RACIST DEI training tells white firefighters that they are a problem.

@LeopoldBloom Are you aware the expression, “ you people” is not taken well by many. It is found disrespectful.

Equality is fair. Can’t necessarily say the same for equity. I’ll go with meritocracy.

And if you want to espouse that “people you hate”, that statement crosses all racial and ethnicity lines. It is not unique to any one group.

@soar2newhighs I'm trying to be insulting. I'm glad you took it that way. "You people" implies contempt and dismissal.

A meritocracy is great as long as everyone is starting from the same place with the same advantages and opportunities. Otherwise, it's an oligarchy.

@LeopoldBloom Fair enough.

@LeopoldBloom The only equity anyone deserves is equity of opportunity. If you don't cut the mustard after that then you don't get the job, position, or admission what ever the case may be. Any other version will end in with a race to the bottom as far as your standards are concerned.

@Johnson212 Equity of opportunity sounds great. However, if someone has been affected by systemic inequality, just saying that an opportunity is being offered equally to everyone isn't taking that into account. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up."

@LeopoldBloom How did the Irish do it then ?

@Johnson212 They didn't face 1/100th the discrimination that Black people faced. Compare arriving poor and starving in the 1860s to 300 years of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, segregation, and redlining that didn't officially end until 1965, and continued illegally well after that date. We already had an Irish president by then because whatever oppression the Irish faced only lasted a few decades. Heck, JFK's grandfather Francis Fitzgerald was a Congressman and the mayor of Boston. Comparing the Irish to Black people is historically ignorant.

@LeopoldBloom You obviously dont have a clue what the English did to the Irish.

@Johnson212 I'm well aware of what the English did to the Irish. An gorta mór was just the tip of the iceberg. You probably don't even know what that means.

The fact that the Irish were oppressed in their homeland had nothing to do with the treatment they received here in the US. I've never heard a Black person complain about how their ancestors were treated in Africa. You're mixing apples and oranges.

@LeopoldBloom Yes apples and iranges un the sense that the blacks want to ever be victims and want decent people to pay for the sins of the father. The irish madebtheir lives better and if not for beer would have taken over the world.

@Johnson212 Again, the Irish experienced oppression in their native land, and came here to escape that as many others did, including my own grandparents. Black Americans were brought here in chains and endured centuries of slavery, followed by what amounted to apartheid, which only ended within our own lifetimes. That being said, many Black Americans have managed to overcome this history of oppression and achieved success. I live in a majority-Black city, and my middle class Black neighbors are pretty much indistinguishable from their white counterparts. That being said, by metrics such as generational wealth, Black Americans still lag behind whites. Saying "do what the Irish did" only shows your ignorance of the histories of both people beyond just "they were oppressed."

Do you say the same thing to Native Americans, for whom conditions even today are worse than most other groups? To give you an example, the infant mortality rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is the worst in the Western Hemisphere, exceeded only by Haiti. Are they supposed to lift themselves up by their bootstraps as if they're immigrants who came here for a new life?

What's ironic is how people like you extol the initiative of past immigrants while despising the current ones.