"Sincerely confused" sounds like a very nice way of putting it. You must be in the Christmas spirit! I don't actually care that much what jibs is doing and it seems sort of gauche to speculate too much, and I'm trying to rehabilitate my image after all those years calling people mother****er in werewolf games.

I chose to respond because I like posting. It's a public forum, someone might read it and find it useful, including him. Or not. Maybe responding is entirely a character fault on my part. I am a pretty terrible person when you get to know me.

I would using the definition of racist law you propose.

I also think its a bad law even in a totally non-racist world.

Oh I'm not telling you what to do, I certainly feed trolls on the reg myself, I was actually interested in if you actually were taking this seriously.

Honestly it'd be a little fun if someone did.

Ok, a few question. And feel free to let me know if I ever misrepresent your position.

1a. Of the pool of people that do not have government ID's, a statistically significant amount of them are non-white vs white (I am assuming if it was 49/51 non-white to white this would be a non issue so correct me if I am wrong).
1b. Getting government ID's are difficult causing the effected to be burdened.
1c. A necessary condition for a law to be racist is that it must cause a burden to non-whites.
1d. Therefore, Voter ID laws are racist.

Is this a fair representation of your view?

Q1)If so, my first question would be if the law effected only say 50/50 (or something close) of non-whites vs whites would the law cease to be racist?

Q2) I am using non-white vs whites, this is not what you actually used. Do you believe this (the issue of racism) relates to all non-whites? If not, who do you believe it relates to? For example, are asians included in this? Are there any historically disenfranchised groups like the Irish that would now be considered white included in this?

Q3) You mention that you believe there is no evidence of fraud that is impactfull and that the law doesn't have any measurable benefit. Do you believe that this makes a difference with regard to whether or not the law is racist? In other words, if it was shown that there was voter fraud that made an impact in elections and that this law would have a significant measurable benefit, would it still be a racist law?

Q4) I am assuming this is a (R) backed law/bill. Do you believe that if non-whites in a significant proportion voted Republican vs Democrat that the Republicans would still back this law?

I responded seriously. Whether or not my "serious" response is actually worthy of serious consideration is another question of course. I'm sure others could do better

Where did I say I was confused that a law can be racist? I absolutely believe laws can and have been racist. My question deals with how one comes to the conclusion that a law is racist. Some of us put thought into our beliefs/views. I know that is an odd concept to you.

Well, I appreciate you trying to have an actual civil conversation. And no one else is even attempting, so so far you're the best "they've" got!

Jibs: I'll respond real quick but then I'm done "working" for the day so it will have to wait

Q1) correct. It might still be a bad law, but it wouldn't be racist.

Q2) My understanding is the burden imposed by the voter ID laws actually proposed and implemented impacts Black people more than Asians for a variety of reasons. I think you talked about class issues in the other thread. Class is certainly part of the issue, and you can't completely isolate class from race, but you can distinguish them. Voter ID laws disproportionately impact poor and urban voters, because they are less likely to already have IDs and have a harder time getting them. Poor urban voters are more likely to be Black than Asian or Irish. But Voter ID can be a bad law purely in the sense that it disenfranchises poor people of any race. It's racist because of the impact on Black people. Those are not mutually exclusive

Q3) I think it does in a few different ways. One, as I mentioned, is that it's circumstantial evidence about the motivations behind the laws. Another is that as I said, I'm not worried about "racism" in a purely abstract way, but with regard to the impact of laws. A law with an affect that disproportionately burdened Black people in a very mild way but which was very beneficial in general might be racist in the abstract, but still reasonable and worth having. There is a general legal principle that burdens and benefits of laws should be in some reasonable proportion. Proponents of voter ID often mock the idea that getting an ID is a real burden, despite lots of evidence that it is. And since the benefit is non-existent, that burden matters all the more

Q4) There are many voter ID laws. Since voting is managed by states, they are state laws. To my knowledge they are all backed by Republicans. It is known that in some cases Republican legislators advocating for the laws have admitted explicitly that they favor the laws because they think they help republicans. They help republicans by suppressing demographically Democratic voters, specifically poor and Black ones. It seems very obvious that Republicans wouldn't support Voter ID laws at the state level if that were not true. Or at the very least, it would be a much lower priority.

So once again no chance of you just cutting to the chase. Wonderful. Glad to see you've elected yourself ombudsmen of... something.

lol, there is no chase. Why do you come to these forums if you don't actually want to discuss anything? Is blindly calling people racist really that gratifying?

Wait so there is no chase, you have no point, you're literally just trying to bog people down into some bizarre esoteric "treatment of public policy as LSAT practice problem" debate....

And I'm the one who doesn't want to discuss anything?

Yeah, man, let's chat. What the **** are you talking about?

Like it's some sort of weird self-congratulatory "I is the logic boy" nonsense mixed with "Al Sharpton invented racism to keep blacks voting Democrat", right? Tell me I'm wrong. Write out your actual thesis here.

Because again, the idea that people who believe in institutional racism is such a mindblowing concept that you had to learn more about their fascinating thought processes....

Nope! Nobody will buy that from you. Not from anyone else, really, either, but especially not from you.

Lol, no problem. I am also almost done with "work" so probably will only post one liners as I will be on a tablet. Respond whenever.

Ok. thanks.

I'm sorry, I guess I was not clear in the intent of my question. I was speaking more generally about racist laws. For example, could a law be considered racist if it disproportionately effects Asians in the way that Voter ID laws are said to effect blacks? In other words, does concept/condition extend to other races?

This is a reasonable position. How much weight to you put on the intent of the Law?

Let me take this a little further. Let's say Law A carried a mild burden but only produced a mild benefit. The intent of a Law A was clear and had nothing to do with race. Once put into effect an unintended consequence of Law A was that the burden, albeit mild, was mostly carried by non-white group X.

How would you classify such a law?

This kinda goes along with my question above. It would seem that the laws main objective is to prohibit voters that mostly vote democrat.

Fly, what do you think it says about your beliefs that you are so scared they won't hold up to logical scrutiny?

Oh probably that they are wrong because they are based on emotion, not facts.<-this punctuation is known as a "period" and denotes the end of a sentence that contains a declarative statement.

What you think it says about you that you're consistently unwilling to even ****ing articulate yours?

Sure, but to repeat myself for the sake of clarity, the threshold of concern about racially imbalanced effects of a law is going to be a lot different for white people than black people. Affirmative action has some "burden" on white males, in terms of lost opportunities. I don't consider this racist.

Intent is secondary to actual effect. Racist intent makes even a mild harm far more egregious. Good intent doesn't absolve bad law.

I wouldn't call Law A "racist" most of the time, but I wouldn't disagree if someone pointed out that it had an unintentionally mildly racist effect. My choice not to call it "racist" has more to do with the politics of words and effective communication than anything else.

A potentially practical example: The ACA has no racist intent whatsoever. But in practice, as it has actually been implemented, because the Supreme Court struck down the federal requirement for states to expand Medicaid, the law has ended up benefiting a lot of Black people far less than a lot of white people, because of the number who are poor and live in states which did not expand Medicaid. ACA is still a good law in my opinion, but through these complex interactions between the federal government, the states, and the courts, it may actually have put a large number of Black people at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the populace. The effect is to perpetuate white supremacy. That is a real problem. But I probably wouldn't call the law "racist".

That the law as it is applied violates a constitutionally protected right.

Are you saying this because the constitution correctly protects against racist laws or because the constitution get to define what a racist law is?

Take racial profiling as an example. Can changing the constitution change whether it's a racist law or not?

People pick and choose what constitutional rights to defend

Throw amendment 2 under the bus while defending the rest, for example.

People having opinions about which laws should exist??

And being in favour of some laws and not others??

What sort of rank hypocrisy is that?!

Affirmative action laws are the only outright laws written to be racist….but don’t let the facts get in the way.

The SEC example was incredibly stupid because nobody even made an effort to show that the enforcement effected whites at a higher rate than they are represented in the target population (i.e. "wall street douches"). This might as well have been one of stockboy's stupid "I don't understand how fractions work but more white people get hit by lightning on golf courses so meow chow golf lightning obv racist CHECKMATE" logorrheas.