My comment was primarily addressing legislative and financial efforts to eliminate inequality. Which, while prompted by your last sentence about wealthy privilege, may be a bit of a tangent from your original intent for the post.
Back on point, I basically agree with the core argument in the article you linked. Implicit bias is certainly possible in many situations, and taking mitigation steps like blind-evaluating resume qualifications is perfectly sensible. But your post seems like it goes further than the article by advocating active "platform-leveling", and you lose me there; I feel that attempting to balance injustices in the past injustices by introducing injustices in the present is inappropriate.
Regarding your story, my initial thought was "I wonder how this story would be perceived if the genders were reversed?" Would a man told to "Smile!" be equally justified in taking offense?
In that context, I think "Smile!" has the generally accepted meaning of "I'm about to take a picture; please compose yourself in whatever way you would like to be preserved in the photograph". Saying "Smile!" is just shorter. What would your friend prefer for people to say in that situation?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 08:38 pm (UTC)Back on point, I basically agree with the core argument in the article you linked. Implicit bias is certainly possible in many situations, and taking mitigation steps like blind-evaluating resume qualifications is perfectly sensible. But your post seems like it goes further than the article by advocating active "platform-leveling", and you lose me there; I feel that attempting to balance injustices in the past injustices by introducing injustices in the present is inappropriate.
Regarding your story, my initial thought was "I wonder how this story would be perceived if the genders were reversed?" Would a man told to "Smile!" be equally justified in taking offense?
In that context, I think "Smile!" has the generally accepted meaning of "I'm about to take a picture; please compose yourself in whatever way you would like to be preserved in the photograph". Saying "Smile!" is just shorter. What would your friend prefer for people to say in that situation?