[VBprogrammer]

I mean this in the nicest possible way; have you ever faced discrimination based on the colour of your skin, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities or anything else which is protected by law in most civilised countries?

If, like a significant portion of the HN audience, you are straight, white, middle class and male it's probably easier for you to dismiss the right to fair treatment than it might be for individuals in those categories.

[dnautics]

I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me. I'm much happier knowing that the people that operate that business were racist jerks (instead of, say, them being forced to serve me and spit in my food, which would be a health concern), and I have dissuaded probably on the order of a hundred people from going to that place, and that was in the era before social media.

[code_sloth]

> I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me.

I'm not you, and I can't imagine what your situation is, but I'll bet whatever precious little civil rights laws that are enforced wherever you are has probably has helped you more than you know.

Some people thought pandemic response teams are a waste of money, until a pandemic happened, then they realized perhaps there wasn't a pandemic previously because that team was doing their job.

[pmiller2]

I have had the same experience (although it was not race-based discrimination). Theoretically there were laws to protect me, but, practically, asserting my rights under those laws would have been too costly and time consuming to be worth it.

[monocasa]

Why didn't that strategy work for black people in the 1960s? Or LGBT more recently?

[dnautics]

My claim is it didn't. You don't think black people were discriminated against in private locations well past the 1960s? What absolutely worked in the 1960s, was the banning of government REQUIRING segregation in private entities by law (which by the way, many companies absolutely chafed at, because quite frankly segregating your business is a cost-sinking pain in the ass to arrange and enforce). Nobody is disputing that CRA I and CRA II were much needed reforms.

[monocasa]

If that were the case, then de facto segregation wouldn't be increasing even to this day. Without the government enforcing segregation, people started separating themselves physically. Schools for instance are more segregated than they were in 1975.

Segregation wasn't a case of the government pushing these ideas on to unwilling populace.

[_-david-_]

This could actually be because of forced busing of whites to black schools. Many parents want to send their kid to the best school and were willing to move to avoid their kids going to worse schools.

White parents were more likely to be able to afford to move which resulted in them leaving. Minorities tended to be poorer and could not leave and stayed in the areas with the worse schools. Kids who go to worse schools are less likely to get out of poverty so they stayed in the same poor areas and had kids in the same area repeating the cycle.

Since schools are typically given money based on property tax it meant that the schools in poor areas tended to receive less funding. There are also issues with teachers getting lower pay if they were in a poorer school. I think these issues are fixed in some states but there are still issues related to this in various states.

[monocasa]

The trend has gotten worse even after forced busing wasn't a thing anymore.

[kuzimoto]

I don't agree with discrimination, and would never seek to engage in that myself.

With that being said, in the private sector, there really is no "right to fair treatment" with exceptions for anything required by law for affirmative action. By forcing fairness (where a business must provide service to someone it doesn't want to), you are simultaneously removing the freedom of association [0].

[0] While not explicitly stated in the US constitution is argued to be a fundamental human right.