Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of people’s skin.

"Name another," was my response.

More peaceful police interactions?

Fewer police interactions (for the same initial conditions other than race)?

Better housing options?

Better renting options?

Biased voting districts from gerrymandering?

Better healthcare outcomes?

Better employment opportunities?

Greater upwards mobility in general?

Greater social outcomes?

Greater chances of being taken seriously?

Better cultural representation?

There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions?

This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.

Some variation is unavoidable, but statistically significant variation isn't! Why should people in those underpriviledged groups accept a society which gives them fewer chances?

> There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions?

Yes, it does matter? If police interactions are calmer and you live longer, you have more chances to turn your life around. We as a society have more chances to help them.

> This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.

We should help the poor, and we should work to remove disparities between races and ethnicities. Why are those things opposed in your mind?

2) I haven’t heard realistic plans for actually helping people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.

3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge cases.

4) You could easily find other ways to group people to locate “disadvantage”. Religion is an easy one, but affirmative action based of religion sounds quite discriminatory.

5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People’s difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by actual experiences.

But people are being treated badly due to their race. Why can't we use race as one criterium to decide who needs help? Why do we have to pretend that racism isn't a real social thing that affects peoples lives?

> 2) I haven’t heard realistic plans for actually helping people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.

Well, if you define these plans as unrealistic you're not going to find realistic plans. But affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan - so much so that it is (or was) reality!

> 3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge cases.

Sure, but people are being treated badly due to those nebulous groupings with many edge cases. Why do we have to ignore that?

> 4) You could easily find other ways to group people to locate “disadvantage”. Religion is an easy one, but affirmative action based of religion sounds quite discriminatory.

Do you have statistics showing that a similarly statistically significant difference exists between different religions?

> 5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People’s difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by actual experiences.

"The people who identify racism are the real racists!" isn't as good of an argument as you think. People have different experiences due to their race. Attempting to find ways to curb that isn't "racist", it's "normal social behavior".

Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.

> affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan

It's also kinda racist.

> people are being treated badly due to those nebulous groupings

This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race. However, I do not see why this means people need "help". What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still have no answers.

Why should the affected groups, or society at large, accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to make things fair in light of this fact?

> It's also kinda racist.

Can you explain why? You cited MLK Jr. earlier. He didn't think that AA is racist. Where do you disagree with his position?

> This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race. However, I do not see why this means people need "help". What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still have no answers.

No, you've gotten answers, you just don't like them. I've explained pretty clearly why this means people need "help", what kind of help and so on.

That's exactly what the court just did. It prevented universities from being racist.

>>> But people are being treated badly due to their race

>> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.

> Why should the affected groups, or society at large, accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to make things fair in light of this fact?

So the court helped black people in regards to the bigotry of racists by "preventing universities from being racist". Your solution to racism is to treat everyone equally - which in turn means that black people just have to accept the bigotry of racists. So your solution is for them to just suck it up. Am I understanding you correctly?

Yes. This is the logical solution. The way to end X is that everybody stops doing X. It's very clear, simple, and I'm sure you would agree with virtually all values of X.

Your thinking on this topic seems very to contain many inversions.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Do you think it should be eliminated? Then why are you arguing against its elimination? Why do you claim to think it should be eliminated? Why should I be convinced that you actually believe it should be eliminated?

Earlier in this comment tree the other user wrote:

> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.

I agree with this, so the presupposition for the rest of the comment chain is that this statement is agreed upon, unless otherwise specified. I pointed towards this statement multiple times and asked: if this means that minorities will be discriminated against (since the agreed upon statement is that racists will still exist), and the attempt at "positive discrimination" is forbidden, they are simply discriminated against. What is your solution to this problem? How do we help them to no longer face discrimination under your proposed solution?

I don't think you have a solution, as you have so far failed to bring one up (even though I asked this question multiple times). So far, your position is equivalent to "they just have to suck it up". Can you finally offer a different position?

I’m here to limit the set of such solutions to policies that actually decrease the total amount of discrimination.

Your positive discrimination increases the total amount of discrimination. Therefore it does not qualify as a policy that decreases discrimination.

Do you not agree that affirmative action is a discrimination based on race?

Why not both? I expect you'd find the cross-section of people who want to, say, give black people better medical outcomes, and those who support helping the homeless and poor is quite large.

I feel like "what about the poor" reliability shows up when discussing helping brown people, but as soon as something is designed to help the poor the same politicians show up to condem it as entitlements or socialism.

I've seen no evidence to suggest that anyone trying to better minority outcomes has ever actually distracted from implementing programs to help the poor.

The focus on race breeds inaction because we insist something must be done before we have any idea how to solve it.

Focusing on minorities isn’t helpful either because minorities includes demographics that are doing quite well.

Assume we can fix poverty entirely. We already live in a world where, accounting for income, black people have worse health outcomes than whites. Why do you assume helping poor people will fix that? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume we'd now love in a world where no one is poor , and black people still are underserved by our healthcare system? How do you propose fixing it if we can't acknowledge the racial disparities?

> The focus on race breeds inaction because we insist something must be done before we have any idea how to solve it.

Bull. We aren't unable to implement programs help the poor because people dare mention race. Plenty of people are trying to push for programs to help the poor regardless of race. It's not the people who acknowledge that black people are more likely to be poor standing in the way.

This isn't a solution, it's passing the buck along.

1. Communal cultures and stronger family structures. White Americans are insanely atomized and individualistic and that is a serious issue

2. Birthrates/Fertility

3. Far better food/cooking and eating

4. Cultural control, especially in music and to a lesser extent in sports.

5. In the case of certain immigrant groups, significantly higher family wealth than the average white american

6. In the case of some ethnic groups, significantly better physical prowess (it's a handful of tribes where many of the best runners come from)

Obviously these are not all that significant compared to the disadvantages, but the idea that there are no other "unfair advantages" is just wrong.

To answer my own question - it's complicated; it did hurt him in some regards but it helped him too. There were a lot of people in the primary and general election who wanted to know they weren't prejudiced and voted for him at least in part for that reason.

This wasn't legal affirmative action. It was something else. I don't know if I'd call it an "unfair right" but for the right person in the right circumstance it can be an advantage. Does it out weigh all the disadvantages? Probably not.

It’s intentional. These political footballs are half real, half tactics.

But is there really any better explanation?

Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never really true in the US today.

If you help "all people" with "no regard" to race, you have just participated in favoring white folks over all others, even though you likely don't realize it. The systems by which you choose to "help" all have various types of racism built-in, and you will have racist results as output, even if you yourself never directly try to commit such an act. (This is what systemic racism is, sometimes called 'institutionalized racism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism )

Affirmative Action, while not perfect, is one of the few things ever tried that actually accounts for this. It's saying, "you can't be more racist than X" where X is some kind of objective metric (say, "percent of enrollment by race"), and it does not care which of the thousands of people or systems involved are causing the issue, it attempts to force-corrects for it.

It is an emergency stop-gap, until such a future as that result is already happening naturally, making it redundant. The fact that we still depend on it ~60+ yrs later, is sort of living proof that we haven't really dealt with systemic racism yet. (As if all the other evidence, between housing, employment, police brutality and murders, etc, wasn't already enough)

But let's leave one variable in: America is exactly as racist as America is currently. Ethnic backgrounds and cultures still exist, and there are enough white assholes in "gatekeeping" roles to affect the distribution of people who pass their gates. This is a fact that is a true thing that already exists in America; we're not ADDING it to the model, we've just left it in as the only thing we want to measure.

Structurally, as a society, you want the distribution of people who pass through higher education into roles like "Doctors" and "Lawyers" and eventually "Politicians" to broadly match the distribution of cultures that comprise the society as a whole. Otherwise you create an apartheid state, and an angry under-class that threatens the stability of the system. This is an axiom so simple that even Lyndon Johnson understood it.

So in our Model America, you need to have a law that says "yeah we know that everyone is the same, but because a degree from [Prestigious University] has a ripple effect that affects society as a whole, we want to make sure that graduating classes have at least the CHANCE of reflecting the cultural diversity of the nation as a whole, so we need to have a law that prevents Bad Actors in Admissions from just saying 'Oh, we already let in all the white people in line, wink wink wink, sorry, maybe next year'"

That's the reason you might still want quotas. And given the distribution of test scores because everyone ISN'T identical frictionless spheres, you might want to add a weight to minority test scores to float them overall, so they get in.

And yeah, that might not seem fair if you're in the majority; or if you're in the minority whose test scores are highest, but there's a clear and self-evident purpose to those kinds of weightings. Life's not fair, but it should be equitable, overall.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-o...

I also seem to recall a factory or trade uprising/strike in/around Europe between 1400-1700 where they basically made up whiteness to divide the laborers and get them to argue amongst themselves (successfully), but this may be apocryphal as I cannot seem to find a source.

How stupid do these people think 'everyone else' is. This is the most absurd thing I've read all day.

Humans, who divide themselves along such lines as _what tv shows they like_, had to have the concept of _skin colour_ invented for them. Really think about how ridiculous this assertion is.