Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
[0] https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highli...
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
> They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution.
The study found:
> Across all included cities, redlined D-graded neighborhoods had 12.2 ± 27.2 wells km−2, nearly twice the density in neighborhoods graded A (6.8 ± 8.9 wells km−2).
So, just like I said, "more often", but that's still only less than twice as often as the most desirable neighborhoods. This is hardly a noticeable difference to residents.
Significance:
Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts. "The presence of wells in historically redlined neighborhoods remains relevant, as many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-production, can contribute to ongoing pollution."
* Meant to say,"Redline districts are often near oil refiners and highly polluted."
Yes, 2x is clearly "disproportionate", but it's a far cry from being obviously significant. If you assume that pollution is not significant in best neighborhoods, then it's not greatly significant in worst, because twice something insignificant is still hardly significant. Replace oil wells with something else that's clearly harmful: murders. Imagine the worst neighborhoods had twice as many murders as the best ones. This would actually be improvement over the status quo: worst neighborhoods are far more dangerous than just 2x!
> Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts.
It does no such thing. It says that wells can contribute to ongoing pollution. That does not mean that it does, and it does not even quantify the contribution of wells to pollution, nor does it even show that the worst districts are significantly more polluted in the first place.
The point of this study is to corroborate the narrative of redlined district being significantly more polluted than the "best" districts, and that this is why residents of these districts and their descendants have worse outcomes today. It shows something that's not very interesting on its own (just twice the number of oil wells). However, it's clearly successful in building narrative, given that it convinced you that it provides evidence for it.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
Talk about an unusual life!
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position. Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.
> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country
Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?
As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.
We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.
If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.
It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Inquisition]
It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.
The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.
> Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.
It was always a mix of different peoples - Celtic, then Romans when they invaded, then various Germanic peoples (including the Franks that gave the country it's name)... even the standardization of the French language is fairly modern. We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise...
https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
Literally the Vikings [1].
> in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn
Yes [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
After all, there are practical problems of who is eligible, how long, and who gets to decide that.
Not only that, but at that point there is now strong financial incentives to be in specific groups. At least while the money flows.
Not everyone can be eligible, or it loses all meaning. Someone has to pay, or it can’t be funded.
Someone has to be officially the victim, and officially the offender, or such a program can’t actually exist. Etc.
These aren’t modern problems either, and this isn’t ‘modern’ racism, whatever that is. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz]
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
Frankly, they often do.
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
If you were an Irish immigrant in NYC in the 30’s, would you still say that about an Irish community group?
How about a Latino workers group in 70’s Los Angeles?
Or for that matter a ‘black community’ group in 70’s Los Angeles too.
LA has always had a lot of gang warfare, which divides itself along ethnic lines because that's the underbelly of human nature. Gang warfare is a great example of everybody doing things that are very bad for themselves and others because of a perceived division with little basis in fact. If there's enough gang warfare I guess you could see racially segregated unions, like in the deep south, but that is again against worker's interests just like how segregated churches oppose God.
It is very difficult to find even a selfish motive for segregation unless you are an actual slaveowner or apartheid government official.
There were also prevalent crime issues and ethnic gangs at the time. And many people (Irish in particular) DID go around saying those things you assert no one ever said.
For people who ‘looked Irish’ it was absolutely in their interest to align with these groups to some extent, or they’d be discriminated against and not have useful power to fight against it, and not have a group of people aligned with them that would provide housing, jobs, etc. to them.
In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason the Irish stopped being discriminated against so heavily is because of the political machines and gangs that punished groups for discriminating against them this way.
Same with the Catholics, actually.
So what are you actually talking about?
> Humans are tribal. [...], I don’t think just pretending we’re all one [tribe] will work. [...] I hope we can build [a] common [tribe].