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JuniperMesosyesterday at 9:30 PM0 repliesview on HN

> Okay, that’s true, it’s one of the available choices. That’s a rather extreme position to take, given the history of slavery, racism, and sexism in the U.S.

Slavery, racism, and sexism have happened in every single human society that has ever existed in some form or another, the US isn't special here. Discrepancies in average outcomes between different ethnic groups as measured by the statistical tools of industrialized states are at least as old as industrialization, and have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place.

> We know for a fact that outcome discrepancies were caused by racism before 1965.

No we don't.

> What reason is there to believe outcomes discrepancies aren’t a problem, given that society generally believes they are?

Societies generally believe all kinds of contradictory and mutually-inconsistent things, because a society is comprised of the aggregate of a large number of individual people who all have different understandings of the world, self-interests, group loyalties, etc. I don't assume that if society generally believes something, this is an unchanging fact about society, or that the thing is in fact correct, or that I should agree myself.