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Originally Posted by LordJvK
I do not ignore evidence of racial bias, but the cause of racial bias is economic more than anything else.
Take the study in freakonomics on names. Why are people prejudiced about made-up or mis-spelled names vs. names like "Emily Anderson"? It doesn't take a lot to figure out that it's because it suggests all sorts of things about their background, level of education, and so on and so forth. That's clearly still WRONG, but the root cause is class, not race.
I mean they did a study recently in the UK that showed that someone called Adam is 3 times more likely to get called for an interview than someone called Mohammed. Why is that? Is it because employers care that Adam's skin is white and Mohammed's is brown? No, it's because they associate the word Mohammed with a set of events and attitudes. Now, clearly still WRONG, but the root cause here again is not really race, but culture.
I am talking about the root causes of prejudice using data, not making blanket statements about lots of people.
Poor white people also face invisible prejudices. If you turn up to a job interview in a pair of trainers and your dad's old suit because you can't afford a new one, and you've got a regional accent, you are at immediate disadvantage to the guy who is in the prestine suit speaking the Queen's English in crystal clear tones.
Prejudice exists because of real conditions on the ground, and people drawing conclusions based on their experiences of them, or based on what they've been told about them.
Welcome to the thoughts that the progressives you despise are pretty much born with, and which you think you discovered as if you were clever. This is pretty much a starting point of studying racism and oppression.
Congratulations on being qualified to
begin learning what all the "damn liberals" have been hashing out for the last 50 years.
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This gets much closer to an actual analysis of why these things happen than the hand waving gesture of saying "well X group has privilege and Y group are victims". That solves nothing, it actually just ends up making people of X group resent people of Y group more and vice versa.
There would seem to be enough resentment to go around as to not really mean anything too particular. When it was said that black people should have the right to vote, that ended up making whites quite resentful. But was that not a legitimate grievance? If so, if it is that voicing any grievance regardless of legitimacy causes resentment, then why worry about resentment?