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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Why should that be? I can already think of the Conflict Theory explanation - but what would the Mistake Theory explanation for that be?

By "X theory explanation", do you mean "if you are an X theorist, you could explain it like this" or "if [your opponents who are responsible for this state of affairs] are X theorists, this is how they would justify their choice"?

Assuming it's the former, it doesn't seem like a hard exercise. I'd think that the mistake that camp pro-SJ does in this and many other scenarios is assuming that just because certain minorities have inferior SES nationally on average, they always and everywhere can not possibly be at a local advantage or have something to bestow withholding which on an ethnic basis can be unfair to individuals and ultimately to the detriment of all. Maybe there is a white or Asian teenager who grew up over in the neighbourhood of the black church, in a particular subcommunity where all his friends and social superiors are black. The only status that he would be feasibly placed to pursue in his life is status in his local community, which is significantly gatekept by the black church in question, and even if they aren't formally rejecting him, in practice he would obviously, visibily be out of place if he tried to join and participate.

The easiest way to make the mistake-theoriness of the view stark is to then treat both sides as sum utilitarians. If we compelled the black church to make an explicit effort to admit more people who look like him, would this on balance do more good by helping people like the hypothetical black-neighbourhood kid (or any number of other effects which I didn't address, such as the sense of civic belonging that may be fostered by everyone being subject to the same rules), or more bad by making the job of running a $disadvantaged_minority church even more onerous than it already is (and accordingly keeping the black-white SES gap greater, with all the disutility this entails)? Presumably the SJ utilitarian response is the latter, but are they right about this?