The OP was flagged to death yesterday, and this is an attempt to recreate a comment I couldn't submit.
> Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But it is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.
I don't think this is the contradiction that he presents it as. I understand affirmative action to be an attempt to ameliorate the effects of unjust generational racism. It would undermine that goal to not have a taboo about "assume[ing] a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences," because it would just maintain some of that racism in a different form. Both affirmative action and the taboo are interlocking efforts towards the same goal.
Some might object and say you have obviate the need for that taboo by just not having affirmative action, but the problem with that is that it might take orders of magnitude longer to wash away the effects of the unjust generational racism in the area in question.
> Some might object and say you have obviate the need for that taboo by just not having affirmative action, but the problem with that is that it might take orders of magnitude longer to wash away the effects of the unjust generational racism in the area in question.
There seems to be a belief kicking around that if we could just help minorities in the right way, racism would go away faster.
I don't think this is so. Time after time in US history, the government has tried to institute "helpful" social programs to lift black people up. Time after time, those efforts have failed. Any time that blacks start to build some wealth for themselves, the government comes in to "help" and screws it all up.
Let's look at something like desegregation. Every reasonable person will agree that desegregation needed to happen, but it was rushed and the consequences of it weren't considered like they ought to be.
Black students, many of whom previously went to schools that were less good, were now integrated with racist white students and faculty. So while the "education" part may have been better, they were too concerned with being bullied to actually get a decent education at all. The net result? A poorer education that they would have got at their "worse" black-only school.
Additionally, black-owned businesses were thoroughly destroyed by desegregation. Before desegregating, black business owners had guaranteed business via other black patrons. Afterwards, blacks were free to patronize other businesses when it was convenient, but racist whites at the time still refused to support black business. That ended many black businesses.
The Pruitt-Igoe complex [1] replaced many homes owned by blacks. They thought they were "helping" blacks escape the poor living conditions of their older homes. Instead, they fractured black communities and destroyed the equity they held in their own properties.
A poorly-designed welfare system throughout the 70s and 80s trapped blacks into low-income lifestyles and incentivized fathers not being present at home, which is a significant disadvantage for youths [2].
So here's where this is all going - the government needs to get the fuck out of the way and let black people succeed. We, as society, can and should intervene to stamp out racism _where it is evident_. What you can't do is look at income or incarceration statistics in a vacuum and say "clearly America is still very racist."
There is work to be done, and most people don't dispute that. What is disputed is that fighting racism with racism is an effective strategy. It isn't.
> There seems to be a belief kicking around that if we could just help minorities in the right way, racism would go away faster.
> I don't think this is so. Time after time in US history, the government has tried to institute "helpful" social programs to lift black people up. Time after time, those efforts have failed. Any time that blacks start to build some wealth for themselves, the government comes in to "help" and screws it all up....
> There is work to be done, and most people don't dispute that. What is disputed is that fighting racism with racism is an effective strategy. It isn't.
One problem with this line of argument is that it is often advanced in bad faith by people whose actual goal is to avoid addressing the problem at all.
Another problem with the "do nothing and let it work itself on its own" approach is that it goes against many conceptions of justice. If you repeatedly stole money from me, most people wouldn't consider the matter settled if you got to keep what you stole and were merely prevented from stealing yet more in the future: justice requires at least some effort to repair the past damage, even though those efforts usually quite imperfect (e.g. monetary compensation for wrongful death).
I would guess that a significant contributor to the problems you outlined was an unwillingness to go the full measure to address the problems, often for illegitimate reasons (e.g. racists maintained enough power to block all but half-ass solutions) or legitimate ones (e.g. enough time passed that the direct perpetrators and victims are dead, but unjust effects nevertheless linger).
> One problem with this line of argument is that it is often advanced in bad faith by people whose actual goal is to avoid addressing the problem at all.
Why does the intent of the person making the argument matter? The argument stands on its own merits or it doesn't.
> Another problem with the "do nothing and let it work itself on its own" approach is that it goes against many conceptions of justice.
Firstly, nobody said "do nothing." There are plenty of ways to help underprivileged people that _don't_ take their skin color into account. Secondly, do you think that affirmative action does not go against many conceptions of justice?
> If you repeatedly stole money from me, most people wouldn't consider the matter settled if you got to keep what you stole and were merely prevented from stealing yet more in the future: justice requires at least some effort to repair the past damage, even though those efforts usually quite imperfect (e.g. monetary compensation for wrongful death).
OK, let's run with your example. Let's say I stole a bunch of money from you over a period of years and blew it all on drugs. I get caught, go to court, am found guilty. I have no money (or very little, certainly not enough to pay you back), and eventually the drugs catch up to me and I die. But I have a son. Would you submit that "justice" is you collecting money from my son?
That's essentially what's happening. Nobody alive in the US today owns a slave, nor were they a slave. You can spend literally forever talking in circles about the effects of history on people of present day. Yes, things like slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining had bad impacts on black communities. Do we spend forever talking about it? No. And who gets to decide when the wrong has been "righted", anyway?
What we can do is try make society like the society we want to see. Is it "perfect"? No, it will never be. But it's better than playing swing-the-social-pendulum for another 200 years.
The whole point of my original post, and what so many people miss, is how the effort to "repair past damage" _also has negative effects_. Nobody at the time thought about the fact that welfare was trapping blacks in poverty. But it did. A well-intentioned policy change at that time arguably did more harm than good.
Today, I can tell you with confidence [1] that there are lots of white people who have taken notice that medical schools, universities, government institutions, big companies, etc. are happy to lower the bar for black folks. This has two problems: the first is that it doesn't feel fair, which is going to enrage people when the whole conversation is about what's fair. The second is that high-achieving black people will be perceived as less competent by their peers.
> I would guess that a significant contributor to the problems you outlined was an unwillingness to go the full measure to address the problem
What would "full measure" be?
[1]: with over ten anecdotal experiences, because something like this is not "socially acceptable" to study
> Why does the intent of the person making the argument matter? The argument stands on its own merits or it doesn't.
That attitude might work for arguments like mathematical proofs, but we're talking about social policy here. It's too complex for that kind of certainty, so trust and good faith matter.
Also your argument was essentially like this: the Soviet Mars 2 probe failed to land on Mars. So did the Soviet Mars 2, 3, 6, and 7 probes. Therefore, NASA shouldn't try to land Viking 1
on Mars, since governments have been shown to not be able to do that kind of thing successfully.
> OK, let's run with your example....
> That's essentially what's happening. Nobody alive in the US today owns a slave, nor were they a slave. You can spend literally forever talking in circles about the effects of history on people of present day. Yes, things like slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining had bad impacts on black communities. Do we spend forever talking about it? No. And who gets to decide when the wrong has been "righted", anyway?
That is not in fact what's happening today, which is why the response consists of social policies like affirmative action instead of stuff like garnishing the wages of the descendants of slaveholders to repay the descendants of slaves. I even alluded to that.
Another way to look at it is the wrong wasn't solely committed by the individuals involved (e.g. slaveholders), but by the government and other institutions that enacted policies like slavery and Jim Crow. The government and those institutions still exist, and have the responsibility and ability to take corrective action.
Running with examples is like running with scissors; they're both bad ideas that can turn to serious errors.
> That attitude might work for arguments like mathematical proofs, but we're talking about social policy here. It's too complex for that kind of certainty, so trust and good faith matter.
That's absolutely ridiculous. You can evaluate the policy and make an educated assessment as to what its effect will be. The person suggesting the policy is not some kind of oracle, they don't have some mystical ability to foresee how the policy will play out in practice. So again, their intent doesn't matter, only the content of the policy does. This smells an awful lot like a way to discard the policies of people you don't like without attacking the policies on their merits.
> That is not in fact what's happening today, which is why the response consists of social policies like affirmative action instead of stuff like garnishing the wages of the descendants of slaveholders to repay the descendants of slaves.
You make it sound as though affirmative action is without cost to the people who don't benefit from it. Even the least-intrusive form of affirmative action, where organizations must actively ensure their employment processes are not discriminatory, have a cost. But I'm not opposed to that piece specifically.
What is more often costly to individuals is affirmative action that is implemented in the form of a hiring quota. If you lose a job versus someone who looks good for "quota" purposes, sure, your wages aren't garnished by the government directly, but you lost out all the same. And then you might say something like "they're white, they'll be fine, they can just get a job somewhere else." As if to imply that all white people come from privileged enough backgrounds that it's not even an issue worth caring about.
> I even alluded to that.
If you're going to have a conversation about something like social policy, perhaps do something better than "allude".
> Another way to look at it is the wrong wasn't solely committed by the individuals involved (e.g. slaveholders), but by the government and other institutions that enacted policies like slavery and Jim Crow. The government and those institutions still exist, and have the responsibility and ability to take corrective action.
Here is the problem. A government is not an entity that exists in the same way as a person, or even a company does. Saying that "the government" must take corrective action really means _all of the American people_. And that gets right back to the issue of fairness, because as soon as you start spending government money to solve this problem, you spend taxpayer money.
> Running with examples is like running with scissors; they're both bad ideas that can turn to serious errors.
Closing with a comment like this -- suggestive of a slam dunk -- seems like the more serious error when a great many parts of my argument went completely unaddressed.
> Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But it is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.
I don't think this is the contradiction that he presents it as. I understand affirmative action to be an attempt to ameliorate the effects of unjust generational racism. It would undermine that goal to not have a taboo about "assume[ing] a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences," because it would just maintain some of that racism in a different form. Both affirmative action and the taboo are interlocking efforts towards the same goal.
Some might object and say you have obviate the need for that taboo by just not having affirmative action, but the problem with that is that it might take orders of magnitude longer to wash away the effects of the unjust generational racism in the area in question.