Rex Kerr
3 min readJul 31, 2023

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Not all of them--my own argument says that I wouldn't be able to anyway.

However, most big successful movements that have increased how just our society is have been based upon unifying principles, not divisiveness. This almost always results in a structurally anti-racist or anti-discriminatory result, because almost always the injustice has fallen most harshly along discriminatory lines.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is a pretty good example of this. Almost everything in the Act is simply promoting the goal of good policing. And almost nothing there depends on risky, unproven ideas about how to radically restructure policing--we don't have to test out gradually the idea that de-escalation works, that lethal violence should be used as a last resort, that accountability reduces abusive behavior. This could be done tomorrow. Literally.

Furthermore, I think there is a regrettable tendency to focus on outcome metrics that show up long past where the core problem was, and not fundamentals of how to make people's lives better.

So, for instance, I think that efforts like the Harlem Children's Zone are fantastic, because they go right to one of the most central disparities in our society--education and our (lack of) belief in children--and try to fix it, with remarkable results. We could follow up on their example by inverting the funding structure of many public schools where poor neighborhoods with the least property taxes get the least-well-funded schools--that's backwards; they need the most help not the least! (to avoid provoking resentment, this should probably be structured as property tax providing equal funding for everyone, and then additional need-based funding coming from alternate state or federal sources)--and also really scrutinize how we can do better to both support and believe in all children, following HCZ's relatively high degree of success. I don't think this is something we can do instantly, but we could do this in years, not decades.

Regarding attitudes, I think colorblindness as an aspirational goal needs to be re-examined. Colorblindness as an analytic method is ridiculous--you can't tell if there's a problem if you don't look! But in our individual lives we are mostly not in a position of doing data analytics. It's very hard to square both the idea that othering is bad, with an approach that encourages everyone to find a tiny intersectional box in which they sit, othered from everyone else, with experiences you can't even begin to imagine. At the very least, the rise in the attitude "colorblindness is racism" (switched from the previous attitude "colorblindness is anti-racism") has coincided with a precipitous decline in perceived racial harmony and an increase in hate crimes, with little improvement in trends of racial equality. Because many things have been happening at once, it's hard to know where to assign blame; but at least it seems apparent that this has not been a resounding success.

These are the kinds of solutions that I think work very well: those which are unifying, universal, empowering, individualizing, humanizing. And in cases where there is explicit discrimination, anti-discrimination laws should be used swiftly and decisively to punish the wrongdoing.

When all that is done, if there are still major problems, we then might have to get into more difficult issues where we take something from group A and give it to group B, with the rationale being that the opposite was happening (intentionally or incidentally) in the past. These are much harder to get right, for the reasons I gave in my original reply. An alternative approach is to work to more thoroughly decouple present opportunities from past conditions. Without seeing what things look like at that point, it's hard to know what I'd advocate for.

Anyway, you asked for my solutions; from my observation of history and human nature, this seems like the best bet to me: universal, humanizing actions that are structurally anti-racist (but usually not specifically race-aware in implementation, even if we used race as part of our conceptualization for what structures we needed to alter) as the primary goal of legislation to improve justice in society.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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