These “merit” systems in many cases actually give preferential treatment to minorities. Even if they didn’t, what they usually measure is parental investment, which differs widely from household to household and obviously a parent cannot invest more than they have.
This is where single parent households - which all races have, though as a percentage they are much higher in black households - really screw the next generation because mommy has to work a job, usually low paying, and can barely keep the essentials paid.
So in reality those disadvantaged blacks should be sharing a common cause with disadvantaged whites (and other groups). Because both sides are getting the shaft for mostly similar reasons.
And if they team together they’d actually be a large enough block of people (and voters) to make a difference. The current progressive policy, where it’s “everyone against white people” doesn’t work out as well because they are 64% of the population.
For example, one unjust thing is that if you are poor, and live in a poor neighborhood, your neighborhood can’t pay shit for property taxes. So the schools are bad and there is less funding for police. This disadvantages all skin color.
SamuelA: I agree partly with you. I think we are all to some extent like the “blind men describing an elephant”, and the truth is a combination of a lot of things.
I think the extent to which “merit” systems support minorities by added rules is a lot less (orders of magnitude less) than the extent to which they support (also by added rules, many of them unwritten and unspoken) people who are both rich and white. I think stripping away the unwritten and/or unspoken rules, and stripping away anyone’s ability to reinstate them - or indeed create more of them - is the important part of that issue. If merit was defined strictly, in the narrow subject area being applied for (no extracurricular points allowed, etc etc), and all other criteria were prohibited even as adjunct measurements, so that it was either merit in that field or pure chance, that would be a major positive change.
I think it’s clear, whether anyone likes to admit it or not, that being black in the United States today is a disadvantage per se, and not just as a statistical accident of also being poor or whatever else.
I agree with this. What I’m saying is that this may be true, but the “silent majority” of white people aren’t going to take up your cause if the alleged benefit is “absolutely nothing, fuck you, you’re part of the oppressor class”. This is the flaw behind “black lives matter”. People criticizing it just get labeled as racists.
When reality the slogan should sum up the fact that none of us want to be shot dead by the police if we ain’t packing or legitimately threatening the officers. Hand in pocket while surrounded by 20 cops with assault rifles? Yeah not a threat. Charging forward with a claymore over our head and it’s just a couple cops and not that much distance? Fine, that’s a threat.
That’s absolutely true, and is the reason that some states - California and New Jersey for two, pool property tax money at the state level and allocate it back to the districts based on criteria other than property values in those districts.
Doesn’t solve the complete problem, since those districts often need more money to deal with kids who have been disadvantaged from birth, but it helps a bit.
And when you don’t say any of those things? Say, for example, like this:
Incidentally, since apparently I struggle to interpret what you write correctly, I’d sure appreciate that clarification I asked for earlier:
I’m sure it was merely an oversight that you hadn’t done so already.
It’s not what the studies establish; it’s the conclusions drawn from them. The conclusion you are drawing from yours does not follow from the study you cite.
If Black Lives Matter were instead called “Concerned Citizens Against Police Brutality” and focused on all misuses of police force, without emphasizing the racial aspect, I think they’d be a lot more successful politically.
Even if all you truly cared about was blacks getting unjustly killed by police, it would still make sense strategically to frame it in race neutral terms, to win over white voters.
Isn’t it weird for those who say things like this to think “Hey, white people can’t be arsed if it’s only about black people getting unjustly killed by police.”
Isn’t that an indication that we have a huge racism problem?
Immanuel Kant wrote "“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” In-group bias is simply part of the human condition. There’s no way we’re going to stamp it out completely. I’m a pragmatist who is interested in achieving results, even if it’s not achieved in the most morally pure fashion.
Then maybe you can explain your point a bit. Are you drawing any conclusions from the study you cited in the Independent, like “white privilege means police don’t shoot you if you resist arrest”, or are you asserting it as a mere correlation and it doesn’t prove anything about causality?
If you are just saying “this doesn’t prove that white privilege causes anything”, then fine and I agree with you.
This. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” makes a very important point beyond the general principle of “police brutality is bad”. It’s pointing out that one key reason police brutality so disproportionately affects black lives is that our society has an entrenched historical legacy of believing that black lives don’t actually matter very much, certainly not as much as white lives.
I agree with Blalron that many white people are deeply uncomfortable with having this pointed out and would feel happier with the BLM police-reform movement if they stopped doing so. But I disagree with Blalron that white people’s discomfort about this issue ought to be pampered by rebranding the movement to something less disturbing to their feefees.
One of the major problems of the BLM movement is not that white people don’t care very much if it’s black folks getting unjustly killed - it is that white people don’t care very much if it is black folks who are justly killed. BLM kicks up an apparently equal fuss over both kinds of shootings. And tends to trumpet both kinds as equally evidential that there is a huge racism problem, even when it isn’t.
It isn’t always wrong - even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while - but BLM should pick their battles more carefully. Hollering “hands up - don’t shoot” is fine unless the shootee in question didn’t have his hands up, wasn’t shot in the back, and was ten minutes off a strong arm robbery and assaulting a police officer at the time.
I don’t think wagging your finger at white people and calling them racist is ever going to work, especially when the racism is mostly occurring on a subconscious level. They observe the surface level of their own awareness, don’t see any racism, and therefore resent any implications that racism could be influencing their reactions. I don’t see any way we are going to get past that, except by side stepping the issue of race entirely and framing issues in colorblind terms.
In other words, because white people are going to reflexively “resent any implications that racism could be influencing their reactions” we should just give up honestly discussing or even mentioning the ways that racism influences white people’s reactions?
I really don’t want there to be an elephant in my living room. So obviously the only way to “get past that” when you see an elephant in my living room is to refrain from mentioning it. Yup, that sounds both logical and effective.
A lot of people have become aware of their racist thinking by having it pointed out to them. I know that’s happened to me. Now, I’m not free of any racial bias, but I try to be aware of it and counter it with reality. And sometimes, I can cut the thinking off at the pass.
We can choose to try, or we can choose not to try. Either way, we’re making a choice.
Michael Brown seems to have turned into a religious icon for BLM. You can no more convince them that Brown deserved to be shot than you can convince a devout Christian that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.
Possibly true. But I would think a lot of us whites would find it kind of embarrassing that the only realistic possibility for reaching a situation where the social effects of white racism can be openly and honestly discussed is to completely eliminate racial whiteness as a distinct phenotypic category from the human species.
Well, okay, if that’s what it takes, but talk about oversensitive. “As long as there are still any white people in existence on the planet, we can’t talk about white privilege!”
They don’t have to be eliminated, they just need to become a small enough minority that politicians don’t have to routinely cater to oversensitive white folk.
The most remarkable thing about this is the assumption that it’s easier for black people to overcome all of the barriers set up by white people over hundreds of years than it is for white people to examine their own thinking.
One side is told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and the other that it’s just too hard and scary to think about stuff.