Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?

[bennyboy]

Yeah.  It's not crime rates, incarceration rates, single-parent families, or any of those things, either, right?  It's 100% the white oppressors who are keeping black people down, right?

Until systematic oppression is 100% eliminated, I'm comfortable with tracing those problems to the doorstep of slavery, Jim Crow, brutal policing, harsher sentencing, red-lining, and in-general discrimination by white folks; I'm comfortable with laying those problems at the door of white oppressors. Once nothing more can be done about the oppression, maybe we can tell what any problems that are left are about.

The amount of white oppression hindering African Americans should be 0%. And then the country would still owe them for keeping them down so long. Justice is about redressing wrongs. We have a hell of a long way to go before things are square.

I've already said that ultimately, the problem of black inequality in America surely is rooted in the slave history.

But it's one thing to arrive at a moral truth, like the idea of restitution, and another one to actually arrive at some policy.  How would you actually reduce "the amount of white oppression hindering African Americans" to 0%?  Make it illegal to oppress others? Estimate the unpaid hours of all slaves with compound interest and give every black family a hundred million dollars? What, actually, would you recommend doing?

Let's take a specific case, here.  One thing we've learned in this thread is that severely deprived children tend to have learning problems-- this should be obvious, right?  Then we can see that 66% of black children are part of single-parent families.  Okay-- so the mom is probably having to work a lot, and the children may not have much help learning either life lessons or their school lessons.

No doubt, this is ultimately an effect of the poverty of slaves being released into the population after the civil war, but not being given restitution for their many years of hard labor, and not therefore being able to purchase property or engage in profitable entrepreneurship.

But what actual method would you use to make a single-parent child's daddy come back?  Blaming white people for the state of things might feel right, but how in your mind does it translate into an actionable policy?

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I'm just firing this out randomly:

I think the best position to take is to simply have your own position on everything. Trying to be part of "a group", be it left, right, whatever, means that you end up trying to defend things you don't actually agree with.

Hmmmm.

I've said that prisoners should be released from jail (my own idea).  That's clearly a leftist position.
I've said that black people have low SAT scores, and this will affect their ability to make a good income.  That's not really a position, but referring to it is definitely perceived as a rightist tactic.

The result isn't that people see me as trying to call 'em like I see 'em.  It's that I've been lumped in with white supremacists, and that the many humanitarian policies I've suggested have been disregarded-- perhaps, as Khemikal claims, it's easier to discard positions inconsistent with an opposing ideology as "see how Fair Minded™ I am!" than to consider each idea on its merits.