residential segregation plus Jim Crow was worse.


The fact that that was worse doesn't make this good.
 
The fact that that was worse doesn't make this good.

My original point was that in some ways things have actually gotten worse since the end of legal segregation. On the whole I think they have gotten better, but just as a guess I'd say I am considerably more radical on this question than you. By way of example, do you support reparations for slavery?
 
My original point was that in some ways things have actually gotten worse since the end of legal segregation.


Some things have gotten worse for the working class as a whole since the end of legal segregation. Most Blacks, being at the bottom, or even below, the working class have born the brunt of this trend. But other things like mass incarceration have certainly been targeted more on Blacks then on whites, to offset the gains of desegregation.

Conservative politicians are more than happy to hurt poor whites as collateral damage when working to hurt poor Blacks and other minorities.



On the whole I think they have gotten better, but just as a guess I'd say I am considerably more radical on this question than you. By way of example, do you support reparations for slavery?


That's a difficult question. And the answer, rather than being a moral or ethical answer, came down to being a realpolitik answer. Which is that Blacks did not get any form of reparations because doing so would have precluded there being any peace. And so it has always been politically impossible. What I do support is a series of policies to offset the socioeconomic position of Blacks so that they aren't as a whole left behind any longer, and so we would be on a merit basis afterwards. But that's not easy to do either.
 
Some things have gotten worse for the working class as a whole since the end of legal segregation. Most Blacks, being at the bottom, or even below, the working class have born the brunt of this trend.

I'm not sure the effect can be entirely explained away as an artifact of growing inequality. The figures I remember seeing showed that the average wealth of whites increased consierably while the average wealth of blacks has been more or less flat and actually declined after the financial crisis. Worth bringing up that the Clinton campaign was going to use "Wall St doesn't gun down black males" as a talking point, but Wall St actually robbed black America blind and the only politician I heard talking about it was Bernie Sanders.

But other things like mass incarceration have certainly been targeted more on Blacks then on whites, to offset the gains of desegregation.

That is certainly true, and in fact Van Jones recently pointed out that mass incarceration, as a policy choice, was also effectively a voter-suppression policy. The political effect has likely been to handicap the Democrats even worse than they would have been otherwise, but that's what Bill Clinton-style triangulation'll get ya.

But that's not easy to do either.

I think it's essentially the same problem. Nothing gets white people angrier than the suggestion of redistributing wealth from white people to black people, which is why I never really take white peoples' claims to "color-blindness" seriously.
 
Another factor in play is that the gains to education are far higher now than ever before. The biggest gains may have gone to the 1%, or the 0.1%, but very big gains have gone to the 10%, and even the 20% as well. And those gains are to a very large extent the gains from professional skills. And Blacks to a large extent are excluded from that because they are excluded from decent primary education. And so never gain the skill levels for entry into the 20%.

That skill differential was not nearly as much of an obstacle 50 years ago.
 
It is always weird seeing Great War or WWII pictures in color.
 
To be fair, colour photography and film did already exist in WW II. That's not to say that black and white should be 'retrofitted'. It borders on historical falsification.

How did it not work? The US is still heavily segregated, and blacks are much poorer because of it than they would be otherwise.

Segregation policy (also known as apartheid) has long been abandoned - because it didn't work. The fact that people tend to 'segregate' into separate communities is not the result of a nationwide policy. Rather, it's the result of, being conservative, tending to stick with what they know.

The classic case of segregation policy is, of course, South Africa. It didn't work, simply because you can move people where you please, they still need to go where there is work. In essence, apartheid was a farce. So, you can build billion dollar walls all you want, that doesn't stop economics from working. (Something which you might expect a billionaire businessman to understand.)
 
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Why did rationing in the United Kingdom last so long after the end of World War II?
Short answer is, Britain was still running a wartime economy into the 1950s. Huge areas of Europe had been devastated by the war, so weren't producing agricultural surpluses that could be exported to Britain, and indeed surpluses from relatively unaffected like Australia and South America were diverted to Europe to prevent famine. Britain also maintained a wartime army through this period, and keeping the troops fed remained a priority. This was all exacerbated by very poor farming years in 1946 and 1947, leading to shortages of staples like bread and potatoes, and delaying a return to normal production.

It was also in part because the rationing suited the egalitarian policies of the new Labour government. Although rationing is typically seen in terms of constricting food supplies, it also ensured that almost everyone recieved a baseline of food at a controlled price, and some very poor people ate better during the war years than they had in peacetime. Labour were unwilling to sacrifice this control and risk abandoning the poor to a still-unstable market until they could guarantee genuine plenty. Immediately after the war, the Conservatives were still too anxious about the favourable reputation of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, seeing the rise of Soviet-backed regimes cross Central and Eastern Europe and remembering how close Britain had come to revolution after the previous war, so they quietly accepted the continuation of what you might call "wartime socialism" until they satisfied that the threat of revolution had passed.
 
To be fair, colour photography and film did already exist in WW II. That's not to say that black and white should be 'retrofitted'. It borders on historical falsification.



Segregation policy (also known as apartheid) has long been abandoned - because it didn't work. The fact that people tend to 'segregate' into separate communities is not the result of a nationwide policy. Rather, it's the result of, being conservative, tending to stick with what they know.

The classic case of segregation policy is, of course, South Africa. It didn't work, simply because you can move people where you please, they still need to go where there is work. In essence, apartheid was a farce. So, you can build billion dollar walls all you want, that doesn't stop economics from working. (Something which you might expect a billionaire businessman to understand.)


You should come to the US sometime. Segregation still exists. Not in as formal a way as before, but it remains government policy. It is not voluntary.
 
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