If you think that the problems (inequalities) racism brought ceased to exist with segregation, try learning about red-lining and how countless black neighborhoods got unfairly bulldozed to make space for highways. All that stuff happened only a lifetime ago, of course its effects can still be felt today.
.
You could also use the same reasoning to argue that colonialism hasn't really ended either, when the colonialists went home they still left behind the scars of centuries of exploitation, that shit doesn't get washed away in a day.
The analogy is a little shaky but yeah that's a pretty good intro. The hard issue to solve here is with how this injustice is resolved. I think the most reasonable solution attacks the problem directly: rewriting racist laws (like zoning) and punishing or heavily disincentivising racist behavior in government officials (including police and judges). In the analogy, this would be equivalent to enacting hotel policies against discrimination and retrofitting disabled-accessible options into the building.
That still isn't directly Attacking the problem, you remove racist laws however you still have a system in place to add oppressive laws so they will come back. The problem isn't the laws or the government officials it's the whole damn system and unless you change the system it will continue to oppress. The hotel is designed to be discriminatory and to slowly go back to being discriminatory (as you said shaky anlogy) if changes are to be made. The only real solution is tearing the whole hotel down and building a park there
I appreciate your response but I'm lost. What exactly is the system if it's not the government, the laws, and their lasting effects? Are we just talking about society?
What view are they trying to counter here? I understand all the words of the post and I agree with the logic but I don't see in what situation this argument is useful. Perhaps I'm lucky not to have been exposed to the people for whom it would be useful...
Edit: I saw some very clear answers to my questions after scrolling down a bit. I think I just didn't understand what the term "systemic" meant here.
There are people who believe that any kind of fix to counter discrimination is unnecessary, because "well I'm not racist, and I certainly haven't discriminated in X way, so nothing needs to change". They are either unaware or ignoring the reality that the effects of past discrimination don't go away just because the people that did it are gone.
It's different with racism, because it's easier and cheaper to stop racist practices than it is to modify a building. And modifying a building isn't hard or all that expensive.
The only reasonable reason why not, would be that it would be impossible to do so. If you are physically able to add those accomodations and not doing it then well you are a bigot that makes people's lives more difficult on purpose.
Yes! I’m very glad to live in a place where at 32 I still don’t need a driver’s license. I can see how crippling and isolating it can be to need a car (e.g. North America), but not being able to drive it.
I’m very much a car guy. I love cars, I love driving them, I love fixing them, etc.
I wholeheartedly wish they were purely optional. Please put less people on the roads, let more people use cheaper public transportation, and let those distracted drivers stay out of heavy machinery!
Not to mention, sometimes walking is just preferred. I visited Chicago without a car and it was fantastic. Walking and trains were all I needed, and it was great. Definitely want more of that around, especially for cross country options.
Poverty is inherited and it's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Black people in America are poor because they used to be slaves
White cultural traditions are legal in Australia. Many aboriginal cultural traditions have been made illegal in Australia due to land ownership changes
Black people are under-represented in universities, so the university scientists building facial recognition apps aren't building them to work on black people
Schools teach their lessons in english. Multilingual students who don't speak english at home often have a disadvantage in lessons that will be felt their whole lives
Children of illegal immigrants may have never received identification such as a birth certificate and it can be hard to get this as an adult
Whenever the police use robotic and computer systems to detect criminals the AI ends up racial profiling and harassing black people
Poverty is inherited and it's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Black people in America are poor because they used to be slaves
That's capitalism's fault. Poor white kids would face the same issues.
Black people are under-represented in universities, so the university scientists building facial recognition apps aren't building them to work on black people
That's just a lack of data points and not a system constructed by anyone. The data points should be increasing naturally.
Schools teach their lessons in english. Multilingual students who don't speak english at home often have a disadvantage in lessons that will be felt their whole lives
It'd be awesome if we can just solve language barriers generally. Before we can do that having a single official language in working situations seems to be not avoidable for productivity.
Children of illegal immigrants may have never received identification such as a birth certificate and it can be hard to get this as an adult
Not related to racism.
Whenever the police use robotic and computer systems to detect criminals the AI ends up racial profiling and harassing black people
Is this happening? I think it's straight out wrong to predict criminals with AI trained on previous data.
All in all I agree that many of the existing systems sucks but I don't think it's helpful to link every problem to racism. Disclaimer: I'm not black or white
I'd add for the "school in English/dominant spoken language" part (because compared to the other it doesn't seem that bad) in a quite a few cases it stems from a previous active effort to suppress a culture that was never really 'fixed', not simply just "eh I don't understand so why do I have to cater for it?".
If you're European, chances are you can name a good few examples that happened in your borders, both as something you did or something that was used against you
When you have to pick a language to teach in, isn't this the best language to teach in though, in a predominantly English speaking society?
I don't think segregating classes into separate language-based ones would be a good idea. That leaves kids not speaking English at home nor at school in an even bigger disadvantage in terms of learning English and we need we need kids of all different backgrounds mixing together so that they may understand and accept one another.
Poverty: Same thing for any people of any race the most important part is their ability to get an education that'll get them out of it while having stability, slavery has nothing to do with it.
Australia: I live in Australia what are you talking about?!
Idk who has to pay, are you trying to say old families that had slaves in any country and it can be proven they did should have to pay? So much shit that's happened in history has had no reparations.
What would be equivalent of "no disabled parking" in this case when it comes to racist institutions?
One needs to be more precise when pointing out systematic racism, you need to point out which rules or regulations are made to be "white race centric", which rules exactly hinder the progress of black/brown people.
Also, I think analogy can also be taken in bad way as black people are being being considered handicapped or inferior and the institutions should make special arrangements to accomodate them. And that's completely not true, as obviously the only difference is skin color. But, yeah, that's another way of looking at this analogy.