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Comment by bun_at_work | Hacker News Reader

> They don't really take a lot of actions to back it up.

Is this why more groups have been added to the list of protected classes? Is this why our current administration is one of the most diverse to ever exist?

I get the twitter outrage is fun, but when you look at data, our government has become more and more about equality and inclusion in meaningful ways. The US government isn't perfect, but it can't be perfect, there will always be room to grow. It does take time, but looking at data and trends shows equity ticking up over time. Lets have more nuanced views.

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Diversity of skin color is not meaningful change in the slightest if all the policies stay the same. They're just hiring different faces to say the same things.

Are you trying to say there are existing racist policies in 2021? Can you list some examples?

The existence of the Electoral College, which was specifically designed to give slaveholding states an advantage when selecting the President.

The gerrymandering of electoral districts to maximize the concentration of white voting power.

To put a finer point on the electoral college, it was to appease slaveholding states so they would ratify the constitution. They wanted their enslaved to increase their voting power at the polls without actually giving Black people the right to vote. So the three fifths compromise let them count their enslaved as three fifths of a person. Now it obviously wasn't enough that a Black vote would only count as 3/5ths. The electoral college was needed so they could accomplish this while still having only white people as representatives elected by white voters.

There were other reasons for the electoral college, but appeasing the slave states in this way is one of the big reasons that was specifically written about and reasoned openly between the founding fathers at the time.

So when someone tells you, oh, the electoral college allows smaller states to have a say, think that through a bit. That old apocryphal explanation makes no sense really.

Diversity of skin color is meaningful in many ways, but that's not the greatest example. Policies that have changed in recent years include giving transgender individuals protected class status, as well as gay marriage being legal, federally.

There are also the states legalizing marijuana to consider. If the war on drugs is in fact a racist policy, then turning back the pages on that, wrt the most common, least harmful drug, then real policy changes are being made. Furthermore, the current congress has introduced legislation to legalize marijuana federally. So yeah, we are seeing policies change.

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