Posted: 27 May 2021 at 11:17am | IP Logged | 9
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"In a properly egalitarian society, every ethnic group should (even with an uneven start) be eventually evenly diffused among every level of social and economic strata"
I think you are 100% correct about this, but I don't agree that the lack of even diffusion today is conclusive proof that we remain a systemically racist society; at least not to the extent that some would portray.
When you consider how drastically uneven the start was, and the fact that we are barely more than 150 years removed from slavery (not to mention Jim Crow, forced segregation, and all of the other barriers that had to be removed over a period of several decades after slaves were emancipated) I think it is unrealistic to think that blacks would have caught up to whites with respect to the income gap, property ownership, etc., by now even under ideal circumstances. Its going take more time to overcome our history.
Having said that, I'm not suggesting we should just wait for progress to occur on its own. Action must be taken to move things forward.
So rather than look at a snapshot of how evenly diffused minorities are among all levels of society, as an indicator of how racist we are, I think it is more useful to compare current levels of diffusion to historic levels from a variety of points in time, and use it as a measurement of how well we are progressing towards equality.
With regard to that, I think two things are clear: We've made incredible progress since 1865, and progress during the second half of the 20th century, and first couple decades of the 21st century has been too slow in many ways.
As far as the pace of recent progress is concerned, I believe that can be partly attributed to vestiges of systemic racism that remain, and partly attributed to ineffective government policies that addressed symptoms of the problem, rather than attacking the root causes.
A very recent example is the Defund the Police movement. Several cities have reduced the size of police departments in order to reduce the number of harmful interactions between police officers and members of minority groups. Now we're seeing crime waves in these cities, but nothing has changed with regard to racial equality, because defunding the police doesn't address the reasons why racial minorities are disproportionately poor, or commit a disproportionately high number of the crimes that bring them into contact with police.
Policies like this miss the mark. And if that is where our focus is when it comes to promoting racial equality, then we are missing out on opportunities to implement other policies that might be more impactful.
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