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Comment by undefined1 | Hacker News Reader

focusing on race only makes it more relevant. it's an incredibly counterproductive approach, clearly.

Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism until...?

Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, “I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.” Hear what I’m saying?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeixtYS-P3s

the failure to heed such wisdom is erasing all of the progress we made toward achieving MLK Jr's dream!

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

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Morgan Freeman is wrong in that very old video. That he is black and famous doesn't make him any less wrong. If he holds that opinion today he'd still be wrong. Pretending that we don't see race and yet operating in a world deeply defined by it will do precisely nothing to address structural racism.

Structural racism is both real and documented both in laws and policies [1], and its geographic and demographic impacts [2]. No amount of imagining race away is going to change that.

Also, Morgan Freeman is not an authority on how to combat structural racism that is tied into our economic, healthcare, housing and educational systems. He's a damn great actor, though.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimi...

2. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

> Pretending that we don't see race and yet operating in a world deeply defined by it will do precisely nothing to address structural racism.

What do you see as the steady state? Are the systems we're building now to be explicitly race-aware, like hiring quotas by race, the steady state we want to shoot for? Or do you see these practices as a stepping stone to some farther goal?

> do you see these practices as a stepping stone to some farther goal?

They are absolutely a stepping stone toward a society where opportunity is not heavily skewed against historically underprivileged racial groups - something like Dr. Kings dream.

But it's false to claim that we would be there today if we just pretended to not see race, and to claim that we have addressed either past or current structural racism.

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