This is just an incredibly dishonest framing.

Go ahead, try to frame his statement in the opposite direction, feel free to be as dishonest as you like.

Why would I need to go dishonest? Byrd made a lot of mistakes, and changed with the times. Lots of people require the times to change around them. You are one of these people if I've ever met one. Unfortunately it's the default mode for most people. The strongest agent of social change is the changing social circle after all.

It's dishonest because slavery stopped 150 years ago but legal discrimination ended less than 50 years ago and actively benefited every white person, and we still have an active Republican party currently actively creating laws designed to discriminate.

Byrd also personally benefitted (in political terms) from being aligned with the platform of Southern Democrats. He notably didn't renounce the Klan until the 90s, when it had become clear that the Democrats' grip on the South was a lost cause and would crumble over the next decade.

Byrd aside, I vehemently disagree with your claim that every white person actively benefitted from the discrimination of blacks - not in, say, 1970 and even less so in 2010.




What do you mean? My policy preferences and general ideology/worldview did not change in years. If my assessment of, e.g., the Trump presidency has changed, that's in reaction to his own actions (notably his failures in 2020 and his delusional, dangerous post-election antics) rather than the attitudes of others in my social circle or here on PaRD. Compared to most people, I have a very low inclination to go with the flow or to succumb to the zeitgeist...

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 6 2021 12:34pm

Every white person who participated in the economy benefitted from suppression of competition of other races. You don't get to escape the benefit when the entire society is designed to exclude your competition.

That's a really inadequate zero-sum perspective. We can assume blacks to be just as talented and hard-working as whites, so including blacks into the economy and society should have grown the economy and wealth about proportionally. The pie would have to be shared among more people, but also grow in size. It's highly non-trivial to calculate which effect would have been larger.



Yes, certain low IQ/low skill whites would have been worse off if they had to compete, but the higher education whites would have benefitted from society tapping into the potential of blacks. All whites would also have benefitted from a more equal society, better race relations, less crime and government spending on police and prisons, and so on. For those unfit for meritocratic competition, the downsides of racial integration would presumably have prevailed, but for everyone else, Jim Crow was a net negative.


At the end of the day, the diverging economic development of the antebellum South and North prove that slavery or slavery-adjacent discrimination does not create sustainable wealth. In the long run, slavery or massive racial discrimination leaves everyone worse off except for a tiny few rich elites and a few low ability individuals from the privileged group.

Jim Crow did not make working- and middle-class whites rich, it made (almost) all of America poorer.

How are the descendants of blacks that owned slaves supposed to feel?

who cares lol. start to live in the present. why is it always people of color who live in the fucking past.

dude try to tell us he's white but he got to be lowkey black to be that biased .

freelancing yourself never been that easy, stop trying to work a desk job and freelance yourself and you won't feel oppressed.

This post was edited by SunnyvaleTrailerPark on Jun 6 2021 01:03pm

I am as white as they come. Sorry bro.