But that should be the goal. Using skin color as a proxy for being disadvantaged works only inasmuch the proxy is precise enough. If it's not, it's just another bias.
If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.
But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.
I think there are two different but related angles at play:
1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.
2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.
We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.
This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.
Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.
I understand that anti-black racism is still a factor today.
I really fail to see how doubling in on the importance and reality of race and skin color in particular (as opposed to culture) everywhere is going to make that problem go away.
If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.
But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.
I think there are two different but related angles at play:
1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.
2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.
We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.
This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.
Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.