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Comment by turingcompeteme | Hacker News Reader

I guess everything you wrote is correct, but it seems like a very white-middle-class perspective. Legal segregation in America only ended a generation or two ago. That's just one of many examples which meant that for many Americans, since the founding of the country, there was never a hill. More like a ditch they couldn't leave.

Of course it's a massive issue, but it always amuses me when people look back to how "great" it used to be. For a white male, the 50's seemed pretty great. If I was anything else I'm pretty sure I would choose 2019.

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To be clear, I didn't say the past was good or equitable or that I would prefer it over today.

The progress we've made in civil rights — there are women alive today who were born before women could vote! — is great and the current administration shows that we still have a long way to go.

But note that while we have made progress on civil rights in many ways, the increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too. "It's worse for white people but better for black people" is an over-simplification. Black people are suffering under these economic problems too.

Yours is a phenomenal analogy, I thought, but as the comment opening this thread insinuated, you are naive.

> increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too

Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_. And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress--and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".

> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.

This Malcolm X quote does a great job highlighting how the cessation of a particular oppression is hardly progress. Since slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and Red-Lining, there has been little in the way of reparations to make African American communities whole--not to mention the millions of Mesoamericans(1) similarly exploited in the history of American Imperialism(2), and still to this day(3)!

So, thanks again for that completely brilliantly painted analogy. I hope you find these texts offer some compelling augmentations to your understanding.

1) Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America"

2) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"

3) CrimethInc's "No Wall They Can Build"

This is a common problem I see in arguments with progressives. You are considering the failure to reach an ideal state as equivalent to zero progress, and attacking anyone who acknowledges incremental wins as undermining the cause.

> Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_.

Yes, so, you should celebrating that you and are in agreement that increasing economic disparity is bad.

> And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress

It is progress in any and all possible definitions. Going from "black people are legally considered property" to "a black person is the President of the United States of America" in less than 200 years sounds like a hell of a lot of progress to me.

> and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".

Nowhere does anyone claim it is "sufficient". You are painting anyone who's not as idealistically pure as you as an enemy. That's not an effective strategy for gaining support or furthering your cause. It's a mixture of defeatism, elitism, alienation, and sanctimony.

This is something people on the right actually do really well. They are always celebrating their success and building each other up. Reading political news, I often feel like no one can tear down a Democrat quite like another Democrat. Where is the teamwork? Why don't we let our opponents attack us instead of doing their job for them?

> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.

Here's the full quote:

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.

Call me crazy, but I'm not aware of any strategy for healing a wound that doesn't involve removing the knife first.

> I'm not aware of any strategy for healing a wound that doesn't involve removing the knife first.

When did I advocate for simultaneous slavery and reparations?

I suppose slavery can be modeled as an area of fenced off land near the beach

Yeah. This is an issue that a lot of folks cant seem to grasp. For almost all Americans this is the best time in our history to be alive. One could argue Obama's years were better for some people groups but generally things are better than they've ever been for every single type of person.

I know there's still a lot of change that needs to happen but I wish people would pick their head up and realize this once in a while.

The underlying idea seems to be that the economic reality is worsening and this is true for every group. Meanwhile some groups have had more and more artificial barriers removed that make it easier to access that economic reality as say someone who is middle class and white (not necessarily equal, but let's just take white and middle-class as a standard for comparing). So yes, it is better for certain groups, but to continue the analogy of the hill, these groups have had artificial barriers removed that make it easier and easier for them to climb, but that hill itself is getting steeper and steeper.

So on the one hand those barriers are getting torn down slowly, which is progress in one dimension, but the economic reality is worsening for everyone. For example, people of color mighty be competing with other individuals on more level ground when it comes to getting jobs, but the supply of those jobs, the quality of life they support, and the security they afford seem to be decreasing, and the all important question isn't what it's like now, but what it'll be like on 20 or 30 years.

As a side note, worsening economic conditions can result in a flare up in racial tensions which might undo the progress that has been made.

Artificial barriers are only removed as they become irrelevant in the face of greater, more subtle and less infamous levers of control.

As the internet offers greater surveillance, phone taps become less relevant.

As offshoring jobs to nations w/o union protections, where beatings and murders of organizers is less punished, working conditions in the US can improve without cutting too deeply into the bottom line... just until they close the factory.

As manual labor is increasingly done outside our borders, or by precarious undocumented immigrants, as laborer reproduction is increasingly done by their wives, more white women will be allowed into management, executive, and leadership positions. Did you notice, all the heads of the Military Industrial Complex firms are now all women? (1) What allowed this to happen?

1) https://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/201901...

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