I’m terribly sorry I never responded to this, I didn’t see it until now.

Furthermore, we see that most non-white led businesses are restaurants, workshops and selling goods from their respective cultures. With restaurants and little food booths being the backbone of non-white economic success. Why do non-white people have to start with a small take away shop first when entering a new white society? Why is this universal?

Because wealth is heritable.

If I follow your argument of R(1) then it’s just for a lack of not trying hard enough, while we have enough evidence that our loan systems actually benefit white people and put non-white folks at a disadvantage.

Our loan systems benefit the wealthy. Being white correlates quite well with wealth today, because my white grandfather was very likely to be much more wealthy than my black neighbor’s grandfather. And wealth is heritable. You see correlation and jump to causation. If my white grandparents were as poor as my black neighbor’s, and his black grandparents were as wealthy as mine, our situations would be basically reversed. He’d get the loan.

The whole idea of a Meritocracy is, unfortunately, a utopia that won’t work to make everyone equal

Of course meritocracy won’t make everyone equal, because people are of different merit. The only thing that will make everyone equal is communism, where merit is removed from the compensation equation, and it pretty much sucks.

But let’s not dismiss you suggestion completely yet, so research states that women only ever apply for a job where they fulfill the requirements to 80% or more, men typically apply when they fulfill 50%. Which accounts for why we see fewer women apply for high profile positions. We also see that men typically get those jobs, so qualification-wise our assumption should be that on average men are less qualified than the women the compete with and still get the job. What does that say about Meritocracy and equality?

It says more about psychology than it does about anything else. Women tend to be more risk averse, for sociobiological reasons. The psychological personality profiles of each gender vary, there is no universal, but at a population level women and men form a bimodal distribution across most personality traits. These bimodal distributions are biological.

I do think there’s sexism in the workplace, by the way, but multivariate analysis show the absolute upper bound of the impact of sexism is about 4% salary, and it’s likely less than that. Most of the wage gap can be explained by lifestyle choices, or in some cases, lifestyle demands. Almost all the gap is in “choice of profession” and “kids.” And sometimes one impacts the other.

The most convenient detail about the R(1) definition: It’s individuals, so we can’t do anything about it

We can definitely do plenty to combat individual racism. One of the most important things we can do is exposure. This is why I support things like school integration and our current affirmative action policies, while I vehemently oppose things like Harvard having black only dorms and black only graduations.

is it possible that the conservatives and white supremacists have their own term that is supposed to silence their critics that is called communism? ;)

Yep. And it annoys the shit out of me. We’ll share a beer over that one. :) But there are some times when invoking communism is appropriate, such as when someone points out that meritocracy will not produce equity. Of course it won’t. It can’t, unless everyone is of equal merit. And since they’re not, you will never get perfect equity out of a meritocracy.

I do think you can get more than we have now. And I don’t think that large wealth gaps help anyone. Large wealth gaps are a classic precursor to violent revolution, so if the rich people had have a lick of sense they’d be very positive to some flavor of wealth redistribution. That’s what violent revolution is, for what it’s worth. Severe, unfun, wealth redistribution.

So unintentionally and without the intent to do so, this PNAC you mentioned created a racist agenda.

They created an oil agenda to promote the existing wealth holders at the detriment of the people who live on dirt which happens to be situated above oil. That’s not (R1) racist, although it is detrimental to people who happen to be of different races. We can fix this by treating all people regardless of race (or which land they live on) with the same dignity. But if I propose that solution, it will be construed (rightly) as being blind to race, which then means I’m accused of being racist by the R2ers.

So I have a suggestion: Let’s take a birds-eye view on this. You and I are basically discussing different definitions of racism and basically created a competition between the two. In order to truly create a meaningful discussion, we need a definition that we can agree on. Every scientific theory basically starts with defining their vocabulary and without working with the same definitions we will not be able to have a meaningful discussion.

So what can we do to come to a shared definition of racism and move on with the conversation?

This was almost literally the reason I wrote this article!

I’m not sure we need an R3. We simply must both be aware, when we have a discussion, whether we are speaking in terms of R1 or R2.

And the beer offer stands. If you’re ever in Atlanta, look me up.