Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.
50 years later after a bunch of people have been born, died, and moved in and out? No way.
This is not math, no matter the answer it’s clearly opinionated, hence this Supreme Court case.
There could be a discussion about one year vs ten years or something, I don’t know. But it’s irrelevant to the current topic.
Just do what’s right based on individual circumstances. If person A is poor, help them, don’t discriminate against person B. That just feels like a government trying to pass blame for its own failed social policies over the last 50 years.
If you can find the individuals and draw a straight line, then you have a case. If not, well, not fair, but welcome to reality.
It may have made sense at one time, but that time is passed and it’s incompatible with our Constitution, so it needs to go. From now on, help individuals who need help and ignore their skin color.
— As uttered by quadrillions of philosophers of varying repute
Unless you suggest an omnipotent being intervene, I'm not sure how you intend to enact perfect fairness. Circumstances change over time. With some help from other nations, I imagine Ukraine could recover quite nicely from the war in time (once it's over). People won't come back to life, sure, but that's been true for eons. Unfortunately, African-Americans generally don't have the potential for such a positive outcome, which is why reform needs to happen. To go back on topic, I just don't think AA is the solution (or, at best, it's an aspect of the solution to be phased out eventually). I've said my ideas of reform elsewhere.
Feel free to correct this with Bitcoin.
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Because the alternative is to be forever stuck on all possible grudges of yesteryear, never moving on.
Personally, I am not going to start hating random contemporary Germans only because Nazis killed three of my relatives 80 years ago and, well, burnt and pillaged their way across Central and Eastern Europe.
I just refuse to be a mindless slave to the past, whipped up by nationalist politicians, no matter how horrible that past was.
Is it the same if you wait five or six generations instead of a year?
As is widely discussed and intuitively obvious, "the past is prologue."
What happened in the past is relevant to the present because the past quite literally creates the present.
As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]:
...we are going back to the old country. We're going back to where many of
our ancestors came from, to see where their stories came from, and their
memories, and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we
are.
This is what history is about. Where we come from, what lies behind the way
we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws
were made.
Because we don't exist in a temporal vacuum (thank you, Second Law of Thermodynamics). Rather, our pasts and the impact of the events of those pasts inform and shape the present. Ignore it at your own peril.
But the people and laws that caused evilness in the past are largely gone.
What we are talking about here are the effects. But the effects are not cleanly separated by skin color, and the burden of addressing them should not be assigned by skin color, either.
Affirmative Action is just a bad solution from all angles, created by anthropomorphizing groups of people as though they were individuals.
Who said anything about Affirmative Action?
You dismissed the importance of history. That's what I objected to.
And you just dismissed it again. And you're still wrong.
Perhaps you and others are/were. But I didn't. In fact, I never voiced an opinion about Affirmative Action at all.
Rather, I pointed out that ignoring history is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with that assertion, but I didn't discuss AA, nor was my reply related to the recent SCOTUS decision.
Are you suggesting that I keep my big mouth shut if, in your estimation, I'm not sufficiently "on topic?" Not saying that's what you're implying, but it's definitely something that could be inferred -- and I did.
If I misunderstood, please do correct me.
For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided.
When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage.
Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing.
History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.