Update CRA 64

Update: As usual, THC goes more or less where I'm going with this.

The blunt instrument that is anti-discrimination law was only necessary in an environment with cartels of local control between local bigotry in control of laws and businesses/property to the exclusion of any competing views. The "market" solution is to allow competitive entry and exit, but that's closed off by legal and social regimes. Right of exit is one thing when someone may be talking about moving down the road to the next town say, and it's a lot easier now with a global economy, but in the 1960s, moving away meant moving away from friends, families, and social institutions which you had some strong emotional and even economic attachment to (just as it does now, but without the ease of global communication and air travel access). These decisions are not easily made, and they are made harder still when there are few places to go. I question the logic of "well they could just move North or to Mexico, or go back to Africa". These are indeed options, but they are not and were not necessarily good options. They also suffer from some of the same centralising failures of logic that imposing anti-discrimination laws do: they assume motives and interests from afar that may not be appropriate for local decisions. Much less that the amount of resources required for uprooting millions of people was never taken into account or delegated.

To boot, the other glaring problem is that all of these options still excluded private businesses and owners of property from contracting in particular ways with people of other races in the place of strife and contention for mutual economic and personal gains. I cannot see how this should be suffered for us to abide. If the penalty for this is that a vanishingly smaller number of people are compelled against their will to employ people of racial characteristics that they do not share and do not care for, or to serve or sell products to such people as they would prefer not do business with, this may be a small price to pay.

Sadly, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the blunt instrument selected has not quite had this impact. Racially motivated business owners or home owners, etc, have relocated to more racially homogeneous neighbourhoods or residences to escape the petty inconveniences of being visited upon by these feared or abhorred "others". This has often gutted the economic capacities of the places they departed (typically inner-city urban areas) and reduced the ethnic diversity of cuisines, schools, and local culture, to the contrary of well-intended premises that people should not self-segregate over such meaningless trivialities. Likewise private schooling in some locales imposes a de facto state of segregation, imposing a caste system of poverty upon a few who cannot escape. I'm not sure that there is a way to escape this problem through decisive legal action; to compel people to abandon attitudes of suspicion, mistrust, and hatred in all their forms. Racism, and its related nationalism or xenophobia, should be shunned and openly opposed for the costs it imposes on people of all races and cultures. But I'm not willing to go "thought police" to expunge it from society or even to ban the expression of it. I am willing only to combat it from the perspective that it is wrong and to oppose it where it imposes visible and obvious costs and penalties.

The one positive benefit of something blunt like CRA might be that this shunning and opposition became more successful and possible or effective in some places, driving out systematic and legally oppressive regimes encrusting a particularly pernicious social and cultural view of the world. I suspect that this may be in time worth the cost of sacrificing the liberty of a few from withholding voluntarily the capacity to do business with only people they wish to contract with (ie, people of the same race and culture). There are still no mechanisms, legal or otherwise, to compel the free association and companionship, the mingling of couples, parties, and outings involving these disassociated ethnic enclaves. But if at least our economic participation absolves us of this original sin, maybe we're getting somewhere.