SCOTUS rules on Travel Ban

[Belsnickel]

(06-28-2018, 10:22 AM)michaelsean Wrote: I understand your argument, but I'm not sure if it has to work out that way.  I mean is that a statistical certainty?  

The premise of equality of opportunity is that everyone has the same opportunity to succeed. It is as close to a statistical certainty that you can get that if this is true, then over time, with a large enough n, the distribution among the strata should represent the overall population. This does make a couple of assumptions, though, and I would get to that in my argument if there would be some acknowledgement of this.

The biggest assumption would be that people started off equal. We know this isn't true, though. Think of this as a 400m race. Equality of opportunity would mean that everyone has the same starting place and has to run the same distance. Think of the start line as 1607, the founding of Jamestown and the finish line as 2007, so we have a nice even 400 years to work with. I am going to focus on two runners only for simplification. What has happened is that because of policies in place, the white runner had at least a 258m head start on the black runner. That is the conservative placement, because effects from Jim Crow and other racist policies up until the CRA (and beyond) could cause an argument to be made for a head start of nearly 360m.

So we have a runner that only needs to run 142m or less, and a runner that needs to run 400m. We are calling this equality of opportunity.

This was what the whole idea of 40 acres and a mule was all about. At the time we could've afforded it because of the expansion of the country. It would have at least moved the black runner up a few dozen meters to try to make it closer to the idea of equality of opportunity. But this never happened. We dropped the ball and because we have never made meaningful efforts to fix it, in fact often making it worse, we are currently in the situation we are in now where the average black person would have to live out three to four lifetimes to accumulate the wealth the average white person would.