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by astrange 2171 days ago
> But I benefit from slavery that did exist, and my ancestors benefited from a genocide.

I don't think this is the best way to say it, because "I benefit from slavery" sounds kind of abstract at this point. In fact, white people benefited from all kinds of 100% real and explicit racism right up to and beyond Civil Rights.

You don't have to uncover anything hidden because you can just go look up e.g. zoning laws in Berkeley and they will just say in the meeting minutes that they'd invented them to keep out the blacks and Chinese. The reason highways go through US cities instead of around them is because they wanted to knock down the black neighborhoods. They really put a lot of effort into it.

One reason to fix it is that it'll improve life for you too - undoing zoning will make your commute shorter and housing cheaper. But of course, people tend to not care about their absolute quality of life as long as it's better than someone else's.