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> Okay, that’s true, it’s one of the available choices. That’s a rather extreme position to take, given the history of slavery, racism, and sexism in the U.S. Slavery, racism, and sexism have happened in every single human society that has ever existed in some form or another, the US isn't special here. Discrepancies in average outcomes between different ethnic groups as measured by the statistical tools of industrialized states are at least as old as industrialization, and have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place. > We know for a fact that outcome discrepancies were caused by racism before 1965. No we don't. > What reason is there to believe outcomes discrepancies aren’t a problem, given that society generally believes they are? Societies generally believe all kinds of contradictory and mutually-inconsistent things, because a society is comprised of the aggregate of a large number of individual people who all have different understandings of the world, self-interests, group loyalties, etc. I don't assume that if society generally believes something, this is an unchanging fact about society, or that the thing is in fact correct, or that I should agree myself. |
Sexism is different as its not a group trait that affects whole families or communities so the disadvantage is not inherited.
The US is not unique with regard to race, but not all societies are the same. The US has a history of race based slavery which had a cultural impact, and it had racist laws and lynch mobs etc. until very recently.
> have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place.
There were actual racist laws in the US which is pretty good evidence of people being racist in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...
In most of the world people could legally marry someone of different race. In the UK an author could depict a marriage between people of different races in a children's book in the 1950s - I cannot think of any American examples of the same.