> You can’t undo racial discrimination against someone who is now dead by discriminating against someone else who is now alive.
A better way to look at it: We can and should try to mitigate the indirect, generational disadvantages of past racial discrimination. Some of those disadvantages are domino effects, manifested over many years. They're the evil twin of generational wealth.
Those generational disadvantages can be a drag on the descendants of the victims of the past discrimination. That gives a certain amount of comparative advantage to those of us whose ancestors didn't suffer racial discrimination — and who benefit from present-day white advantage even when our ancestors weren't among the racial oppressors.
Sure, my various immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents had to deal with a certain amount of ethnic discrimination. But it was nothing like that suffered by nonwhites.
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused. And yes, that would be quite odd.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
> To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s not just “my ideology.” The universities and corporations that practice DEI do not believe they discriminate against people in the present. They see it as a remedy for historical discrimination.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
So if admission rates are below population averages, is it your contention that:
1. Fewer minorities *want* to go to college -- what do you think causes that bias?
2. Minorities want to go to college, but due to factors of their environment are less able to make it to college -- what do you think leads to that inability?
3. Minorities want to go to college, and their environment is just as supportive of that goal as for white, but minorities are less capable (on average) of achieving that goal -- what are we to make of this?
4. Some other explanation I haven't thought of?
My contention is that the evidence of discrimination against (non-asian) minorities in universities is non-existent. I don’t have an opinion to what’s causing admissions rates to be different than population averages. If someone proves that it’s caused by discrimination against minorities, then we have laws to address that and I’d support enforcing those laws.
If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?
By this logic we should stop giving college scholarships to women. They are over represented in enrollment compared to men, so that can only be sexism right?
Society faces many problems—individuals don’t need to have an opinion as to the causes of all of them. I’m not an education expert, so I can’t tell you what causes lower admissions rates. If you think the reason is universities are discriminating, then it’s incumbent on you to build a case for that. I’m sure I’d support enforcing the laws against discriminatory conduct that you can show is happening. But I’m not going to support indicting people without evidence of wrongdoing.
You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discriminated against, we should now randomly discriminate against some other people.
You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions. Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me: it's not a zero-sum game, and white people in general seem to have done fine over the past fifty years of "abuse".
>The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
