There’s some good discussion downthread already. I want to make a particular observation that your intuition is:
- totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors
- reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable
- what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they want this to be the predominant intuition even for people with more context
- logically reasonable if you assume advantage barriers generally follow a similar pattern and even then if you assume good faith
- untenable on inspection for the same reason any social democratic institution needs to exist: a thing that’s supposed to be structurally fair intrinsically isn’t, and demands correction to address that
The problem is that an economic axis isn’t the only one involved. Sometimes it isn’t even involved at all. Racism is deeply embedded in American culture and history and outcomes, even when other factors are otherwise favorable. And at least in the US, this is a huge source of conflict among otherwise like minds even on the left.
It would be much better if those with an open mind to “can’t we just level the field” had a more open mind to the various axes of relative and historically intentionally stratified advantage. That applies to race, to sex, to sexuality and gender identity, to disability. And in each, structural inequality is much more particular and involved than access to money/resources.