Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

That was my point, yes.

> then it's gone, and where am I? Right where I was to begin with.

Much better to, say, send you to college and make sure you get employed so that it's easier for you to maintain a life of your own choosing, isn't it?

So even absent any idea of the government "owing" a group for historical wrongs, there's (to me ) a convincing argument that affirmative action is needed. It helps break the feedback cycle.

Completely eliminating class distinctions would also break the cycle pretty quickly, but that seems staggeringly unlikely any time soon. :(

But then you talk about a poor white person and compare him to a poor black person saying they're not in the same boat. What does this poor white person have to do with your successful white family? That whole story is not relevant to this person as an individual.

We can see that on a historic scale the entire group of people that can trace back to slavery was more hard done by than others. But that means nothing to this poor white person. In fact, he may have suffered oppression by government in some other form. He may have just shown up during slavery fleeing a war-torn country, or political or religious imprisonment. Or this government may have falsely imprisoned his grandfather years ago. On a large scale it's nothing like the systemic oppression of slavery, but the point is, he doesn't feel responsible for any of the other guy's issues.

It is well known that the government in the past was in the wrong. But when it comes down to individuals, it's going to be difficult for someone to accept that a guy living next door scraping by on food stamps gets a boon from the government every month, and they don't, simply because they are white. I see your point, that the white person's problems are less attributable to the government than the black person's. But I don't think that this is the way to stamp out racism or even make people feel any better about the past. I think this is the wrong way to go about fixing things.

I think it would be better to make a big deal about government racism and punish it going forward in a very serious way. I think people will appreciate ongoing work to punish current and future offenders much more than a handout for wrongs past.

Also, helping those who are economically challenged based on their economic situation makes more sense than trying to correctly and accurately attribute their economic situation to their race and offenses from decades past. The government is going to end up helping some poor white people in this case along with helping some poor black people. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Unfortunately, in this scenario some black people aren't going to be helped. In fact, even some black people who can directly trace their history back to slaves aren't going to get help because they aren't sufficiently poor today. That's not ideal, but hopefully they would appreciate that going forward, racism is being discouraged and at least some attempts are being made to assist the less fortunate.

Obviously there is no silver bullet here, and there will never be complete agreement on how to deal with this. But I absolutely do not think that continuing to make decisions and policy based on race is the way to show that racism is not okay. It's a completely toxic way of thinking that needs to be eliminated - especially from government.

Having a quota of minorities is passive because it's a fire and forget rule that must be met. That is still being racist, because you are discriminating applicants success based on ethnicity.

Reactive laws is really just judicial. You can't write a fire and forget rule of law and have it be anything but a passive manipulator of public policy, it doesn't have reactionary change based on circumstances like courts do.

> Also, use of the legal system to remedy institutional and societal problems has really only been effective to introduce marginal change in the face of existing problems, so its not an overall solution to the problem, just a small part.

You don't solve the hostile behaviors of cultures and groups by being racist. You solve it by criminalizing their racism and punishing those who are bigoted.

> This would of course assume that it is possible to be institutionally racist against the predominant white culture in the US, which is not possible. In that sense, a policy such as affirmative action is not racist and instead is a policy that combats racism.

I'd argue the MLB is institutionally racist against white people. There is a tremendous cultural racism thinking it requires high melanin skin content (not even necessarily African heritage) to be good in basketball. And that is a permeating cultural force that a lot of people don't argue against, they just "assume black people are better at basketball". Or how Asians are better at math because they are Asian, and not because they had strict parents who lauded over their studies.

There is plenty of institutional anti-white racism. White people can't be "street" or ideas like "white people can't dance". They are institutional, not of white culture, but other cultures. It doesn't mean it isn't racist if the majority population isn't in the culture that purports it.

I'm not saying there isn't tremendous institutional racism and sexism in the US. I'm just saying inverse bigotry that replaces merit with skin color, ethnicity, or gender is inherently wrong. When ethnic minorities and women experience less math, science, and intellectual learning, you go where they aren't getting that and give it to them, you don't take what is inherently not racial and make it so.