> I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are:
This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.
Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle for being racist against white people? You're intentionally using circuitous language but that appears to be the message. People are individual human beings, discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.
I simply responded to the above comment saying eliminating the privilege of white people is a dogwhistle for being racist against white people. It's not. I said nothing about the post, and don't know why you're bringing it up. Please try to keep context in mind so you don't make halfbaked statements.
How non-racist of you (and non-presumptuous) to “eliminate someone’s privilege” based solely on the color of their skin. You do know there are poor and disadvantaged white people too, right? You might even be surprised that they outnumber black people.
And shame on you for even thinking you have the right to make such a call, or even entertain such a notion.
I feel like often people in your position don't have a basic undestanding why racism is wrong. You don't have a concept or any empathy for how racism affects individual people, all you see is the broad identity group itself. You don't understand the individual core experience of what racism does to people, dehumanizing them, prejudicially dismissing their life and individuality on the basis of skin color. Or at least, you don't doesn't appear to, given that you are guilty of doing this.
Not every white person has "privilege", the advantages typically referred to by this word is about heavily overlapping normal distributions between racial groups. We see statistical level differences in these overlapping curves, but people can be on opposite ends of the curve and that width is greater than the width between races. Ultimately when you boil things down the issue is individuals within systems discriminating against other individuals. In addition, skin color is one axis, there are literally thousands of axes in which one may be privileged, just to name a few examples, how many medical issues you have, the quality of your parents friends, the quality of your early school friends and teachers, whether you're attractive or ugly, many of these things are out of the control of a child and in many cases have a much bigger impact on the quality of your life than skin color, or even the big obvious ones like sex and sexuality.
It's becoming really common for advantaged people to feel justified in being a racist towards disadvantaged people, because the disadvantaged people are white. When this happens i'm not sure how you can see this as a good thing. By assuming every white person has "privilege" to be taken away you are committing racism against individual human beings with complex lives and life experience. Basically, stop! You can fight racism without devolving into racism yourself. I still remember the MLK era speeches about how fighting racism with more racism was unacceptable, we are all human beings with individual humanity, not our skin colors. Not sure what happened that so many people lost the plot.
> This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.
> You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated
Man, you are now losing audiences that are sympathetic to your position. Are you accusing Manuel_D of edit-sniping you? Or are you claiming that the comment as it is currently written omits the above fact?
For transparency, yes, I did remove that first sentence a few minutes after posting (but before the reply was posted). I felt it was too harsh in tone. I don't remember changing "biological" to "bigraphical"
* The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.
* The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
* Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission.
This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.