Comment by xdennis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xdennis | Hacker News Reader

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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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