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These social issues vasculate by design to keep the peasants of every color at each other's throats.
The only real war is class war, too bad our owners propagandized us from birth to refuse to fight that particular war.
Now by all means, carry on fighting over the social wedges that are largely caused or exacerbated by our rigged capitalist dystopia.
Just don't be late for work.
You can't reduce all of society's problems to one source. We need to improve the lives of everyone, and we don't do that by ignoring the plight of minority groups. We can accomplish more than one good at a time.
Not all, but nearly all.
Abortion should be legal and available to all women, that said, around 40% of them are done for economic reasons: https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29
Hence the issue is greatly exacerbated by our capitalist dystopia.
I don't think I need to l source the economic growth incentive for exploiting undocumented immigrant labor they invite, while at the same time propagandizing half the country to hate them so they don't gain social footing to get fair pay.
Climate change, hmmm...
Collapse of the nuclear family and birth rate, hmmm...
K-12 educational collapse due to tax breaks for a certain economic class in almost every state, hmmm...
Higher ed being bastardized from a societal necessity to a for profit indentured servant factory, hmmm...
Food deserts and urban decay from big box stores killing main street to eliminate threats and then pulling out of those neighborhoods once succeeding leaving nothing but abandoned disaster areas, hmmm...
I'm sure there are some national problems that aren't caused by, substantially exacerbated by, or intentionally stoked for division by our owner class through their captured governments and bully pulpit, but without addressing our rigged economy and the wealth class gaining more hard power year after year, I'm sorry but it's deck chairs by comparison.
I'm a bit puzzled by this response, to be honest. Yes, there are economic factors in many issues facing our society. However, the causes of abortion are not the same as access to it. And I notice you left out issues that are extremely pressing or even existential to many people, like inequities in policing, medicine (I don't mean access to medicine, I mean inequities in treatment and research), higher ed, as well as denial of rights to self determination for Transgender people and erosion of civil rights for LGBTQ people across the country. Some of these have economic components, but none can be completely solved by economic means.
Of course we need to fix our broken economic system. The inequalities in wealth and the stranglehold that the capital class has on our economy and government are a dire problem. But to tell minorities who are also struggling in many ways that those struggles are a distraction is unconscionable. We can help each other, we don't have to reduce the struggle to make a better world down to a single factor, and to do so will just create more inequalities when we fail to consider the needs to groups besides our own.
Honestly, if we could stop this cultural race war for like two seconds we'd have a way better society. I just went healthcare end high speed rail.
Is there some reason that we can't work to have a more equitable society racially and economically? It's not a zero sum game, we can care about and accomplish more than one thing at a time...
Exactly. Even if the real villain was capitalism all along (spoiler: it is), we can't abandon all of these battles along the way in hopes of winning the war in the end. The fight will take generations and we need to win ground on multiple fronts to have any hope of real, honest to goodness, change.
How would one sustainably protect/save the Jews (and all the other victimized groups) without first dismantling the Nazi regime?
Sure you can free this camp and that camp without marching on Berlin, but if the machine, the source that propagates it and maintains it remains intact, you're addressing a symptom of the primary cause and they'll just build more camps.
If you resolve one social wedge, they'll stoke another in it's place through the government they fully captured decades ago. Why do you think they're actively unresolving decades settled resolutions through their Federalist Society judges?
Practiced insatiable Greed that rises to a level that becomes dangerous to society, that makes you more powerful than your single vote, that lets you buy your own regulatory bodies and inform the laws that are supposed to regulate you for the public good needs to be disallowed/criminalized. Without that, it's a never ending game of division wedge whackamole, and you only need to understand who that benefits, the modern masters/profiteers/"job creators."
An economy is supposed to be a tool to better distribute good and services for the benefit of a society, ie the people in it. Our society lives in service to, and is often told we need to make sacrifices for, our beloved 🌈economy. We're doing it backwards, we are being played, it's so obvious that it burns.
I'm just going to quote the comment that you are replying to, since you don't seem to have read it.
Is there some reason that we can’t work to have a more equitable society racially and economically? It’s not a zero sum game, we can care about and accomplish more than one thing at a time…
I don't agree that the sole cause of racial inequity is economic. If you only address the economic factors, then you will still be left with an unjust society. Again, what I am saying is that we can do more than one thing at a time.
To address your analogy, what you're proposing would be like marching on Berlin and leaving the camps in place, and just assuming that the folks in the will be fine once you overthrow the Nazis without actually doing the work to make sure that is the case. In reality, allied forces liberated the camps in the process of marching toward Berlin. That is what I am trying to say. We need to dismantle all of the machinery of oppression, not just the economic parts.
Edit: This probably came across as unnecessarily combative. I'm going to take a step back from this thread for a while. Ya'll stay nice.
Reducing economical disparities will solve the so-called "racial" inequalities.
Affordable education, housing and care for all don't necessitate discrimination, even positive.
When an university degree costs hundreds of thousands, the problem isn't the ethnic makeup of the happy few who can afford it, it's scarcity itself.
European state manage to fund a higher education for pretty much all of those that care to try it, it is not an impossible dream.
edit: to clarify, I don't think ending affirmative action before making any general progress is a good idea or will do any good.
just to keep eyes on the prize and be aware of diversion tactics.
Reducing economic disparities will help solving racial inequalities but it won't solve them on its own. In the US there are so many racial disparities baked into the system we'd also need to looking into school funding reform, policing reform, prison reform and zoning reform as well. All of those institutions are built on explicitly racist foundations.
Not to mention K-12 that isnt in literal ruin, so underfunded that becoming a teacher, what should be one of society's most revered professions, is a life on the edge of poverty. Proof positive that we choose to actively sabotage the future in the name of increasing the next quarterly earnings call for Wall Street sociopaths. How about our tent cities in every major city filled with our beaten, hopeless brothers and sisters our society throws away like garbage for the crime of not being effective enough capital batteries.
I could get into other stuff but there's just too fucking much. Almost all of which stems from allowing insatiable greed to fester and metastasize until it became an aspirational trait and core value in the US. Now half the peasants dream in vain of being in the Oligarch class (good luck class traitors) instead of condemning and dismantling such a class.
The Gorden Geckos/Mr Potters/Ebenezer Scrooges were elevated and deified and allowed to run a muck here and warp our nation and increasingly the world to their cancerous, antisocial vision, and everyone outside of the owner class lost, even most who are their most zealous defenders. The real people these cautionary villains reflected used to be seen correctly as the deeply broken, deranged, selfish people they are.
We the people kill ourselves laboring to enrich people that don't even see us as human beings with intrinsic value outside of capital generation. Every other conflict is a sideshow by comparison. Rant over sorry.
If the only war is the class war, why do minorities have to fight (and die) for equal rights? Why are their own class-members among the first to try to stop them from achieving equality?
Once again, social wedges. Indentured servitude never went away, it just rebranded. The almost entirely caucasion owner class did cling to using race as the ultimate tool for coerced labor, but after generations of resistance, and the unquenchable quest for unsustainable growth, more than half a century ago decided that having a racial underclass in a largely white population simply wasn't enough exploited labor to increase their wealth and power fast enough, as it's never fast enough.
The poor, true believer Fox News consuming racists are the cultural remnant of that long abandoned unspoken compact between the wealth class and their once favorite colored, highest ranking capital batteries when it was convenient. Racism is real. Racism is wrong, but to the oligarchs, it's become just another tool to manipulate their labor pool.
Some might see it as poetic justice on the once complacent white peasants who took solace in being the richer, more socially powerful peasants, and that's fine, but unproductive, as we have a common enemy who manipulates and stokes such anymous with the means of major media propaganda they own to maintain productivity. It's easier than chains, it's more insidious than Jim Crow. Just turn half fhe peasants against the other half and they'll never look up. You can't argue with the effectiveness.
The latest in a series of measures ensuring that future generations will be mired in problems which we've been inching away from for centuries only to dive right back into them on a regular basis.
20 more years of this SCOTUS in all likelihood. That's what 4 years of Trump got us, and DeSantis's nominees for Florida's SCOTUS make Trump's nominees look like level headed centrists. Unless we get big Democratic majorities, then maybe there's a chance at SCOTUS expansion.
Remember it's not enough to just vote in the general, participate in your primaries too and encourage your friends and family to do the same for both federal and state/local office. The people who are most eager to right these wrongs quickly and through drastic action are usually the underdogs for their nominations. Removing Republicans in favor of Democrats will help most of the time regardless, but how much it helps depends on which Democrats we are electing. It's the difference between slowing the bleeding for 2 years and actual meaningful change.
Biden will sign a new Judicial Act if Congress puts one in front of him so don't worry about that or how wishy washy he might sound in the meantime. He may be lukewarm on SCOTUS expansion in hypothetical discussion, but when the paper is on his desk, he'll sign it. But it's up to us to give him a Congress that would do it and state governments that will sue to put cases back in front of a relegitimized SCOTUS after the fact.
Y’all need to fucking vote blue in every election to stop this shit. No third party shit, no “both sides,” no “my vote doesn’t matter.” If you actually want to stop this kind of stuff, you have to vote for democrats in every election.
This includes primaries. If the left isn't radical enough for you, you can change that within the primaries. It's wild how many complaints about the Dems come from people who only vote in presidential election years.
some states don't have primaries; they have caucuses. which means you get to spend an entire day in a room with a bunch of other people arguing.
if you're conflict avoidant, that's the equivalent of a root canal without anesthesia.
Race shouldn't be a consideration in whether to admit a particular student. But it should be used on an ongoing basis to ensure that the admission process is applied fairly.
Then, if it's determined that there's a racial bias in admissions, the root cause should be analyzed and corrected. Are students of one race better prepared academically? That's a problem that needs to be fixed at the high school level (or earlier). If you admit students who aren't prepared for college-level courses, you either have to spend resources on remedial classes, or have a lot of students from that race drop out.
Are students of one race more able to pay? If we want everyone to have the same chance at education regardless of background, maybe college should be fully government-funded.
That’s a problem that needs to be fixed at the high school level (or earlier).
What ability does a private university like Harvard have to affect the equity of primary or secondary education across the entire country? This sounds good, but who is doing the fixing? The same people who are stripping away the ability for colleges and universities to address inequity by considering it in their admissions policies are also strip mining public education. Maybe AA was a bandaid but ripping off the bandaid because it would be better to fix the injury, but having no ability or will to fix the injury, just means that now you're bleeding all over the place.
It's about competitive college admissions. Rich students get college prep, tutors and extra curricular activities to give them an edge. Not having to work through high school is also a massive advantage.
the worst generation at it again
Unpopular(?) left-center opinion incoming:
Y'all are in here acting like the world is ending. The Supreme Court just said "No, the Constitution makes clear that you can't use that specific tool. Use another".
It did NOT say, for instance: "you can never implement any policy whose outcome is a student body whose racial diversity reflects that of the society". Just that the policy can't achieve that outcome by approving or denying students based on their race. You think there's not room to move within that?
I support the intention behind affirmative action, and I want to live in a world where race predicts as little as possible about your life, but I can't disagree with Roberts when he says AA is discrimination on the basis of race. And I can't argue with anyone who says this kind of discrimination is not constitutional (when federal authority OR funding is involved).
And you'll find me on the left side of most SCOTUS decisions, but I don't buy the arguments from the dissenting justices, specifically that the court is obliged to keep allowing an unconstitutional practice in order to (my paraphrasing) keep the racial mix of our future leaders balanced. I understand what they mean when they say that, and I agree diversity is important in leaders. It is not the job of the Supreme Court to make this happen.
I see this as a good thing, if ai have a candidate that is better than another, why would I deny the 1st candidate admission just because of the 2nd’s color
My parents were both in school during desegregation. We are less than a generation from people of color being denied the right to equality in education. Hell, Bob Jones University v. United States was decided in 1983. That sort of systemic inequality doesn't just go away overnight. You have to take intentional steps to address those inequalities, and affirmative action is one of those steps. Color Blind policies fail to address systemic racism because they assume we live in a post-racial society, but the affects of centuries of inequality still exist everywhere in our society.
It's more like, you have two candidates who are equally qualified. One is black and one is white. You could choose either. If you have a very low number of black students, you'd obviously want to choose the black student to increase campus diversity and vice-versa.
It ignores context. The state caused generational harm to a specific group of people. The fix has to target the same people. If you feel in a general sense there isn't enough opportunity to go around, that's a different bone to pick imo.
a candidate that is better than another
Better how? Any metric you use to measure candidates can arguably already be biased towards people who didn't grow up poor.
Better grades? Students who attended well funded schools get better grades. That's indirectly measuring wealth
More extracurricular activities? Students from wealthy families have more opportunity to take part in extracurricular activities. That's indirectly measuring wealth.
Ability to pay? That's just straight up measuring wealth.
While not the greatest solution, affirmative action was meant to give people born into bad situations a way to climb out. Education is directly linked to wealth and requiring wealth to get an education keeps poor people poor.
There are many many reasons.... and everyone replying to you is talking about them all
a "better" candidate by most academic standards is more likely to be wealthy and, in the US, that means more likely to be White. Simply put, White people have more generational wealth, which makes them more able to participate in extracurriculars, more time to study, less general stress.
If a college wants to create a more holistic education than just academic, it benefits them to have a diverse student body. The more diverse the student body, the more tolerant and open minded your graduates will be. They'll be more open to listening to people that don't look like them, and society will be better for it.
and then there's 3) The elite in this country have always been and thus have been biased towards Straight White Men. Without guardrails in place, they will select more Straight White Men, and we will regress.
The problem with this thinking is that especially in education, the education level of the parents matters a lot. If you have parents with no higher education, the child is not likely to get one either. This means that groups that were previously disadvantaged will have fewer kids that attend, and their kids will have fewer kids that attend, and this goes on and on.
In order to break the cycle, you need to push the opposite direction for a while. Otherwise you're disadvantaging children for something that happened to their great-grandparents.
Because that policy would further solidify the total disenfranchisement of minorities that are already intentionally left behind.
I work in graduate education, and about 30% of my work is in admissions. My life just became very complicated.
Me, still waiting for those "checks and balances" to kick in:
Edit: this comment hit a lot of nerves and I'm not entirely sure why lol
I'm sorry, did you meant the "checks and balances" that will be cashed for lobbying against the common interest of citizens? /j
Reminder, the framers were imperfect products of their time, many of whom owned slaves, suggested landowners be the only class allowed to vote, and created a flawed document that, while ahead of its time a quarter millenia ago in the age of gunpowder muskets and speed of horse communication, blue screened windows 95 style a long time ago in the face of modern scale and structural societal change.
This affects white people too. Asian students are often discriminated against when applying for colleges. I imagine that we’ll be seeing a lot of Asian students displacing both white and brown students as a result of this.
Clarence Thomas probably considers this his shining achievement. He has had a personal vendetta against affirmative action forever, despite benefitting from it himself.
It will be impossible for any but the most elite and wealthy universities to comply with race-blind admissions.
It's now open season to sue college admission offices and bilk them of everything you can. All you have to show is that there is a racial bias in their admissions, which you can define any way they want. Disproportionate representation from the population? Racial bias. Disproportionate representation compared to applications? Racial bias. Perfectly proportional representation according to some population statistic? Clearly affirmative action, since only through AA could you get your representation so proportional.
Think a university can be race-blind to avoid this? Nope. If the representation isn't perfectly proportional (and again, by what standard?) that shows inherent bias. So they'll have to collect race information and then compare that to their admission standards to CHECK That their process is suitably race-blind. Which means it isn't race blind. Which means it is AA or some shit.
And only wealthy universities have admissions departments large and staffed sufficiently to do this. Smaller and public universities will just be bulldozed.
Everyone will have totally different standards about what is fair and powerful, rich, likely racially advantaged/majority groups will sue like fuck to exploit their advantage while racially disadvantaged/minority groups do not have the means to do the same. The de facto outcome will end up discrimination.
The old system was the equivalent of admitting and acknowledging your bias and being transparent about your process and motivations. It directly made use of race as a factor to specifically target and avoid discrimination. The new system mandates that institutional and systemic discrimination be propped up and protected.