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 Originally Posted by rong
I don't believe that's necessarily true. Surely an alternate outcome could simply be a very divided society where hatred and bigotry goes unchecked and creates such a then and us society that war would be very likely.
That outcome would be divergent from demonstrated reality though. We have loads of real life examples of ways in which anti-discrimination policy perpetuates racism and discrimination, and ways in which these problems work themselves out in the absence of law enforcement.
To Dr. King's credit, his biggest accomplishment was to undo some of the state-sanctioned racism of his day. Private businesses that discriminated against blacks were never the problem. A mild nuisance at best. We can choose not to eat at a white-only restaurant, but we cannot choose not to have a racist judge, or a racist district attorney, or a segregated public school. As with most problems, its only really a problem when it involves the state.
You don't need a law against discrimination to prevent businesses from discriminating. The profit and loss system already takes care of that. A restaurant that only allows whites to walk in will be at a massive disadvantage to one that doesn't discriminate. A firm that only hires whites will be at a disadvantage to competing firm that hires the equally-qualified blacks at a lower salary and underbids them on every project (due to having lower overhead costs).
The only time something like a white-only restaurant or a white-only country club would exist in a free society would be where it is valued. That is, when racist customers so value being in an environment with only white people that they are willing to pay out the ass for it. And even in this case, the business has to worry about its reputation in the community. A lot of these problems just work themselves out culturally.
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