I think you are talking past each other. Sure, yes, any system may evince disproportionate outcomes for various demographic groups. I think your point is that that variation doesn't matter. In your examples, that is likely the case.
But I think implicit in the parent comment is that there are some systems that have demographic variation and where that variation significantly impacts the power, agency, or well-being of one of the groups.
And for cases like that, real people are being harmed. They are unfairly not getting the same opportunity for success and liberty that other groups receive. That is a problem that anyone who cares about fairness should care to solve regardless of whether that's the intent of the system. It's not about blaming and shaming the architects of the system. It's simply a matter of something akin to good engineering to want systems that work well for all users.
The fact that men don't go to spas as much ultimately doesn't matter. But if black people in Houston disportionately lost power and froze to death that is an entirely different category of problem. We should not equate them.
I actually agree with most of your point here. The reason I objected is not because I think freezing to death is equally serious as a spa day. We have many serious problems that need to be solved quickly, including utility infrastructure. The very specific point I addressed, however, was that the claim that equal outcome itself is the singular measure of intent (and therefore some greater ___ism) is demonstrably false because it doesn't comport with the real world.
Orthogonal to that issue is the one you raised, and that is whether some people (regardless of race, income level, etc.) need improved utility infrastructure. Manifestly, they do. But I care about that issue because they're human beings. I care because the government has a moral duty to provide the life-critical services it promised its citizens. Freezing in the winter is a serious problem regardless of how we draw the demographic boundaries around those freezing.
Edit: It's for this reason I was frustrated in previous decades when politicians constantly used to say "do it for the children." No matter the issue, it was always "for the children." They still say it, but it's largely been replaced with "do it for the minorities." Why not just do it for people if it's a good idea? If it's a bad idea, let's skip it.
> The very specific point I addressed, however, was that the claim that equal outcome itself is the singular measure of intent (and therefore some greater ___ism) is demonstrably false because it doesn't comport with the real world.
I don't think that's an accurate representation of the parent comment. They said, "A system can be racist in terms of outcome without having been intentionally designed to be racist." So it's clear they aren't implying that unequal outcomes are a singular measure of intent.
Something I try to be more mindful of when commenting on social media is how my reply steers the conversation. I think we all fall into the trap of "Oh, I agree with 90% of this but I'm going to correct this 10% bit here." In practice, that often derails the conversation completely away from the 90% that actually matters.
I believe these online conversations can be a meaningful and important part of how we learn about and interact with the world, so I try to be mindful of the goal of the entire thread and not just whether my comment is technically correct or not.
In this case here, I think your point detracts from the very important general point that there are many systems in the US that are clearly, measurably racist against Black people. And quibbling about the intent of the current participants in that system takes attention and effort away from actually fixing anything.
Imagine you're standing in your bathroom and raw sewage is firehosing out of the toilet all over the ceiling and walls. There is an interesting discussion to be had with your roommate about the relative merits of plastic versus copper pipes, temperature-dependent material fatiguing effects in winter-time, etc. But maybe that should be tabled until the matter at hand is addressed.
Right now, Black people are jailed, assaulted, and killed at a significantly greater rate than other races in the US in large part because of persistent systems whose history stretches back to a time when its creators were deliberately, actively, intentionally racist.
> Why not just do it for people if it's a good idea? If it's a bad idea, let's skip it.
Let's say you have a classroom where half the students are failing because the teachers mumbles and speaks really quickly and those students don't speak English as their first language. You might rightly say that, "Well, we want to improve the test scores of all students, right?" So you do all sorts of study plans, etc. and raise the scores of the whole class by 10 points. Great. Everyone is better. But the scores of those ESL kids are still unfairly lower than the other kids because you deliberately ignored any relative inequities by choosing to only focus on things that improved scores for all kids.
But I think implicit in the parent comment is that there are some systems that have demographic variation and where that variation significantly impacts the power, agency, or well-being of one of the groups.
And for cases like that, real people are being harmed. They are unfairly not getting the same opportunity for success and liberty that other groups receive. That is a problem that anyone who cares about fairness should care to solve regardless of whether that's the intent of the system. It's not about blaming and shaming the architects of the system. It's simply a matter of something akin to good engineering to want systems that work well for all users.
The fact that men don't go to spas as much ultimately doesn't matter. But if black people in Houston disportionately lost power and froze to death that is an entirely different category of problem. We should not equate them.