Misguided?

I and fellow Twittereactionary Jim (not Jim Donald or Kalb) ran into an open-minded progressive the other day on Twitter and had a lovely time. At least I think she was open-minded. And it didn’t really look that way at the start.

Apparently this young woman, going by the unusual name EATingthePress and self-described DC Area researcher stumbled upon a conversation that Jim and I were having about a week ago regarding miscegenation and how black women tended, more than most groups, to hate interracial coupling. This is, of course, a well documented fact by social survey data, rates of out-marriage (wherein black men out-marry at twice the rate of black women), and is well ratified anecdotally by anyone who has spent much time around black women at all.

Anyway, to make a short story long, Jim and I, by way of a furious tweeting frenzy (twenzy?), straightened out this “Researcher” (who may for all know actually be employed doing research, potentially with your tax dollars) on the fine point of an average of opinion not being quite the same thing as the opinion of Every Black Woman in the World at All Times, and a few other key aspects of rhetoric and statistics with which high quality researchers ought to be familiar.

The conversation grew quite cordial, and EATingthePress actually apologized for her hostile introductory remarks (something to the effect “you two are totally bigoted idiots”). I was curious how she felt after meeting us, and finding Jim and I far more informed, intelligent, and benevolent than should probably expected. So I put the question to her:

@Nick_B_Steves definitely misguided but I believe you both are more than ok. Try to be open & not afraid of the future. Its gonna be ok 🙂

— EATingthePress (@CMar13Newsfeed) November 19, 2013

And I know that EATingthePress was probably just being polite and didn’t really want say “fscked up in the head” but otherwise totally okay, and so used the term “misguided”, but that word really stuck with me: Misguided. Me? Jim?? Misguided?? By WHOM??!!

If I am misguided it is in spite of, not because of, all the “guidance” that the society at large endeavors to give. 90% of all clergymen do not say, cannot say what I happen to believe to be true about the world. And 95% of corporate honchos do not say it. And 98% of politicians. And 99.2% of media pundits. And 99.9987% of university professors do not say it.

If there were a conspiracy to keep Nick B. Steves (or JimC3 or any Reactionary, neo- or otherwise) from believing what he believes about the world, you could hardly come up with a better plan than creating the Western intellectual environment in which we live. (I.e., short of exterminating us, which has of course been tried in some even more progressive states than our own.)

And yet what I believe about sex and race is what virtually every human, having the leisure and intellectual capacity to actually form a coherent opinion, believed well into the 20th Century. Although I ferociously oppose what Woodrow Wilson did for to the world of international relations, can anyone plausibly think that his views on sex and race were more “liberal”, more “progressive”, than mine? Doubtful.

Woodrow Wilson and I would disagree on much, but not on the plain facts before our eyes concerning differences between the sexes and differences between the races. If anything, I have far more data today to confirm what Mr. Wilson took only intuitively and anecdotally.

If I am misguided, then I have done to myself, but not at all because I could not be made to see reason. I am misguided enough to refuse to ignore the patent facts before my eyes, and not see things that are obviously not there. I’ve quote it before, but the words of Jim Donald drip with timeless wisdom:

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

If that’s misguided, then so be it. I’ll deal.