Caroline is speaking of colour-blindness and she is correct that this is how Social Justice critics of it see it. I really need to write an essay on the misconception that liberalism is the belief that we have already achieved liberalism. https://twitter.com/C_a_rolin_e/status/1281574738016587776

This doesn't happen with other political & ethical stances. People don't think socialism is the belief that we live in a socialist society or Social Justice the belief that society is just, libertarianism the belief that individual liberty has been achieved etc.

However, liberalism, when understood correctly as the goal for individual freedom, universal rights, meritocracy etc etc, is nevertheless misunderstood, mostly by non-liberal elements of the left, as the belief we have already achieved all of this.

This is largely because liberalism is a reforming impulse while socialism & Social Justice are revolutionary ones. Therefore, they are prone to regarding liberalism as lacking any sense of urgency & being too complacent about the status quo.

To be fair, they are not entirely wrong about this. Liberals tend to believe that the institutions & norms we have right now are fairly sound, but that their benefits have not been made equally available to everyone. See this definition of liberal feminism by critics of it.

We don't want a revolution. We think liberal, secular democracies are worth preserving & that the remaining task is to remove material & social barriers that prevent everybody from having equal access to all of its benefits.

This is how the Civil Rights Movements worked. MLK, liberal feminists & lesbian & gay activists did not demand to overturn all the structures of society. They demanded that racial minorities, heterosexual women, lesbians & gay men have equal rights & opportunities within it.

A good example of this is a disagreement I had with a socialist feminist a few years ago. She said feminism could not work with capitalism. She was factually wrong about this. Feminism works with capitalism when women have the same ability to benefit from capitalism as men.

Therefore, I said, she could absolutely critique capitalism and argue for socialism but not on the grounds that capitalism is sexist & disadvantages women. It doesn't. Neoliberal feminists exist & defend women's access to profitable positions of power within capitalist systems.

So, the liberal feminist, anti-racist, LGBT approach is one that wants to maintain our institutions & norms but make them available to everyone. It does not assume that we have already achieved this

Some liberals towards the classical & libertarian end will argue that we have mostly achieved this & that further progress needs to be made purely by the individual efforts of members of demographics who are doing statistically less well. I disagree with them.

Because of the 'left' bit of my left-liberalism, I think we need to even things up so that we genuinely have a level playing field. We need this before we can genuinely have a meritocracy. I think a genuine meritocracy is something we should aim for.

However, I differ from Social Justice activists who also think this because I think 1) material status - wealth - is more significant to attainment gaps than identity and 2) affirmative action in employment/university is both too late & doesn't benefit the disadvantaged people.

By 1) I mean that I think kids are prevented from doing well mostly by a lack of resources than their sex or race. A black girl with educated parents with money to privately educate her & give her books, tutors, space to study, a college fund is likely to do well.

However, a black girl in, say, the US is statistically less likely to have these advantages than a white girl so making resources available to people who lack them will benefit black communities more than white ones, but not leave out poor white kids.

Also, aiming resources at children's education is going to work much better to level a playing field than ticking boxes on an identity quota for adults. The latter is likely to benefit the black girl from 2 tweets ago but not poor black kids. No upward mobility can come from this

Therefore when it comes to policies to level playing fields, I see value in starting early & providing resources ranging from breakfast, quiet study spaces with tutors, laptops & WiFi, clubs & camps to financially disadvantaged youngsters. Also education for adults, tho!

The added benefit of aiming resources at people, especially children, who lack them rather than at people of a particular identity group is that this accords with the sense of fairness of nearly everyone even tho moral foundations vary so much.

It is counterintuitive to many people to see programmes aimed at a certain race or sex as fair, even if you show statistics that this group is not doing well. People don't think statistically. They see the poor white kids who don't qualify because of their skin & think 'racism'

Whereas, if you show that you are aiming material resources at people who lack material resources regardless of their identity, the fairness is much more intuitively graspable & the fact that way more of these people are black doesn't diminish that unless you are genuinely racist