Astral Codex Ten

Black

5 min read

Black

Article

Black is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 09, 2022 and March 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard”; “he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary”. It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 09, 2022
  • Last seen: March 09, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
In 1930 going to Harvard was something you did because you were a WASP. If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard. Partly because of racial discrimination to be sure. But partly because going to Harvard was not a prestigious trophy. Simply having a college degree marked you out as elite. So why not go to the college your community built? Where you'd see the elites of your own community?
Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
March 09, 2023 · Original source
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.
Inline links: society demands that politicians resign if they use it
“All lives matter” is a hyperstitious slur. Taken literally, it’s an inoffensive sentiment, perhaps the most inoffensive one. My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular, and that people would scream at you if you used it, then the only people who kept using it were ones who cared so little about BLM’s opinion that they didn’t mind - maybe welcomed - being screamed at. I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use. Now it’s probably 99-1.
True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” is a hyperstitious slur, in the sense that racists talk about it more than non-racists, this helps it become a signal for racism, the fact that it’s a known signal for racism causes non-racists to talk about it even less than they would otherwise, and the vicious cycle ends with it being a very strong signal for racism and non-racists avoiding mentioning it. This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on. I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case.