Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both.
And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?
> America is not in the least social-democratic,
It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.
And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?
> America is not in the least social-democratic,
It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.