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Comment by esja | Hacker News Reader

How is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?

How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?

And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?

And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?

Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.

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I think we agree more than you realise!

Of course there are millions of dimensions to account for. That doesn't mean that you give up on trying to address them! That line of argument lets you discredit any attempt at doing good.

Help black people who are discriminated against in the workplace? But what about asians!

Make life easier for deaf people by adding accessibility features to websites? But what about people who can't afford a computer!

Save the rainforest? But what about the arctic!

> So why deliberately move in the other direction?

Because western society is not currently colour-blind, in a very particular direction! That was the point of the seesaw metaphor: not to say that race is one straight line with black at one end and white at the other, but to say that if you want people to have equal opportunities regardless of their race then you have to help the people who are currently at a disadvantage.

> Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.

Me too :)

The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that you should not take action to help one disadvantaged group if that action excludes a different disadvantaged group. Is that a fair summary of your point?

Do you think this applies to all disadvantaged groups, or just when discussing issues of race?

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