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by strogonoff 1695 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
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.

Because I've had this conversation in bad faith far too often, I would like for you to paraphrase what you think my argument has been up to this point, so that I may ascertain your ability or willingness to understand it.
Your argument—and I am paraphrasing it in a way that highlights what I fail to understand, as an outsider—seems to be that using race as discriminating factor in order to resolve disparities caused by using race as discriminating factor in the past is better than eliminating the use of race as discriminating factor altogether, and addressing those disparities in an unbiased way (e.g., dispense aid based on wealth, not race).
Okay, and humor me: why might I have come to that conclusion? Note that I've actually already explained why, so there's no reason for you to "fail to understand." All you have to do is bring yourself to actually write it out, in your own words.