If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine.
Instead, could write a convincing case that the group you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest of society, rather than the other way around?
It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.
But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say they're against: racism.
When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same baseless criteria for discriminating against people. But instead of separating into "inferior" and "superior" you want to separate into "victims" and "culprits".
The solution is to treat the shortcomings, not the people. If black people are doing less well in school, then it might be that the real reason is that poor people are doing less well in school, and the solution would be to deal with that, not based on race.
You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago. Are the descendants of Greeks (in the US) enslaved by Greeks owed compensation? Are the descendants of Europeans enslaved by Africans owed compensation?
I never said "black people." That's a you thing. And I'm an American citizen who knows that we've ALREADY had reparations for Japanese-Americans who were held for a few years during WWII but won't do the same for people whose ownership we can directly trace because we've still got the records of ownership and sale.
So if you're going to be flippant, go do it with someone who doesn't understand history, because your argument is silly.
As a historical fact, West Germany and East Germany both paid reparations to Holocaust survivors, despite neither being legally identical to the German Reich.
If for various reasons you find that unconvincing, itβs also the case that the Funding Act of 1790 has the federal government assume the debts of the colonies.
I think you don't actually know what "racism" is.
AA is definitely a form of discrimination based on race. But that's not the same as racism. And I suggest you might want to engage in some introspection and think about why you've decided to go for the "shock value" in phrasing things how you have.
They put it in scare quotes because there is a big difference between "fairness" and fairness. You're not asking for actual fairness.
If there were two children, each who had a cookie, and one child steals the other child's cookie - nobody would say that a fair way to distribute the next cookie is to split it evenly between both children. But that's the kind of "fairness" you're asking for. It's fair in the most basic and childish sense. Once you stop ignoring what came before it's no longer fair.
Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were made and not kept upon their return, and are still being discriminated against in representative democracy.
And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people have been harmed, financially, spiritually, democratically, and physically... the people who are against attempts to rectify the situation given the tools available also have nothing but "fairness" to fall back on when attempting to justify their positions, because they'd rather sweep it under the rug and pretend like it's something that we should never address.