Running racism in America thread

No, it's a long-winded way of saying exactly what it said.

A meritocracy is a meritocracy. As in, people's qualifications and abilities are what determine their suitability for something. It means that you don't give preference to, or discriminate against, people based on their gender or race. Putting the word colorblind in quotation marks doesn't change the actual meaning of it, or the concept, to some distortion of it that you apparently want to attribute to me.

The context you are talking about. ... is a history in which some people were shut out of things in the past because of their race or gender. The remedy for that isn't to do the same thing in reverse. ... shutting out different people based on broad categories now, and insisting on giving preference to others. At worst, that gives you vengeance, I guess. At best, it's a misguided attempt at a short cut that isn't the short cut people think it is at all. What it leaves you with is NOT a meritocracy, which is an unambiguous thing.

Also, the idea that someone else posted, that giving preferences to people somehow creates a just place is kind of Orwellian to me. Justice means treating people equally and fairly, without discrimination or preference. Yet, we really have people twisting themselves into pretzels trying to turn unequal treatment of people into a just thing, where they conflate their rationalizations for why it is a good thing into it equaling the opposite of what it does.

 

If your approach to your life is, "I have my perspective, and I am going to treat everything and anyone else like I am on an island," that is certainly true. I have no idea why that kind of close-mindedness would be the dominion of just white men. In my experience, people who are like that come from all walks of life.

One place I really differ from you in, are the brushes you keep painting people with. People are a lot more than their skin color. Not all white people have the same experiences in life. Someone who grew up in poverty near the coal mines in West Virginia, is not a bird of a feather with a white man who grew up in Greenwich, Ct. Just as someone from a housing project in West Baltimore had a vastly different childhood, and has a different perspective, than a middle-class black person whose parents were college educated. We're all individuals, not cartoon caricatures.

Regardless, it's just wrong to me to keep insisting on addressing past discriminatory practices with OTHER discriminatory practices or systems of preferences, and to argue that what you are doing is just. That's just backward. If you told me the aim is vengeance? Maybe. But then your goal isn't equal treatment of people. You are just doing more of the same, just picking others to discriminate against. An actual solution -- even though I am sure it won't seem like the feel-good quick fix you think you are offering -- is to stop putting everyone into those boxes and see people as individuals, not a skin color or a religion or a gender that you are going to reward or punish based on who you think is more deserving. Instead, start insisting that our government institutions themselves be places that treat everyone equally and fairly and in colorblind ways. That is how you can get closer to the just outcomes I think we both want. There aren't shortcuts.