| HN Mirror

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.

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> 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.