I don't think it's just a panic though. The Bell Curve was published in 1994 and got the same response it would have today. My squishy guess/model is that a taboo on discussing persistent group differences is an implicit-but-central part of our post Civil Rights Era detente.
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Replying to @eigenrobot @danlistensto
Or, possibly part of a larger postwar consensus taboo against things like "race science" and eugenics policy. "Discussion" may be less a matter of waiting for a panic to die and more waiting for a generation with a particular set of memories and experiences to pass, siecle-style
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Replying to @eigenrobot @danlistensto
And I'm not honestly sure that discussion would make people better off net. Devil's advocate: intellectually dishonest diversity efforts might be some kind second- or third-best outcome, some kind of Cowen-esque creative ambiguity that lets us keep civil conflict at bay . . .
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Replying to @eigenrobot @danlistensto
. . . until a better solution presents itself. I don't believe any of this strongly but my gut at least is that there are lots of tacit compromises at work, and we'll never know quite what they are because part of the truce is that you don't talk openly about the truce.
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Replying to @eigenrobot
so in other words you have to be actually John McWhorter to even discuss it, and even then it's tricky
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Replying to @danlistensto
I think that's true. Another possibility/angle/something: there's lots of hostility about this because any attempt at discussion is seen (correctly?) as an attempt to renegotiate the terms of the truce.
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Replying to @eigenrobot
the truce is already broken though. we have an explicit racist in the white house and a moral panic where blues reflexively call their opponents bigots/racists on a hair trigger.
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Replying to @danlistensto
it's fraying for sure, possibly not broken? I'm not sure what broken would look like I guess possibly Trump-as-explicit racist is overblown (?), I would guess as a matter of pushing policy he's not so bad compared to most Presidents. maybe Bush II was a lot better actually(!)
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Replying to @eigenrobot
as a matter of pushing policy he's trying to build a border wall and expel brown people with ambiguous immigration status. I'll grant you that he has merely consented to Red congress expected defunding of social welfare programs, and has not pushed that especially aggressively.
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Replying to @danlistensto @eigenrobot
W. I think was much more personally sensitive to issues of race but his partisanship and congress prevented him from doing anything good about. Can't let Katrina/New Orleans get a pass. Accidentally racist policy is still racist.
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>Accidentally racist policy is still racist hmmm disagree for purposes of this discussion would say Bush II possibly did more for black people than any President since LBJ just mostly in Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief …
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Replying to @eigenrobot
credit Laura for that. never has the term "better half" been more apt.
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