Racism isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be in America.

There's still work to be done

I agreed with everything you said up until this point. This is the point of contention in the entire argument (at least among rational people, anyway). Does the fact that racism exists in some form necessarily mean that there is "work to be done." I would argue that it doesn't, and that "work being done" is, at this point, starting to create more racism than it prevents.

Diversity hiring initiatives disadvantage whites and Asians. That's just what they do; that's the explicit point of the initiatives. "There are too many white people on this staff, so if two candidates are equally qualified and one of them is nonwhite, give the job to that one." That's what it boils down to. And it's not just hiring decisions. Many practical initiatives geared toward increasing racial diversity or eliminating racial inequality work basically the same way.

You could argue that in the 80s and 90s, even people who initially criticized those policies grew to understand that they were correcting inequalities that existed right in front of them. I don't think that's a bad argument at all. But we are now in the late 2010s, and the simple fact is that a lot of whites don't see much, if any, discrimination against nonwhites in our daily lives. Does that mean it doesn't exist at all? Of course not. But there are definitely a lot of people who don't see any of it.

So the "work that needs to be done" is now something that these people perceive to affect them in a discriminatory manner (because it does, that's the point of it, as elaborated above) in order to fix a problem that doesn't exist. ... So the "work that needs to be done" is now cycling otherwise normal people back into racism. These people begin to view minorities as having government-mandated privilege. They view themselves as being discriminated against.

And there's no good solution for that. These people aren't just idiots. "Trumpanzees" as reddit likes to call them. There are informed, educated people who are starting to become racists because they feel that they're being discriminated against because of their skin color. And they feel this way because... they are. That's the "work" that's being done.

So, to conclude that long rant. I agree with you that racism still exists. But I disagree with you that "there's work to be done." Racism's always going to exist, and there's no good solution to totally stop it, without discriminating against some other group and pissing them off.

/r/unpopularopinion Thread Parent