4 ms·

I’m not too familiar with those laws, but yeah I generally support damages to specific people for specific acts. Like when people are falsely imprisoned. I’m su

by tomp 6y ago

I’m not too familiar with those laws, but yeah I generally support damages to specific people for specific acts. Like when people are falsely imprisoned. I’m sure there's a lot of examples that involve people of other races

tsimionescu 6y ago
After slavery and before the Civil rights act, in a lot of the USA, a doctrine termed euphemistically 'separate but equal' led to segregation laws establishing 'whites' only and 'blacks' only neighborhoods, schools, restaurants, workplaces etc. , followed of course by large discrepancies of funding between the white areas and the black areas. This ended officially sometime in the 1960s, so almost all black people over 60 in America today experienced it directly to some extent (and in reality disparities continued for many more years: e.g. the local school in a historically discriminated neighborhood is not going to get any better if today the discrimination stops, unless someone starts investing in it to account for the years of neglect). Most of affirmative action is meant to undo this injustice specifically, because direct reparations to the millions of people who were owed them were never even on the table. And of course, social justice is about more than black people. We haven't even talked about the historical disenfranchisement of women, the relatively recent imprisonment of gay and trans people, the internment of Japonese people, and so many other injustices that have never been repayed, even if they stopped.
- tomp 6y ago
  > Most of affirmative action is meant to undo this injustice specifically Intention =/= effect. It would be far more effective if the state invested more effort into educating people from underprivileged families (black, poor, immigrants), rather than lowering the standards for college admissions, which probably has worse outcomes (those students likely won’t catch up in terms of their skills), as well as creating new injustices (e.g. discrimination against Asians).

by tomp 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

After slavery and before the Civil rights act, in a lot of the USA, a doctrine termed euphemistically 'separate but equal' led to segregation laws establishing 'whites' only and 'blacks' only neighborhoods, schools, restaurants, workplaces etc. , followed of course by large discrepancies of funding between the white areas and the black areas. This ended officially sometime in the 1960s, so almost all black people over 60 in America today experienced it directly to some extent (and in reality disparities continued for many more years: e.g. the local school in a historically discriminated neighborhood is not going to get any better if today the discrimination stops, unless someone starts investing in it to account for the years of neglect). Most of affirmative action is meant to undo this injustice specifically, because direct reparations to the millions of people who were owed them were never even on the table. And of course, social justice is about more than black people. We haven't even talked about the historical disenfranchisement of women, the relatively recent imprisonment of gay and trans people, the internment of Japonese people, and so many other injustices that have never been repayed, even if they stopped.

tomp 6y ago
> Most of affirmative action is meant to undo this injustice specifically Intention =/= effect. It would be far more effective if the state invested more effort into educating people from underprivileged families (black, poor, immigrants), rather than lowering the standards for college admissions, which probably has worse outcomes (those students likely won’t catch up in terms of their skills), as well as creating new injustices (e.g. discrimination against Asians).