LoD 135: And Together is “Inherently Unequal,” Too.

Copyright (c) 2016, 2025, Thomas Kratman

I note a couple of interesting effects and implications of the election of Donald Trump. Among these is that, probably because Trump took such a large chunk of the white vote, the alt-Nazis (who are not, by the way, nearly the same as the alt-right or alt-west) seem to have come out in full force. I’m not impressed with them in any sense, not least because they’re not bright enough to understand that, absent both minorities and liberalism, whatever limited appeal they have disappears and their philosophy ends up on the garbage pile of history where it belongs. The other effect, historically far more important, is that the decks have been cleared for perhaps the first time since 1945 or so to have an honest conversation about race in America, and to finally admit that most of our efforts to ignore the problem, or to deal with it by putting idiots in charge of fixing it or covering it up, have failed miserably.

The thing that really stands out with the civil rights-anti-discrimination-desegregation and integration regimes we’ve been trying to make work since the forties is how nearly completely they have failed. Yes, we could, for example, eliminate red-lining, and did. Yes, we could arrange for favorable loans to facilitate integration in housing, and have. Yes, we could tell people – truthfully, so far as I know – that the first black families to move into a white neighborhood are generally of higher or even much higher quality than the whites they replaced. Yes, we could overturn the doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, which is to say overturn “separate but equal,” and did.

And none of it, not a bit, seems to have done any of the good hoped for. True, black students are not segregated into wretched and underfunded, albeit well-disciplined and effective, schools. Integration, however, didn’t much happen. Whites simply fled, taking their kids with them. Where a tyrannical legal system attempted to force them to integrate via bussing the whites fought and either won or fled further. The still segregated schools are better funded, of course, at least until the tax base collapses, but the actual education on offer seems in every way worse where not worse than useless.

Yes, the full weight of the law could be brought to bear to ensure that black folks could live where they wanted. Unfortunately, all the law could do was to give them the address they wanted; unless they were both lucky and full of foresight, moving well past the leading edge of migration, that address turned out to be all they could generally get. Yet the address was the least of what they sought. Rather, it was a quality of life that they really wanted for themselves and their children, a life neat and clean and safe and law abiding. This, though, they could not keep. As someone once put it, “Integration is what happens between the first black family moving in and the last white family moving out.”