Instead, you fight racism by A) stomping it out where you see it, B) instituting policies that help poor and disadvantaged people in general. Strategies like that are much more foolproof than trying to fight racism with racism. Also much more expensive, which is why there's a temptation to kid ourselves that fighting racism with racism could possibly work.
What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out?
Are there cases I can read about where these strategies have been proven foolproof, has it worked in other countries to eliminate racism by helping the poor?
I'm an engineer. Systems theory is how I interface with these ideas. It has notions of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- i.e. how hard you can push (or how long you can delay feedback, the two are somewhat interchangeable, which is often under-appreciated) before your attempt to build a self-correcting airplane wing, power delivery circuit, rocket that points up, etc stops being self-correcting and turns into a wildly oscillating self-destructive mess that you should count yourself lucky if it only destroys itself without taking its surroundings with it.
In society, we can't calculate gain margin and phase margin, but we still have to decide how hard to push and if we push too hard, the system will still punish us. All of us. Nobody likes to hear "push more softly for the cause you believe in." I sure don't. But having screwed up this choice in an engineering context, I respect the possibility of screwing it up in a social context, and I see it as a strong argument for exercising restraint.
> What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out?
We've stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see, so from here out it's largely going to be difficult. That is: option B, above. That's how we go after the systemic racism: ensure that the system shrinks the influences of the past rather than growing them. In particular, we need to figure out what kind of support is necessary to give the next generation of kids a fair shake at life and give it to them. Even more specifically I'm thinking about federally funded health care, housing, and primary/secondary education. It's going to cost a lot. It's not going to let us indulge in fantasies of somehow canceling out the racism of yesterday. But it might let us fix tomorrow.
What examples are you thinking of? When has that happened?
> We’ve stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see
Are you sure about that? Why are you sure about it? There are a lot of metrics that still show wide inequalities by race, such as pay and wealth, access to health care, and last but not least education. Police treatment differing by race obviously still exists.
I think this has been the sticking point, that some people will only “see” obviously oppressive or racist behavior as something we should stomp out, but when it comes to outcomes, even though outcomes clearly shows racism exists, there’s a flood of fierce debate like this one that we shouldn’t do anything about it, in the name of being anti-discrimination.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02...
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-tre...
If the policy is to look at race and give/take points, that's racism in the most literal way possible.
If the policy is to look at SES, it's not racist, even though there's a correlation.
At some point correlations become strong enough that it's difficult to disentangle concepts, but I don't think this is an example of that. In particular: would giving points based on SES have screwed Asians in the way that trying to balance races did? Probably not. It's a better formulation of the problem.