Properly speaking, no, the moral status of racial segregation in the past is not affected by unknown future events. In the minds of our descendants, though, things might be different. The civil rights narrative we learned in school is that blacks wanted to be equal, to blend in as indistinguishable pieces of a post-racial society, and there were so few of them that it would have cost whites very little to integrate them, but out of perverse hatred we refused to do it. Today, whites are legally disfavored, we are disproportionately the victims of interracial violence, and our history and culture are demonized by the media and schools. Still, none of this affects the average white very much, because we’re still a majority. Soon, though, we’ll be a minority, a legally disfavored, widely despised and scapegoated minority, and that will be much worse than the current minor inconveniences of affirmative action and antiracist status-signaling. The narrative of American racial relations will surely be different then, once it is clear that equality was just a brief transition period between white supremacy and colored supremacy. Equality is unstable. One naturally settles to a state where one race has higher status than another. In such a zero-sum game, it is more understandable that whites once used the law to keep themselves in the top spot. One needn’t suppose that they were driven by some inexplicable form of hatred. This is, at least, how it will appear, even if equality was once an achievable thing and segregation really was driven by anti-black animus.
It may be realized in the future that whites resorted to law because of the weakness of our race, because we knew that in a level social playing field with blacks, we would lose. Certainly whiteness is genetically weak: the child of a white and a black is black, by general acknowledgment both when being white was high status and now that being black is high status. Whites may well be socially inferior too; I remember reading somewhere that black high school students are more popular than white high school students. Most importantly, we whites know ourselves to be inferior to the blacks and the Jews in morale. (I haven’t been talking about Jews up till now, but they really fit in on this point.) The really frightening thing about our racial competitors is their absolute certainty in their superior righteousness. The blacks and the Jews, it would seem, never experience the doubt that plagues whites, much less our sense of moral inferiority before the Other. They are certain that our identity is based on hatred; we deny it, but we understand their point and worry they might be right. They never worry that maybe we’ve got a point. In a contest between certainty and doubt, their certainty will always win.
Why do they have the stronger faith? Maybe it’s innate; whites just aren’t as good at group loyalty. Maybe we really are morally inferior and know it; having admitted that slavery was wrong, we can’t feel ever again like we have any moral legitimacy in the face of blacks. That would be ironic. It would mean we were compelled to keep being unjust to them just because we had already been unjust to them so long that an acknowledgement of their equality would immediately be an acknowledgement of their superiority. Even though one might then say that the whole thing is ultimately whites’ fault (although remember that European countries that never practiced slavery or colonialism also get demands that they become “multicultural”, i.e. accept colored supremacy), one can appreciate that the whites born later inherited quite a predicament. Does it ever end? Are whites going to have to ask blacks to enslave us before we can again be a race like any other?
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