| curl-6 said: If I knew how to solve all discrimination and inequality, I'd have a Nobel peace prize; it's a complex problem and there is no easy solution. I simply believe that treating people better or worse based on traits they cannot control such as their skin colour or their sex is fundamentally wrong; it only perpetuates division as people see others being treated differently for being white/black/male/female which creates resentment and thus further fuels racism/sexism. |
I agree, there are no easy solutions. But changing culture to 1. become more aware of implicit biases based on background (aka: "become more woke") and 2. actively integrate marginalized peoples into common socio-economic institutions do work as difficult, effective solutions to reduce inequalities based on these categories. So any critique of them would have more weight if there were viable alternatives.
I am not convinced that the right-wing resentment comes from treating people differently, but rather from the fact that what were club goods and services increasingly have become public ones available to everyone. It's not very different from say 1832 U.K Conservatives being angry that The Reform Act of 1832 made political institutions more equally inclusive by including more people of relatively marginalized classes. And yes, the effect is that many of those Conservatives loss political-economic resources they (or their ancestors) previously guarded for centuries, in the same way historically dominant classes (white, men, etc) lose previously guarded socio-economic resources when their club goods and services become more public - but that is an effect of reforming or restructuring institutions so that people who were previously excluded are more equally included.
Treating people as individuals who are independent of their backgrounds or the groups they're embedded in would make sense in a society where everyone was born with the same opportunities and all results came from their own chosen decisions. Unfortunately, that doesn't describe our real-world societies. In our real-world the social institution of inheritance allows historical injustices to propagate beyond their historical period. In order to correct the effects of those historical injustices you either eliminate inheritance(s) and give people equal opportunities upon birth or you aim to holistically consider the opportunities individuals inherited due to certain groups they're embedded in when considering the merits of their choices continuously throughout your interactions in life.
And this makes practical sense too, to consider background. A poor person who has had fewer opportunities like tutoring and motivate parenting who achieves the same test scores as a wealthier person with more resources of this kind, likely had to make very different (merit-worthy) choices to achieve the same result. Likewise, when it comes to other marginalized classes. So it's not merely a matter of "treating people better or worse" due to their status in a social category, but rather what they have achieved despite a lack of inherited opportunities.
