5 ms·

Exactly. So you believe your life would be better and easier if you were black or a woman, right? Would you agree to be black if it were possible right now?

• jerf 16y ago
  Were you planning on even engaging with my point? I'm not sure why I should try to engage with yours if you're not going to engage with mine and instead fire back trite gotchas. Apparently as a black woman I'm more likely to get a degree and more likely to get a job, so what was your question again? Deprogram yourself and look around you. You're running old code. If there is still vast reservoirs of systematic racism and sexism floating around they sure don't seem to be very effective!
  • axle 16y ago
    That's basically the problem - you don't understand. You don't understand that black men can't just go into the clubs that white people can, you don't understand that when white people meet black people, their faces are slightly less relaxed. Take a trip as a white guy to Asia or Africa or somewhere. You are the pinnacle of society. And we're not even talking Barack Obama mixed race, try being a real black person for a while. The systematic racism and discrimination is still there. And when it comes to women - how many of your elected officials are women. That's democracy - the people choose the men. If the world were equal, I would happily say all form of positive discimination should be abolished. But it's not equal - it's still a terribly unjust place.
    • jerf 16y ago
      Ah, moving goalposts. Now affirmative action is not done when it fixes the US, it's only done when it fixes the world. May I humbly suggest that screwing around with hiring policies or college acceptance policies in the US is extremely unlikely to have this effect? If the US refused to employ anyone but black women in any position, anywhere, I do not see how that will solve your problem with the world. You're still not engaging with my point, either. When is it enough? Give me a criterion for when I know we're done. And since we're not talking about "the world" but the US, when are we done in the US? Now you want 50/50 parity in politics, specifically, to add to all the places where "they" are ahead and still gaining? Can we finally stop if we actually get there, can we finally stop if male-WASPs are underrepresented in all parts of the job market and in all degrees, or will that not be enough either? I really hate to say this, but this is the sort of argumentation we get on this topic. You refuse to engage with your opponents because you're used to just winning. Wave the flag of racial discrimination and watch the opposition just melt away. You don't have to engage. When discrimination in the US was rampant and it showed in the job market and college degrees, that was probably reasonable. But if you want to explain why we need these policies when we've exceeded proportional representation and are still trending away from proportional representation, you're going to have to actually engage. Why aren't we done here? (And I don't care about fixing the world for the purposes of this argument. I'm pretty sure that being an American and believing that I must solve the world's racism with my policies is not generally acceptable, rightly so. Now we shouldn't dismantle affirmative action policies because that wouldn't be sufficiently culturally imperialist?)
• Retric 16y ago
  As a WM I would have no problem becoming a BM. At 30 it's less of an issue, but at 18 it would have been very helpful.