| Discriminating in favor or certain minorities is as close as you can get to balancing the injustice. Consider how many covert ways there is for biases to systematically screw over people, and how impossible it can be to definitively prove. * The things you were exposed to as a child. Whether or not you know/see people who look like you in a certain career path. * Whether or not you feel like you fit in at certain classes in school. * The biases of your mentors and whom they choose to invest in. People favor other people who they feel are similar. This impacts who gets opportunities for further training positions. Who they write recommendations for. Who gets opportunities for internships. Each of these choices compound, as people with more opportunities look better than people with less. * The biases of your peers and coworkers. Who gets blamed when things go poorly. Who gets credit for successes. On the individual level, it's usually difficult to point out exactly where the injustice occurs to know how to address it in real time. As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. With that in mind, it becomes much more reasonable to essentially reverse discriminate. Given two people with the same resume, with person A being from an underrepresented group and person B who is not, the best candidate is likely A who has had the additional burden of biases. Doing this at large actually will reduce the biases. As it becomes normal to see the underrepresented group in a career path: * More kids will see people like them in the career, leading to more trying it * Classes will be more diverse and welcoming so more will stick to it * Mentors are likely more diverse as well and will give opportunities to other people that look like them * When you don't stick out, it's more likely you'll be treated fairly by peers and coworkers |
What this does is distribute the injustice evenly between the races, but this sort of concern about races (rather than the individuals that comprise them) strikes me as the very essence of racism: it's treating individuals within a race as unimportant and treating race itself as all-important.
> As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others.
We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.