I was reading a book on migration ethics recently – I may write a review later 1 — and it reminded me how a certain picture of the normal liberal state and its place in the world figures in a lot of political philosophy. Although the normative arguments are supposedly independent of historical facts, history is to be found everywhere, but only in a highly selective version that reflects the dominance of the United States within the discipline and the prominence of prosperous white liberals as both the writers of the important texts and as the readers and gatekeepers. 2 Their assumptions about the world and the US place in it shine through and form a "common ground" that is presupposed in much of this writing.3
In this vision, all the world is America 4 — though not one that corresponds to the actual history of the US — and the rest of the world mostly consists of little proto-Americas that will or should get there in the end (thereby echoing Marx’s dictum that the more developed country shows the less developed one a picture of its own future). This imaginary, but also not-imaginary, state is a sort-of cleaned-up and aspirational version of the actual one, cleansed of embarrassing details that are mere contingencies that detract or distract from what US liberals suppose to be its real essence or telos. Crucially, it is also considered as a basically self-contained entity, where all the important relationships are ones among people on the territory.5 It is an association of free and equal persons that has simply arisen on virgin soil. Both the actual United States and other countries fall short of this model, of course, but with time and good will wrinkles and carbuncles will be removed. 6
Now nobody believes that actual United States is anywhere near where its supposed essence directs it, so proponents of the model have certainly conceded its gross and deep injustice. But I think that what they take that great and deep injustice to be and the necessary mode of its correction, is both revealing and problematic. In brief, the apparently wise and noble vision of "the Founders" is soiled by the great uncorrected "anomaly" (henceforth the Anomaly) of race and the bringing to full citizenship and equality of the United State’s black citizens. In this narrative, then, slavery, the Civil War, Lincoln, Reconstruction, the struggle for civil rights and Martin Luther King all loom large and the central political task is overcoming that legacy of civic exclusion and subordination so that all take their place as full American citizens, recognizing one another as equal members of the Republic.
Corresponding to this is a characterization of White Supremacy (though this term is rarely used explicitly) as the domination of White Americans over Black Americans, with White Supremacy conceived of as being overcome once true civic equality is realized. (On the Left there is a variation of this story in which race is an epiphenomenon of class and in which the Anomaly is overcome once black and white recognize their commonality as American workers.) 7 Anyone who consumes the liberal output of Hollywood will also recognize the narrative in innumerable movies, but Selma is a recent example. The narrative of essential purity contaminated by the Anomaly explains some of the angrily defensive reactions to the New York Times‘s 1619 Project.
Now the narrative isn’t exactly false: the struggles of black Americans for equality are of very great historical importance: those who fought and fight for civil rights were and are heroic. They really did make immense sacrifices against racism and injustice, something that is rather diminished in a narrative that has them as redeeming the essential goodness of the very polity that brutally oppressed them and in large measure continues to do so. The trouble is that the bordered national and historical frame that the narrative is set in leaves so much else out of the picture, most significantly, perhaps, three things: first, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, overwhelmed by the aggressive imperial expansion of the original white settler-colonists; second, the fact that black Americans have another commonality that is tacitly suppressed in the focus on US citizenship, namely with the African diaspora elswhere in the Americas that also results from the Atlantic slave trade; third the fact that White Supremacy was not simply directed at black Americans but also had as its antagonist — and not just in the United States — immigrant workers from China, India and other Asian countries (and more recently from Latin America).
On the first of these, the place of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the story, there is either silence or the the thought that it was all a long time ago and we can’t unpick it now (and certainly not without causing great injustice in the present). And maybe that’s right, at least to the extent that claims to resources on the part of indigenous populations have to both settle the thorny and contested question of who counts as indigenous,8 and to upset the lives that have been blamelessly built by many in the very places that indigenous people used to hold. Hence various attempts by philosophers to address the supercession of historical injustice. 9 But it is one thing to think that we cannot roll the clock back and quite another to deny the exclusionary claims of past holders of territorial and property rights while asserting very strong claims for oneself against people now characterized as non-citizens and hence as “outsiders” but who may well include descendants of past holders. Anyway, my purpose here is not even to begin to settle these questions of restitution, compensation and the like — which many people have worked on — but to note how little the issue features compared to other intrusions of historical detail into the central texts of liberal political philosophy.
The second omission, in some ways more interesting to me, is that of the black diaspora. It is interesting because of what neglect of it implicitly erases. The Anomaly is that there exists on the territory of the supposedly liberal-democratic state a group of people who have been wrongfully excluded from the civic status of equal citizenship and so the "solution" is to turn them into (or to recognize them as) regular citizens alongside other Americans. Presented like this, the Anomaly is a problem that is purely internal to the liberal democratic state and the "solution" is the re-establishment of a kind of normality that is consonant with the alleged essence of the political community. Perhaps this re-establishment also involves some kind of compensation in recognition of historical injustice, and perhaps it does not, but either way the goal is to bring it about that the hitherto excluded are brought to a position where they have a set of rights and duties towards the other members of that political community that are more extensive to those owed to "outsiders". Indeed, the primacy of these "internal" rights and duties over external ones is presupposed by the assumption that the state or nation is the privileged site of co-operation for all its inhabitants.
However, alongside the commonality that black Americans share with those who live within the state that they inhabit is another history, that of all the descendants of those forcibly brought to the Americas by Europeans, some of whom ended up in the United States, others in Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America or in the Caribbean. That the descendants of the victims of this legacy of forced kidnapping, transportation, rape and murder ought to, in the first instance, be bound by ties of civic equality to the children of their kidnappers and exploiters (and others, of course) rather than to their fellow victims who contingently ended up behind other borders, may have something to recommend it given that we live in a world of bordered national states, but it is surely an argument that deserves to be set out in the open rather than something that disappears behind a theory’s founding assumptions. Too often I have read some white American migration theorist arguing that "we", ie the set of American citizens, ought to protect poor black Americans from labour competitition from immigrants, but why are those poor black Americans part of a "we" that excludes a "they" of whom other descendants of slavery are a part? (Commonality with one’s fellow victims beyond borders is also something that bears on the indigenous case.)
The third omission is the failure to notice that the United States (like other white settler states such as Canada and Australia) has historically pursued policies of racial exclusion to preserve white supremacy that have little to do with the dominance of whites over black Americans. 10 The chief exhibit here is the Chinese Exclusion Act and related measures at the end of the 19th century and the subsequent making explicit by leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt of an approach that saw the United States as part of a group of white countries determined to preserve racial dominance against the threat of labour competition from Asia. These days, if work on migration ethics mentions these measures at all it is as another unjustified "anomaly" that disgraces the constititional liberal state which really ought not to discriminate in matters of immigration. This rather neglects the fact that such measures of racial exclusion were not unjust deviation from the state’s legitimate exercise of the right to control its borders but rather the central motive to getting immigration control started in the first place.11 Moreover, while the focus of racial anxiety has shifted its location somewhat, the central motive behind restrictionism remains the worry that the white core of America may be overwhelmed by the undesirable other: nowadays "Mexican rapists" instead of Chinese labourers and "prostitutes".
The centrality of the Anomaly in the historical imagination of liberal political philosophy and the pretence that White Supremacy would be defeated once civic equality for all, irrespective of race, is realised within the borders of a liberal constitutional state that remains free to restrict immigration obscures much from view that we ought to take seriously if we oppose both inequality and racism. First, there are consequences for the realization of civic equality within the state. Historically, the creation of a national citizenship and pressure to conform the the expectations of what a citizen is like has not worked well for indigenous people and their children. In the present, the equal status of citizens who look and sound like the people that the state is trying to keep out is often compromised as they and their families suffer the consequences of aggressive immigration enforcement.12 But in focusing on equality within the state taken as a discrete unit, as a little world unto itself, the methodological nationalist gaze simply fails to notice that White Supremacy both historically and in the present is maintained by keeping the non-white Other (Chinese labourers then, Central Americans now) on the outside. Liberals caught in an epistemic frame that is limited to citizens within borders can therefore complacently congratulate themselves on their anti-racism, because they favour equal status of all irrespective of race, while upholding in practice a system of white dominance. To my mind the lessons ought to be that we cannot easily separate questions of equality among citizens from the unequal statuses that are produced by nationality and bordering and that in doing political philosophy we cannot easily escape from the contingent unjust histories that have deposited particular people in the places where they now are.
[Many thanks to the friends who gave me feedback on drafts of this post]
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It was Michael Blake’s Justice, Migration and Mercy, (Oxford University Press, 2021).?
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As as British person I’m aware that we could tell a similar story about Britain, racism, exclusion etc as I refer to here and we could even find examples of historical amnesia and selection in the work of British political philosophers to illustrate the point (perhaps David Miller, and see for example Lorna Finlayson’s "If This Isn’t Racism, What Is? The Politics of the Philosophy of Immigration" Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1):115-139 (2020)). But US institutions are so dominant within the discipline that it is American historical narratives of self-congratulation, messianism, guilt, anxiety that loom largest.?
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Olúfémi O. Táíwò discusses Stalnaker’s notion of common ground as presupposed in conversation in his new Elite Capture (Pluto/Haymarket, 2022). It is "a shared resource that participants in a conversation use to build and perform social interactions." "When we act in social contexts, we treat the information in the common ground as if it were true…." Elite Capture pp 40–41.?
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See what I did there??
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Most liberal political philosophy therefore resembles the approach that Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Shiller have called "methodological nationalism". See e.g. their "Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences", Global Networks 2, 4 (2002) pp. 301–34. In political philosophy, both Alex Sager and Speranta Dumitru have been prominent in challenging the assumption of methodological nationalism. See e.g Alex Sager, "Methodological Nationalism, Migration and Political Theory", Political Studies. 2016;64(1): pp. 42–59 and Speranta Dumitru, "Qu’est-ce que le nationalisme méthodologique : Essai de typologie". Raisons politiques, 54, 9-22.?
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The relationship between the liberal state in ideal political philosophy and actual states has, of course, long been a topic of controversy, on which see for example Charles Mills’s classic article "Ideal Theory as Ideology" (in Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker, eds., Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 163-81). On the one hand people will say that something like Rawls’s well-ordered society (as an example among others) is a purely philosophical construct to enable the discussion of abstract principles, on the other hand critics have long suggested that Rawls, Dworkin et al are merely parochial rationalizers of something like existing states. Personally, I think that claims of purity are often belied by the intrusion of actual facts into the discourse, most notably facts concerning civil rights but also, for example, Dworkin’s discussions of workfare programmes in his Sovereign Virtue. In our conversations with students, moreover, there’s often an implied "we" and a shared social and political context against which classroom argument takes place. But I also think that the "merely" of the parochial rationalization attack vastly overstates that case. Anyway, here I’m in the business of noticing which bits of reality and history intrude and which don’t, and suggesting that this might be symptomatic of something.?
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A proper academic article making the points of this blogpost might look through the works of, say, John Rawls, and note how often the Anomaly, Martin Luther King, Lincoln etc are mentioned compared to the lacunae outlined here and then look at later work by others in journals such as Philosophy and Public Affairs. The answer for Rawls himself is that even the Anomaly gets rather thin engagement, though one can extrapolate from his concerns with topics such as civil disobedience. Later work could include Elizabeth Anderson’s Imperative of Integration (Princeton 2010) and Tommy Shelby’s brilliant Dark Ghettos (Harvard 2016) (which both shows how much can be done to address racial injustice from within a Rawlsian paradigm but also stays firmly rooted within the boundaries of the nation state).?
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On which, see Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Migrants and Natives (Duke 2020) pp. 46–50.?
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The key reference here is Jeremy Waldron’s "Superseding Historical Injustice", Ethics , Oct., 1992, Vol. 103, No. 1 (Oct., 1992), pp. 4-28. For reasons why past injustices in the acquisition of territory might not necessarily impugn the justice of later holdings see Lea Ypi "A Permissive Theory of Territorial Rights" European Journal of Philosophy 22 (2):288-312 (2014).?
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The key text here, which will transform your thinking (guaranteed!) is Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge University Press: 2008).?
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As Sarah Fine has pointed out, race and discrimination are central to popular discourse on immigration but almost absent from philosophical discussion of it, despite the roots of modern immigration control in the desire to discriminate on grounds of race. See her “Immigration and Discrimination” in Fine and Ypi eds Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford, 2016).?
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See, for example, the work of Amy Reed-Sandoval, such as her Socially Undocumented (Oxford, 2020).?
{ 49 comments }
MisterMr 05.09.22 at 11:48 am
I think that the problem is that, generally, liberals perceive unjustice as a discrimination inside a set of rules that the liberals assume are natural, but in reality represent a specific historical concept of justice.
I have a consequentialist/utilitarian view of morality, and therefore I think that “justice” is that laws that lead to the most widespread happiness, and “unjustice” is that laws that instead lead to unhappiness, and that “rights” are a concept that we create to reach that kind of “justice”.
So if for example we take white colonists who snatched territory from natives of the americas, I don’t see it as automatically a form of teft: I see no reason to say that american natives had better claims to american soil than european settlers. Since this process created a lot of deaths and suffering among the natives, I still see it an unjust, but only because of the consequences, not really in principle.
The problem of the opposite view, that european settlers snatching lands from natives was unjust in principle and not just because of the consequences, is that it rests on the assumption of some form of property rights of the natives on the land, but property rights are a cultural creation, so when we think in these terms we are just projecting our modern concept of property (or in fact any concept of property) in the past: the Spaniard could well believe that the only property rights that exists are those that are accepted by the king of Spain or perhaps by the Pope, and in fact piracy against ships from other countries was quite the norm in the past.
Going back to the spirit of the post, the problem is not so much what were the past injustices, but rather where we want to go from now, and the past will then be judged in terms of justice/unjustice retrocactively depending on what is the kind of society we want to live in in the future.
So for example if the “telos”, the utopian society we are pointing towards, is a society similar to USA today but with, say, less unemployment, an NHS, free college for everyone etc. then automatically this puts pressures on all the people who don’t want to conform to it.
It seems to me that putting the accent on specific forms of discrimination (racism, sexism, omophoby, political discrimination etc.) instead than on equality in general is a way to accept a concept of “meritocracy” that by itself might create or justify inequality, unless it is specified very well.
Also about the link between migration and racism, yes I get the relationship but, as someone who is for open borders, migration should not be restricted for anyone, not just for people whose ancestor we believe were mistreated: it is a problem because if we say that the problem of limit to migration is racism, then in all cases where one can dispute racism limits to migration are ok.
For example, suppose a white USA blue collar who is against migration from Mexico, because he thinks that mexican labor will push his wage down.
– if he does this as a form of disguised racism, then this is bad and should be forbidden;
– if instead he is not racist but just wants less competition, then it is ok or at least acceptable? or is this still bad?
I don’t think this distinction makes sense, but it seems to me that much of the liberal arguments against discrimination do follow this logic, which I see as self-defeating in the end.
Thomas McCulloch 05.09.22 at 1:28 pm
“The third omission is the failure to notice that the United States (like other white settler states such as Canada and Australia) has historically pursued policies of racial exclusion to preserve white supremacy that have little to do with the dominance of whites over black Americans. 10 The chief exhibit here is the Chinese Exclusion Act”
Yes, but Bertram and others omit the massive disparities in the success of those policies. Historical policies of racial exclusion have not maintained white supremacy when it comes to Chinese Americans, among the many other non-white groups that outperform white Americans along most measures (including groups that have been subject to more policies of racial exclusion, such as Iranian Americans). So The Anomaly is more of one than Bertram would like to admit.
Fake Dave 05.09.22 at 3:10 pm
@2
Oh those overperforming Asian Americans! Just a bunch of whiz kids getting ahead with their apps and such! Who’d have thunk it that the same region that produced the debt slaves who built our railroads and did out laundry could also provide us with doctors and lawyers and other valuable human resources. All it took was inserting a fat loophole for “skilled” workers in an otherwise extremely restrictive racial quota system and suddenly corporate America was free to brain drain an entire continent and the model minority myth was born. We got a peek at what a more “natural” sample of Asian immigration would look like after the fall of Saigon, but the country quickly lost interest in that particular group of huddled masses yearning to be free.p
Jake Gibson 05.09.22 at 3:29 pm
I am ambivalent about “open borders”
But I absolutely believe that economic refugee is a legitimate category for consideration.
Especially since many of all our ancestors were economic refugees.
Mass migration from global warming will be a hell of a problem just about everywhere.
M Caswell 05.09.22 at 3:31 pm
“That the descendants of the victims of this legacy of forced kidnapping, transportation, rape and murder ought to, in the first instance, be bound by ties of civic equality to the children of their kidnappers and exploiters…”
Most black Americans are biologically and culturally “descendants” of both the kidnapped, and the kidnappers.
Thomas McCulloch 05.09.22 at 3:38 pm
@3
Despite the rambling sarcasm I’m not at all denying that the United States has a history of racially exclusionary policies and white supremacist ideology continues into the present. But in terms of effects The Anomaly is actually anomalous. Conflating the legacy of hundreds of years of large scale slavery, apartheid and domestic terrorism with comparably minor exclusionary policies helps to fund DEI corporate consulting gigs but doesn’t tell us much about what actually impacts social outcomes.
Tim Craker 05.09.22 at 3:51 pm
Mister Mr: “the problem is not so much what were the past injustices, but rather where we want to go from now, and the past will then be judged in terms of justice/unjustice retrocactively depending on what is the kind of society we want to live in in the future.”
What if the society I want to live in in the future is one that does not dismiss history so blithely? What if I retroactively want to ensure that history is not dismissed as an attempt to put the focus on “discrimination” rather than the promise of “equality?”
J. Bogart 05.09.22 at 3:57 pm
“That the descendants of the victims of this legacy of forced kidnapping, transportation, rape and murder ought to, in the first instance, be bound by ties of civic equality to the children of their kidnappers and exploiters…”
Two small points: A substantial portion of the population of the USA is not descended from either category. Settler states are real enough, it is just that the category covers more or less all existent states.
L2P 05.09.22 at 7:42 pm
Chris asks us, “Why are those poor black Americans part of a “we” that excludes a “they” of whom other descendants of slavery are a part?” Fortunately, he already knows the answer, because, “The descendants of the victims of this legacy of forced kidnapping, transportation, rape and murder ought to . . . be bound by ties of civic equality to the children of their kidnappers and exploiters. . . .”
Chris Bertram 05.09.22 at 7:52 pm
L2P, I assume that selective quotation is some kind of elaborate joke on your part.
John Quiggin 05.09.22 at 11:16 pm
@fn4 I saw what you did there, and appreciated it. The influence of Locke is pervasive.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/
Fake Dave 05.10.22 at 12:35 am
@6
I’ll admit to rambling sarcasm because I was punchy after staying up all night with a newborn. I apologize for lowering the standard of the discourse. What prompted my sputtering outrage was you trotting out a decades old racist trope about Asian American overachievers that only seems to come up when people are trying to dismiss discrimination against other “minorities.”
The history is clear. The vast majority of early Asian immigrants to this country were treated as captive labor and, when they had finished building the West’s infrastructure, they were deemed undesirable by the body politic and banned, detained or deported en masses. Some of their descendents are still around and may have built success for themselves over many generations, but demographically speaking, most of those “Asian Americans” that are accused of ruining the bell curve for the rest of us are actually from distinct groups of much more recent immigrants that were let in precisely because they were better educated or more successful than their average compatriots.
It’s a fundamental category error. The Taishanese and other marginalized East Asian serfs who built the railroads had a lot in common with other unfree laborers. A technical student from Bangalore or a Shanghai financier probably doesn’t compare. Our government lists them under the same racial census category, but still actively discriminates against one group (as in the broken promises to the “boat people”) while eagerly welcoming the other. Part of racist ideology is putting more value on people’s labels than their lived experiences. You can do better.
Moz in Oz 05.10.22 at 1:29 am
M Caswell: “Most black Americans”…
The one drop rule lives on! And not just in the USA, we have it in Oz too.
I’m not entirely sure how the Treaty of Waitangi differs from the various bantustan treaties in the US, and how that mixes in with Maori notions of (and abilities at!) diplomacy and war, but the outcome has been quite different. It leads to a much more optimistic view of governance and justice IME. Much more Obama “not red america against blue america, but the united states of america” than the more usual “government exists to preserve injustice”. For the US part of overturning slavery would surely be removing the electoral college and other anti-democratic carbuncles that were created to preserve it. And the constitution that still explicitly permits slavery as punishment.
“They are us” being one kiwi quote… and that quote was immediately challenged (and again recently) on the basis that “they” explicitly requires a separate “us” to have meaning. But challenged from within the liberal context that assumes a right to equality, rather than the US context where first the outsider’s right to consideration must be established.
The supreme court leak suggests that things are going backwards faster than the optimists would like to admit… women possibly aren’t people, they’re incubators that can be enslaved to serve an ovum. Which is a form of inequality not even hinted at above.
Matt 05.10.22 at 2:16 am
I’m sympathetic to some of this (though I think much of it is better put in terms of the sort of understandable, if not admirable, parochialism that’s found in much, perhaps most, academic work.) I do want to push back a bit on two statements about immigration history here. First:
This rather neglects the fact that such measures of racial exclusion were not unjust deviation from the state’s legitimate exercise of the right to control its borders but rather the central motive to getting immigration control started in the first place.
And: …despite the roots of modern immigration control in the desire to discriminate on grounds of race.
It’s often claimed that racial restrictions were the first immigration restrictions (and that this is relevant for thinking about current immigration regulation – a jump, of course.) But, this isn’t really accurate. In the US, for example, before the Chinese Exclusion Act, there were restrictions on immigration by “Vagrants and paupers; prostitutes; convicts; lunatics; idiots; those likely to be public charges; and people suffering from contagious or loathsome diseases”. In Australia, before the start of the “White Australia” policy, there were prohibitions on “Criminals; anarchists; public enemies; hotbeds of disease, and sexually immoral women.” Now, these categories were often “ethnitized”, but could be, and were, applied against people from any country. Like almost all regulation in the 19th century, they were applied in a haphazard and unsystematic way. And, for various reasons, in the US they were first put in place by the states, rather than the federal government, though the federal government did adopt them (and didn’t oppose the states using them before.) (Before federation, the Australian states also imposed regulations like this on their own, though that’s a bit different administratively.)
I don’t know that all that much follows from this, but I think it’s worth knowing that regulations like this existed before “racial” ones, as that’s often ignored or simply not known. (It would be very interesting to know what regulations there were, if any, on migration to South America at this time, but the understandable excuse for parochialism is that it’s often hard enough to learn detail about one country. I think that’s okay, so long as one doesn’t over-generalize and keeps in mind the limits of inquiry.)
J-D 05.10.22 at 6:28 am
It is probably true that the origin/foundation of most if not all existing states can be traced back in time to a forcible seizure of territory from previous occupants. For contemporary purposes, though, it makes a difference whether there is a surviving group still negatively affected by the consequences of that dispossession. I have no particular reason to think that the dispossession of the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of the Peloponnese was any more justified or less harsh than the dispossession of the Indigenous inhabitants of the country where I live (Australia)–it may have been a far greater wrong, for all I know; but the obligation of the present possessors of the territory where I live (that is, the Commonwealth of Australia) to make restitution depends partly on the contemporary existence of a population of Indigenous Australians still negatively affected by the continuing effects of that wrong; and in a similar manner there could only be an obligation to make restitution for the forcible seizure of the Peloponnese if there existed, to receive that restitution, a distinguishable surviving pre-Hellenic population still negatively affected by the continuing effects of that wrong (which, as far as my knowledge goes, there isn’t).
Following on from the previous point, it wasn’t my ancestors who brigandised this country, but that’s of no relevance–it’s not the guilt for the crime which is attached to its proceeds, only the obligation to make restitution, and that obligation is not passed on by line of descent but by inheritance of the spoils, and like other descendants of more recent immigrants, I share in that inheritance. The obligation of the contemporary Commonwealth of Australia to make restitution to contemporary Indigenous Australians arises from the fact that the Commonwealth of Australia is now in possession of the stolen property (that is, the land) in conjunction (as previously mentioned) that contemporary Indigenous Australians are still negatively affected by the continuing consequences of dispossession. (It is for similar reasons that the contemporary obligation to restitution falls primarily on the Commonwealth of Australia rather than on Great Britain–it was Great Britain and not the Commonwealth of Australia which brigandised the territory, but it’s the Commonwealth of Australia which holds it now.)
MisterMr 05.10.22 at 6:39 am
@Tim Craker 7
“What if I retroactively want to ensure that history is not dismissed as an attempt to put the focus on “discrimination” rather than the promise of “equality?” ”
You are already living in your hypothetical, you can already see the results.
Also I’m not dismissing history, I’m dismissing the categories you are using to give a moral evaluation of it.
MisterMr 05.10.22 at 8:58 am
@J-D 15
“it’s not the guilt for the crime which is attached to its proceeds, only the obligation to make restitution, and that obligation is not passed on by line of descent but by inheritance of the spoils”
according to this logic, if the average black american has an higer income than the average white briton, then the average black american should give restitution to the average white briton.
Not that I disagree, but I don’t see this as a form of “restitution”. “Restitution” implies the guilt of the crime IMHO.
MFB 05.10.22 at 11:43 am
I don’t believe you can easily distinguish between guilt and inheritance of the spoils. White South Africans are, on the whole, better off than blacks, but also have an enormous sense of superiority to blacks (which informs most of their politics) and all this arises out of the spoils of colonialism and apartheid.
Of course, if South Africa were a popular destination for whites abroad and we had an immense influx of foreign whites (as we did in the last decade of apartheid, but not since, even though things are immensely more secure and comfortable now than they were then — suggesting that the motive for coming was ideological rather than in pursuit of comfort and security) then would those masses of new whites, who were not colonists or apartheid supporters, be deemed guilty of anything? Well, what would they be coming for, if not to feed at the trough provided for them by colonists and apartheid supporters? So in that case they would owe the blacks big time even though they as people had never done anything to the blacks.
I think the whole issue is pretty complicated and also tremendously obfuscated, usually by people with something to lose from simplifying it or explaining it. As a result I think this was one of the best posts on the subject I’ve read on this weblog, because at least it tried to raise some of the central issues.
Mike 05.10.22 at 12:32 pm
“In this vision, all the world is America ….. and the rest of the world mostly consists of little proto-Americas that will or should get there in the end ”
This is illustrative, since the US policy of manifest destiny was eventually extended towards remaking foreign lands in the image of America. With varying degrees of success, depending on the territory.
TM 05.10.22 at 1:46 pm
“In this vision, all the world is America”
It’s not clear to me whose vision is alluded to here. I do not think that it is a universal feature of liberal thinking that “all the world is America”, although it is certainly true that most thinking by Americans (liberal or otherwise) is extremely US centric.
When I think of the “picture of the normal liberal state”, I would rather say that that “normal picture” is highly influenced by the very problematic and mostly 19th century idea of the “homogenous” nation state. Which makes the US exactly a huge outlier.
J-D 05.10.22 at 4:21 pm
No, restitution for a despoliation depends, as I pointed out, but evidently not clearly enough, possession of the spoils in question, in conjunction with the existence of a surviving population which is still experiencing the continuing negative effects of the despoliation in question and is therefore still owed restitution for it. The Commonwealth of Australia is in possession of territory (Australia) which was despoiled from Indigenous Australians, and therefore owes restitution to contemporary Indigenous Australians. Contemporary black Americans, as a group, are not in possession of the spoils of any despoliation of contemporary white Britons and therefore whatever obligations they may have towards them do not include an obligation to make restitution for any such despoliation. A contrast would be with a hypothetical (but possible) case in which an individual black American is in possession of property stolen (whoever by) from an individual white Briton, in which case the logic of an obligation for restitution would apply.
J-D 05.10.22 at 4:24 pm
It may not be easy, but that doesn’t justify not trying.
PatinIowa 05.10.22 at 9:21 pm
It’s strange that the United States would see the rest of the world as potential liberal nation states and then, when we’ve razed a part of the world to the ground, we leave behind anything but.
Iraq, for example, is hardly “… a basically self-contained entity, where all the important relationships are ones among people on the territory.”
Another gap between reality and ideology, I suppose.
Fake Dave 05.11.22 at 5:46 am
A number of commentators here and elsewhere are either being willfully obtuse or truly can’t grasp that the right to restitution and reparations is about lived experience and current social position not abstract census categories. It’s about the people, not the labels. No one is saying Barack Obama deserves reparations for slavery just because his dad was “black” (through he apparently does have enslaved ancestors on his “white” mother’s side), but maybe he is entitled to some kind of justice for the torture that Churchill’s boys inflicted on his Kenyan grandfather — not because he’s half Kenyan, but because his specific family are survivors. In both cases it wouldn’t be all white people who pay restitution and even the descendents of specific wrongdoers are probably off the hook unless the “possession of stolen goods” argument is especially compelling.
No one is saying random white people should be punished for other people’s crimes. There are specific people who committed demonstrable injustices and were never punished and local and national authorities were negligent in preventing that harm and in seeking justice. The specific individuals responsible for historical injustices may be gone (though the past is rarely an “past” as people like to think), but the governments that enabled, aided, and profited from predatory discrimination and wanton violence are still there and doing everything they can to avoid an honest reckoning. They need to be challenged on it so that they can make things right and also so that they know we’re watching just in case they try it again.
There’s a certain kind of self-pitying white guy who thinks this is all about racial grievance and finding someone to blame and as they make the slightest nod toward truth and reconciliation, the “reverse racists” are going to show up at their door asking for forty acres and a mule. That guy can’t see the point of reparations because he thinks it’s all about race and his race is on top so he has nothing to gain and everything to lose from rocking the boat. He’s wrong though. It was never about race. It’s about power and its abuse. Racial hierarchy may have codified the culture of predation, but they didn’t create it. Bullies pick on the weak because it’s fun and the more they get away with, the more fun they’re having and the less likely they are to stop and the more brazen they become. A culture of predation and impunity makes everyone less secure — even the people who haven’t been victimized yllet.
TM 05.11.22 at 7:14 am
MisterMr: “So if for example we take white colonists who snatched territory from natives of the americas, I don’t see it as automatically a form of teft: I see no reason to say that american natives had better claims to american soil than european settlers. Since this process created a lot of deaths and suffering among the natives, I still see it an unjust, but only because of the consequences, not really in principle. The problem of the opposite view, that european settlers snatching lands from natives was unjust in principle and not just because of the consequences, is that it rests on the assumption of some form of property rights of the natives on the land”
To recognize that taking other people’s land by force is unjust doesn’t require any assumption of property rights. It is the land that they inhabit, that they rely on, live from. It is their livelihood. Appropriating the land inhabited by other people means displacing them and destroying their livelihood. It doesn’t take complicated legal concepts to recognize the injustice, I would think.
John Locke’s claim that native Americans had no right to live on their land because they didn’t subscribe to the British legal system was never more than an arbitrary justification of the unjust. It seems unlikely that Locke himself actually believed this nonsense. Curious that the argument is still around.
MisterMr 05.11.22 at 3:27 pm
@TM 25
“To recognize that taking other people’s land by force is unjust doesn’t require any assumption of property rights. It is the land that they inhabit, that they rely on, live from. It is their livelihood. Appropriating the land inhabited by other people means displacing them and destroying their livelihood.”
It depends: if you think of some big landowner, who owns a lot of land, the expropriation and redistribuition of land has been a constant demand of many movement (not just marxist ones, it was a very common demand in antiquity).
This doesn’t apply to native Americans or Australians, because they weren’t very rich, however this means that one has to add a clause “taking other people’s land by force when they are not the very rich”, and while this is a reasonable clause it becomes very difficult to place an exact limit of when “very rich” begins.
So the problem isn’t that I want to impose a logic of positive law, it’s the opposite, it’s that the idea of restitution implies positive law.
@Fake Dave 24
“[…] the right to restitution and reparations is about lived experience and current social position not abstract census categories. ”
I read the OP (that is not specifically about restitution) and it says:
“However, alongside the commonality that black Americans share with those who live within the state that they inhabit is another history, that of all the descendants of those forcibly brought to the Americas by Europeans, some of whom ended up in the United States, others in Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America or in the Caribbean. That the descendants of the victims of this legacy of forced kidnapping, transportation, rape and murder ought to, in the first instance, be bound by ties of civic equality to the children of their kidnappers and exploiters (and others, of course) rather than to their fellow victims who contingently ended up behind other borders, may have something to recommend it given that we live in a world of bordered national states, but it is surely an argument that deserves to be set out in the open rather than something that disappears behind a theory’s founding assumptions. Too often I have read some white American migration theorist arguing that “we”, ie the set of American citizens, ought to protect poor black Americans from labour competitition from immigrants, but why are those poor black Americans part of a “we” that excludes a “they” of whom other descendants of slavery are a part?”
So it seems to me that it is specifically speaking of census categories, disagreeing with one way to build categories and proposing a different one.
@J-D
“No, restitution for a despoliation depends, as I pointed out, but evidently not clearly enough, possession of the spoils in question, in conjunction with the existence of a surviving population which is still experiencing the continuing negative effects of the despoliation in question and is therefore still owed restitution for it.”
This would limit restitution to a very restricted number of cases, e.g. native Americans and Australians but not descendants of slaves. I’m I reading this correctly?
Also does it mean that the native should own all the land in America and Australia? I think this is unlikely to happen.
J, not this one 05.11.22 at 4:51 pm
Without reading such people, I would guess that their vision of America is one in which white Christian emigrants from the British Isles left because of lack of economic opportunity or religious and political freedom and reproduced their white yeoman farmers’ culture on their individually owned homesteads, creating a “normal” (i.e. much like English) culture based in their hereditary Protestant Christianity in its more egalitarian forms, and living comfortably and without much conflict until 1945 or so when modernity intruded in both hemispheres simultaneously.
To say that this ignores the reality of Native and Black Americans is a big part of the problem. That it imagines America as the place where a certain kind of British ideal can be thought of as Real might be considered a big problem too.
retired schoolteacher 05.11.22 at 5:39 pm
I have lived in aboriginal territory, as a settler minority, for half my life. The discussion is interesting, important. However realistically, nothing is going to be done. All the wrongs of this poor world call for money, the same money in each case. And righting a moral wrong is low on the public agenda. Is anything being done about climate change?
Things here will continue as before, somewhat kinder, but the way forward is adaption to whatever is possible. For the displaced and aggrieved the logical response is anger, suppressed or otherwise.
Tm 05.11.22 at 7:35 pm
MisterMr: I disagree with your framing colonialism as a property dispute.
LFC 05.11.22 at 8:27 pm
from the OP:
The third omission is the failure to notice that the United States (like other white settler states such as Canada and Australia) has historically pursued policies of racial exclusion to preserve white supremacy that have little to do with the dominance of whites over black Americans.
While that’s certainly true, and while it’s also true that race and ethnicity in general have been tied up with U.S. immigration policy, it’s also the case that there have been periods of more and less restriction in U.S. immigration policy, which accounts for why, during certain periods, there were very substantial waves of legal immigration to the U.S. (mostly but not exclusively from different parts of Europe, including Eastern Europe and Russia esp in late 19th and early 20th centuries). Some of those waves included people (e.g., Irish, E. European Jews, etc.) who were considered ethnically or “racially” undesirable by a substantial number of white Americans. As early as the 1840s or thereabouts one gets the formation of organized nativist political parties (e.g. the Know-Nothings) opposed to the immigration of European Catholics and others viewed as undesirable. The Know-Nothings favored “racial” exclusion, the quotation marks being called for since, putting aside the question of whether race is anything other than a social construct to begin with, an Italian Catholic, say, walking down the street would generally appear “white.”
I’m far from an expert on the history of U.S. immigration policy, but istm these pendulum swings from less to more restrictive — the dates of which can be found in any textbook or prob Wikipedia — should be acknowledged. It doesn’t affect some of the main points of the OP, but it does suggest that the standard picture of the U.S. as “a nation of immigrants” — after the initial wave(s) of immigration mostly from the British isles and more spec. England and also after much of the forced transport of Africans — is not false.
As it happens, I was reading earlier today an NYT piece about Francis Fukuyama that someone drew my attention to. It mentions in passing that his paternal grandfather was “a Japanese immigrant who opened a hardware store in the Little Tokyo neighborhood [of New York City] in the early 1900s.” How common that sort of story is, I have no idea. But the fact that there was a Little Tokyo neighborhood around the turn of the century, when immigration was still relatively open, is itself noteworthy.
P.s. I haven’t read the whole comment thread so if the above repeats points already made, sorry.
Chris Bertram 05.11.22 at 9:49 pm
@LFC I strongly recommend to you the Lake and Reynolds volume listed in footnote 10 above. Asian businesses and neighborhoods in California were highly vulnerable to pogroms at the period you mention and many Chinese workers were deported back to China.
LFC 05.12.22 at 12:13 am
Chris,
Thank you for the suggestion; I’ll follow it up.
J-D 05.12.22 at 1:31 am
The seizures of territory in the Americas and Australia by Europeans were acts of brigandage; so was the enslavement of Africans for transportation to the Americas. The United States of America is a rich country and it is still true that its wealth derives partly from the historical enslavement of Africans. Contemporary African-Americans are still experiencing the continuing negative consequences of the past acts of brigandage which brought their enslaved African ancestors to the American continent. The obligation for restitution follows.
No. Many more factors go into calculating the form restitution should take than those which establish the basic obligation.The dispossession of the entire non-Indigenous population of Australia would go far beyond what is justified. The suggestion is a mischievous one; it distorts and obscures the real issues to give currency to the idea that the dispossession of all non-Indigenous Australians might be a real goal.
MisterMr 05.12.22 at 11:58 am
@Tm 29
Property is an important thing, it is not the only right but it is a very important one, in particular in modern society where other forms of rights like castes or aristocracy disappeared. I don’t think that framing colonialism as a property problem is a way to trivialize what happened. I see european colonialism as a process similar (but much more extreme) to what happened in europe with the enclosures and similar dinamics: resources that were previously common became privatised and the people who lived on the common resources were screwed.
@J-D 33
“The suggestion is a mischievous one”
I’m indeed being mischievous, but not in the way you say: my point is exactly that nobody wants to give all the land to the natives.
In my opinion, your position is contradictory.
You say “Contemporary African-Americans are still experiencing the continuing negative consequences…” but, while blacks have lower incomes than whites in the USA, I don’t see how a black citizien is suffering more negative consequences than a white citizien whith the same income.
So if we are speaking of consequences, either we can determine a specific point of injustice and act only against it, or we are speaking of inequality in general.
For some reason you disagree that we have to speak of inequality in general, and you previously said that restitution depends on “possession of the spoils”; but “possession of the spoils” is a very hard rule that would give arguably too few to some (e.g. blacks) and too much to others (natives), or at least would be too burdensome to non indigenous people.
It seems to me that you are bouncing between a strict definition of a specific injustice and the general one about inequality, but for some reason you can’t/don’t want to accept the general one about inequality.
Stephen 05.12.22 at 6:58 pm
CB: claims to resources on the part of indigenous populations have to both settle the thorny and contested question of who counts as indigenous, and to upset the lives that have been blamelessly built by many in the very places that indigenous people used to hold.
J-D@15: there could only be an obligation to make restitution for the forcible seizure of the Peloponnese if there existed, to receive that restitution, a distinguishable surviving pre-Hellenic population still negatively affected by the continuing effects of that wrong
So let’s look at an actual modern example. If you believe Plaid Cymru, there is in Wales a distinguishable surviving Welsh-speaking Brythonic population still negatively affected by the continuing effects of the forceful and wrongful Anglo-Saxon invasion.
Then is restitution from England to Wales obligatory?
Possible exceptions: Pembrokeshire, Little England beyond Wales. Cornwall, technically in England but not ethnically so. And are restitutions due from relatively recent Asian or African immigrants to England to relatively recent Asian or African immigrants to Wales? Not to mention English people now living in Wales, Welsh people living in England?
Rather a large can of worms, I fear.
J, not that one 05.12.22 at 9:23 pm
Looking at racism internationally is potentially very interesting. For instance, at music festivals in the US, it seems to be common to acknowledge the Native inhabitants of the land where the festival is taking place, thanking them or including a Native prayer or statement by a representative of a local tribe. I believe this was initially done in Australia and Canada, but has been taken over as an indication of support for all people of color and for anti-colonialist movements. Support for Black North Americans and West Indians was almost certainly not part of the original Australian intent, but these kinds of things evolve very naturally.
In the US, we have tended to focus on trends at a federal level and constitutional questions (that is, why is our Constitution better than Communism or Fascism?), and I wonder if there will be resistance to looking at state-by-state lawmaking as the OP suggests, and a tendency to equate its existence anywhere with its being the only law everywhere–which will most likely generate its own resistance in turn.
J-D 05.13.22 at 1:42 am
I didn’t mean that you were being mischievous, my point was that the suggestion was mischievous, in the sense of being harmful in its effects.
In every country that I know anything about, there is inequality between the rich and the poor–more in some countries than in others. This inequality is a bad thing and everybody would benefit from a reduction in inequality. This is true independently of the particular historical sources of a particular pattern on inequality.
In the United States, it is a recorded fact that black Americans are, on average, poorer than white Americans. So we can consider the following two possibilities:
(1) the economic inequality between white and black Americans is completely unrelated to any continuing effects of the sequence of historical events deriving from the experience of slavery–that’s a complete coincidence;
(2) the experience of slavery is at the beginning of a chain of events which has continuing indirect effects up to the present, and those effects contribute at least in part to the present economic inequality between black and white Americans.
When I see those two possibilities spelled out like that, I can’t figure any way to accept (1) and reject (2), and if you can I hope you can tell me about it.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the negative effects of an act of brigandage and dispossession are purely material/economic, and this applies both to the immediate and direct effects and to the lingering indirect effects. The continuing negative effects on African-Americans deriving indirectly from the history of slavery cannot be captured entirely by economic measurements. However, it is possible, at least in some instances, depending on how the issue is handled, for some form of material restitution to play a part in a process which does something to redress negative effects both economic and non-economic.
I can imagine that some people might say that if sufficient action were taken to remedy the general problem of economic inequality, it would also resolve the specific problems of groups of people currently experiencing the continuing negative effects of past historical dispossessions (such as First Nations peoples in many countries, and descendants–in the US and other countries–of enslaved populations). The fact that those specific problems are not purely economic in nature gives cause for doubt about this, but I suppose it might possibly be true. However, even if it were true, not enough is currently being done to remedy the general problem of economic inequality, and while that remains true the case for specific action to remedy the more specific problems I have mentioned remains valid.
There’s no contradiction between accepting the case for action to deal with the more general problem and the case for more specific actions to deal with the more specific problems.
Fake Dave 05.13.22 at 1:54 am
@34
Income is irrelevant. Wealth (in all its forms) is the metric that matters. Income fluctuates constantly, but wealth is built generationally and tends to be quite “sticky” within families and communities. If grandma loses the farm, all her heirs lose it too. We don’t need an elaborate theory of racial justice to know who those heirs are. Simple genealogy will do. Determining whether those heirs deserve restitution is a thornier issue, but it’s also a legal problem that is largely unrelated to demography. You don’t have to make it about “races” at all.
William Berry 05.13.22 at 5:26 am
Am I hallucinating or is this actually something that was posted?
I generally don’t like commenting here (there’s a lot of tedious prissiness in the comments IMNSHO), but I can’t let this pass.
(Am I wrong in thinking that “Mr. Mister” has been an astute commenter on CT in the past? Maybe I have been overly generous in my assessment.)
Am I meant to understand, and to accept as a matter of fact, that as long as an AA person’s and a white person’s financial situations are the same, there should* be no difference in the negative consequences they might suffer?
I mean, something, something, vote suppression, murder cops, housing and job discrimination— on and on and on. (I’d love to see Simon Balto, or Ta Nehisi Coates, or Jamelle Bouie, or Maya Wiley, so many others, respond** to this shit.)
But never mind. Mr. Mister is spewing racist garbage, and probably doesn’t realize it, and probably would deny it, and apparently doesn’t care. (Or is this some 11-dimensional irony and I’m just too tired and sleepy to appreciate it?)
*Well, that usage (“should”) might be a little complicated. Obviously, there “should” be no difference. That there is a difference is, of course, the whole problem.
**Wait; they already have, numerous times, and at length. Mr. Mister should do some reading.
lurker 05.13.22 at 7:58 am
‘the Spaniard could well believe that the only property rights that exists are those that are accepted by the king of Spain or perhaps by the Pope’ (MisterMr, 1)
Some Spaniards did think seriously about this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#The_conquest_of_America and their conclusions did not please Charles V.
lurker 05.13.22 at 8:06 am
@J-D 15
Yes, a settler state is a meaningful concept only in a context where an indigenous people still exists.
To use a non-Anglo example, Russia is a settler state in its relationship to the existing indigenous peoples of Siberia, North Caucasia and the far north of Russia, but Russia’s Muscovite core is post-settler. Moscow is built on indigenous Meryan land, but there are no Meryans left.
J-D 05.13.22 at 10:20 am
It was not my intention to cause you to feel fear, but if I have unintentionally had that effect on you, I wish you the courage to deal with your fears.
Do you believe Plaid Cymru? Why or why not?
I observed in a previous comment that many more factors go into calculating the form restitution should take than those which establish the basic obligation. That makes it a more difficult question. However, in the kind of cases we are considering, it’s generally going to be unfeasible and not sensible to try to remedy the problem at the individual level. In the typical case of the kind of enduring historical wrongs under discussion, if anything practical is to be done about restitution on the relevant scale, the obligation is going to have to fall on a national government. I don’t know enough about the history to be sure, but there’s nothing obviously unreasonable about the idea that the government of the United Kingdom has some specific obligations to the Welsh people.
MisterMr 05.13.22 at 10:53 pm
@J-D 37
I certainly agree that (2) is true and (1) is false, but I don’t see why this entails that economic inequality caused by previous acts of brigandage/dispossession is worse of other forms of economic inequality.
Other forms of injustice, such as racial harassment, are a different story.
“There’s no contradiction between accepting the case for action to deal with the more general problem and the case for more specific actions to deal with the more specific problems.”
This is true, but if the case for action for a specific problem is built on a logic premise that hides the other more general problems this should be pointed out.
The problem that I see is that, in my opinion, it seems that many assume that all inequality/problem is caused by some earlier case of dispossession/brigandage/discrimination etc., which is not true in pratice.
This in my opinion is based on an idealized view of how our society works, and this idealized view hampers progressive policies.
@Fake Dave 38
“Income is irrelevant. Wealth (in all its forms) is the metric that matters.”
Point taken.
@William Berry 39
I’m MisterMr, MrMister is another commenter (who according to a comment in a different thread is a gay academic, whereas I’m neither).
I hope I’m the abstute one, though. Abstute, but bad at spelling.
“and probably would deny it”
Yes in fact I deny that I said anything racist in this thread, but feel free to point in greater detail what I said that is racist.
@lurker 40
Cool! But the “Ius peregrinandi et degendi”, that would negate all limits to any form of migration, is not based on any concept of ethnicity, and in fact it’s more or less the negation of the idea of thinking in terms of ethnicity.
William Berry 05.14.22 at 2:55 am
I owe an apology to the redoubtable Mr,Mister who I unforgivably confused with a tiresome troll, now grown fat and happy by being overfed (I apologize for my own part in that).
The troll’s ‘nym is an obvious ripoff of “Mr.Mister”, a longtime, and generally excellent, commenter here. Since this works an actual injury (by an invidious association), I don’t know why it is tolerated by the moderators.
banned commenter 05.14.22 at 6:37 am
@41 “Moscow is built on indigenous Meryan land”
Hmm. But surely Meria themselves, being a Ugro-Finnish tribe, had to migrate from western Siberia?
Anyhow, may I suggest that perhaps assimilation (which is what happened to Meria) is the perfect solution to all this nonsense? Wait a couple of centuries, and hopefully righteous victims and evil conquerors will mix-and-melt and synthesize into one and the same. Unless, of course, some version of identity politics keeps them apart forever. But that’s really a malfunction, a failure… I think.
J-D 05.14.22 at 6:48 am
I didn’t write that it was a worse problem–I’m not sure that comparisons of the kind are possible. I observed that it is a more specific type of problem.
It may be possible to distinguish the economic and the non-economic aspects of the issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s possible to separate them entirely, still less that it is advisable to do so.
I don’t know who it is that you suppose to be making such an assumption; certainly I don’t.
Stephen 05.14.22 at 7:38 am
J-D @42: I’m afraid you haven’t quite grasped some of the subtler aspects of colloquial English usage. Not your fault, of course.
As for Plaid Cymru: surely the point is not whether I believe them, but whether they themselves believe in their grievances. Since some of them have been so aggrieved that they have set fire to English-owned or UK Government property, I conclude they do.
That the government of the United Kingdom has some specific obligations to the Welsh people is an acceptable idea. Look up Senedd Cymru if you have time. More controversial is the idea that the government of the United Kingdom has some specific obligations to the English people.
MisterMr 05.14.22 at 9:04 am
For what is worth, MR are my initials:
MisterMr -> Mister Marco Rossi
So I can’t be MrMister, it wouldn’t work.
I also am an active commenter since at least ten years, initially with the nickname Random Lurker, then since some years ago as MisterMr.
J-D 05.14.22 at 11:37 am
Sometimes this happens after a couple of centuries and sometimes it doesn’t. However, in a situation where it has not yet happened, the fact that the future possibility exists (a) does not justify trying to force it and (b) does not justify doing nothing else about the current problem now.
Don’t be afraid, and don’t imagine that I think of the difference in our styles as a defect in yourself.
It has considerable value as evidence that (some) Welsh people still experience negative effects from past (or even present) wrongs committed against the Welsh, but I’m not sure it’s conclusive.
I am already aware of Senedd Cymru, as it happens.
If you have any basis for supposing that the government of the UK has obligations towards the English people specifically related to historical wrongs committed against the English people specifically, you have not shared it, and I can’t think what those specific wrongs might be.
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