I think there is a good reason why people who consider themselves anti-racists think we should see race in many places, and why they think 'color-blindness' is not enough.
The main reason is that, if people of a particular group have been treated very badly by society for a long time, simply stopping that treatment is unambiguously a good thing, but it leaves that group in a disadvantaged position which can persist long after the persecution stops. Black people start off life (on average!) with a substantial disadvantage, so if we want people to have equal opportunities to achieve great things regardless of the colour of their skin, you have to do something to redress the balance.
This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.
An analogy sometimes used is that of a house on fire. If your house is on fire, you'd like the fire brigade to focus their attention on your house, rather than nearby houses that are not on fire. To an anti-racist, the idea of ignoring the colour of people's skin entirely is as misguided as the idea of fire-fighters focussing on all houses regardless of whether they are on fire.
Is an Asian child who is born poor less deserving of help than a black child who is born poor? If so, why? If not, why not?
And if your ultimate goal is a society where race is irrelevant and we all treat each other equally, exactly how does doing the opposite get you there?
I believe that society remains biased against black people and as such, if we have limited resources to help people escape poverty then they should disproportionately be used to support poor black people.
To me, ultimate goal is a society that is not biased for or against any racial group. Currently society is biased against some racial groups, so to redress the balance I believe that we should give more support to those that society is biased against.
Maybe it's a silly metaphor, but imagine a seesaw. Currently more weight is on the left than the right, so it's unbalanced. I'd like it to be equally balanced so at the moment, I think the best thing to do it place more weight on the right.
How is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?
How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?
And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?
And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?
Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.
Of course there are millions of dimensions to account for. That doesn't mean that you give up on trying to address them! That line of argument lets you discredit any attempt at doing good.
Help black people who are discriminated against in the workplace? But what about asians!
Make life easier for deaf people by adding accessibility features to websites? But what about people who can't afford a computer!
Save the rainforest? But what about the arctic!
> So why deliberately move in the other direction?
Because western society is not currently colour-blind, in a very particular direction! That was the point of the seesaw metaphor: not to say that race is one straight line with black at one end and white at the other, but to say that if you want people to have equal opportunities regardless of their race then you have to help the people who are currently at a disadvantage.
> Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.
The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that you should not take action to help one disadvantaged group if that action excludes a different disadvantaged group. Is that a fair summary of your point?
Do you think this applies to all disadvantaged groups, or just when discussing issues of race?
> This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.
I hadn't thought of equality of opportunity in this way before, but it does appear to be an innate problem of that approach.
As a counter-argument, I think the preferential treatment approach is upside down. Hiring less qualified people to redress historical inequalities is a top-down approach, authoritarian and minimally impactful. The individuals you hire help them, but not the disadvantaged community at large. We should be taking a bottom-up approach where the disadvantaged are afforded more community funding to bring up their access to opportunities. It is a slower approach because it takes a few generations to see the results, but it leads to long-term change, not band-aid fixes which I feel preferential treatment delivers.
As a counter-country-argument, why not take both approaches? There's something about trying to fix a wrong with more wrongs that I feel will damn the entire system.
Preferential treatment can mean many things. For example, you can provide programs for ethnic minorities to retrain as developers. It could mean scholarships that are only available to black people, or immigrants, or deaf people. It could mean training recruiters and interviewers so that they are less biased in their evaluation of candidates - in ways that they might not even realise.
That said, aiming to hire more people from disadvantaged groups can have positive effects beyond just the people that you hire. It gives young people a wider variety of role models. It can increase your team's performance because you have a wider variety of viewpoints. It can lead to wider cultural change in the company as a whole, making qualified people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel more comfortable applying for senior roles.
And it doesn't have to mean hiring worse people. Perhaps it just means focusing more on problem solving and creativity and less on education and 'culture fit' in your interview process, or advertising your jobs in places where they will be seen by a more diverse group of people.
The main reason is that, if people of a particular group have been treated very badly by society for a long time, simply stopping that treatment is unambiguously a good thing, but it leaves that group in a disadvantaged position which can persist long after the persecution stops. Black people start off life (on average!) with a substantial disadvantage, so if we want people to have equal opportunities to achieve great things regardless of the colour of their skin, you have to do something to redress the balance.
This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.
An analogy sometimes used is that of a house on fire. If your house is on fire, you'd like the fire brigade to focus their attention on your house, rather than nearby houses that are not on fire. To an anti-racist, the idea of ignoring the colour of people's skin entirely is as misguided as the idea of fire-fighters focussing on all houses regardless of whether they are on fire.