[danShumway]

I'm not going to get into a policy debate about what HN will and won't moderate, but this is so completely obviously a pro-segregationist dog-whistle just masked behind immigration instead of race.

"The cultures are just too different to mix, that's the root of all of the trouble" should sound instantly familiar to anyone who's ever read a history book. At the end of the day, if this is the debate we all want to have, fine, we can repeat that entire historical debate for the Nth time. But we should be clear what is being debated.

[rayiner]

I’m fascinated by how Americans are completely unable to distinguish between race and culture. It must be the poor American education system everyone talks about.

There’s obviously more to “history” than America’s experience with black people. My home country of Bangladesh exists because two different cultural groups didn’t want to share a country, and the separation worked out great. And of course even in the context of black people in America, lots of people are sour on integration. Listen to the podcast “Nice White Parents.” A consistent theme is how white parents want integrated schools, while what black parents want is for their mostly-black neighborhood school to be as good as the white kids’ school. Or read this article by a black New York Times columnist about the joy of leaving New York for Atlanta: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-pol....

As an immigrant myself, it sucks to raise your kids in somebody else’s culture. At least in America we have pluralism, where the cultural groups mostly agree to leave each other alone. I’d never want to live in France if it meant raising my kid to be French.

[onetimeusename]

> I’m fascinated by how Americans are completely unable to distinguish between race and culture.

Culture has a historical basis. The NYT funded the 1619 Project which asserts that all white American history can be attributed to enslavement of Black people. Also, since the people who run the NYT likely promote the idea that we should reject the influence of Old Dead White Men because they do not appeal to non-white audiences, don't be surprised if anyone assumes that race and culture are closely related. I certainly do because they may well have a point. I don't see any reason to believe people with no ties to this country will care about its history or culture or future except for their own ends.

A number of people have vocalized the viewpoint that culture is incomplete without race essentialism such as Indian Hindu Nationalists who are erasing Mughal empire history from their curriculum or ethnic groups in California who passed a bill to require ethnic studies that focuses on Black, Latino, and Asian studies. In the former case it would be difficult to argue that Hindutva was merely just cultural. So race and culture being closely related seems like a commonly held belief globally.

[onetimeusename]

What makes you think the NYT speaks on behalf of white people?

https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/

[selimthegrim]

Did the separation work out great for the Biharis? Should the Bengalis in Orangi, Karachi be given one way tickets to the Indian border?

[danShumway]

It's not that Americans are unable to distinguish between race and culture, it's that we recognize a long history of culture being used as an argument for segregation.

The race/culture distinction between modern nationalism and racism is just a historically-revisionist excuse. In actuality segregation was heavily reliant on cultural arguments, and the arguments you're raising here now are almost verbatim the arguments raised by segregationists (literally down to "only white people want this"[0]). You might not like to hear that, but it's simply true. Here's George Wallace on the subject[1]:

> White and colored have lived together in the South for generations in peace and equanimity. They each prefer their own pattern of society, their own churches and their own schools – which history and experience have proven are best for both races. (As stated before, outside agitators have created any major friction occurring between the races.) This is true and applies to other areas as well. People who move to the south from sections where there is not a large negro population soon realize and are most outspoken in favor of our customs once they learn for themselves that our design for living is best for all concerned.

Pro-segregation arguments were heavily reliant on culture as a justification for separation. Segregationists argued that separating White and Black culture threatened the "peace" between these supposedly incompatible societies, and they were quick to argue that segregation actually benefited Black citizens and that many of them preferred "separate but equal" access to resources. Black communities had their own churches and schools, they argued, and it was unjust to both White and Black culture to force those rich but very separate traditions to intermingle.

If Wallace was alive today and gave this same speech about immigration, I think you'd be defending it.

[0]: That you link to Charles M. Blow is particularly funny here given that in that very article he argues against strict separation based on culture or race -- effectively arguing not for isolationism for Black communities but for deliberate self-motivated integration back into the communities that they originally fled from in order to recapture political power within a white-dominated culture. Charles Blow is also, incidentally, a strong critic of nationalism/anti-immigration (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/opinion/charles-blow-bigg...), so I strongly doubt he'd agree with your supposed distinction between cultural and racial segregation.

[1]: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf...

[rayiner]

> It's not that Americans are unable to distinguish between race and culture, it's that we recognize a long history of culture being used as an argument for segregation.

You’re invoking a logical fallacy. Just because a rationale is invoked pretextually in one context, doesn’t mean it’s not valid in a different context. And the difference in context is critical. “Segregation” was about keeping people apart (and disadvantaged) in their own country. That concept has no bearing on voluntary immigration between countries.

You’re missing the critical part of Blow’s article. He proposes: “That [black people] return to the states where they had been at or near the majority after the Civil War, and to the states where Black people currently constitute large percentages of the population. In effect, Black people could colonize the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them.”

Blow is proposing that black people leave the northern states where they constitute a minority and return to southern states where they constitute a majority or near majority. There’s nothing integrationist about that proposal—the central premise is that being a minority in someone else’s community sucks and it’s better to live in a community where the majority is people like yourself.

[danShumway]

If something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck and has historically been used in its verbatim form to justify racism and the people who historically used it to justify racism themselves made the argument "you are conflating racism and culture, we're not racist stop conflating these two concepts" -- I think in that scenario it's very much worth looking at whether they might not actually be literally the same argument.

> “Segregation” was about keeping people apart (and disadvantaged) in their own country. That concept has no bearing on voluntary immigration between countries.

The distinction you raise here is arbitrary and mischaracterizes the historical debate. Segregationists argued that segregation was not about disadvantaging the Black community. Wallace argued that he had done more for the Black community than anyone else in the South and was directly investing resources into building up the Black community. Wallace very vocally objected to people conflating "segregationism" and "racism." He argued that he was not racist, and that his policies were intended to benefit the Black community. After all, he argued, why would non-white people even want to go to schools and churches where they would be a minority?

In addition, the argument for separation of culture based on the lines between countries almost directly mirrors the arguments made by Southerners about the distinction between culture based on the lines between States. The only difference is scale, evidenced by the fact that many of those same people so quickly and easily made the same arguments about countries. The South argued that segregation was a way to preserve the autonomy and community of a State. Their argument was always centered around political/government/geographic separation.

This is a perspective that is largely lost today because we are more connected in the modern US than we used to be and state divisions feel more arbitrary. But a segregationist would have instantly recognized your argument about the culture of a country and would have instantly said, "yes, that's what I'm talking about. The South and the North are united, but we're still basically different governments, we have nothing to do with each other. We just happen to be under the same federal umbrella, that doesn't mean we're a shared culture."

So I don't think I'm making a logical fallacy at all. This is not me saying "oh, Hitler liked dogs too." This is me pointing out that your argument is a copy-paste of segregationist speakers with "race" swapped out for "immigrants", and that every single defense you have raised of your position looks like it came out of a segregationist pamphlet.

----

> the central premise is that being a minority in someone else’s community sucks and it’s better to live in a community where the majority is people like yourself.

This is an inaccurate characterization of Blow's central premise, evidenced by the fact that Blow is pro-immigration. Obviously he doesn't agree with you, or he would agree with you. :)

Blow is making an argument about political power, yes. He is not making an argument about the intrinsic benefits of cultural divisions and he is certainly not making an argument about the benefits of homogeneity; he is making an argument about the use of political power to combat systemic oppression. Blow specifically calls out in his article that he is not arguing against mixed society, he is purely interested in getting population numbers to the point where Black communities can enact legislation to combat structural racism. It's also worth noting that Blow's argument is not "live and let live", it's specifically to overwhelm white power structures and enact state-wide legislative policies that would affect majority-white communities as well.

Blow is not trying to form a separate Black society. He is trying to enact structural changes across the entire United States.

It's honestly pretty gross to put his arguments in the same camp as an ideology that skirts uncomfortably close to great replacement theory on the regular. And I can't stress this enough, it's objectively wrong to equate them, given that Blow himself does not agree with you on immigration policy.

[selimthegrim]

He is conflating this with 1971 - there isn’t an army with a religious assimilationist ideology that looks down on you for your script, your language and your skin color here.

[danShumway]

I'll be honest, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here or what argument you're trying to make. I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me.

But in the interest of being very up-front and clear about my position, I also think it's pretty obvious that France has an Islamophobia problem. I don't think it changes anything about my argument, and I don't think someone advocating for segregation based on religious differences is any better than someone advocating for segregation based on race.

A description of French Muslims as if they're some kind of invading religious force who's going to forcibly convert France is divorced from reality, and it's basically just great replacement theory reapplied to a religion.

So whether rayiner wants to separate everyone based on race, class, religion, ethnicity, whatever -- blaming all of a country's problems on immigrants is still a segregationist dog-whistle. I'm kind of tired of everybody playing coy games about this. The anti-immigration anti-mixing-of-the-cultures arguments that show up under these articles are transparently parroting people like George Wallace, and then their authors try to put on a surprised pikachu face when the comparison is drawn. But the comparison is appropriate and relevant -- modern anti-immigration panics have extremely strong parallels to anti-integration movements of the past.