Selective ‘Segregation’

Martin Luther King wrote these words in his famed 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” 

These words not only reveal the infiltration strategy at play but betray a radical misunderstanding of what is historically known as the American system — one in which the individual is the sole architect of his own destiny, as opposed to the Marxist doctrine which asserts the opposite: according to Marx himself, “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” This opinion stands in contrast to the principle of American liberty, whereby the individual is the most essential element within a free society, whereby man is esteemed the possessor of his own destiny, whereby the political organization of sovereign states (within a federal republic) and local jurisdictions (issuing and maintaining their own policies and ordinances) were meant to ensure political independence and respect for each distinct culture and community, as well as the norms, traditions, and policies which might serve at any time to defend one or the other against outside or unwarranted influence. 

To the extent that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” it is through the ever-widening range of measures enforced through government under the guise of the “common good”, achieved through the misconception applied to the American form of government — that misconception of a ‘national’ political body where the Founders specifically rejected it in favor of a federal republic, a confederation of free and independent states, and a construction which guaranteed “equality under the law”, not “equality of outcome” nor some kind of coerced equality of treatment between fellow individuals maintaining their freedom to associate or to disassociate to their own satisfaction — maintaining their freedom to, likewise, tolerate, accept, embrace, or condemn ideas, actions, and people, in accordance with their own standards or preferences. 

King’s words betray the maxim that “just government is derived from the consent of the governed.” As such, political authority and public resource distribution properly belong to the group that meaningfully constitutes “the governed” — those who pay the bulk of taxes and determine the extent and conditions of their consent. Because ‘white’ citizens in Birmingham formed that contributing, consenting body, they were within their rights to decide how (or whether) public resources were allocated, even if that meant excluding non-contributing or unapproving groups. Therefore, any claim of injustice fails unless it is first shown that the excluded group legitimately belonged to the consenting, contributing polity. Any idea or policy to the contrary denies not just the freedom of the individual but the right of the people to be secure in the protection of their own customs and cultures, particularly where financial and political influences have combined to both define progressively more of daily life and usurp control over the prevailing cultures within society.

* * *

In the modern world, there’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around terms like ‘segregation’ and ‘discrimination’, and at least as much of the same around the supposed remedies. As it turns out, the measures believed to remedy the ‘problems’ are as misunderstanding of the ‘problems’ as they are culpable in incentivizing the very problems they claim to solve.

First, it is essential to bear in mind these facts: ‘segregation’ and ‘discrimination’ are indispensable to the human condition, the endurance of culture, and the survival of the species; and one’s support of ‘segregation’ needn’t imply animosity or hatred, nor a preference for government intervention or ideas strictly opposed to the free market. 

In fact, it is precisely because of such ideas and institutions opposed to the free market, namely ‘equal opportunity housing’, that such factors and preferences are not generally permitted to enter consideration; and I say ‘generally’ because minority groups tend in many cases to be exempt (not officially but in practice) from the constraints imposed upon the general (i.e. ‘white’) population. 

Whether by force, intimidation, the conditions they create, or the decisions landlords make, minority groups are in many cases permitted not only to effectively cluster in their own communities but to practice their own forms of ‘segregation’ while the majority (i.e. ‘white’) population is actually held accountable to the statutes in place, or otherwise ideas carrying force through the conventions of ‘political correctness’. These outcomes do not require conspiracy; they emerge from uneven incentives, selective enforcement, and cultural norms that penalize some preferences more heavily, or more expressly, than others. 

The asymmetrical treatment of in-group preferences represents one such factor. It is well-established that in-group preferences are inherent to each group, and it stands to reason that they would not be incompatible with ‘free market’ designs. However, in places like modern America, there is, in practice, nothing resembling equal protection where this preference is concerned. On the contrary, certain attitudes, pressures, and conventions have coalesced to favor some and their preferences at the expense of others and theirs.

As for the type of market that prevails in the modern American context, it is a heavily modified kind of “free market” — one rigged with special ‘protections’ and powerful privileges for specific groups, and for particular purposes (i.e. ‘affirmative action’), to the distinct disadvantage of other groups and their (often privately-held) preferences. 

This, in turn, creates a situation that is very hard to ignore: one in which some groups are (in effect) perfectly free to ‘segregate’ themselves from (and ‘discriminate’ against) others, whereas one group in particular — the ‘white’ population — is kept strictly accountable to the statutes as written. Put another way, if one group is systematically discouraged — through reputational risk, social sanction, enforcement expectations, or a lack of institutional support — from asserting its rights while another group is encouraged and supported in doing so, then the regime functions affirmatively for the latter group — even in such cases where the law, as written, offers ‘equal protection’ in theory.

Another irony in this case is that, where minority groups are found in violation, ‘discriminating’ against ‘white’ folks, the latter tend to forget it and move on, while lacking little in the way of media or political support (and lacking specific protection as members of the so-called “protected class”), whereas the minority groups who comprise that class scarcely hesitate to rally against even the slightest hint of ‘discrimination’, even where it is obviously imagined and clearly untrue — and lawsuits can be rather profitable for attorneys and those of the “protected class”, even where they lack real substance. 

This creates a situation in which minorities are free to ‘segregate’ and impose upon communities where they are unwanted — and they are even politically empowered to do so. 

Meanwhile, the ‘white’ population is progressively brought under the pressures of legislation, litigation and ‘political correctness’, and the accompanying threats of ‘mob justice’, to the extent that they are terrified to even contemplate any such preferences, let alone act on them — even where they are completely valid in a strictly logical sense. 

Ultimately, in the United States, “black culture” functions as a relatively unified identity with shared narratives and political expression. What is labeled “white culture,” by contrast, is a loose aggregation of diverse regional, ethnic, and social traditions that lacks both a unified identity and a cohesive political force. Because of this imbalance, rules governing preference, association, and protection are applied unevenly: collective behavior, in-group solidarity, and political ‘protections’ are normalized or defended for one group while being delegitimized for the other.

This is the asymmetry that has come to enable the ‘new segregation’: the creation of a new ‘noble class’ under a different name, and the squeezing out of the ‘white’ population in its own country.