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Comment by charlieyu1 | Hacker News Reader

Can we just treat people equally and don't put so much emphasis about colour. Race struggles were a relic of the past 50+ years ago.

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Turns out, the USDA has a pretty wide gap in approving funding for farmers that can be explained by race. Seems like it may still be an on going issue, or that a history of systemic factors have contributed to it. Either way, we ain't there just yet boss.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/19/1156851675/in-2022-black-farm....

I agree, it seems so simple. The more we focus on this stuff the more it makes people adopt it as a worldview, imho. I just don't understand why people want to look at the world this way - and it is something you need to be taught.

Some want to, but there are also biases that we aren’t aware of.

> Race struggles were a relic of the past 50+ years ago.

Race struggles were a current event 50 years ago. The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1968 -- 55 years ago -- for example, and it hardly represented the end of racial injustice in the US. (Indeed, it's still an ongoing process in some regards.)

It took roughly a century to go from constitutional amendment to legislative enforcement for equal treatment under the law. In 2023, for political points, state and local leaders are banning critical race theory in schools (even though it’s an academic legal theory).

However one feels about “race”, it’s a current theme, not a relic, politically, economically or legally. And that shouldn’t be at odds with the individual choice to treat others equally.

> In 2023, for political points, state and local leaders are banning critical race theory in schools (even though it’s an academic legal theory).

Critical race theory is a fad among academicians, but it isn't academic in any way. It's a prescriptive worldview about how to interpret social dynamics; it is not a descriptive theory from which one can derive testable hypotheses.

Like any other prescriptive worldview, it has no place being taught as truth in a public school, which is what the opposition is all about.

Well we don't treat people equally, and those affected are right to confront it.

The obvious answer is because some people have different starting points than others. Thus, even if all rules were changed equally, there wouldn't be equal outcomes.

And consider the Monopoly experiment where some people are given twice the money, still attribute the fact that they win to their decision making and the losers losing to their poorer decision making.

We psychologically will never attribute what we've accomplished to external factors and will never see that those who don't accomplish what we've done may be disadvantaged -- even with the factors are pretty obvious.

The problem is that some people want to treat people equally and not address any wrongdoing. And another group is fine to not treat people equally -- and since there is no one left to address wrongdoing, they can do so with impunity.

It's not entirely binary, though I agree those groups are grid locked.

The civil rights movement was ~60 years ago, this is absurd even on its own terms.

In the US, sure, but the rest of the world is in varying states of dealing with long seated prejudices.

The issue I have with the US is that for all the talk of trying to rectify racism everyone seems more intent on "othering" than ever before. By that I mean it spends significant time trying to slot everyone into categories so they can then be treated in some prescribed manner. These categories are not based on the actual needs of individuals, but a persons RGB value. The policies in the US, at the governmental and private level say that people, based on color, are not equal, and some people need more help and others less. It's prejudicial at the core and the whole way of looking at things needs to be rectified.

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