Race is one of the foundations of the American experiment, we refer to it as the ‘original sin’ (slavery). We never did anything about it until the Civil War, and then again with Civil Rights. It still lingered, as black/white were bisected in society. Then further subdivisions amongst other races. It’s part of our dilemma, we’ve been circling this problem since the beginning of the country.

America in general really struggles with the impulse to gate-keep opportunity. It’s true, America has the most opportunities in the world, but the natural human impulse to gate-keep kicks in. It can happen with race (‘we don’t want too many of ______ in our neighborhoods), it can happen with immigration (‘we don’t want too many _______ in this country), it can happen with class (‘Not everyone deserves what we deserve’), and so on.

My fear is the solution is still drenched in the same gate-keeping. The solution is not to gate-keep back the other way (‘they excluded us, so let’s now exclude them’). Same problem.

The investment portfolio rebalancing strategy doesn’t sit well with me. Life is not a weighted ETF where you can just go ‘divert the 50% of funds from commodities into a new distribution of 10/10/10/10/10 of crypto, gold, treasuries, etc).

Americans have a virtualization problem. Most Americans see that their country is diverse on TV and the Internet, but in their day to day, they really don’t intermix. Even if we do intermix, it’s still generally virtualized in such a way you only see them, like on TV or on the Internet. It’s even worse in non-major cities. It’s easy for most Americans to fool themselves into thinking they are open-minded, but it’s a whole different thing being comfortable watching another race on YouTube, than sharing a neighborhood with them.

I’ve mixed two different views here, apologies, but it’s a convoluted problem in America. It should be out of our minds by now, yet it isn’t. It’s so bad (or has been so bad) that we are literally setting race/gender quotas at this point, truly sad state of affairs.

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Edit:

I just want to add a small anecdote on how disconnected the discussion about this is. Usually we try to offer a chance to people who come from underprivileged backgrounds. This discussion usually falls on deaf ears because many Americans cannot fathom what it was like to go to an inner-city public school. They can’t imagine (no experience) what it’s like to sit next to classmates in the 12th grade who read at a 4th grade reading level (but are on track to graduate high school, already accepted to a college - have fun reading Nabakov and Dostoyevsky). If you can’t imagine that, then of course the discussion is a non-starter and will sound completely unfair. I’ve sat in those classrooms and all I could think was ‘holy shit you are gonna need all the help you can get’.

So, when I say the ‘portfolio rebalancing’ strategy doesn’t make sense, I mean it. It might make us feel better, make us feel fairer, but many people are not ready to just be thrown into these buckets of equity. The true solution requires work, not just quota-filling.

It’s just a country full of a bunch of entry-level inexperienced citizens. Neither side has exposure to the other side. We lack general wisdom.