People who deal with the world solely based on feelings are bound to make things worse.
Throughout the world injustice still exists. Poverty creates vicious cycles. Poor public education handicap kids’ potential in criminal ways.
However, to identify a problem is the easy part. To understand the dynamics that actually keep those problems in place is the real challenge. Now, even if you are clueless to what is the cause of something it is very easy to understand when a false reasoning is being used.
Karl Popper understood this well. He defined a concept called “Falsifiability”. In a very high level, Popper believed that something can only be considered scientific if it could be proved false. Belief in God for instance, is not scientific because it cannot be proven false. Using a real life example: if you believe that the cause of poverty is high unemployment, you would have to accept that your theory is false if you had some society where there is very little unemployment and poverty still exists.
Now, the current theories around racism all fail the falsifiability test. The easiest way to prove this is to ask your friend who believes in these theories: what would have to happen tomorrow to prove to you that racism is not an issue anymore? Would having the same percentage of poor being white be enough? Should we have the same percentage of black and white NBA players? Would having a black man being the most powerful man on Earth be enough?
Same thing applies to the idea of race itself. What would it take for someone to belong to a race? What would it take for me to prove that I am not a member of a certain race? What would it take to call affirmative action as ‘done’ or the need or affirnmative action as not valid anymore?
Chances are that these people would have no answer for these questions… They will tell you that they don’t need to know these answers! For them, the fact that “we have a lot of black men in prison” is proof enough but again, they would never accept having less black in prison as proof of the absence of racism. In other words, the definition of what they call racism itself is not scientific. Therefore, it is scientifically impossible for us to find any kind of true solution for it.
It is not surprise that certain groups of people remain in a vicious cycle of poverty and under achievement. You cannot solve a problem before you understand it.