[alistairSH]

You’re also deliberately ignoring the point that there might be no such thing as innocent third parties, but only people who aren’t aware they’re part of the problem, even if it’s subtle and unintended.

I was about to post the same and that's 100% my take... sure, I didn't own slaves and I don't intentionally do anything racist... but I can absolutely acknowledge that by virtue of genetic lottery (white, with educated parents, etc) I had it orders of magnitude easier than the kids who grew up on the other side of town (black, less educated parents, etc).

I said it in another comment - affirmative action may not be the best solution, but it's tiresome to see people trot out the "2 wrongs" argument without proffering a better solution to the problem.

[nec4b]

What about white kids on the other side of the town with drug addicted parents?

[dahart]

What about them? Being white doesn’t make people immune to drugs, nor guarantee anything, right? So what’s your point? Race advantage is something you can’t always see by looking at individuals, especially cherry picked examples. Bias is a statistical effect, so you may need to look at everyone in order to see it, unless we are talking about clear cases of oppression, inability to vote or slavery or violence or things like that. Most of that has been resolved, but subtle bias is still around.

[nec4b]

>but I can absolutely acknowledge that by virtue of genetic lottery (white, with educated parents, etc) I had it orders of magnitude easier than the kids who grew up on the other side of town (black, less educated parents, etc).

How do the white kids with unfortunate life circumstances have an advantage over similarly situated black kids?

[dahart]

They don’t. You’re cherry picking a biased sample. Black kids have “unfortunate” circumstances statistically more often than white kids, and some of that disadvantage stems from when racism was legal and widely practiced. It can take generations to fix wealth disparity.

[dahart]

Thank you. Yes the whole problem and confounding factor with this argument is that racism exists, and emerged on its own. If we choose Laissez Faire, we already know the outcome, and it’s bad. The notion that we should do nothing to fix it and let the chips fall where they may would amount to institutionalized racism as opposed to institutionalized (positive) discrimination. Plus affirmative action can and should end, whereas racism does not without changes.