zlacker

> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.

I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.

>>pdonis+(OP)
Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first?

Are the only important problems universal ones?

>>pessim+i2
No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.

>>pessim+i2
> Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad

You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption.

And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.

>>pdonis+(OP)
But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer

>>pdonis+(OP)
We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

>>pessim+i2
>...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people?

Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

>>x86_64+iB
> the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

No the "go-to move" is to refuse to realize that we as a society have been trying to "fix" racism for decades now (arguably centuries), and it's not helping. The very people all the landmark civil rights laws and court decisions were supposed to help are worse off now than they were in the 1960s when those laws were passed.

So instead of continuing to do this not-working thing, maybe we should ask whether the root problem is something else, and work on fixing that instead.

>>fzeror+9n
> We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem.

> You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.

>>TeaDru+3n
> isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights?

Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it.

But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.

>>pdonis+tI
I think you have both generic problems and module specific problems.

>>pdonis+tF
I hear that a lot, were blacks really better off living under Jim Crow than they are today?

>>x86_64+iB
Because it is the correct approach. There is no white fragility.

>>pdonis+tI
Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).

>>TeaDru+PA1
> There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s

That doesn't mean we haven't been trying to fix racism for more than half a century. It just means the "fix" hasn't been working.

>>pdonis+hS1
Fixing racism hasn’t garnered significant traction with significant capital support for a while. Additionally, I would argue that attempting a 50 fix for systems that are multiple centuries old (and have had that much time to work their way into every part of society) seems short sighted.