We are all Slave now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'll address all of this in detail, but I don't have time at the moment.

I do have time, however, to say this: Any flaws or difficulties in an analysis attempting to show that a historically oppressed group's current disadvantages are caused in part by the group's own actions are equally applicable to any analysis attempting to show they are entirely caused and perpetuated by the oppression. You can't assert that you can prove one, but using the same tools you'd need to prove that, it's impossible to test whether the other applies.

In tort cases, contributory negligence is used to reduce an award of damages. A plaintiff who has been harmed $100K and who is deemed to be 10% at fault will recover $90K from a defendant deemed 90% at fault. As I bet you know, in some states and the District of Columbia, a plaintiff who has been harmed, say, $5M, say because a bus driver recklessly ran a red light and hit her, might recover nothing because the bus company's lawyer convinces a jury that she was 1% at fault, unjust as that seems.

When we talk about issues of systemic bias and oppression, and about what society might do to achieve a more perfect union, we don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how much of the inequality we see is the direct and proximate cause of bias and oppression. Beyond any reasonable dispute, the people who devote themselves to discussing how much the victims of oppression brought it on themselves are opponents of doing anything, on the margin, to ameliorate past harms, and are often working to reverse things that society has done to reward the content of people's characters rather than the color of their skins. Even assuming the best of intentions and perfect execution, I have to ask whether there would be any benefit to society from trying to use "science" to "assess" a marginalized group's "responsibility" for their own situation. What sounds like an intellectual exercise has the practical effect of saying to someone who got hit by bus, "sorry, you should have been more careful, you're out of luck."