xhieron , 6 months ago

I didn’t “slip” the word always in there. That’s the point.

In the past we did not have good methods or even good understanding of what kinds of indicators we should look at or how. The idea of privilege as a concept wasn’t even being studied until the late 1980s. So it was reasonable to use less precise predictive measures (like skin color) when looking at data in aggregate in order to remediate prior harm. But we’re not talking about anthropology here. We’re talking about policies that affect individual living persons, and if we want to know whether those persons experienced disadvantages, we can just ask them. This isn’t a matter of “Are you more likely to have suffered x disadvantage if you’re black in America?” It’s “Did you personally suffer x?” or at the very least “Did one of your ancestors personally suffer x?” If institutions are deciding they don’t need to ask that question because they can instead just screen all applicants of a particular skin color instead, they’re doing the exact racial stereotyping that we’re attempting to correct. That exact kind of screening is how the FHA and lenders prevented black people from owning homes historically: They decided that all black applicants were more likely to have certain bad qualities, and they categorically excluded them. Now, some well-intentioned but misguided liberals (and occasionally racists) are instead deciding that all black applicants have certain good qualities, and they categorically exclude everyone other than them. It shouldn’t take a huge logical leap to understand how that’s not better.