I'm confident the younger generations are much more sensible towards most all of those points. But the most crucial IMO is fixing the justice system which is run by much older generations (even more so than politics) so unfortunately it will be a long time until that catches up.

Or advocating for massive reparations.

> encouraging diverse hiring practices, confronting both overt and covert racism when we see it, educating ourselves on racial privilege, fighting racial profiling and sentencing in our justice system, and just in general fighting for racial equality

It's odd that in the last 40 years of policy where these things where all mandated, promoted, and force, it only made things worse - for everyone (ex: dumbing down the education system to the lowest common denominator, hiring based on race rather than merit, breaking up the black family structure, seeing racism under every rock and corner to excuse bad behavior, promoting said bad behavior as either "authentic" or as the natural result of "white racism", etc).

Maybe, just maybe, your personal bias of viewing blacks as some type of helpless children that have to be taken care of - is the problem, and not the solution.

You're a Cultural Marxism peddler.

I am white and I think I am in the very same group as blacks and all other races, namely the group called "individuals". All we need to do is fight for individual rights and teach people respect is earned on an individual basis. Nothing can be assumed from group membership in real life; every leftist would agree with this statement, yet you want to make laws based on group membership. Nothing can be assumed based on group membership. Whoever does is the true racist. Stop peddling your divisive ideologies. Stop drawing lines around people. We drew lines around places in maps and today we have wars over those lines. Your lines around people create the same kind of conflicts on a smaller scale. Please stop it. There's only one kind of person, the individual. Let's protect individual rights and everyone will be OK, and by that I mean everyone, not just the groups your crony leftists select to be privileged to the detriment of some other group's disadvantage.

You can try and create "race", "religion", "gender" labels all you want but to me there's only one sort of person, the individual, and nothing can be said about an individual a priori.

Stop propagating divisiveness.

> Nothing can be assumed based on group membership.

Nothing should be, but unfortunately for many minority groups, it is. The fact that it doesn't affect you is the great benefit of being white (and, if such things don't affect you, probably male).

I mean that you need to acknowledge the concept of race. Say you're facing a 10% unemployment rate in some city. If you treat everyone as an equal individual, the solution will be some combination of economic changes, lowering taxes, increasing subsidies, whatever.

Now imagine 90% of the unemployed are black, in a city where blacks are the minority. Clearly there is more than an economic problem here. Promoting individual rights is not going to help, because all races have identical rights in this scenario, and businesses should always have the right to not hire someone.

The solution would depend on the underlying problem, but it might very well involve giving some sort of temporary advantage based on race. The parent comment advocated forgetting all race, religion, gender labels, but we can't do that until everybody agrees to let those labels go. Until then, we need to acknowledge race and gender so that we can recognize when a problem exists, and address it.

From a colorblind perspective, race is already solved, right? All races have equal rights, discrimination based on race is illegal, legally we're all good.

How is that fair though. You make a statistical restitution of sorts but if there are 20 jobs and 100 candidates of equal standing. 50 candidates fit one biological classification (A) unrelated to the job and the other 50 fit another (B). How is it fair then to ensure that a certain number of A > B get the jobs available?

Why is it that when the number [getting the jobs] A < B by design it is wrong, but when A > B it's right.

Moreover what you appear to be arguing is not even that the candidates have equal standing with regard to ability to perform the roles but that you should select A > B even if on average candidates in group B are more able to fulfil the job requirements.

So now you reject candidates who are more able to do a job simply because they fit unrelated classification A. How is that discrimination good?

Why is it alright to antagonise people now because of their race when it wasn't in the past; don't you think that will just foment ill will and a greater focus on irrelevant biological classifiers?

We shouldn't discriminate against a poor person because they're poor and in group B, we should offer opportunities for all poor people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps regardless of unrelated biological classifications. By this means we will remove needless discrimination rather than shift it around. If, in order to make restitution you feel that there are excessively many poor people from one group, then make more opportunities available to all poor people. That way all those who wish to take advantage can do so regardless of whether their earlobes are attached or whatever hangup you have.

No, you misunderstand me, the solution would not be to force companies to hire some percentage of black people, or anything like that. Companies should hire whoever is best for the job.

But it is absolutely fair to address the reasons black people are so disproportionately unemployed. Is it because employers are unconsciously discriminatory when evaluating candidates? Yes, according to a a few studies. What can we do about that? I don't really know, but helping poor people in general will not solve this problem.

Is it because particular communities have been caught in a cycle of poverty and lack of education for centuries, because of slavery and segregation? Yes, often it is. You are not racist, you had nothing to do with those crimes, but unfortunately the antagonism of the past is still very much affecting the people of today. It is not antagonistic to address these longstanding issues. Again, I don't know the solution, but it might involve offering college scholarships specific to black people. It might involve some kind of affirmative action.

These ideas are not antagonistic to non-black people, even if a white guy gets rejected from a college that accepts a less-qualified black guy. We cannot treat everyone equally when some people are starting so far behind.

Yes, we should offer opportunities for all poor people, but that won't do enough. Biological classification A is at a huge disadvantage, and all the people responsible for it are dead, so we can't punish them or make them fix it. We have to try to fix it.

>We have to try to fix it. //

Yes. But we won't fix it by layering on more irrelevant discrimination.

You have to start where you are, making things unfair now because they were unfair before just retains the acceptability of creating unfair systems.

Thanks for giving up your further insight. I suspect we won't both move beyond where we are unless you have a different angle to give that you think is more convincing?

I'll just give you a quick analogy to explain why I don't see it as discrimination.

Say an innocent person is accused of murder as a teenager, spends 30 years in jail, and then is released when the real killer is caught. As a society, we owe this guy something, right? We can't treat him like a normal unemployed person, because he's at a severe disadvantage through no fault of his own. For simplicity's sake we'll say all the police and prosecutors involved with his case are dead, so the responsibility lies entirely with the society/government they represented.

Ok, now imagine he never gets any kind of compensation, never gets a stable job, and dies leaving kids behind. Do you believe society owes his kids anything? They are at a severe disadvantage, still basically as a result of society's mistakes. You might say it was irresponsible of this guy to have kids with no means to support them, fine, but I would say the bulk of responsibility still lies with society as a whole.

And since our society has limited resources, if we were going to compensate these kids, we would necessarily be taking money away from something else. Money that might have been used to pave some roads, or fund some art, or pay some government employees. And even though the other potential recipients of this money had literally nothing to do with the original crime, it's not unfair to take it away.

Now imagine this whole story happened to a bunch of people, all of whom happened to be black. And that today, 95% of the black people in our fictional town are related to one of the original wrongly accused victims. Society owes something to almost all these black people, right? We don't owe them anything because of the color of their skin, it's just that all of the victims are black, and nearly all of the black people are victims. If there were an easy way to figure out exactly who was affected by the original crimes then we would, but there isn't.

So basically I'm only making two points:

1) Society's responsibility does not die with the victim.

2) Saying "all black people deserve compensation" is not racist when nearly all black people are affected by slavery and segregation and modern discrimination. If we could quantify exactly how much every person's life was affected by these things, that would be great, but obviously that's impossible. We really want to say "all victims of slavery and racism deserve compensation", but the only realistic way to identify that set is "black people".

Thanks for expanding on this.

My immediate response is that, right, the children of the wrongly imprisoned person (let's call them "CWIP") are disadvantaged. So one of them goes for a job and the other candidate's parent wasn't wrongly imprisoned so you give the job to the CWIP, rather than to the person who spent years studying to be sure to qualify fully, lived through extreme poverty, cared for their sick parents ... the CWIP get the job through accident of birth ... and this is supposed to be better than having people get a job through accident of birth [eg because of an unrelated biological characteristic].

So, then you want to expand this and say, "well, look, more of these people with this characteristic have been disadvantaged in the past". But, they're only a group because of that characteristic. There are people who've been similarly disadvantaged outside that characteristic-group and adding additional disadvantage to them because of something they didn't do, that none of their ancestors even did, based solely on irrelevant biological characteristics (let's call that "IBC"; yes, things like skin colour). Surely you can see how injust that is.

Are you going to then flip things around and say, well we acted injustly to this generation because they didn't have the right IBC and now these children were discriminated against unfairly, so now we'll have to be unfair again? Anything else would be morally inconsistent and partial. So you wind yourself in knots.

Lets take your hypothetical end position, you want to help the disadvantaged in that town, because 95% of those you feel are disadvantaged are because they're CWIPs. What's wrong with offering assistance to all those disadvantaged? Are you concerned that one of those 5% of disadvantaged people might be a descendant of a juror/judge/policeman who acted improperly? Surely equal grace to the disadvantaged is better that injust discrimination against the rest of that 5% who weren't involved?

Let's take a different tack: Logically, you're going to want to discriminate in favour of those with long-standing native North American ancestry too. So do you favour all tribes? What if one tribe was instrumental in wiping out another, do you favour them both, despite the ancestors of the one having the other's blood on their hands. If it doesn't matter if your inherited genetics are from ancestors who were Blackfoot or Assiniboine [two tribes who IIUC warred against one another], why does it matter if your ancestors were French, Portugese or British [or whatever]? If none of those matter, then why do other inherited IBC matter?

Suppose I'm rich, from a family of millionaires for multiple generations; do you still want to discriminate for me against the poor because of IBC?

Perhaps USA is different but in my country, UK, it's possible for a motivated individual to go from decrepitude to being part of the 1% within a generation. Certainly it's possible for nearly all those who wish to work hard to get education (non-academic trade qualifications for example) that will set you up with a reasonable standard of life if you're prepared to work hard. [Aside: this is becoming more difficult it seems.]

You've put the case for ongoing racial discrimination very well but the way you propose introduces further injustices by design; you lift up all those who're black (say). The way I propose may mean that injustice takes a generation or so to be fiscally corrected but doesn't introduce further injustices which will take further generations still to correct; I choose to offer help to all those who're most disadvantaged regardless of irrelevant biological characteristics.

PS: I just wanted to add, I like your analogy and it certainly gave me pause and I'll definitely think on it some more. Thanks.

You seem to only be able to think from the perspective of central planning. I invite you to stop invoking this earthly "god" and give people a chance.

Can you give me an example of how a town where 90% of the unemployed are black could possibly come into being in the free market where voluntary trade and contracts are enforced by the governments courts (and there are no group-membership based laws)?

I'll give you the beginning. Once upon a time there was a town where all sorts of races lived in (no one bothered to count because these people learned the lessons of Nazis using Dutch records to kill Jews and they didn't want that again). Then you fill in the blanks, then all of a sudden without government interference in the market, 90% of the unemployed are black.

I eagerly await your reply.

Without granting that your premise is either meaningful or coherent, racism in the population could easily explain it. The absence of group membership based laws doesn't impy the absence of group membership based attitudes that are implemented through individual decisions.

It's not all of a sudden. And I'm not talking about super blatant racism where every business owner is like "I don't like those black folks so I just won't hire them".

It's not all of a sudden because in the US, we had slavery and then Jim Crow. There was never a time where everyone lived equally, and then all of a sudden all the black people were unemployed. They've always been disproportionately poor, uneducated, unemployed, and that's a really tough cycle to get out of.

And it's not blatant racism. A black guy with a Harvard MBA doesn't have much of a problem getting a job in this town. But there's still plenty of subtle, unconscious racism. A black guy is more likely to be rejected for any given job than a white guy with a comparable resume. There's plenty of studies on this issue, here's the first one I found: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=422902

The employer here doesn't hate black people, they just decided to hire the white candidate for a reason they probably wouldn't be able to put their finger on.

These black people don't have any business connections, so it's a lot harder to get internships and jobs. Half the adults they know when they're in college are unemployed or in jail. This is more of a poverty problem than a race problem, but race still plays into it. You can't get a job in your dad's office like your white friends did, because your parents were constantly passed over for jobs like that.

These black people have a much harder time starting their own business. Their family doesn't have any money, and they seem to have more trouble getting a loan than white people do.

I want to reiterate that this is not all of a sudden. There has never been a time in the US where all races lived in equality and harmony. If 90% of the unemployed are black, it's probably always been that way, right up until none of them were unemployed because they were all slaves.