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Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those

by mcv 3y ago

Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both. And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down? > America is not in the least social-democratic, It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.

faeriechangling 3y ago
I don’t see how any of that morally justifies discriminating against Asians though.
EatingWithForks 3y ago
Additionally we had issues where banks were being prosecuted for not giving housing support to primarily black neighboorhoods all the way still to STILL IN 2023! https://apnews.com/article/city-national-bank-redlining-settlement-b55eade5ccdbf0974ff77f011a5d8af9 https://apnews.com/article/city-national-bank-redlining-sett...
93po 3y ago
> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. Ask any black person and there's your answer.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  Ask justice Thomas
  - 93po 3y ago
    Ask any black person with a net worth that isn't $30 million
    - rayiner 3y ago
      The decisive majority of black people agree with justice Thomas that colleges shouldn’t use race as a factor for admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/25/most-amer...
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      Seems like you are moving the goal post? Are you saying rich black people aren’t as black as poor black people? I seem to remember a presidential candidate saying something similar. Why would you punish someone for their success despite the disadvantage you insist must be accounted for?
      - 93po 3y ago
        i cannot roll my eyes any harder than i did here. my point is that looking at the outliers of any context aren't going to be the ones that give you an accurate picture of reality.
    - ryan93 3y ago
      Thomas was anti affirmative action going back 50 years to when he graduated from yale law. he grew up very poor.
    - gmarx 3y ago
      Where did you get 30 million? One online source estimates 1 million net worth and has some reasoning to back it up. My guess is that if he has owned a house in the DC area since he has been on the supreme court, he would have a lot of home equity too but probably not up to 30 million
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> You've got to try to make things right. The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies. Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  You can give poor people money, but that has nothing to do with black people. Black people aren't asking for money because they're poor, they're asking for money because the country was built with their ancestors' uncompensated labor, it was entirely legal, and the descendants of their owners still enjoy the fruits of that uncompensated labor. You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    No one is going to be able to go back in time and change history. Getting into the weeds of defining who is and is not deserving of wealth redistribution is just going to waste society’s resources by pitting tribe versus tribe, and ironically mostly helps those at the top. “Poor” is easier to define and rectify, and at the end of the day, I think the goal should be to provide a floor to members of society and maximize opportunities to all.
    - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
      I would look at what happened in South Africa. An explicit part of Mandela's agenda was setting an end point for the discussions around what happened during apartheid. South Africa is also a good example of what happens if people decide to go back and reopen that box (and tbf, when it came to money the initial movement was quite short-lived, the current President of South Africa got very rich very quickly).
    - cloverich 3y ago
justinclift 3y ago
> ... when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. In the US, isn't that the case regardless of people's skin colour? This example springs to mind for me anyway: https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/verdict-in-police-shooting-death-of-unarmed-australian-woman-justine-ruszczyk-damond/news-story/6c7d152489328baf4f72e63761f04425 https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/verdict-in-polic...
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Statistics matter, anecdotes do not.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Unless they are the FBI crime statistics, then we are back to anecdotes.
    - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
      The way you analyze statistics matters too. For instance most don't cross-reference crime statistics with economic background and see how drastically that affects any prior (likely racist) conclusions.
      - Amezarak 3y ago
        Have you cross-referenced that? What I saw was that the lowest economic quintiles of some groups committed less crime than the wealthiest quintiles of other groups. The "economic" in "socio-economic" is important, but so is the "socio", which may include being discriminated against in the past. Unfortunately, statistics don't really bear out a lot of popular claims about the impact of poverty. For example, per-student funding does not make as big a difference in academic performance in schools as demographics and the local social environment: there are a lot of schools with bottom barrel funding that perform great and schools with exorbitant funding that perform miserably. And family income is not the strongest predictor of SAT scores.
parineum 3y ago
> Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down? It hasn't but it should be. One thing I know for sure is that the first step to ending that discrimination shouldn't be to add more. Why not start by removing that?
ThatGeoGuy 3y ago
> Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. The "last chattel slave" was only freed around September 1942. I've seen this reference in several places, but the most direct one is a footnote on a wikipedia page [0]. Regardless, it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering. The children and grandchildren of enslaved black people are still alive today! Waving it away with "time has passed" seems more an attempt to bury the issue than to approach it with some semblance of acknowledging the wrong done. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeville,_Texas#/media/File:Beeville_couple_arraigned_on_charge_of_holding_Negro_in_slavery_on_farm_(1942)_The_Brownsville_Herald.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeville,_Texas#/media/File:Be...
- wk_end 3y ago
  I think you may have misread the comment you're responding to.
- javajosh 3y ago
  >it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering I'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically? To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc). What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.
naasking 3y ago
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. The people who had been harmed by those policies are not the ones seeking admission to Harvard. Everyone seeking admission to Harvard has been born into circumstances through no fault of their own, so just help the financially less fortunate to provide more equal opportunities across the board. Black people are disproportionately represented among the poor, so this would disproportionately help them anyway.
- cloverich 3y ago
  But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth. IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out. Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period). If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
Kye 3y ago
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations was widely dismissed for the title in 2014, but it's a chronicle of this sort of thing, and it's very much ongoing. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
chmod600 3y ago
“you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.” For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided. When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage. Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing. History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  The problem with your logic is that if you leave the past the past then there’s effectively no punishment for discrimination in the present. Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.
  - chmod600 3y ago
    The Ukraine war is not 50 years ago and clearly affects the entire country. If Russia decides to pay reparations that could make sense but it’s a different issue by a long shot. 50 years later after a bunch of people have been born, died, and moved in and out? No way.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Why or why not does the time matter? And what length does or does it not matter? This is not math, no matter the answer it’s clearly opinionated, hence this Supreme Court case.
concordDance 3y ago
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do. Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get sentiments like "Muslims did 9/11 and they must pay" without considering that the tendency-towards-9/11-ness might not carry over to the entire set of "Muslims". Less than half of Americans were even alive in 1971 and no one is alive from the days of US slavery. Thinking "those who have inherited benefits due to negative treatment of African Americans should transfer wealth to the descendents of those African Americans" is a separate idea to race based affirmative action. Race based AA would see the children of a pair of Ukrainian immigrants put below the children of a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even though neither group has anything to do with slavery.
- blackle 3y ago
  9/11 was not a systemic injustice, it was perpetrated by a small group of extremists in a single act. Racial discrimination was a systemic injustice perpetrated by lawmakers, enabled by an unjust society, with country-wide effects lasting multiple decades (if not centuries). It's not a logical fallacy to think that a systemic injustice requires a systemic solution.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    But the solution is to remove the injustice. That's not what's contended here, I think.
    - mcv 3y ago
      It is what I'm discussing. Not sure what else there is.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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marcosdumay 3y ago
> You've got to try to make things right. Well, ok, you should. Now, favoring person A due to their skin color, at the expense at person X, because person B was once harmed to favor person Y due to their skin color does not strike me as a productive way to do that. You can start to make things right by banning that shit about children of alumni, all the bullshit police behavior there, doing some real wealth redistribution, etc. You can go looking at individuals that were harmed too, but modern legal systems have a really hard time dealing with that kind of situation, so be prepared to cover new ground, and be wary of not creating larger injustices than the ones you are trying to fix. Anyway, I'm far from the US too. The entire thing isn't completely academic to me, but it's close to that.
belorn 3y ago
Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past is being put behind them. We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.
- Teever 3y ago
  Germany paid reparations.
  - mcv 3y ago
    But not to Greece.
    - throw_a_grenade 3y ago
      And not to Poland.
      - throwaway6734 3y ago
        And not to Ukraine
      - snovymgodym 3y ago
        Germany has paid reparations to Polish individuals harmed by the second world war. > In the meantime, Poland and Germany concluded several treaties and agreements to compensate Polish persons who were victims of German aggression. In 1972, West Germany paid compensation to Poles that had survived pseudo-medical experiments during their imprisonment in various Nazi camps during the Second World War.[35] In 1975, the Gierek-Schmidt agreement was signed in Warsaw. It stipulated that 1.3 billion DM was to be paid to Poles who, during Nazi occupation, had paid into the German social security system but received no pension.[36] In 1992, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation was founded by the Polish and German governments, and as a result, Germany paid Polish sufferers approximately zl 4.7 billion (equivalent to zl 37.8 billion or US$7.97 billion in 2022[citation needed]). Between 1992 and 2006, Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish, non-Jewish victims of slave labour in Nazi Germany and also to Polish orphans and children who had been subject to forced labour.[37] The Swiss Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust (which had obtained settlement money from banks in Switzerland) used some of its funds to pay compensation between 1998 and 2002 to Polish Jews and Romani who were victims of Nazi Germany.[37] Germany also ceded around 20% of its pre-1938 territory to Poland. The ethnic Germans who lived in those territories were subsequently denied citizenship and expelled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees) I'm not really sure that there's anything more to settle between the two countries in 2023.
e40 3y ago
[flagged]
FireBeyond 3y ago
> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that High schools in Georgia have had segregated proms as recently as 2019 (and possibly since then too), either formally, up to 2012, or informally (one county had schools that had a prom that was open and then a "white prom" which didn't specify attendance requirements, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to who was welcome where.
idopmstuff 3y ago
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. I don't disagree with you, but I've always found it wrong that in a lot of cases of academic affirmative action, it's Asians who are absorbing the cost of making things right, when they are definitely not responsible for any of the wrongs done.
PathOfEclipse 3y ago
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how? > Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight. In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being. If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.
latexr 3y ago
> it's been 150 years! It’s been 60. “Black People Were Enslaved in the US Until as Recently as 1963”: https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-states-antoinette-harrell.html https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-stat...
WalterBright 3y ago
> many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni I suspect that's strongly correlated to whether those alumni made contributions to the university or not. I know several children of alumni that were rejected - and their parents hadn't made donations, either.
- pohl 3y ago
  So affirmative action for children of wealthy alumni, then.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Nope. It's quid pro quo.
    - pohl 3y ago
      Preferring a euphemism doesn’t make it a different thing.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Calling a spade a hammer is not helpful.
        pohl 3y ago
        I'm chuffed to be praised with such faint critique.
bloppe 3y ago
Of course thing's haven't been "made right" (reparations?). They never will be. You simply cannot correct such a large and complex past injustice. By the time you're done sorting through all the details to a reasonable standard, everyone who was around when the reparations process started would have already passed away, and doing this kind of thing sloppily is a recipe for disaster. The only way forward is to correct current injustices and level the playing field on which people compete today (i.e. the rationale behind affirmative action). I do think the focus should be on class rather than race; the two are highly correlated but not the same. Nothing in the SCOTUS decision seems to prohibit affirmative action based on class, so I actually think this ruling could turn out less impactful than many seem to fear or hope.
DanHulton 3y ago
And not to mention, slavery still happens. Prison work is a thing, and you don't have to look at too many studies to see that Black men are incarcerated at a rate far out stripping the average. Systemic racism leading to incarceratuon is very much a thing, and enforced prison work is very much a thing, ergo modern slavery. If reparations were being paid, it could be paid to people who are alive right now.
monocasa 3y ago
> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And to put this in real terms, the number of racial justice who have 'killed themselves' via methods like 'hanging themselves from a tree outside their house with sheets their family haven't seen before' makes you think that this really isn't a whole thing that we've gotten past. It's not like lynchings were legal in the 1950s; the perpetrators simply structurally didn't face justice for their crimes. https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-activist-deaths-black-lives-matter-20190317-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...
claytongulick 3y ago
> when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. As an absolute number, more white people are shot by police than black. [1] As a percentage of population, the rate is higher in the black population, however that's a very complex analysis when you break it down by homicides by region and the populations (many urban areas are majority black, or Hispanic). > You've got to try to make things right. Discrimination based on race doesn't strike me as a very good strategy for making things right. It seems to me like it will just foster increased racial tensions, resentment and problems without solving anything. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
ironcurtain 3y ago
If that’s your summary of knowledge, it’s misleading and lacks nuance. GI Bill did not exclude blacks, it’s educational institutions that chose either accept or decline those funds for black applicants. Still in South there was about a hundred of colleges accepting black paying with GI bills. Majority those lynched was white. You’re propagating victimization narrative. There are historic black colleges that would and should gladly fill in gaps left by historical white institutions like Ivies. Same with neighborhoods. Both have the same problem that none is willing to talk about in polite non-Southern society.

by mcv 3y ago

faeriechangling 3y ago

I don’t see how any of that morally justifies discriminating against Asians though.

EatingWithForks 3y ago

Additionally we had issues where banks were being prosecuted for not giving housing support to primarily black neighboorhoods all the way still to STILL IN 2023! https://apnews.com/article/city-national-bank-redlining-settlement-b55eade5ccdbf0974ff77f011a5d8af9 https://apnews.com/article/city-national-bank-redlining-sett...

93po 3y ago

> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. Ask any black person and there's your answer.

Fatnino 3y ago
Ask justice Thomas
- 93po 3y ago
  Ask any black person with a net worth that isn't $30 million
  - rayiner 3y ago
    The decisive majority of black people agree with justice Thomas that colleges shouldn’t use race as a factor for admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/25/most-amer...
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Seems like you are moving the goal post? Are you saying rich black people aren’t as black as poor black people? I seem to remember a presidential candidate saying something similar. Why would you punish someone for their success despite the disadvantage you insist must be accounted for?
    - 93po 3y ago
      i cannot roll my eyes any harder than i did here. my point is that looking at the outliers of any context aren't going to be the ones that give you an accurate picture of reality.
  - ryan93 3y ago
    Thomas was anti affirmative action going back 50 years to when he graduated from yale law. he grew up very poor.
  - gmarx 3y ago
    Where did you get 30 million? One online source estimates 1 million net worth and has some reasoning to back it up. My guess is that if he has owned a house in the DC area since he has been on the supreme court, he would have a lot of home equity too but probably not up to 30 million

lotsofpulp 3y ago

> You've got to try to make things right. The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies. Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.

pessimizer 3y ago
You can give poor people money, but that has nothing to do with black people. Black people aren't asking for money because they're poor, they're asking for money because the country was built with their ancestors' uncompensated labor, it was entirely legal, and the descendants of their owners still enjoy the fruits of that uncompensated labor. You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  No one is going to be able to go back in time and change history. Getting into the weeds of defining who is and is not deserving of wealth redistribution is just going to waste society’s resources by pitting tribe versus tribe, and ironically mostly helps those at the top. “Poor” is easier to define and rectify, and at the end of the day, I think the goal should be to provide a floor to members of society and maximize opportunities to all.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    I would look at what happened in South Africa. An explicit part of Mandela's agenda was setting an end point for the discussions around what happened during apartheid. South Africa is also a good example of what happens if people decide to go back and reopen that box (and tbf, when it came to money the initial movement was quite short-lived, the current President of South Africa got very rich very quickly).
  - cloverich 3y ago

justinclift 3y ago

> ... when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. In the US, isn't that the case regardless of people's skin colour? This example springs to mind for me anyway: https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/verdict-in-police-shooting-death-of-unarmed-australian-woman-justine-ruszczyk-damond/news-story/6c7d152489328baf4f72e63761f04425 https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/verdict-in-polic...

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
Statistics matter, anecdotes do not.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Unless they are the FBI crime statistics, then we are back to anecdotes.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    The way you analyze statistics matters too. For instance most don't cross-reference crime statistics with economic background and see how drastically that affects any prior (likely racist) conclusions.
    - Amezarak 3y ago
      Have you cross-referenced that? What I saw was that the lowest economic quintiles of some groups committed less crime than the wealthiest quintiles of other groups. The "economic" in "socio-economic" is important, but so is the "socio", which may include being discriminated against in the past. Unfortunately, statistics don't really bear out a lot of popular claims about the impact of poverty. For example, per-student funding does not make as big a difference in academic performance in schools as demographics and the local social environment: there are a lot of schools with bottom barrel funding that perform great and schools with exorbitant funding that perform miserably. And family income is not the strongest predictor of SAT scores.

parineum 3y ago

> Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down? It hasn't but it should be. One thing I know for sure is that the first step to ending that discrimination shouldn't be to add more. Why not start by removing that?

ThatGeoGuy 3y ago

> Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. The "last chattel slave" was only freed around September 1942. I've seen this reference in several places, but the most direct one is a footnote on a wikipedia page [0]. Regardless, it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering. The children and grandchildren of enslaved black people are still alive today! Waving it away with "time has passed" seems more an attempt to bury the issue than to approach it with some semblance of acknowledging the wrong done. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeville,_Texas#/media/File:Beeville_couple_arraigned_on_charge_of_holding_Negro_in_slavery_on_farm_(1942)_The_Brownsville_Herald.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeville,_Texas#/media/File:Be...

wk_end 3y ago
I think you may have misread the comment you're responding to.
javajosh 3y ago
>it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering I'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically? To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc). What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.

naasking 3y ago

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. The people who had been harmed by those policies are not the ones seeking admission to Harvard. Everyone seeking admission to Harvard has been born into circumstances through no fault of their own, so just help the financially less fortunate to provide more equal opportunities across the board. Black people are disproportionately represented among the poor, so this would disproportionately help them anyway.

cloverich 3y ago
But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth. IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out. Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.
- naasking 3y ago
  > But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period). If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.

Kye 3y ago

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations was widely dismissed for the title in 2014, but it's a chronicle of this sort of thing, and it's very much ongoing. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

chmod600 3y ago

“you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.” For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided. When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage. Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing. History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.

endisneigh 3y ago
The problem with your logic is that if you leave the past the past then there’s effectively no punishment for discrimination in the present. Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.
- chmod600 3y ago
  The Ukraine war is not 50 years ago and clearly affects the entire country. If Russia decides to pay reparations that could make sense but it’s a different issue by a long shot. 50 years later after a bunch of people have been born, died, and moved in and out? No way.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Why or why not does the time matter? And what length does or does it not matter? This is not math, no matter the answer it’s clearly opinionated, hence this Supreme Court case.

concordDance 3y ago

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do. Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get sentiments like "Muslims did 9/11 and they must pay" without considering that the tendency-towards-9/11-ness might not carry over to the entire set of "Muslims". Less than half of Americans were even alive in 1971 and no one is alive from the days of US slavery. Thinking "those who have inherited benefits due to negative treatment of African Americans should transfer wealth to the descendents of those African Americans" is a separate idea to race based affirmative action. Race based AA would see the children of a pair of Ukrainian immigrants put below the children of a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even though neither group has anything to do with slavery.

blackle 3y ago
9/11 was not a systemic injustice, it was perpetrated by a small group of extremists in a single act. Racial discrimination was a systemic injustice perpetrated by lawmakers, enabled by an unjust society, with country-wide effects lasting multiple decades (if not centuries). It's not a logical fallacy to think that a systemic injustice requires a systemic solution.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  But the solution is to remove the injustice. That's not what's contended here, I think.
  - mcv 3y ago
    It is what I'm discussing. Not sure what else there is.
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marcosdumay 3y ago

> You've got to try to make things right. Well, ok, you should. Now, favoring person A due to their skin color, at the expense at person X, because person B was once harmed to favor person Y due to their skin color does not strike me as a productive way to do that. You can start to make things right by banning that shit about children of alumni, all the bullshit police behavior there, doing some real wealth redistribution, etc. You can go looking at individuals that were harmed too, but modern legal systems have a really hard time dealing with that kind of situation, so be prepared to cover new ground, and be wary of not creating larger injustices than the ones you are trying to fix. Anyway, I'm far from the US too. The entire thing isn't completely academic to me, but it's close to that.

belorn 3y ago

Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past is being put behind them. We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.

Teever 3y ago
Germany paid reparations.
- mcv 3y ago
  But not to Greece.
  - throw_a_grenade 3y ago
    And not to Poland.
    - throwaway6734 3y ago
      And not to Ukraine
    - snovymgodym 3y ago
      Germany has paid reparations to Polish individuals harmed by the second world war. > In the meantime, Poland and Germany concluded several treaties and agreements to compensate Polish persons who were victims of German aggression. In 1972, West Germany paid compensation to Poles that had survived pseudo-medical experiments during their imprisonment in various Nazi camps during the Second World War.[35] In 1975, the Gierek-Schmidt agreement was signed in Warsaw. It stipulated that 1.3 billion DM was to be paid to Poles who, during Nazi occupation, had paid into the German social security system but received no pension.[36] In 1992, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation was founded by the Polish and German governments, and as a result, Germany paid Polish sufferers approximately zl 4.7 billion (equivalent to zl 37.8 billion or US$7.97 billion in 2022[citation needed]). Between 1992 and 2006, Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish, non-Jewish victims of slave labour in Nazi Germany and also to Polish orphans and children who had been subject to forced labour.[37] The Swiss Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust (which had obtained settlement money from banks in Switzerland) used some of its funds to pay compensation between 1998 and 2002 to Polish Jews and Romani who were victims of Nazi Germany.[37] Germany also ceded around 20% of its pre-1938 territory to Poland. The ethnic Germans who lived in those territories were subsequently denied citizenship and expelled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees) I'm not really sure that there's anything more to settle between the two countries in 2023.

e40 3y ago

[flagged]

FireBeyond 3y ago

> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that High schools in Georgia have had segregated proms as recently as 2019 (and possibly since then too), either formally, up to 2012, or informally (one county had schools that had a prom that was open and then a "white prom" which didn't specify attendance requirements, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to who was welcome where.

idopmstuff 3y ago

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. I don't disagree with you, but I've always found it wrong that in a lot of cases of academic affirmative action, it's Asians who are absorbing the cost of making things right, when they are definitely not responsible for any of the wrongs done.

PathOfEclipse 3y ago

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how? > Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight. In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being. If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.

latexr 3y ago

> it's been 150 years! It’s been 60. “Black People Were Enslaved in the US Until as Recently as 1963”: https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-states-antoinette-harrell.html https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-stat...

WalterBright 3y ago

> many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni I suspect that's strongly correlated to whether those alumni made contributions to the university or not. I know several children of alumni that were rejected - and their parents hadn't made donations, either.

pohl 3y ago
So affirmative action for children of wealthy alumni, then.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Nope. It's quid pro quo.
  - pohl 3y ago
    Preferring a euphemism doesn’t make it a different thing.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Calling a spade a hammer is not helpful.
      - pohl 3y ago
        I'm chuffed to be praised with such faint critique.

bloppe 3y ago

Of course thing's haven't been "made right" (reparations?). They never will be. You simply cannot correct such a large and complex past injustice. By the time you're done sorting through all the details to a reasonable standard, everyone who was around when the reparations process started would have already passed away, and doing this kind of thing sloppily is a recipe for disaster. The only way forward is to correct current injustices and level the playing field on which people compete today (i.e. the rationale behind affirmative action). I do think the focus should be on class rather than race; the two are highly correlated but not the same. Nothing in the SCOTUS decision seems to prohibit affirmative action based on class, so I actually think this ruling could turn out less impactful than many seem to fear or hope.

DanHulton 3y ago

And not to mention, slavery still happens. Prison work is a thing, and you don't have to look at too many studies to see that Black men are incarcerated at a rate far out stripping the average. Systemic racism leading to incarceratuon is very much a thing, and enforced prison work is very much a thing, ergo modern slavery. If reparations were being paid, it could be paid to people who are alive right now.

monocasa 3y ago

> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And to put this in real terms, the number of racial justice who have 'killed themselves' via methods like 'hanging themselves from a tree outside their house with sheets their family haven't seen before' makes you think that this really isn't a whole thing that we've gotten past. It's not like lynchings were legal in the 1950s; the perpetrators simply structurally didn't face justice for their crimes. https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-activist-deaths-black-lives-matter-20190317-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...

claytongulick 3y ago

> when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. As an absolute number, more white people are shot by police than black. [1] As a percentage of population, the rate is higher in the black population, however that's a very complex analysis when you break it down by homicides by region and the populations (many urban areas are majority black, or Hispanic). > You've got to try to make things right. Discrimination based on race doesn't strike me as a very good strategy for making things right. It seems to me like it will just foster increased racial tensions, resentment and problems without solving anything. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

ironcurtain 3y ago

If that’s your summary of knowledge, it’s misleading and lacks nuance. GI Bill did not exclude blacks, it’s educational institutions that chose either accept or decline those funds for black applicants. Still in South there was about a hundred of colleges accepting black paying with GI bills. Majority those lynched was white. You’re propagating victimization narrative. There are historic black colleges that would and should gladly fill in gaps left by historical white institutions like Ivies. Same with neighborhoods. Both have the same problem that none is willing to talk about in polite non-Southern society.