Kachi wrote:
Or it keeps money in the communities that don't have as much of it, which is kind of the point.
Except that if everyone follows that same approach, then no new money will ever flow
into those communities either. Thus, they'll always be poor and never improve their condition.
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Your point might hold relevance if minorities weren't more segregated today than they were in the 70's, but these days your race is very likely your community, and keeping money within your community is something white people would probably happily do if they could easily figure out which white people were in their community and which weren't. It's not very effective when you're vastly the majority.
Assuming it's true that minorities are more segregated today than they were in the 70s, couldn't one suggest that this is *because* of the rise of the "help out your own group" mentality? If those groups abandoned that idea, we would become less segregated and the issue wouldn't matter anymore. Certainly, there would be no correlation between money in a community and race.
Put another way, if a black person had the same lack of knowledge as to whether another black person was part of his own community as white people do (your example), then he'd have no reason to apply any sort of racial criteria when spending money. Wouldn't that be better in the long run? IMO anything that re-enforces and even creates additional differentiating factors between racial groups runs counter to the presumed objective of moving to a colorblind society.
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Research bureaus that get large government grants are able to collect that data in -samples- to do statistical analysis and report on general trends. Schools do not have the resources to actually collect that data on individuals.
I'm not sure how that addresses the issue I raised. Do those research bureaus actually start with a colorblind definition of "needy groups of people" and then use data analysis to determine ways to identify them? Or do they start with lists of existing minority groups and then use data to determine the amount of need within those groups?
I suspect it's more of the latter than the former. Add in pressure from political groups who want more funding for their group, and it's hard to believe that the end result of this process is anywhere close to racially unbiased. I suppose it's possible though. I'm still curious why we can't just direct these resource towards "people in need", and not look at their ethnicity. The very fact that we do somewhat strongly suggests that there's a skew in there somewhere.
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But what is "harm"? If you choose to buy something at a store because the owner has the same skin color as you, aren't you harming the owner of the store you might otherwise have purchased that item from? It's just strange to me that things like differences in hiring rates and pay, with no definitive motive behind them are fairly universally assumed to be proof of "institutional racism" by whites against blacks, but a black person deliberately choosing to financially benefit a black person in preference to a white person isn't?
If it weren't for institutional and systemic racism, again, you might have a point. But attempting to offset one with the other is the difference.
But you are offsetting one thing which is not a conscious choice to inflict harm on another, with a conscious choice to inflict harm back. When a white person buys a product at a store without considering at all the color of the person who owns it, but because there already exists the condition where most stores are owned by white people, we can say that said purchase "benefits" white people. And we could even say that by exclusion, it "harms" black people (for example). But said harm is unintentional. It's not done out of a racial intent.
When a black person attempts to offset that by deliberately avoiding white owned stores in favor of black owned ones, isn't what he's doing worse?
Another aspect of this, which ties into a point I made earlier, is that what the white person is doing automatically adjusts to changing socio-economic conditions. As any given group gains more equality in the store owning market, the economic gains from consumer activity automatically shifts. No one has to think in terms of "how many black owners are represented here, and should I adjust my behavior in some way to make things fair?". They simply buy the products they want. But the solution you're advocating perpetuates racially discriminatory decisions. All the time. By all the people.
I just can't see how that's conducive to ever ending racism. When people are expected to constantly take into account the skin colors of the people they interact with every day, you're creating an acceptance of racial discrimination. I just think that's going to take us in the exact opposite direction to where we should be going.
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It's all an effort to make things more fair and equitable-- to establish a more even footing. We can't just say, "Ok, equal starting now!" which was the initial idea of the civil rights movement, and magically everything is ok.
But you can never have a fair and equitable result if you use unfair and non-equitable means to get there. And honestly, from the trends we've seen, it certainly appears as though the means we're trying to use don't actually make the result any more equitable. As I pointed out at the top of this post, self-segregation tends to primarily hurt the group doing it. They fall farther behind. They don't catch up.
Edited, Mar 3rd 2011 1:47pm by gbaji 
