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Comment by ghufran_syed | Hacker News Reader

Why use historically marginalized groups - which almost always means racial groups as your target?

If you want to put more money into educational support for children where neither parent went to college or makes more then $x - I'm all in favor. But when you can easily measure those things, why then conflate it with race? If certain racial groups fall into those disdavtaged categories, they will automatically benefit. But maybe poor hard working white, or indian, or Chinese parents are dubious about giving additional benefit to the middle class or rich people who happen to be of a certain race? To take a specific example, why should a university prefer to accept one of president Obama's kids ahead of the child of a Chinese butcher or shopworker, all other things being equal?

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I didn't say race very deliberately. There are plenty of marginalized groups of particular races, of course, but there are marginalized groups based on plenty of other criteria. LGBTQ+ folks, the elderly, women, immigrants, etc etc etc.

All of these are crude generalizations. If marginalization can be definitively stated to exist in someone, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured, then it can be directly compensated for without resorting to generalizations.

I would prefer that the state treats every one equally, instead of trying to equalize something as elusive, hard to measure and outside of any sensible government mandate, as good fortune (or lack of bad fortune) in one's life.

> I would prefer that the state treats every one equally, instead of trying to equalize something as elusive

I don't think you quite understand here. There are ways of helping out marginalized groups, with their specific problems, and still treating everyone equally.

For example, when there are laws that are passed, that make sexual harassment in the workplace illegal, this disproportionally helps out women, with this problem that they mostly face.

But, even though, yes, this helps this marginalized group, it is still equal. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether it happens to either men or women, but passing such a law does help this marginalized group more.

You are correct, of course, but equality can be deployed the opposite way as well. The law that says "no sleeping under bridges" impacts different groups unequally.

I'm trying to imagine how you would quantify how marginalized someone is. Black Americans have challenges, women in America have challenges, Black Women in America have challenges that are unique from either Black Americans or women. (When people talk about intersectionality, this is what they mean.)

How does being queer interact with being from West Virginia, or being poor and and having celiac.

There's just too many factors, you cannot just calculate them all, because they are not independent variables.

Every one has challenges. Claiming certain groups have more challenges implies being able to measure the difficulty of challenges, in order to be able to ascertain the challenges of one group are greater than the norm.

Biggest one of all they always exclude is genetics, intelligence, predisposition, drive, these are not evenly distributed, and why would they be under a system of evolution.

I can't tell you how much concrete there is in my house, I can't tell you how much concrete there is in the apartment building down the block.

I can tell you with near certainty that the apartment building has more concrete. Even if I've never been inside it.

Likewise, I can't measure the amount of challenge I faced (they were significant), I can't tell you the amount of challenge a trans kid faces. I can tell you with near certainty the trans kid faces more.

You don't need to measure, you don't need to be exact. Opportunity is wildly uneven right now. We can absolutely level things, and worry about whether we over corrected later.

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