Comment by throwaway894345
5 years ago
> 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?