Instead we discriminate against the poor white guy from the ghetto growing up with a single mom? Brilliant. That guy had none of the supposed white male advantages. Hire/accept people based on their merits. If you want to take into account overcoming adversity that's fine with me. But picking someone based on the color of their skin, be it white, black, or other, is wrong, and it's racist.
I'm that white guy from the ghetto with a single mom. I'm an executive now, and I'm sure it was easier for me than a black kid from my old neighborhood.
Let me change the subject slightly, people who are tall and good looking have more opportunity and success than those that aren't. No one, even you, are making purely rational decisions based on merit. All of us make decisions that are influenced by things we aren't aware of.
Let's argue based on aggregate statistics instead of individual situations. I don't see why otherwise rational/scientific people feel the need to debase themselves by talking about edge-case individual examples when it comes to things like this.
I don't think poor, white people are an edge case. As of 2007, 9.9% of the white, non-hispanic population lived in poverty (compared to 27.6% of black people and 26.6% of hispanics). The numbers are lower, but they are far from edge cases. The source of adversity in the human experience is not solely rooted in race.
Thus African Americans are more than twice as likely to live under the poverty line. Those are not I odds I would like to gamble with had I been born black.
There will always be some people who have it better than others. I would prefer that we make sure that those who have it the worst comparatively don't have it that bad on an absolute scale.
Individual situations are important in this case. It is as much about fairness for the white guy/girl with poor parents who is being discriminated against by his or her government as it is about the African American who is being discriminated against by employers, schools etc.
This is obviously a tough issue, but edge cases are important. There is too much noise in the statistics.
