Comment by softcactus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softcactus | Hacker News Reader

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> Just look at the African American incarnation rate, single parent household rate, etc. look before and after the civil rights act.

First leap of logic, attributing these issues to the civil rights act and not to years of systemic injustice in the US (and backlash to the civil rights act). This is like looking at the US before and after the civil war and pointing to inequality afterwards saying: "look how bad the inequality was after the civil war" due to slaves becoming sharecroppers. Do you actually think African Americans are worse off post-1964?

> Localized governance would not have had the same negative impacts.

Second leap of logic. Localized governance would have had slavery and Jim Crow laws still enacted. The reason why the Civil Rights Act was implemented at the Federal level was because it WOULD NOT have ever been implemented at the state or local level.

There is no "libertarian" solution when it comes to dealing with racism or similar conflicts. Consider any genocide, be it the Bosnian genocide or the Holocaust, etc. How do you combat that through a libertarian framework?

"Well, it would be government overreach to limit their ability to enforce segregation. Let the states decide."

"Well, it would be government overreach to limit their ability to do mass murder. Let the states decide."

Finally, consider why the concept of libertarianism exists in the first place. It exists to maximize personal liberty. If one person is meaningfully limiting the liberty of another, be it through violence, or economic means, ostracization, or intimidation, then wouldn't that be the BEST time for government to intervene to maximize the overall liberty of the system? I think we can all agree that the freedom to not be oppressed is more valuable than the freedom to oppress others.

> Do you actually think African Americans are worse off post-1964?

I think a lot the changes are misattributed and it depends by what metric.

To your point,

> First leap of logic, attributing these issues to the civil rights act and not to years of systemic injustice in the US (and backlash to the civil rights act).

We’re on the third generation since the act. If the act was effective we could argue systemic racism has been overcome. We could declare victory.

If it was a success this wouldn’t be a discussion. You can’t legislate things better. What we can say is since the 60s, there are more drugs, more single parents, reduced cultural strength, and supposedly still lots of racism. It doesn’t seem better.

> If the act was effective we could argue systemic racism has been overcome. We could declare victory.

It's a game of cat and mouse. Like in the Lee Atwater video I linked, the arguments for racism have become so abstract that it requires intimate knowledge of reactionary talking points to call them out. Red-lining, means-testing, austerity, and voter ID laws come to mind. These policies seem innocuous at first but they are an extension of Jim Crow into the modern day. My frustration with you in the other thread has been trying to point out that these tools are often defended under the guise of "election security" and "states rights" but are just tools to continue suppressing minorities.

Furthermore, segregation wasn't ended until a full decade later when the federal government started withholding funding for schools in the South.

> If it was a success this wouldn’t be a discussion. You can’t legislate things better. What we can say is since the 60s, there are more drugs, more single parents, reduced cultural strength, and supposedly still lots of racism. It doesn’t seem better.

Non-sequitur. How is a law from 1964 to combat Jim Crow supposed to account for a concerted effort by the US government to ship drugs into the US during the cold war, and then hardest criminalize the drugs used by minorities, then pass the crime bill under the Clinton administration and militarize the police and expand prisons massively?

I must repeat myself, your desire to play "devil's advocate" or whatever is happening, causes you to appear naive or willingly ignorant. Saying that the Civil Rights Act was the cause for African American drug use and incarceration is laughable and ignores the drug war started under Nixon, ramped up under Reagan, and given sharper teeth by Clinton. How is that argument supposed to be taken seriously?

Did the CRA usher in a post-racial utopia? No. To claim that it was ineffective because other factions in the government continued to undermine it is silly.

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