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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Which I totally agree with. My point was simply that there are some people (in the black community, in every community) where, given nothing more than increased opportunity, could be much more successful and well-off than they are. Those people exist in every community, so considering that lack of opportunity (or even more extreme: giving opportunity) will absolutely have a positive impact.
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Right there with you. It's a matter of figuring out which "some people" it will actually be a boon to, and which it won't.
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saying "providing better opportunity won't matter because some members of the black community don't have books" is a fundamentally incorrect statement on its own. It makes no sense.
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Having a bunch of books in the house, regardless of your race, is going to correlate strongly with how intelligent your parents are, which by virtue of what I was saying is going to correlate strongly with your own potential for intelligence. I assume that's what he was saying. Actually my understanding is that this is a real, honest to god statistical factor that has been used in studies to predict outcomes for marginalized people - literally whether they have books in the house. I can't recall where I read that. Anyway, it's kind of a sidebar issue, I'm not sure why you've fixated on those couple of words.
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This all ties back to the point: How is recognizing a factor that certainly impacts members of a community at a higher rate than others, a bad thing? It's not like other communities don't get considerations specific to them, so what's the difference?
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As long as it's relevant to the factors I listed earlier I don't think it's a bad thing. You do have to demonstrate that it is relevant, otherwise it's just noise. But I'm not that skeptical of it, personally. Either way though, my original post is really what I think of this - if you want judges to consider something they currently aren't for sentencing purposes, you probably need a change in law.