[strogonoff]

From the outside it seems frustrating that instead of addressing the underlying issue—indexing individual’s worth based on race (or other unalienable characteristics)—the solution is to keep applying the same logic, just assigning different weights to the output.

For example, financial aid should not depend on race, but on actual financial situation. If it happens to be generally worse for certain minorities, you’ve achieved your goal—and without using racial discrimination. Judging by one’s appearance seems like the lazy way out.

[bsanr2]

How would you propose to level the entrenched inequities if not by reversing the previously unequal distribution of scarce resources?

[raxxorrax]

If we talk about inequities, why not use economic factors? Get the money from equity holders. Probably from BlackRock in this case, not from WhiteRock.

[bsanr2]

Because race was an explicit and continues to be an implicit factor in separating the haves from the have-nots.

>Probably from BlackRock in this case, not from WhiteRock.

That's cultural appropriation.

[strogonoff]

Don’t you think this being a factor is exactly what should and could be addressed? (That is what my comment was about.)

If have-nots who are black miss out on financial aid (or something else) because they are black, then giving financial aid based on have/have-not status without considering the race sounds like the safest, most sustainable, and (importantly) most respectable way of going about it.

Explicitly avoiding favoring based on race strikes me as the surest way to eliminate the disparity (that which accumulated from decades of exactly such favoring), while attracting least pushback from across the political aisle.

I can’t imagine any reason for not doing this except for short-term optics, minority votes, etc.

[bsanr2]

No? The point is that poverty and financial weakness in the black community is a direct result of racist attacks on black economic activity, often carried out or backed by the government, and now practically self-sustaining by nature of the force and length of application. You right an off-balance body with equal and opposite force to the direction of momentum.

[strogonoff]

By “no”, do you mean you’re in favor of maintaining the status quo where race “continues to be an implicit factor”?

I fail to see how using financial weakness as discriminating factor would not address financial weakness in the black community.

[raxxorrax]

> That's cultural appropriation.

No. What culture is allegedly appropriated here? Random insinuations don't make a good argument.

[bsanr2]

It was a joke.