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And if you were a black parent to a black child, how much of a cost would you say you and your people have borne only to end up (statistically) at the bottom of the ladder?
Words and laws do mean things. They mean what the people interpreting them thnk they mean, no more and no less. Just as "all men are created equal" didn't stop race based slavery because all men didn't really mean all men.
I completely agree that two wrongs do not make a right. If we could wave a magic wand and be done with race based issues, I would. But we don't live in that world. And in this world the sins of the fathers appear to be visited on the children whether we want it or not. Our options are constrained by human pyschology and the dynamics thereof.
I'm ok with headwinds for my kids, they'll be fine either way. My bigger concern is that Affirmative action et al doesn't actually primarily help the people its meant to help. I'd take a much more narrowly tailored version if I had the power.
I'm from a backwoods holler of a resource colony. The rate of interpersonal violence may be somewhat lower than the darker half of the melanin spectrum, but "my people" are still statistically at the bottom of the ladder in everything except kindergarten vaccination rates.
To answer your question directly, I think I'd be quite nihilistic about politics achieving anything at all. Hopefully I could recognize how much worse the alternatives could be (as I try to be, even while I rant that we could- easily- do so much better), but that wouldn't make me much happier about explicit racism (towards anyone). Or at least I hope I could still stick to the principle of the matter.
Well, not quite, we have a system designed with certain people to do the interpreting, balanced by having no direct enforcement mechanism. Harvard, UNC, Michigan, and Minnesota are doing no interpreting at all; they're flipping two middle fingers up at the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and everyone else who doesn't think racism is a good thing.
That is, everyone is free to ignore the Supreme Court unless the court has enough of the executive and downstream bureaucracy on their side to enforce decisions by pointing guns at kids. However, that was part of the bargain of avoiding explicit war, as you pointed out, and the racism we have now hasn't left people quite so radicalized.
Indeed.
Ain't that the truth? Squandering high-minded ideals and not even achieving what it should for those tradeoffs in return. What a moral offense that is!
I am not opposed to helping the less fortunate. I am opposed to enshrining and deifying race the way people have, and creating designated punching bags of society.
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Or rather, affirmative action helps precisely the people it's meant to help, and the[ir] claim it was meant to elevate someone else was always bullshit.
Well it depends who you are talking about, in general ADOS want it to help ADOS so from their perspective it is not helping the people it was "meant" to help. Which is the perspective I was taking.
If you mean that the people implementing it never meant it to help ADOS (or perhaps never meant it to primarily benefit ADOS at least) then you might be on firmer ground. But then you'd have to address why they wanted to help rich Nigerians or what have you, but not ADOS. I think I might suggest they meant it to look like it would help ADOS as part of a sop towards previous discrimination but were not too bothered if it actually did or did not.
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