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Comment by warkdarrior | Hacker News Reader

I missed the memo that I am not allowed to agree with that quote. When did this happen?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/colorblind...

https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article-abstract/66/4/503/52...

I quoted MLK (as above) at someone in 2020 and was quite surprised when it uncorked a rant about how that must mean i was a racist and didn't care for the struggles of the oppressed and so on.

Crucially, MLK said "I have a dream" about "one day" in the future. But MLK wasn't dumb enough to think that people could just magically declare racism to be over now without doing anything to address the social inequities and inequalities caused by centuries of historical racism.

Moving the "colored" seats from the back of the bus to the front, is not doing anything to address the inequities, either.

Moving seats obviously doesn't address the economic inequalities. That's why nobody (except maybe some conservatives arguing in bad faith) has ever proposed it.

Punishing people who were never victimizers and promoting people who were never victims for the sake of equity doesn't address the problems of a single parent household and the consequences it has for children, but that is proposed for the sake of Equity all the time

Greater equality is not a "punishment". It's simply a necessity for a functional, just, compassionate society.

In any case, we are all beneficiaries or victims of the past. Children don't start from equal positions. "average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans" https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-w...

As stated by the linked article, this is actually a vast improvement from 150 years ago. But let's not pretend that the existence of the racial gap wasn't the result of historical factors. Arguing that we're all equal now would just be sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that history didn't exist.

"Punishing people" is an immature way of looking at public policy. When the government uses my tax money to pay for prisons, is that punishing me? The point is that the policy is meant for the public benefit, and we can debate the merits of each policy on their outcomes.

What addresses the problems of a single parent household then? Let's hear your solutions.

When people started saying it to oppose re-introducing systemic racism, such as Harvard being racist to Asian students.

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