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Comment by MisterBastahrd | Hacker News Reader

We do not live in a perfect world.

Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were made and not kept upon their return, and are still being discriminated against in representative democracy.

And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people have been harmed, financially, spiritually, democratically, and physically... the people who are against attempts to rectify the situation given the tools available also have nothing but "fairness" to fall back on when attempting to justify their positions, because they'd rather sweep it under the rug and pretend like it's something that we should never address.

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Sins of the father isn't a popular position in this country. It's also a very hard way to get elected.

While we don't engage in mass slavery anymore (well, except for those who are incarcerated), there's still plenty of racial discrimination going on today. Even if we decide that we're not going to talk about reparations for slavery anymore, and things like that, there's still plenty that needs to be fixed that's going on right this minute.

The popularity of the sentiment seems to depend crucially on who precisely the father is, and what the sins were.

You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor, but I have a yes/no question for you:

If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine.

Instead, could write a convincing case that the group you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest of society, rather than the other way around?

I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Their entire case is "it's not fair" in the absolute sense. That because some white folks descend from people who didn't have anything to do with slavery that all should be absolved from participating and benefitting from systemic racism.

It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.

For sure. My ancestors mostly came to the US well after slavery. The only one that I know didn't fought on the Union side in the civil war. But that doesn't matter, because in my life I've received the benefits of being white in America. And I think a lot of that performative and wanton ignorance is basically refusal to admit that sort of privilege born of luck.

It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare quotes) is not important.

But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say they're against: racism.

When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same baseless criteria for discriminating against people. But instead of separating into "inferior" and "superior" you want to separate into "victims" and "culprits".

The solution is to treat the shortcomings, not the people. If black people are doing less well in school, then it might be that the real reason is that poor people are doing less well in school, and the solution would be to deal with that, not based on race.

You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago. Are the descendants of Greeks (in the US) enslaved by Greeks owed compensation? Are the descendants of Europeans enslaved by Africans owed compensation?

I think it's clear that you don't want to treat the "shortcomings" with any solution that requires something tangible. The only time governments ever treat people on a per-person basis are during the census, during voting, and during the outcomes of trials. That's it. All other solutions are class based in nature.

I never said "black people." That's a you thing. And I'm an American citizen who knows that we've ALREADY had reparations for Japanese-Americans who were held for a few years during WWII but won't do the same for people whose ownership we can directly trace because we've still got the records of ownership and sale.

So if you're going to be flippant, go do it with someone who doesn't understand history, because your argument is silly.

> It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare quotes) is not important.

They put it in scare quotes because there is a big difference between "fairness" and fairness. You're not asking for actual fairness.

If there were two children, each who had a cookie, and one child steals the other child's cookie - nobody would say that a fair way to distribute the next cookie is to split it evenly between both children. But that's the kind of "fairness" you're asking for. It's fair in the most basic and childish sense. Once you stop ignoring what came before it's no longer fair.

> You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago.

As a historical fact, West Germany and East Germany both paid reparations to Holocaust survivors, despite neither being legally identical to the German Reich.

If for various reasons you find that unconvincing, it’s also the case that the Funding Act of 1790 has the federal government assume the debts of the colonies.

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