How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period).
If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.
I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world.
> and the same schooling prior to college
This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps.
> The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.
Medicaid attempts to accomplish this. I'm not sure how well. Careful when you say "same," the solution might end up being equally bad for everybody.
>same schooling prior to college.
Stop funding by zip code, that's the cause of it. Fund by either voting district or entire state.
What is your basis for saying this?
Info I have come across suggests the opposite: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wis...
Are their children materially worse off statistically? Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods that everyone who's materially worse off should be uplifted. What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was discussed.
Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents, your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you have representation in that process?
Affirmative action is an artificially generated membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for people who may otherwise be excluded.
As far as legacy admissions go, they're noxious, but you're not accounting for the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege.
What percentage of accepted students have that privilege? It's pretty high.
As an analogy, if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
Affirmative action programs are specifically designed to seek out and uplift people who have been generationally affected in that way. It recompenses them by giving them job/education opportunities that they would likely have had if their parents (and their parents, etc.) weren't artificially held back.
If those are the metrics we're using, then use them directly: prioritize first gen college applicants, applicants whose parents rent, applicants whose parents don't have professional jobs. Otherwise, why should a poor Asian immigrant going to a crappy public school be considered "more privileged" than a rich Black kid who goes to Andover?
> if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
The comparison here would be more something like "your grandfather killed my grandfather, therefore I should get privileges over you."
Referring to five decades in relation to a century makes it sound like a lot more time has passed than has actually passed.
> What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
How can it not be? If a parent is traumatized how can that not affect their child? Do you think that the black children from the 50's were not affected by their parents showing up beaten, bruised and bloodied or by seeing their parents hanging from a tree after they didn't come home the night before?
Entire generations of people were victimized in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has not lived through it, and acting like everything needs to be calculated as a 1:1 transaction if it is even to be considered is not a constructive way to enter the discussion.
Using the Federal policies is simply a stark example of how recently racism was aggressively state-sanctioned. The purpose of affirmative action is to help directly break the racist biases in a complex process to being able to attend college.
It is not a singular solution, nor is it a perfect one. I feel like you are attempting to topple AA since it's not a magic bullet to the complex problem of racism in the US. It is an imperfect effort in part with many others to try and tackle the various inequalities in the US.
Even if the US was able to have a truly holistic effort to solve racism and the wrongs minorities have experienced, what good does funding k-12 schools, scholarships, etc. do to help disadvantaged college applicants right now? Nothing. The common dissent is that if they are poor or otherwise disadvantaged then they should receive benefit from programs targeting those disadvantages. But those still are unable to directly address the various unique ways in which a black person with some set of disadvantages is different than a white person with the same checklist. The problem is simply too complex and the breadth of experiences of minorities in the US far too broad to be tackled any way but directly imo, which is what AA attempts to do.
for example it took so many years to get to this:
https://www.santamonica.gov/blog/statement-apologizing-to-sa...
Chinese-Americans worked largely as indentured labor on railroads and various other large projects both before and after the Civil War. How are their descendants faring today?
Howabout Ashkenazi Jews, who have suffered probably the worst through all of recorded history? We're talking TWO MILLENIA of oppression, not a measly two centuries or so. Where are all the Jewish kids killing each other and flunking out of school for all of their historical oppression?
The generational racism trope/excuse is played out, has been massively contradicted by every model minority you can think of, and needs to die. It has no basis in reality.
Do people who regurgitate this insane idea just think Asians and Jews don't exist? The only way one could possibly entertain an obviously incorrect hypothesis is if you intentionally blind yourself to the voluminous countervailing evidence.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/07/anglo-saxons-deserve-re...
Would you agree that older wrongs are only different from newer wrongs as a matter of degree, rather than a matter of kind?
That is disingenuous, Slavery didn't end until the 13th amendment was ratified in 1865 which is 65 years later than you said, but really, slavery was not even a crime.
Systemic abuses continued long after that and even into today. Those are not crimes either...they are written into law like how property taxes are used to fund public education which ensures that people of means get a good education and those that struggle will continue to struggle.
Lynchings, murders, beatings, being forced by gunpoint to not vote...those are crimes and (while they do happen even today) they happened a LOT in the 50's and into the 60's. The people who committed those crimes are grandparents/great-grandparents and a lot of whom are alive today.
Wrongs against minorities are not some long-ago, almost mythical events that we need to just move on from. They are still happening, and they are indicative of a society that values sameness and predictability over the individual rights and freedoms of the people.
That being said, giving a leg-up to a minority applicant over someone else is, in fact, one way to decrease the effects of the abuses that were experienced.
IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out.
Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.