> 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause
Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police?
> If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers.
The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.
There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden).
> The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore.
Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you.
- Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average.
- People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound.
A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.
> What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.
As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance.
More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race.
I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.
Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.