Quote:
Originally Posted by dleung
The last couple pages illustrate a few of the strawman arguments always coming from those pushing to keep the status quo. No one is saying that the government is conspiring to keep minorities down. They did back in the day, not anymore, yet those minorities are still living with inherited disadvantages (poverty, broken families, crappy schools), as well as ongoing discrimination (profiling by a percentage of racist cops/judges/employers etc). Social justice advocates want to do something to offset those disadvantages, but then you get people trying to undermine that effort with "look at the Asians! see? there's no systemic racism", or "minorities discriminate against darker minorities, hence it's all ok and part of the natural order", or some other red herring.
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I think we need to do a lot of work to ensure that we have a high "floor" or minimum standard of living. I think programs like UBI can help us get there.
But you can't just look at disparate outcomes between groups and conclude that it is because of discrimination or the inherited disadvantages you note, although the latter does play some role (but could be significantly addressed through race-neutral social programs).
Even within this broad and rather useless classification of race that we use you find incredible diversity within each 'race', in part because our common conception of race doesn't map well to biological population groups. But such groups exist and vary in outcomes, both within other people with the same level of pigmentation and without.
Anyone struggling should be helped, but this whole systemic racism / white man's burden type stuff is obfuscating the deep economic issues that are at the root of many people's struggles.
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