1/- Two common objections to my recent Quillette piece: 1) “Aren’t the bad elements of black culture themselves a consequence of slavery/Jim Crow?” The answer could be “yes,” and it would change nothing. Because cultures outlive their causes, the question of how to improve black
2/- culture is orthogonal to the question of how black culture came to be 2) “Do you worry that criticisms of black culture will be used by white racists to further their agenda?” First, it would require intellectual gymnastics to read my criticism of black culture as an
3/- indictment of blacks as a genetically-related group of humans. I’m talking about nurture, not nature. Second, this argument is never made in the opposite direction. One rarely hears, “Can’t BLM arguments be used by violent radicals like the Dallas shooter to justify killing
cops?” If arguments are to be judged by their misapplications, none of us will escape hanging.
