re: Before all this woke stuff started several years ago, didn’t race relations seem good?

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then progress isn't possible

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Depends on what you mean. There are lots of things at play. There is demographic merging across multiple cultural elements, and when you combine this with technological progress (which is fundamentally changing the medium by which we engage with the world) and the culture lag that follows, you are seeing a new culture with its rules of what is and isn't appropriate being developed. The problem with this is that if technological progress continues at a rate that exceeds our ability to make cogent rules, people will continually feel as though they are experiencing significant upheaval, as the mediums we use to engage with the world reinforce that perception, whereas our tactile perceptions might be completely different.

Change is a certainty, and it is almost assured that you won't see a codified apartheid system in the country at any point, which is legal progress. But the cultural project people that is ongoing is fundamentally related to how we interact with technology. I'm working on a long post related to the cultural theorist thread on the PT board which touches on this.

But I'm rejecting the notion that progress is based on an individual's perception of events. What changes and what is changing is largely beyond a single individual's ability to perceive. I think the progress from the CR era was cemented rather quickly, given the relative paucity of riots and protests after 1970 in comparison to before, where there were upwards of 100 incidents of civil unrest per decade. It is only with this protest that we've reached a number closer to the 1968 protests, and still, I'd wager the 1968 protests were larger in a per capita sense.