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I think people are too often conflating morals with fact.
Take "discrimination", in my opinion a superior word to racism alone, though I might accept "vanilla racism" or depending on context its weaker cousin "stereotyping": when someone is treated different because of their race being used as a primary differentiator. We've become so distracted as a society arguing about whether or not it's accurate or occasionally acceptable to make judgements or get caught into debate about if it was really discrimination or some other cause that we forget to say what really needed to be said because the rest is just window dressing: It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them. Whether it's even possible to do this, or what counts as getting to know them, or any other derivative question is irrelevant. It's morally wrong not from any practical perspective, but rises from basic human dignity and fairness.
The parents in your example, I might initially be tempted to say, are acting logically -- but only to an extent. They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are. However, with longer time horizons and a bit of agency, it's harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions. We live in a society, as they say. But this is all beside the point. The real point is that we seem to have inadvertently de-emphasized and cheapened our definition as well as understanding of human rights. The right to be treated equally is one of the absolute fucking basics, and is not worth fucking around with just because we're tempted to get some short term benefits.
This statement is wrong on so many levels.
You conflate treating someone differently with treating them worse. It can actually treat them better on average if the needs of members of the group differ from other groups. The entire idea that something is always better or worse is silly black/white thinking anyway. If you ask a person whether they eat pork before setting up an event with food, you treat them worse if they do eat pork, because you are wasting their time. If they don't eat pork, you probably treat them better if you do ask. And it is perfectly plausible that asking by default is a net-negative for let's say a church event, where the main groups that don't eat pork are self-selected out, but it is a net-positive for an event where the group that you ask contains a certain number of Jews/Muslims.
You also beg the question by assuming that race or other differentiators are arbitrary, even though they clearly are not. Culture differs by race. Biology differs by race. Stereotypes typically do reflect actual statistical differences. Very often, people consider actually it morally wrong if you don't treat them according to their stereotypes. Try treating women like you treat men. It offends them.
You also ignore that getting to know people and tailoring policy to them personally has a substantial cost, may not be possible and can be open to abuse.
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It was actually a negative sum game. Especially by the 70s, the whites were not actually hoarding any resources. So when you forced integration you made schools terrible for the whites because the kids were getting assaulted and the teachers were distracted by teaching students who were at a lower grade level, and you made the schools no better for the black kids. The forced integration made things worse for everyone in ways that were obvious and predictable, but the people pushing it were so inflamed by self-righteousness that they did not care, it was those leaders pushing integration who were morally in the wrong.
Like what? You don't just get to advocate for a situation where girls were getting sexually assaulted in the halls and then say, "well, they should have figured some other solution and then we wouldn't have to forced integration" and then get to take the moral high ground. Let's be very clear here because the rest is just window dressing: deliberately creating a situation where education is impossible because of kids constantly being assaulted and bullied is morally wrong, all the time, in every society. The situation created by forced integration was worse, and the people responsible were morally in the wrong, far more in the morally wrong than the people who supported the segregated status quo.
"Arbitrary" and "treat worse" are tricky here. It is morally wrong to overtly mean or aggressive against someone who has not wronged you. However, it is morally permissible to withhold charity, or withhold generosity, or withhold sharing, or withhold your friendship, or withhold permitting someone to migrate into your terrirtory, or withold wanting your children to raise my children (which is what school is) based upon limited, imperfect information -- such as ethnicity/race, or religion, or politics. Race, like family, or like in many cases religion, is not something a person chooses to be born into, but it is not exactly arbitrary either. Race is tribe, it is a measure of closeness of blood relations, it is not arbitrary, and something that is quite often relevant.
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