UBI in Oakland is the first program only for people of color
Stupid people seem incapable of understanding how color-blind solutions are able to still address racial disparities.<p>If you were to, say, implement a program to help poor people, rather than &quot;people of color,&quot; then to the extent that &quot;people of color&quot; are overrepresented among the poor, then so, too, would the solution disproportionately assist &quot;people of color.&quot;<p>The benefits would be:<p>1.) we don&#x27;t enter an infinite teeter totter of people arguing on behalf of the victimization of their identity groups<p>2.) we actually arrive at an equilibrium more rapidly<p>3.) we don&#x27;t institutionalize the concept of race, and reinforce the idea that the color of your skin is a concept worthy of being categorized by<p>4.) we stop treating race as a proxy stand in for privilege, or competence (which is exactly what racists do), and instead target the direct thing that race was proxying<p>5.) by targeting the actual thing we&#x27;re trying to remediate, we help all people affected by it, rather than limiting ourselves to the identity groups with the best PR. we also don&#x27;t unnecessarily target people who belong to those identity groups and aren&#x27;t actually in need of assistance, but are perceived to be simply by association through the color of their skin<p>Just to reiterate: assume 1&#x2F;6 people in a city were &quot;people of color.&quot; Assume that 4&#x2F;6 people who were poor in the city were &quot;people of color.&quot; If you add a policy to help the poor, without considering race <i>at all</i>, 4&#x2F;6 of the people that you help are going to be &quot;people of color,&quot; despite them only being 1&#x2F;6 of the population. It automatically targets the people who are affected disproportionately...