Pants-of-dog wrote:The trouble with that is that it ignores the reality and experiences of people who have dealt with racism and therefore runs the risk of perpetuating racism by not listening to them.
I beg to disagree. I think dealing with the
consequences of racism can be done in that manner, as long as it is the consequences themselves that are addressed by the law (and policy). For instance, since poverty is a consequence (and also a cause) of racism then I think that what needs to be addressed is poverty itself, rather than beat around the bush on the matter. Particularly if people are otherwise treated equally (as enforced by anti-discrimination laws).
Perhaps one
apparent exception to that rule would be reparations for some past wrongs that were carried out due to the racism prevalent in the past. For instance, consider reparations for slavery. If those were approved by the law, it would
apparently be a policy meant to favor Americans of a particular race. Yet I disagree, since reparations should be given to the descendants of slaves which - in the American context - would not only include pretty much all African Americans who come from the South (since they were not freemen anyway), possibly most or almost all of those from the North (since slavery used to be legal there until the late 18th and early 19th centuries) but also people from other backgrounds whose ancestors were enslaved. Possibly, some Native Americans and perhaps even some Whites. The reason of
why this isn't really based on race is that, although it disproportionately benefits African Americans, in the end the goal of that policy is to compensate for slavery, not something else. This is a similar logic against assuming that all differences between African and White Americans where the former do worse than the latter are due to systemic racism - such a reparations would not be a form of antirracism but simply a compensation for allowing slavery in the past, and they would and should also be separate from a simple anti-poverty strategy or routine income redistribution/social policy. I think those would be fine, but it would need to be part of a broader national agreement in the US.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Again, I think I will listen to BIPOC people about what actually works.
Wouldn't it make more sense to simply state scientific facts and follow scientific literature in general? This includes social sciences, whose evidence is of course not as strong as the physical ones.
Pants-of-dog wrote:This seems counter to reality. Trump is in the WH because he parlayed racism into votes. It had nothing to do with backlash against anti-racism.
Of course it did, why else do you think he successfully managed to run under stuff like "fighting political correctness"?
Pants-of-dog wrote:And if you just focus on measurable economic gains, you ignore other facets of racism like police brutality against blacks.
No, I don't propose literally focusing exclusively on measurable economic gains, hence my support for general equal treatment. But I think that poverty and general socioeconomic status is the underlying reason behind much of the discrimination on other aspects, including police brutality, since African Americans are overrepresented among the poor. I mentioned it to @Donna on the George Floyd thread, but the US has a history of whitification of immigrants when they catch up socioeconomically. Whether this can extend beyond those who look like Europeans remains to be seen, but we should be getting evidence soon enough because of the case of Asian Americans, and in the future also from (some) Hispanic Americans. The good thing though is that we don't even need to wait until we observe this, since fighting poverty is a worthy goal in itself