I appreciate the essay. Thanks for linking to it.

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here. I agree that everyone should have opportunities for advancement. Politics and policy aren’t really my bag, and I don’t have any ideas on what would be the best way to do that sort of thing. There are so many variables, so many things that prevent social equality, right down to individual prejudices, be it against race, class, gender, whatever.

I’d like to believe there was a way of integrating people and preserving diversity, but I don’t know that there is. People will always identify in smaller communities, and as long as that exists, there will always be insiders and outsiders. I don’t know how a society legislates integration and diversity. I just don’t know.

This is adapted from an old essay of mine (not a very good one) on reparations for slavery: http://www.melanconent.com/pub/opin/2001/reparations.html

I think it applies to affirmative action also, although *new* policies to combat discrimination are still needed in banks, apartment and housing markets, and fire departments everywhere, to say nothing of the criminal system ironically labeled justice.

Socioeconomic status affects opportunities. Even without discrimination, the great inequalities of wealth mean that blacks as a group can achieve socioeconomic parity with whites as a group only by having “individual character” far superior to that of whites. These differences in opportunity don’t have anything to do with race in and of itself. As Randall Robinson wrote, “Give a black or white child the tools (nurture, nutrition, material necessities, a home/school milieu of intellectual stimulation, high expectation, pride of self) that a child needs to learn and the child will learn. Race, at least in this regard, is irrelevant.”

[…]

The reasons for reparations are correct. Blacks as a group are not poorer than whites as a group because of any inferiority of any kind, including culture or character. An accurate understanding of the present requires the history that led to it, which (on the economic side alone) includes two and a half centuries of slavery, another century of legal discrimination, continued employment discrimination, widespread exclusion from labor unions during the period that these unions helped create the modern middle class, exclusion from buying suburban homes – from discrimination, not just poverty – just as the house became the primary way in which the middle class held wealth…

But everyone needs economic justice— not just blacks. Poor whites in general are no more poor because of character flaws than blacks are. Blacks and Native Americans, because their poverty was blatantly imposed on them, simply show more clearly the unfairness of basing children’s opportunities so largely on their parents economic situation. America needs to go back and apply “All men are created equal” once again (as we have in limited fashion for poor white men, blacks, and women). We must make opportunities more equal – which in my opinion means less inequality of wealth; Robinson calls for a Marshall plan of educational and other resources – in order to stop the grossly unfair past from being continually passed on to the future.