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0 pointsdahart2y ago0 comments

Your language seems hyperbolic and inflammatory to me. You are conflating discrimination with racism, and also conflating positive discrimination with negative discrimination.

Affirmative action is not racism, even though yes it is intentionally a type of positive discrimination. It’s also out in the open and temporary and more fair, as opposed to cultural racism that it hidden and systemic and permanent and hurting people unfairly.

Getting stuck on the existence of discrimination is a way to lose sight of the goal. The goal is to battle systemic cultural racism & sexism that laws have been unable to fix for more than a hundred years, by trying to adjust outcomes temporarily in favor of the people who’ve been unfairly excluded, only until we have evidence that systemic discrimination is mostly gone. In the mean time, there is still a ton of evidence that the bad kind of discrimination is still pervasive and durable. If you don’t want affirmative actions of any kind because you can’t get past the discrimination, then how do you propose to fix racism? Note people have been trying for centuries and unable to do it without some kind of balancing offsetting positive discrimination to counter the known measurable negative discrimination. Do nothing has already failed. So what’s your solution?

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Dig1t2y ago

>you are conflating discrimination with racism

The definition of racism is "discrimination based on race". Despite recent attempts to redefine racism as something that only white people are capable of, this is how most normal people understand the term.

By using the term any other way you are obviously intentionally ignoring the fact that the term meant "discrimination based on race" for decades.

"positive discrimination" is still just discrimination based on race, i.e. racism. Defining discrimination as "positive" is just a convenient way to tell yourself you are not being a bigot.

To put it another way: if you did not hire a candidate because they are white or asian, say, because you hate white/asian people, the action to not hire them is exactly the same as the "equity" case where you chose not to hire them because of their race but because you are doing so in the name of "equity".

In the end you are just arguing for equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity. We have already seen where society ends up if we allow open discrimination (whether or not you define it as "positive" or "negative"), it's not very good. Equality of opportunity does not freeze the status quo, look at the asian population for an example: asians 150 years ago were stuck building railroads, now they are richer by far than any other ethnic group. They got that way by working hard and making use of our myriad _equal-opportunity_ employment laws.

dahartOP2y ago

What is your solution to eradicating discrimination and racism? You offer only hyperbole and no solutions. It has not solved itself, so how exactly do we achieve equality of opportunity, when it doesn’t currently exist?

Hard disagree that all discrimination is the same, this is a short-sighted and antagonistic view that seems rather ignorant of history. I do not agree that affirmative action is racist by definition.

> Defining discrimination as “positive” is just a convenient way to tell yourself you’re not being a bigot.

Listen, brother, we appear to have the same goal. You’re attacking people who agree with you. This kind of escalatory language is unproductive for all of us. I didn’t define discrimination as positive, I said there are some kinds that are positive, and affirmative action is one of them, which is why it was named that way.

One major difference you’re ignoring is that racism is prejudiced against a specific group and discriminates against a specific group, where affirmative action discriminates in favor of a specific and underprivileged group. It’s partially a sort of dual or opposite, it does not discriminate negatively against any specific group. Any disadvantage or negative discrimination, if you want to call it that, applies to everyone except the group being boosted. And again, the idea is that it’s temporary and open-source, just until we can demonstrate equality of opportunity. Another difference you’re failing to consider is that affirmative action is different from racism because affirmative action targets advantages and help toward whichever group is currently underprivileged. That’s the opposite of, for example, systemically holding back black people or women, which is what has happened for hundreds of years. If white people in America became underprivileged all of a sudden, the affirmative action policy, unlike cultural racism, would switch benefits to the new target.

There are real differences between these different kinds of discrimination that you’re trying hard not to see. I’d recommend reading more about the history of affirmative action and understanding that many many very smart and very kind people of all races have thought very hard about this problem and haven’t come up with a better solution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

Suggesting that any attempt to fix the known problem is willfully racist is a non-starter, and you should be aware that it’s a talking point that originated from white supremacy groups.

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