A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

> It's a really fascinating part of history I always try to learn more about.

I suspect the regressive cultural backlash at the US at the moment as the "next generational" response the the civil rights campaigns in the mid-late 20th century.

In my personal opinion directly race based stuff is behind us at this point. There's only one generation alive today who remember a time where it wasn't just taken for granted that all races have equal potential to yield high (and very low) achieving people and that generation is above "shaking things up" age.

I think regression will be along some other axis. My personal two suspects are a) some variant of gender roles and the way they've changed since the 1960s and b) the widespread acceptance of cultural diversity being a good thing and the idea that there can not be superiority between cultures. The "goodness" of both of these things has been challenged quite a bit recently either directly or by shifting circumstances on other fronts causing people to need to think more critically about those subjects. In contrast, the goodness of not being racist (at least on a first order level) has been sailing along quite successfully recently.

They aren’t really regressions if they weren’t accepted in the first place. A look at the signs on display this time of year just a short drive outside my (major US) city easily convinces me that this is the case, too.

> the idea that there can not be superiority between cultures

I don't believe that. I don't even think that you believe it.

Here's culture A, which believes that there cannot be superiority between cultures. And here's culture B, which believes that there can be superiority between cultures, and in fact that B is the superior one. I'm pretty sure, based on what you said here, that you think that A is the superior culture, and that B should change into A (or at a minimum, that A should not change into B).

And if you can look at, say, the culture of Denmark, and that of Afghanistan, and think that neither is superior as a culture to the other, that seems to me to be almost wilfully blind.

You're right I, here and now in 2024, don't believe it, at least not without some pretty tightly bounded limits. And when you take it to extremes like "afghans vs danes" I think it becomes clear that lot of other people also never really believed in limitless cultural tolerance and sensitivity to the same extent with which they peddled it and that there was always implied limits that were never verbalized.

Funny you mention Afghanistan. I almost did in my original comment. I think Afghanistan and the people we we spent 20yr propping up there is the wedge that will drive open the door to broader discussion domestically.

You can already see this starting to happen where people are getting more comfortable comparing the pros and cons of various subsets of American cultures. Will it turn into anything, IDK.

Accepting that the notion of "superior" has to be culturally defined (it is a value judgement), it follows that cultures will always observe other cultures as inferior or superior based on their own definitions.

Cultures are fundamentally incommensurable and cannot be viewed from some abstract or neutral viewpoint. That doesn't mean to say comparison and discussion isn't informative - just not conclusive.

That sounds like I misinterpreted your first comment. My apologies (I hate it when people misrepresent what I said).

> In my personal opinion directly race based stuff is behind us at this point. There's only one generation alive today who remember a time where it wasn't just taken for granted that all races have equal potential to yield high (and very low) achieving people and that generation is above "shaking things up" age.

All races may have potential but are absolutely not the same in opportunity and it very much is still a directly race based problem. If you want a trivial example, there's campaign messaging going on right now in the United States based on the racist idea that Haitan immigrants are killing and eating pets. If you look at the racial outcomes across the board they are much poorer for PoC in nearly every single possible thing you can reliably measure. From my view, there are still many of us that are of "shaking things up" age, I assure you, because much needs to be shaken up.

> Accepting that the notion of "superior" has to be culturally defined (it is a value judgement), it follows that cultures will always observe other cultures as inferior or superior based on their own definitions.

I think that's true. So when I say that Denmark is a better culture than Afghanistan, yes, I am making that judgment through the lens of western values. But as someone with four daughters, I simply cannot bend my mind far enough to consider Afghanistan's culture (or, perhaps, the Taliban's culture) as superior. (Though I admit that I might be able to if I were in the Taliban.)

But what I was aiming at was mostly the idea that it is morally superior to consider all cultures as having equal value. That position contradicts itself, even if the "morally superior" part is left unstated.

I will give you that all cultures have elements that are worthwhile.

Very well said. We can appreciate that there are a plurality of perspectives while asserting our own predispositions, preferences and value judgments (and I would share yours in this case), all without giving in to the contradictions of moral relativism.