Comment by shadowgovt

5 years ago

> there's nothing about an economic system that says anyone one particular group need benefit more than another.

Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.

I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.

(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.

I should have said racial or ethnic group, since there's no reason other than historical happenstance why any racial/ethnic grouping can't benefit. As for friends of the rich, has there been any economic system where that wasn't true? If not rich, then at least the powerful and well connected have always benefitted in every society. The challenging part is how to mitigate that somewhat.

> I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.

This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.

  • > This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy

    Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.

    There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.

    • > Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy

      Yes, but that's not our system. Our system doesn't give structural advantages based on race (at least we can hardly measure the extent of any such advantages). It does give structural advantages based on class (and many other variables) which correlates with race; however, correlation and causation are famously different. We don't have a white supremacist system or any kind of racist system, although some are advocating for a racist system so that we can eliminate disparities.

      > There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.

      No one is suggesting an alternate historical timeline; I'm arguing that our system today isn't racist, but that it's very nearly colorblind; however, disparities can result in a perfectly colorblind system because the initial racial distributions were not uniform.

      EDIT: Downvoters, do you believe correlation and causation are the same thing in general or only when applied to racial disparities?

> Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.

That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.

  • > White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.

    I'm pretty sure that, to a 90%-10% ratio, they hang out with white millionaires, not either of the groups you described.

    • You're reinforcing the parent's point that there's not race discrimination but class discrimination. Our hypothetical white billionaire is presumably discriminating utterly on a class basis (hanging out with zero poor people of any race) and not discriminating at all on a racial basis (hanging out with members of his class in proportion to their race / without racial bias).

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