The person, one Mr Cuntis Yarvin, at the centre of the #lamdaconf debacle performed an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. One of his defenders on Twitter referenced this response from the AMA as proof that he was not racist.
I appreciate that giving more commentary space to this situation provides the oxygen that our protagonist craves. On the other hand I feel like this is sufficiently important to our community to stand up and defend those people that this person seeks to diminish and damage.
So, with that and a deep breath, let's take this response bit by bit and see whether it works out as a defence by the protagonist as evidence of his lack of racism.
Amusingly, my "one offensive comment" was actually me repeating something my wife (not at all a 'shitlady') learned in her MFA program at SF State (not at all a Hitler Youth academy). (This is the observation that the conquistadors began the slave trade with Africa because Native Americans didn't thrive as slaves, which is not at all controversial history.) I figured that this wasn't exactly the sort of thing I'd say, but coming from her it was probably okay.
So we start with him throwing his wife under the bus. I cannot judge whether or not she's not a "shitlady" but wedlock to this guy has some degree of shit attached to it.
The central claim, repeated here, is that the slave trade began with Africa because Native Americans didn't thrive as slaves.
Are we sure that this is not controversial history? On whose authority is that made other than perhaps his own?
The controversy is clear: by inference Africans did thrive as slaves. The word thrive is explosive in this context. Thrive, according to Merriam Webster means "to grow or develop successfully : to flourish or succeed". How can any race thrive as slaves. Slavery sets deliberate and harsh limits on growth and success.
On this evidence his wife in fact does come over as a 'shitlady'. Likewise he, both for throwing her under the bus and worse, for not being able or willing to make the smallest change to the wording - despite his ever so slight distancing - is most certainly a 'shitman'.
Perhaps oddly, if anything I thought of this as a negative observation about Native Americans (I probably wouldn't do super well in the sugarcane fields either).
He goes on. Now he's not going to do so well in the sugarcane fields. So he's much more like the Native Americans than the Africans. The self-deprecation is meant to be endearing and detract from his central racist observation: that he, as an individual can represent his race. But individuals - like himself, no matter how kitten-weak - do not represent an entire race. Obversely an entire race cannot be summed up so glibly.
Similarly, if I said that Greek Jews were more likely to survive in Auschwitz than Western European Jews (which is also true), this would strike me as a positive comment on the toughness of Greek Jews, not an opinion that they should be sent to the ovens first.
What a context - the Nazi gas ovens! It's breathtaking in itself that he's prepared to go there but then comes the segmentation: He claims as true that one group of Jews was more likely to survive than another. This self-evidently racist assertion is tossed in so casually. I wonder if the 'truth' of this comes from holocaust survivors or a narrow, revisionist statistician. Either way, to divide Jews into who is most and least likely to survive the gas ovens is generally offensive. I cannot imagine the context in which it would be taken as a compliment by a Greek Jew survivor.
Somehow, which shouldn't have surprised me, this commonplace historical observation metamorphosed into "everyone of African descent is best suited to cutting sugarcane for the Noble White Man." I don't have a problem with "rescinding" that, since I never said it.
This is not an apology. He retains his assertion that the observation is commonplace. He only "rescinds" a mocking version of the metamorphosis. Conversely, the fabric of his defence is made of racist and offensive presuppositions woven into attempts at polite and reasonable claims and assertions.
This case needed some clear evidence that the racist as the centre of this controversy remains stoical and unrepentant. I am glad that he has produced it himself.
Yes this isn't controversial history. There are many reasons why Native Americans made worse slaves than Africans. For instance, they had a weaker culture around the concept of "work" and specialization of labor, which means that when they were enslaved they were simply less effective at doing their job. In my country (Brazil) there still remains the stereotype of natives and regions filled with natives being generally described as lazy and unproductive. Another reason is that they were less immune to diseases brought by Europeans. One of the main reasons why the European incursion in the Americas was so successful was because diseases completely ravaged the native population. Another reason they didn't make good slaves was because they fought back more often than Africans. Africans, when in far away lands, defaulted to submission and obedience, while generally Native Americans remained defiant. Another reason was that Africans themselves enslaved each other a lot. Native Americans also did it but to a lesser extent.
You can just look all of this up and I think most of it will be true.
You're reading more into the claim than was there. From the perspective of people enslaving others, Africans thrived since they were better slaves than Native Americans. And since the text was talking about history and historical facts, it makes no sense to remove context and come to the conclusion that the author is making a statement about how Africans became better because of slavery. Thrive here means they were better than others. Not they became better because of it.
I don't know enough about Nazi Germany to assess if his statement on Jews were correct or not, but assuming he's a Jew he probably knows his history better than me. But the point is similar to the one about Africans and Native Americans. There were differences between two groups of people, biological and sociological, that improved the chances of one group getting through a bad situation.
It seems like I won't convince you of anything though. The way you write implies you already think he's racist and nothing he writes will convince you otherwise. He did write another reply that explains his points even more thoroughly https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarvin_developer_of_urbit_ama/d1dlkjd and he wrote another post today https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d#.w2hcahg4s that explains the same point even further. But I know for a fact you won't change your mind. So I won't reply to whatever you reply back to me. Good luck.