alt Hacker NewsEven if an individual’s condition today reflects historical injustices to groups, that doesn’t justify discriminating between individuals today based on their group. To your redlining example: it’s true a black american who inherits a house may have lower home equity than a white american who inherits a house. But isn’t the white american who didn’t inherit anything worse off than both? You can’t lump white americans together based on a group generalization—that’s the very thing we decided is immoral.
The historical argument also doesn’t survive attempts to generalize its underlying principles to immigrants. Objectively, Black americans are extremely privileged by virtue of being americans. A redlined community in 1950s America was still better than my dad’s village in Bangladesh.
Finally, your argument demolishes how affirmative action is actually practiced. Its biggest beneficiaries are immigrants and their children, in particular hispanics. That produces a very unfair result under your logic, because latin america is solidly middle income, and was even more so in the 20th century. In 1990, Mexico’s GDP per capita was ten times higher than India’s and China’s. Yet colleges and corporations discriminate in favor of “hispanics” descended from Spanish conquistadores, and against “asians” whose parents grew up in third world villages.
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> that’s the very thing we decided is immoral
Racism is the thing we decided is immoral, actions based on belief that one group is inferior to another, not any and all notions of groups for any reason.
> Objectively, Black Americans are extremely privileged by virtue of being Americans. A redlined community in 1950s America was still better than my dad’s village in Bangladesh.
Whoa. They should be happy with what they have, and put up with racism and inequality here because there are poorer people somewhere else in the world? Some Blacks in 1950 couldn’t vote - they were “privileged”?
Your reasoning is exactly why I loathe any step towards this sort of thing in the UK. You cannot infer disadvantage from a simple racial categories. For example, the majority of South Asians I know in the UK have affluent and/or well educated parents. On the other hand I know there are people whose parents were poor educated, spoke English as a second language, went to schools in bad areas, etc. If you try to balance by ethnic group its the former who will get the most advantage from it. The Asian side of my ancestry was both more affluent, and had more people go to university than the white side.
As the article says the best universities here look at predicated A levels grades, their own admissions tests, and interviews. From what I have heard at open days etc. they are often clear that they do not care about ethnicity or skills at sports.