- Feb 8, 2007
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But I'm not espousing a colour blind approach to tackling discrimination. I'm saying the philosophical foundation on which anti-discrimination is built is one that views all humans as equal.I'd have to disagree with you on this one. I think it's a noble and utopian attitude, but it just isn't the case in the society we've actually built. While you're right to say that there's minimal biological difference between races in humanity, and what there is is nearly entirely superficial, that is not the only cause of difference.
Black people, for instance, have a history of being subjected to slavery, colonialism, segregation. And that has a spiral effect too. Even today when these things are over, black people around the world are on average far, far poorer than white people. That isn't because they're any less talented, hard working etc - as you said, we're essentially biologically identical. It's because colonialism stole resources from predominantly black areas of the world and gave them to white ones. Slavery and segregation meant black people in the west were poor, while white people benefitted from wealth inherited from their slave-owning forefathers. So I do think, for instance, there's an argument for reparations and for positive discrimination to try and end this historical imbalance, rather than a "colour-blind" policy that pretends the consequences of centuries of the most grotesque racism can be ended by white people simply choosing to ignore it from now on.
And on the point regarding "mansplaining", I do also think context is important. There's a long history of men controlling women that continues to this day. For instance, women's reproductive freedom is regulated near universally including in the UK, and in much of the world very heavily so with abortion outright banned and female contraception hard or impossible to access. As a result, a bloke "mansplaining" why women shouldn't have these rights contributes to those harmful and sexist restrictions, and therefore is far more damaging than whatever example in reverse (e.g. a woman making a flippant comment about how men should keep it in their pants if they don't like abortion or child maintenance). Men have had and still do have the power and inclination to control women in this way - no woman has ever been in a position to ban men from vasectomies "in case your wife wants babies one day".