From: drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Subject: Re: Discrimination and anti-discrimination laws
Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA
	<DRW.92Dec10185240@phragmen.mit.edu>
	<1992Dec11.142450.29687@ux1.cts.eiu.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 21:33:25 GMT

In article <1992Dec11.142450.29687@ux1.cts.eiu.edu> cfthb@ux1.cts.eiu.edu (Howard Black) writes:
   Then why exempt gays from it, if it's "the best practical solution
   available at the moment"?

Better to say "why not include gays in it...".  Actually, the same can
be said for "why not include *everybody* in it...".  You might be
right though.  But the discrimination against gays isn't as intense as
it is against blacks.  Yes, there are gay-bashings, etc., but it's
easier to keep being gay undercover.  There's even the weird statistic
that the average gay person (or is it household?) makes a lot more
money than the average person.  (Though that's likely to be affected
by who defines themselves to be gay.)  The extension of
anti-discrimination laws should be done rather sparingly, because of
the costs that such laws impose.  And if and when the prejudice
against a particular group declines to a relatively low level, that
group should be stricken from the anti-discrimination laws.

   >solution is the assimilation of the blacks into the mainstream US
   >ethnic group, which should take another two or three generations.

   If you mean genetic assimilation, get real and look around.  It has
   already been many generations, and I don't see any evidence of it occuring
   at all. 

Well, it depends on who you look at.  Have you ever seen a crowd scene
in an English movie?  They all look *alike*, and very *pale*, even to
myself, who grew up in an all-white town in Iowa.  There's been a lot
of mixing in the American population, although it officially doesn't
exist -- The average American "White" is of something like 10% African
ancestry, and the average American "Black" is of something like 25%
European ancestry.  American Whites are considerably darker (on the
average) than the northern European population that they are
supposedly derived from.  American Blacks are considerably lighter
than the west African population.

Of course, you are right to ask why assimilation would start now, when
it hasn't happened for the preceeding 300 years.  The reason is, I
think, that the wall of prejudice has started to crack in a lot of
little ways, and that is going to cause a lot of larger cracks in the
next generation or so.  The situation of American Blacks is a lot
better than it was 40 years ago.  Well, situation of the middle class
ones, that is.  (The poor blacks are doing worse, but that's another
question.)  40 years ago, the number of middle-class blacks (middle
class in terms of income) was vanishingly small.  Now, they are about
1/3 of all blacks.  (And rising reasonably rapidly.)  And the number
of inter-racial marriages is going up significantly.  In cities like
New York, there are a lot of people of "mixed" racial background, when
classified by the standard American racial system.  (Such people tend
to get themselves classified under whichever race is most expedient at
the moment, which leaves affirmative action programs in a quandry!)

Comparing the American Blacks to other minorities, they seem to fit
the standard model reasonably well, if you pretend that they arrived
in the US about 1960.  Three generations after that (around 2020 or
2035), we will start to resemble Jamaica, where they don't seem to
have "races" at all.

By that time, no doubt, we'll have an underclass of Hispanics,
discriminated against by the Anglos (formerly the Whites and Blacks).
:-(

Dale
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