What criteria do you have in mind for determining how to treat people differently?
I guess it would depend upon relevant criteria. I wouldn't gesture to something if the man in front of me is blind for example. It would be stupid to treat all people the same way.
We do seem to disagree on the methodology, if not the reality of treating people differently. I argue for a "presumption of ability" such that each individual is considered to be maximally competent unless proven otherwise. Even for an obviously blind man - is it more moral to assume their disability needs to be accommodated than to hope it does not limit them and they may be able to discern your arm movement despite their apparent limitations? I know this sounds ridiculous in this example but the intent should be clear.
The intent is clear. But in practice what you propose is worse than ridiculous. In the example given, forcing the blind man to explain to you what you should plainly be able to ascertain forces the man to constantly tell people that he's less able than they are. This has real negative impacts on the blind person that I feel you're not considering.
There is a vast divide between forcing a person to explain their disability in order to be accommodated and presuming an apparent disability requires such a person to be accommodated. I do not make an argument to ignore evidence, but instead to look for this evidence and give the presumption of ability absent any specific evidence. That is to say that I find the idea of assuming limitations based on preconceptions to be far more objectionable than not doing so. Further, I disagree that the idea that explaining a disability inherently causes a negative impact on the person with the disability rather than there merely being an overwhelming societal perception as such. There should be no shame in expressing facts or personal limitations in general and I argue that this should be normalized.
My dad lost his right leg just below the knee in a motorcycle accident many years ago. He can get by pretty well with his prosthetic, can walk pretty well, can climb a ladder, can drive (it gets more exciting when he's driving manual - but that's another story), and generally does well. To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever shamed him for having one leg. But he certainly doesn't want to be reminded of it or advertise the fact that he is missing a leg. He never, ever wears shorts. He never goes swimming. He never parks in handicapped parking spots.
While I agree with you that there should be no shame in expressing facts or personal limitations and that they should be normalized, that's just not the case for many who have disabilities. If my father had to tell everyone that he needed a special accommodation to use an elevator or escalator because he was unable to climb a long set of stairs, it wouldn't happen. He just wouldn't go to that place.
On the subject of providing exactly equal opportunities, I would say it is an interesting idea but falls down when considering a parents desire to have a better life for their children. Sacrifices and hard work should be acknowledged. If there is no point in attempting to aid the next generation because everyone is equal in outcome no matter their ability, culture, or upbringing, society falls apart.
I'm glad you brought this point up. It's a very important one.
All parents desire to have a better life for their children. The wealth that a parent accumulates can be passed to children so that these children receive an unearned step up in life over others. It makes for a less equal playing field and benefits some in this new generation.
The inverse is also true.
In the US, white slave owners became rich because they exploited black slaves. This went on for generations. After they were forced to give up slave ownership white former slave owners continued to monopolize generations of unequal advantage that they leveraged into power to continue to oppress their former slaves. This also went on for generations (and still - in various measurable forms - goes on today). Today, many of the decedents of those black slaves are disadvantaged by multiple lifetimes of lost opportunity.
Knowing that a very large percentage of black people in the US start out with generations of unearned disadvantage, and knowing that a very large percentage of white people in the US start out with unearned generations of advantage . . . it seems pretty unfair to argue that the best course forward is to treat both the exactly the same way.
Treating people with unequal opportunity in the same way will result in the same thing on average - those who start with less end up with less in the end.
Nigerian Americans are one of the most successful ethnic minorities in the US, far exceeding White Americans' financial success on average. It is therefore very difficult to see an argument that their race somehow holds them back. At the same time, multi-generational Black Americans descended from slaves have horrific outcomes on average. I argue it is a question of culture, which has been largely transformed from the goals of equality and self-determination espoused in the US civil rights movement to the brutal acceptance of Democrat policies deciding that Black Americans need to be treated differently because they are functionally inferior due to societal oppression.
You are however clearly right that multi-generational discrimination has held back the Black population as a whole in exactly the manner you describe. I ask that this stops and we treat everyone as equals and not treat people of any race differently because of past oppression, thereby perpetuating a victim mentality and sense of entitlement as opposed to a sense of purpose and ability. Treating people differently due to their race or other uncontrollable characteristics hurts those it is intended to help. Outcomes will not change overnight, but they will change as there is no real argument for essential racial inferiority. Attempting to tilt the scales to more quickly produce the desired outcomes will not see success because it undermines the very characteristics that tend to produce success.
I didn't mention any attempt to tilt scales - just pointed out that what you're proposing guarantees that people who were oppressed in the past will stay oppressed for a very long time. That ensures that unequal outcomes will continue to occur because of uncontrollable characteristics (such as race and accident of birth). This is a difficult problem to solve, but I'm not sure that your approach of simply ignoring it and hoping it goes away is very likely to work. It has (after all) been more than 150 years since slavery was abolished . . . and yet the results of that practice are still very evident.
Part of the problem is that we demonstrably do not treat minorities the same way as white people right now. Killings and arrest rates by police are disproportionate to crimes committed by race for example. Even applying for a job with a black sounding name ensures that you will receive less call backs than applying to the same job with the same resume with a white sounding name. There are a great many other examples. Is the world less racist today in 2020 than thirty years ago in 1990? Could be, but I don't really see any evidence of this. And if things haven't improved in the last 30 years, then how many generations of people need to live through the unfairness that's baked in to society before things get better for them?
A key issue is simply the one you identified in your post. Generally, the passing of unearned wealth to others is a bad idea for society. It inevitably creates a wealthy (and therefore powerful) elite who are sheltered from ever having to earn income . . . whose only claim to this wealth is accident of birth. It does the inverse for the poorest in society. This typically ends up limiting social mobility and weakens meritocracy. Absolutely, this is a difficult issue to address but it needs to be acknowledged as something that we're doing wrong.
It does not seem like we agree with the definition of "oppression" here - unequal financial outcomes across demographics are not fundamentally oppressive but are certainly representative of problems that need to be addressed. Unequal outcomes from unequal beginnings are expected. I reiterate my argument that success due to accidents of birth, as you put it, are not purely arbitrary but a result of long term and multi-generational contributions that should not be denied but instead celebrated and shared to increase equality over the long term.
I do not agree with your interpretation of publicly available crime statistics, namely that "Killings and arrest rates by police are disproportionate to crimes committed by race for example." This is highly contentious. Here is a blatantly political article against this: https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/07/14/fact-check-police-do-kill-more-white-people-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ Here is a blatantly politcal argument for this: https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-clear-white-people-are-not-more-likely-than-black-people-to-be-killed-by-police/ The statistics can clearly be manipulated to show either perspective.
Your argument here that appears to be that there exists no objective reality but what political pundits tell people and that statistics are meaningless. That kind of defeatism bothers me. How about we look at the actual data in the articles, instead of giving up because understanding things is hard?
Breitbart:
* More white people are shot by police than black - True, but unrelated to disproportionate criminality
* I'm going to just skip over the part where the article references cartoonist and retired engineer Scott Adams as a paywalled opinion source
* Reference Fryer's 2016 study (available here:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf). This study analyzes only newspaper reporting of police shootings. This data set is obviously flawed and indeed, this is mentioned in the report:
"these data are far from a representative sample of police departments and do not contain any experimental variation"
So the conclusions to be drawn from them are rather suspect from the get go. Interestingly, the study does show significant racial bias in police shootings:
"Perhaps the most striking finding is when one replicates the analysis in Ross (2015) across all five datasets: calculating the probability of being black, unarmed, and shot by police divided by the probability of being white, unarmed, and shot by police. A quantity greater than one is consistent with racial bias. Using the data from Ross (2015), this ratio is 3.28. Using the data from the Post database I get 6.20 and 5.99 if using the data in Fryer (forthcoming). In other words, if I ignore the detail available in the Fryer data and simply report the descriptive statistics reported in Ross (2015), I could conclude that the data provided evidence of even more racial bias than that reported in Ross (2015)."
It goes on to argue the authors hypothesis that this is not evidence of racism when controlling for wages, incarceration and teen pregnancy.
Northeastern.edu (a small student run school newspaper):
* This article appears to almost entirely be an interview with a professor who works at the university
* Mentions a Harvard study (
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/) that agrees with Fryer's study in the Breitbart article - black people are killed more frequently by police than their proportion of the national population
OK, so we've conclusively proven that black people are disproportionately killed by police. The disagreement only seems to be whether or not this is because of their economic status (which as mentioned is often tied directly back to racist generational wealth drain), or more direct racism on the part of the police officers.
The truth that people with "black-sounding" names are discriminated against in job hirings is clear. I wholly condemn this but would not agree with the leftist position that this means that racial discrimination is the cause. Would you consider someone with the given name of "Jim-Bob" as being likely to succeed? It is a classist argument, but not a racial one. The solution is simply to presume ability, but not to give people arbitrary advantages.
I do a lot of hiring, and truth be told I usually try very hard to avoid looking at a person's name when going through them to avoid any unconscious bias . . . jump to the skills section, previous history then only look at their name when scheduling the first interview. Honestly, I was surprised that this wasn't the way most people do things. But OK, you've created a hypothesis. "The black names used sound like losers who you wouldn't want to hire and the white names weren't." Cool. Let's check out the study to see if your hypothesis is correct:
https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand_LakishaJamal.pdfThe white sounding names:Emily
Anne
Jill
Allison
Laurie
Sarah
Meredith
Carrie
Kristen
Todd
Neil
Geoffrey
Brett
Brendan
Greg
Matthew
Jay
Brad
The black sounding names:Aisha
Keisha
Tamika
Lakisha
Tanisha
Latoya
Kenya
Latonya
Ebony
Rasheed
Tremayne
Kareem
Darnell
Tyrone
Hakim
Jamal
Leroy
Jermaine
Which are the loser names? At first glance, none of them (white or black) sound like someone I would instinctively not hire. Which ones would you fail to hire because of their name?
Again, on the position of unequal starting points - they are not inherently deserved but neither are they entirely morally dismissable because they are predicated on the success of ones forebears. It is one's parents and other ancestors to thank for this unearned success and their happiness should not taken out of the equation. Should more be done to reduce the contributions of one's family to their success? I believe it's a hard argument to make against the motivational factors and societal benefit of creating what is ideally a long-lived legacy.
There's no moral obligation to coddle the children of the rich and create a class of aristocracy who will inevitable end up ruling everyone else. That said, I acknowledge that there is some benefit (both to society as an individual motivational factor) to being able to better your offspring's position.
How to reconcile the two? It's not possible to see treating everyone the same way as fair if we acknowledge that each person is starting from a totally different point because of what their parents did, but we don't want to lose the benefits of being able to pass some wealth on to your offspring.
What I envision is something along the lines of a cap or limit on the total amount of wealth that can be transferred to the young (overages are taxed upon death), in combination with (and at least partially paid for by the overages) strong social programs available for use by the poor for food, nutrition, health, criminal re-education/re-integration, and education. It wouldn't result in a perfectly level playing field, but it would be a lot better than what we've currently got and would help to push up the middle and minimize those stuck at the extreme ends of poverty/wealth.