[bilbo0s]

Are you arguing that we should take the word of of, say, black people as being more valid in this debate? Because if so, I'm not at all sure that most black people would vote on this issue the way you seem to suspect they would. The reality is that this is one person's opinion. It's not more valid than mine simply because she's black and I'm small town Wisconsin. Nor is it more valid than the voice of the white liberal. Nor even the voice of the black liberal for that matter.

In short, your bringing up her race, is completely irrelevant to the validity or invalidity of the arguments presented. (Which are pretty much boilerplate by the way. As conservatives, and liberals for that matter, we all really need new material if this is the best we can do.)

[transcoderx]

You just assume most black people would feel oppressed? And how would you disentangle that opinion from them being taught they are oppressed in school?

Would you say it absolutely doesn't matter how black people feel about it? Wouldn't that make the whole subject somewhat ridiculous?

And of course a black lawyer is a data point against the claims of systemic oppression.

[uoaei]

"Systemic" and "totalistic" are not synonyms. Your suit of rhetoric has already disintegrated at the seams a couple comments ago.

[transcoderx]

I never said "totalistic", what do you even mean by that?

I think "systemic" is just a way to sound somewhat deep without actually saying anything real, though. A magical explanation for everything.

[uoaei]

Ah, so we've arrived at the truth: you don't actually understand the concepts being discussed, so you reject them out of hand to avoid contending with your own lack of knowledge in a social space that highly values deep and wide competencies.

I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to good-faith study, you will discover the essence of what people are talking about when they talk about "systemic" forces at play in the world.

Note that I am referring specifically to systemic forces because this encompasses the sum total of all causal influences on all elements of the system writ large. Systemic oppression is merely one half of a dichotomy, the other half being systemic privilege. Every sub-population within a general population can be evaluated along this 1D quantitative axis of "net-oppressed" vs "net-privileged". Some may be exactly balanced at the origin on this axis, but it would be simply absurd to assert that every sub-population is on average net-zero on that scale -- the probability of that happening is "almost surely zero". Ergo, some groups are more oppressed than others. Further, our constructed systems are not so complex that causation is unknowable. The civilization that humanity has built has relatively direct cause-effect relationships, largely due to its artificiality. So it stands to reason that we can determine that a) some groups are more oppressed than others, and b) the reasons for that net-oppression of a given group can be determined as functions of the components of the system they inhabit. Does this help clarify things?

[transcoderx]

How do you evaluate the oppression of a group?

Sorry I think it is all just scientism, fueled by socialist subversion theory.

The whole approach of blaming everything on oppression is a receipt for failure.

In a country that had a black president not long ago, too.