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sundin13 on 21 June 2025
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JuliusHackebeil said:
sundin13 said:

Hundreds of years of handouts and federal assistance for white people to help them build wealth, from the Homestead Act to redlining and Levittowns (often which had disastrous consequences for the people left behind), but as soon the federal government could no longer discriminate against minorities, government assistance quickly became just immoral handouts for the lazy. 

How strange...


Meritocracy cannot exist without starting from a place of equality. 

If you misunderstood me and think I am against government help for black people, say, in the USA (or elsewhere), let me clarify: I am not.

I am against government help for black people in the USA (or elsewhere) if that help is contingent on them being black, or minorities, or lgbtq, or whatever the next flavor of the day is gonna be.

More generally to your first paragraph: I never said I was for government hand outs at some point and then suddenly changed my opinion when minorities might have also benefitted from them. What a bad faith reading. It is these quotes and answers that make me think it is effort in vain to talk to you.

I'll quote your second paragraph: "Meritocracy cannot exist without starting from a place of equality." I agree. But equity is not equality. In fact these principles (equity and equality) are mutually exlusive. The moment you argue for one, you will argue against the other. It is either the case that

1) people are treated equally and can expect different outcomes between groups, or

2) that people are treated unequally and can expect simillar outcomes between groups.

To say: I am for equality therefore different races should be treated differently - That is something I cannot intellectually follow.

I recommend Thomas Sowells "Discrimination and Disparities" to combat the detrimental belief that disparities in outcomes between groups must be because of unfair discrimination and an unequal playing field.

I was talking about society changing their views. This flip is something that happened, like, 50 years ago so I'd presume you weren't alive at the time (respect to the old-heads who were around and don't suck though). Sorry for the lack of clarity on that. 

My point with my second paragraph though, is that we can't expect meritocracy to bloom out of society that had its thumb on the scale for hundreds of years. That shit has consequences, simply taking your hand off the scale doesn't right those wrongs, and it doesn't put society in a good position to give the best to its best. 

To me, equality is a goal more than a pathway. I'd love to get to a point where people get out of society what they put in, but when so many black Americans are born so much further behind than many white Americans, we clearly are not there yet. And this wasn't an accident. These situations were in many ways designed by the public policy of the past. 

So, we have a responsibility to set those communities back onto a path where they are able to get out of society what they put in. There are a lot of ways to do that, and a lot of it involves specifically putting resources in to build back those communities, or provide opportunities to the people in them. This will inherently be skewed racially, because the policy of the past that new policy should address were also racially skewed. That doesn't mean that a white person from the inner city shouldn't get opportunities or that we shouldn't also provide assistance to rural communities who face a different set of challenges and are more white, but we have a specific responsibility to the people suffering under the unjust actions of the government of the past. 

Also, I think Sowell misses a lot of the complexity of this issue. For example, he brings up the absence of criminal background checks during hiring, and says that many employers are not discriminating against black people due to individual racism, but instead to reduce the likelihood of hiring an ex-felon, but this misses the pretty clear issue that the increased proportion of black Americans in the criminal justice system is in itself in no small part a symptom of discrimination and past racism. In a way, he is kind of advocating for a "systemic" approach to racism and not an "individual" approach. Racism is not merely something that individuals do, but instead is largely something that is imparted by the weight of systemic decisions of the past. 

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