I've had the same experience (over decades) and never understood it. SQL should not be difficult for any professional programmer, and it's extremely powerful.
The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.
How is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?
How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?
And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?
And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?
Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.
The whole point of the story is that he is black and gets treated unfairly (accused of a crime) because of that. It’s fundamentally about the racial discrimination that was rife at the time.
Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today. It’s also not clear Harper Lee would have bothered to write it.
No, it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. It was not well accepted if the accused was black. The challenge was to persuade people (many of whom were racists) to see the accused man as equal to a white man before the law, and deserving of the same treatment as a white man would have received. In other words, to persuade people to be blind to his colour in their assessment of the case.
There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.
Is an Asian child who is born poor less deserving of help than a black child who is born poor? If so, why? If not, why not?
And if your ultimate goal is a society where race is irrelevant and we all treat each other equally, exactly how does doing the opposite get you there?
The point was not that modern anti-racists are wrong because they disagreed with MLK on some topics, it was that they are wrong because they completely reject colour blindness, of which MLK’s famous statements are one well-known example. Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.
Again: It’s about the specific idea, not a person. And the idea is what is being hijacked, to mean almost the opposite of what was generally accepted.
Sure, but that's not important to the point I'm making. If you asked almost everybody even two years ago what "racism" or "anti-racism" meant, and what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness" and probably some reference to MLK, because that one speech is what they consider the best expression of the view. Whatever else MLK said is irrelevant - it's about the specific idea that most people associated with anti-racism.
The modern "anti-racists" have very different beliefs, which would have very little support if the implications were spelled out clearly to everyone, and therefore these beliefs need to be laundered and disguised as something more respectable. Hence the language games.
I agree with benlumen. I think there is a group which is trying very hard to redefine what racism means, in order to advance a different ideology. It seems to be working, at least in America.
For those people, To Kill a Mockingbird is very dangerous, because it espouses the MLK philosophy (colour blindness) which most people agree with, but which they hate.
For these modern "anti-racists", we must instead see race everywhere, and factor it into every aspect of our lives, making constant calculations and adjustments which we can never hope to do correctly, and which contain internal contradictions we can never resolve. This hands those people tremendous power.
They are like parasites who have taken over a host. It took massive effort to reach the point in society where almost everyone agreed racism was unacceptable, and legitimately feared being called a racist. Like all "isms", we reached the point where almost everyone stopped thinking about what these terms actually mean, and just started substituting the word for a value judgement: racism bad, anti-racism good. This is the perfect setup for someone with different goals to hijack the concept.