But that's the era where you are now. Consider the humble speeding ticket. Same flat fee for everyone. Well that means rich people can afford to break the rules.

In a "more equal" nation like Finland, speeding tickets are income proportional. A billionaire speeding is gonna pay a huge fine, and that's what makes it fair.

And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa (i.e. poor American blacks vs. rich African blacks)? I hear that despite Harvard students being 15% black, the number of undergrads actually descended from slaves can be counted on one's hands.

> Is CRT specifically actionable?

Setting aside for a moment what is CRT, there are debates about problems related to actionability in different accounts of racism on the left. One critique of some accounts is that they are too pessimistic, too mysterious, and too inactionable. You might find this read interesting as an example: https://auth.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-...

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Some black activists, especially among those demanding reparations for slavery, have sought to form a movement around this question. It's called 'The American Descendants of Slaves' movement. If you Google 'ADOS' you can find movement websites and both sides in various debates

Why not do both?

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Slavery impacted affected West Africa as well. The trade eventually destroyed communities leaving them vulnerable to colonization and exploitation.

Some African countries have former slaves e.g. Liberia. Individual slaves were traded multiple times across different countries. Do you include slaves when America was a British colony or only after the revolutionary war.

I assume Affirmative action policies pertain to current racism not just past racism.

Arguments about “GOP racism” might be justified if they were the ones constantly talking about people’s race, but they’re not. In my 33 years in America a Republican has never dared to call me “brown” or “a person of color” or lumped me in with a grab bag of other minorities based solely on skin color. They’re not the ones fighting to legalize discrimination against my kids.[4]

My family immigrated to Reagan’s America, where my brother and I could compete on objective standards. My kids will grow up in an America where they’ll have to compete by telling some story about their grandfather growing up in a village in Bangladesh, hoping to appeal to the subjective aesthetics of some white administrator.[5] It’s not the GOP doing that.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...

[3] https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/12/09/biden-adm...

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...

They'd be justified if the party endorses racist views, elects racist candidates, puts racist policies in place. "Talking about race" is a very narrow and selective definition of "racism".

Democrats are engaged in a sweeping effort to redefine “racism” to serve the purposes of white liberals: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ (“White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities…. Charges of “racism,” for instance, are primarily deployed against the political opponents of upwardly-mobile, highly-educated progressive white people.”)

But let's try 'race neutral policies regarding immigration'. In the previous administration, was VDARE fan Stephen Miller, in your view, advocating for and working to implement race neutral immigration policies?

Indeed, this sort of racism is pervasive among at least progressive democrats. See: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... It’s been wild to me to realize how many progressives I know would hate Bangladeshis if they were white. But as far as I can tell they don’t think non-whites have moral agency.

So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

You made an observation that implied it was somehow risible to think the GOP is a racist party. I don't think it's especially useful to designate one party or another as "racist". But what I said is true: it is not a mystery why people think the GOP is racist: there are out-and-proud racists in high elected office in the GOP, and there aren't in the Democratic party.

I'm not using a novel definition of racism here. Promoting racialization (categorizing people into different races), and treating people differently based on their race--both under the law, through racial preferences, and socially, through DEI--is racism. And Democrats do it much more than Republicans.

> So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

The Republican Party has some racists. In the case of Steve King, the party stripped him of his committee assignments and he lost his seat.

The Democratic Party is engaged in a fundamentally racist project of co-opting minority identities to advance the ideology of white liberals. It starts with promoting racial identity in schools, focused on an oppression narratives. "Asian studies" curricula, for example, focus on discrimination against Chinese Americans in the 1800s (people few Asian Americans trace their ancestry to), instead of for example the rapid upward mobility of Vietnamese, Koreans, and Indians in the 1960s and 1970s (which many Asian Americans today do trace their ancestry to). It continues to Democrat-dominated educational and professional institutions that center people's race and expressly treat them differently based on it.

The fact that it's a paternalistic sort of racism--Democrats think they're helping--doesn't change the fact that it's racism. At the end of the day, all of this is to advance the agenda of white Democrats. That's quite apparent when any non-white Democratic group diverges from white Democrats either out of cultural differences or divergent interests (e.g. Asian Americans when it comes to color-blind metrics or Black Americans when it comes to religion).

The minorities can speak for themselves on this issue (and are, by voting out the co-opters and switching parties). At least, they can as long as Paul Gosar doesn't have his say.

I didn't say that the Republican party was going to lose all minority support, or that every Republican is racist. As I said, I don't think it's productive to describe any party as "racist" (though apparently you disagree). But if I asked you to guess which party has the big-state governor candidate who paid $5000 to be featured prominently on the openly white-supremacist site that featured the Tree of Life shooter, you would not honestly have to think carefully about the question. It is, as I said, not a mystery why people say that the GOP is a racist party; it is many things, and one of them is the party for racists.

And as such, Rayiner's point about elected reps in the Democrat party, including but not limited to the President and high-ranking members of the Senate and House, making race the lens through which everything is discussed and planned for, is racism plain and simple. And it's frustrating for minorities to be disrespected and have their agency taken away by mainly caucasian liberals pretending to represent us. The sad part is that people like Biden and Warren know better, but they're just pandering with to a specific demographic that also views race as the primary driver of everything, but that in turn makes the middle ground also shrink, as people naturally look to mimic their leaders.

This tiresome focus on race-for-everything is making society much more racist, not less, and yes, I would agree it's mainly the Democrat party and it's current policies and rhetoric that is worsening it.

You really have to ignore a lot of Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims (Bangladesh is 90% Muslim), Mexicans, etc. Closing your eyes to the tiki torch carrying Neo Nazis, the racist congressmen, the Jan 6th confederates, the list goes on and on. Perhaps you did not hear when Reagan called black people monkeys (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea...) or when Trump called Haiti, etc Sh*t hole countries (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...) They don’t see race at all.

I am not sure in what universe that Pew poll looks positive for Republicans. Republicans don’t need to talk about race much according to the poll because they don’t live in diverse communities.

I get that you don’t like affirmative action. It has been a great wedge issue to factionalize minorities against Blacks in particular. The Supreme Court will ban it in due time. You probably did not know that the Civil Rights Act (passed after decades of blood, sweat, and tears of Blacks to protect people like you) and Immigration Act 1965 (repealing anti Asian ban) of that allowed your grandad to immigrate here was introduced and signed into law by Democrats. A lot of pain went into getting you here. You should read about it. (Before they ban those books too)

However, many universities seem to be opposed to having an imbalance, a situation that would presumably be expected given the gap in high school graduation rates.

Look who funds universities with large endowments and specifically which departments and buildings they fund. Money means priority and importance and is upstream of culture.

It’s no coincidence that what were fringe ideas that were mainly academic (for decades) and an extension of theoretical post modern philosophy departments very quickly became the truth according to the same power structures that own mainstream cultural energy sources. Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw probably can’t even believe it.