But don’t get it twisted: I’m still opposed to AA/DEI. Not because I think racial discrimination should be tolerated, but because I think we’ve chosen the wrong remedy for it.
If you intentionally discriminate against someone because of their race and materially harm them, deny them a job, promotion, housing, education, or some other protected opportunity because they’re Black, I’d rather see the government come down much harder on the person who actually did it. And yes, I mean criminal penalties, including prison in serious cases. Make deliberately screwing someone over because of their race carry consequences severe enough that people are genuinely afraid to do it.
The problem is you have never shown how to prove it to criminal standards.
Instead, we try to remedy discrimination at the group level. To me, that’s like discovering that some restaurants are deliberately shortchanging female servers and, rather than finding the managers who are doing it and putting them behind bars for intentionally violating those women’s rights, the government says, “We can’t establish exactly who screwed over whom, so from now on every restaurant has to pay women 15% more than men until the numbers balance out.”
That's ass backwards to me. You’re imposing a remedy on people who may never have discriminated against anyone, potentially disadvantaging people who had nothing to do with the original wrongdoing, while the actual racist who denied someone an opportunity might walk away with a fine, a settlement, or his employer paying the bill.
I’d rather individualize both the crime and the punishment: prove that someone intentionally discriminated, punish that person severely, and make the actual victim whole. If racial discrimination is serious enough that we believe society needs extraordinary measures to counteract it, then make the act of deliberately discriminating against someone carry extraordinary consequences. Don’t make race itself the mechanism through which we distribute the remedy.
The current system exists because we could see a pattern but generally couldn't prove guilt.
Remember, outliers happen. I'm thinking of the woman in England convicted of murdering two of her children. Based entirely on the fact that the odds of losing two babies to SIDS is in the millions-to-one range. But back up: given the population of England it's likely
someone lost two babies to SIDS. And it's not actually that much of a longshot, anyway--SIDS tends to run in families, the second death is not an independent roll of the dice. (AFIAK, no data exists on the odds of losing a second baby to SIDS given that someone has lost one.)
And yes, if this were the 1980s, we very well might be arguing about men’s and women’s MCAT scores instead. Which is kind of the point: the group being treated as presumptively “less qualified” changes, but the underlying habit of looking at someone’s identity and assuming they didn’t earn their place remains remarkably familiar.
Regrettably, none of what I’m arguing works if America gets to say, “Well, the people we fucking cheated are dead now, so I guess the debt died with them.” Fuck that. If you rob a man and he dies before you repay him, you don’t suddenly get to keep the money because you managed to outlive him. The debt doesn’t disappear. The loss was passed down, so the compensation should be passed down too.
America doesn’t get to inherit the benefits of what it did while telling the descendants of the people who inherited the damage, “Sorry, you weren’t personally there.” That bill doesn’t vanish because the people who were originally owed are in the ground. That’s a reality America is going to have to face whether it fucking likes it or not.
The Constitution specifically prohibits punishment for the sins of the father.
Few people get meaningful amounts of money from their ancestors. You want repayment of something that no longer exists. We (people in general) do not have the stolen property to return it. I know my parents started with nothing, put themselves through school. Thus anything that happened prior to that has no possible relevance to where I stand now.
I think you're actually helping me separate two things that keep getting mashed together here: guilt and remedy. On the criminal-standard issue, sure, proving intentional discrimination beyond a reasonable doubt would be difficult. I never said otherwise. But “it's difficult to prove” isn't an argument that the conduct shouldn't carry severe consequences when it
can be proven. In fact, your SIDS example makes part of my point for me. A statistical pattern isn't enough to establish that a particular person committed a crime. Exactly. So don't punish individuals because they happen to belong to a group associated with some statistical outcome. Identify the person who actually committed the discriminatory act, prove it, and punish that person. Where I think you're misunderstanding me is with this “sins of the father” rubbish.
I'm not arguing that some random White guy today is personally guilty because his great-grandfather was racist.
He isn't. I don't want to punish him for something he didn't do any more than I want to disadvantage some random Asian applicant because somebody else discriminated against Black people years ago. That's literally why I don't like AA/DEI as the remedy. But saying the descendant isn't guilty doesn't mean the underlying obligation magically evaporates.
Governments and institutions don't die every 70 years and get replaced by legally unrelated entities. America today inherits the assets, property, laws, institutions, debts and obligations of America yesterday. We don't tell somebody holding a government obligation, “Sorry, everybody who originally incurred that obligation is dead, so tough shit.” That's the distinction I'm making. The debt can survive without the guilt surviving. And the person owed doesn't necessarily stop being owed merely because he died either. If somebody steals $100,000 from a man and he dies before getting it back, I'm not convinced that the thief suddenly gets a windfall because the victim had the poor manners to die first. His estate or heirs can inherit the claim without becoming the original victim themselves.
Now scale that concept up. I'm not saying every White person today possesses some identifiable bag of money stolen from a Black family. Obviously they don't. And your parents starting with nothing is perfectly compatible with that. But that's also why I keep saying AA/DEI is treating the symptom instead of the disease. If a government, company, bank, university, municipality, whatever actually discriminated against identifiable people, my preference is to establish who did it, punish the responsible actors when possible, and make the actual victims, or where appropriate their estates or successors, whole.
What I don't like is throwing up our hands because individual wrongdoing can be difficult to prove and then saying, “Fine, we'll just start putting thumbs on scales based on everybody's race.” That's the part I think is backwards. So no, I don't believe in punishing children for the sins of their fathers. That concept was born from some dumbass religious shit. I also don't believe dying should be an effective statute of limitations on getting away with screwing somebody over. Those are not contradictory positions.
