It's a good reminder that, when someone says "life is fair" as if they were seriously making a empirical observation about life, they are effectively blaming individuals who are poor, sick, discriminated against, etc. for bringing their woes upon themselves. When someone says "life is fair," it can be a red flag about that person, since the phrase quickly leads to explicit racism.
That's my most general, straightforward takeaway from Allison's article.
This idea could play out in subtle ways too. For example, if a person prays for fairness, we could ask: Are they lamenting that life isn't fair and are they asking God to give them the strength to do activism or give charity to fix the inequity, or are they thanking God that life has always been fair because really all someone ever has to do is say a little prayer to get what they want? Those are two different worldviews.
On that point, I'm reminded of extremely rich people (and those who sympathize and identify with them) who believe you can use positive thoughts to manifest health, wealth, and success. Under this belief system, aka the so-called "law of attraction" or "the secret", you're supposed to envision and insist that you already have whatever you desire. According to those who promote this idea, if you don't have some specific thing you want, it's because you didn't truly believe it was possible for you to get it. In this worldview, a successful outcome is a measure of how much you believed you deserved it--so everything that happens to anyone is "fair" because they're just manifesting their own thoughts, and this too ends up as racist victim-blaming.
On another note, each of us is sensitive to our perceptions of how life has been unfair to us, and often we prize the safety/stability/comfort zones in which we believe we're treated more fairly: a circle of real friends, a good job, etc. But sometimes, when we explain to ourselves how our happy place works, we oversimplify the dynamics. Even within the bounds of our comfort zones, it isn't true that everyone is perfectly fair to everyone else. We let others down, and others let us down. Even (and maybe especially) in the places we feel are most fair (to us, because we don't consciously feel harmed there, compared to other places), we have to keep our eyes open to the racism that is indeed there. We have to keep envisioning what true justice would be and keep working on it so we can make justice a reality.
That's what I take away and find helpful right now, anyway.
