Nobody in the modern developed world is "oppressed".

Blaming things that happened decades or even over a century ago for your problems today is ridiculous. If you were never personally enslaved for example, then you did not and do not suffer from it.

People have free will, your position in life is foremost the result of your own choices and actions.

People should be treated equally. Nobody should get handouts or special treatment.

At the risk of both wasting my time and essentially just repeating the conversation I just had with another user...

Trans people aren't being denied their very right to exist? The justice system and prison industrial complex don't disproportionately target minorities? The GOP isn't systematically suppressing their voting power? The stacked SCOTUS didn't recently remove women's bodily autonomy? Gay marriage isn't at serious risk of becoming their next target? The Trump administration isn't weaponizing the government to imply that literally any and every minority group didn't earn the positions they worked for? How can any even remotely informed (or even just unsheltered) person actually think this? 

Do you actually think the effects of slavery and discrimination just suddenly stop after one generation? 

You control your own actions, but not the position you start in or the opportunities you have access to because of it. 

In a vacuum, yes. In practice on a systemic level that just solidifies and reinforces the inequities already present. 

It only takes one person, one generation, to pick themselves up and succeed. Blaming stuff from like 150 years ago doesn't help anyone and just creates a defeatist mentality; nobody is going to get anywhere in life by blaming all their problems on an external "oppressor" or events in the distant past that can't be changed.

If the problem is say poverty, then let's help poor people. All poor people, not one race than another.

Cos the thing is, favouring one group over another, no matter how good your intentions are, breeds resentment and actually increases racism, making society worse for everybody; we're in this mess now because of the last decade of well intentioned but ultimately unhelpful favouritism of certain groups.

Racism and racist governmental policies didn't end with Abe Lincoln. The mass move to suburbs happened roughly from 1945-1965 when many of our grandparents were likely buying their first homes (depending on how old you are). The heavy governmental subsidization of this move excluded black people from being able to purchase homes, pulling the wealth out of inner cities and leaving many of our parents generation in vastly different starting positions depending on the color of their skin. Many black individuals born in the 70s and 80 were born into deeply poor inner cities with crumbling school systems and many white individuals were born into much wealthier suburban neighborhoods with much more heavily funded school systems. 

By all means, let's help the poor, but we need to address the damage that our government did to majority minority communities. 

This is definitely not true in all countriesmaybe only in a few that have genuinely achieved social equality for the vast majority of their population, like Norway or perhaps even Australia

For the rest of the world, most of the outcomes in your life are determined the moment you're born

Accepting this doesn't mean resigning yourself to defeat or falling into despair. It simply means acknowledging that, for the vast majority of people, they will end up in the same social class as their parents or even worse... This might be somewhat acceptable if your parents are middle class, but if they're poor, the situation becomes much more grim 

It goes without saying that some "developed" countries don't seem all that developed when you consider their levels of perceived economic disparity. In the case of the United States, this disparity is heavily correlated with racial issues, as the country remains deeply racially segregated. The majority of people living below the poverty line in the USA are Hispanic (mainly Latin American immigrants and their descendants), followed by Black Americans who, only a few decades ago, were still fighting for the same basic rights as white citizens

Of course, there are poor and working-class white people in the USA, and they absolutely shouldn't be ignored from social programs

However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a strong racial component to economic inequality. American communities can be surprisingly segregated, with poorer (read: majority-Black or Latin) neighborhoods facing underfunded schools and significantly higher crime rates. This creates a self-fulfilling profecy: people are poor because everyone around them who shares their ethnicity is also poor. And because these communities are historically underserved by the government, they struggle to escape generational poverty, unlike many white communities that have had more support and opportunities

I don't really understand why so many middle- and working-class white Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that structural racism (such as historical segregation and longstanding economic disparities) is one of the root causes of social inequality in the USA and absolutely deserved to be addressed 

Since people mentioned white blue collar white people feeling increasingly alienated and frustrated and somehow think activism for minorities has anything to do with it (lol)

The reasons why working-class white Americans are experiencing stagnant incomes and struggling to accumulate wealth, while also facing rising prices on everything from groceries to housing, are a separate issue entirely and have nothing to do with policies aimed at supporting minorities

Late capitalist economies around the world are facing similar challenges in sustaining growth at levels necessary to maintain functioning welfare states for their middle and lower-income populations. In Europe, for example, there is a increasingly old-money based economies suffering to sustain an influx of low-income immigrants who now occupy a role similar to that of Hispanics in the US, arguably an even more complex situation due to a much deeper cultural difference 

The US has its own particular problem: a working class that continues to vote for Republicans, despite the fact that Republican policies consistently focus on cutting taxes for the wealthy and passing legislation that undermines labor protections (Americans don't even have the right to 30 days of paid vacation per year, for God's sake. So, in the US, we have the particularly absurdity situation where even with steady economic growth, is not being fairly distributed among the working class 

Again though, if it's a socioeconomic issue, then efforts to address it should be based on socioeconomic status, not race.

The solution to discrimination is to end discrimination, not discriminate in the opposite direction.

Again: there are a lot of policies, but how does it impact who. And again both Republicans and Democrats offer policies that are intended to help the poor. But my obsession with Gini is an oobsession with actual effective policies. If these policies would've an wider effect, we would see an effect on the Gini. But it doesn't happen, because these policies are widely ineffective or nulled with other policies pulling in the other direction. I don't deny that on paper the policies of the democrats look better. But in the end they are widely ineffective. That has a wide array of reasons, but the main one is, that the democrats are fearful of changing the system substantially. Bandaids are not helping if the bleed is too big.

The Yes minister scene is more supporting my view: killing all the poor wouldn't actually help, as they do the work (aka create all the wealth) in the first place. Which is mentioned in the sketch. So I don't know why you post it, you probably didn't really understand it.

The thing is: if the US wants real change of their system, they have to stop thinking in the way of either republicans or democrats. They have to break out of it, try actual new policies.

And look, europe and canada aren't on the same path, although often enough our politicians try to emulate the stupidiest stuff in the US. Britain though had their own Reagan called Thatcher, you see the effect around the same time. For Canada and France only projected data (single points) reaches back to that time, but shows they started with wealth distribution in the seventies around the place the US were, but they actually dropped the Gini - effective policies. For Germany I don't see such projected data, so I don't know. But as you can see the leading european countries and canada are now around the same place in Gini index - a much better (more equally distributed) place than the US. The US needs to learn that an alternative to the dem-rep death pendulum exists.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2023&locations=US-FR-CA-GB-DE&start=1963&view=chart

BTW, if you look closely, germany had their own version of the Thatcher/Reagan influence in form of Gerhard Schröder's "Agenda 2010". Which you can see the effect of from 1998 (when Schröder took office) to about 2005. Schröder was member of the center-left (yes left) party SPD, yet he was too strongly influenced by the neoliberal bullshit.

I think the US has the major problem of the two party system. The best justification for Dems many come up with is "but the Reps are worse". In most european countries this doesn't fly. After the Schröder fuckup the SPD lost a lot of support - without that flowing directly to the center-right (CDU), it strengthened other left parties like The Left and The Greens (directly after the Schröder era, now has some time gone). The US needs to understand that real solution lie outside of their two-party system.

Thank you for your response. It is always nice to see someone argue against racist policy in these discussions.

For our disagreement: I think the contrary can be true and often enough is true. Work 10 years, save money, invest, become an employer, get rich. Rich people coming from nothing is certainly possible. Especially given the fact that (I did a quick search online) in 70 % of the cases generational wealth is gone after 2 generations. 90 % after three. Sure some families are rich forever, but these are the extreme fringe cases. For the very most, it is extreme luck to get wealthy. Then they stay so for 2 or 3 gens, then they are not again. And perhaps somewhen in the future they will be again. Up and down it goes, but it does not build up (except in some super rare cases).

Which (I know you know, just saying) is a mute point to argue in relation to racism. Because what would you do? Lottery? "This one black family out of one million could have made it big, here is your stolen wealth."

If you're talking about the Wealth Diffusion model, one of the root causes is that inheritance was divided among many children. These studies began in the 1960s and 70s, when wealthy families typically had an average of four children. So we're talking about people whose grandparents' inheritance is now divided among, say, 12 grandchildren

This also doesn't account for the fact that those 12 grandchildren still benefit from foundational education and family structure. This means that, among those 12 grandchildren, there's a high chance that most will end up in well-paid professional jobs or even use part of their inheritance to start businesses and build wealth again

A simple example is boyfriend. He's a typical case of a fourth-generation kid whose old family wealth has been steadily vanishing over time for some branches of the family, while other branches used their inheritance wisely and became even richer. He still has a couple of houses and properties that he will eventually inherit from his father's side of the family, and he plans to use that family money to fund his pilot training. Will that make him rich? Probably not, but it's the kind of safety net that can provide a proper education and help him land a good job in aviation once he finishes