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Comment by rootedbox | Hacker News Reader

Racism is the unequal distribution of privilege, and goods dependent on race. It does not deal with race distribution in a population. However seeing racism should even be more apparent when the race with power is in the minority population. A good example would be South Africa in apartheid; or the south during segregation.

But basically if this kid was white, and was named Chris(the christian equivalent of Mohamed).. He would not have been subjugated to any of this. That is privilege that is racism.

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Racism is the individual or collective act of blindly favoring one race over another, or hurting one race over another. There's this thing called the dictionary. If you don't like the definitions in there, come up with a new word and definition!

You have no evidence that this wouldn't happen to a white kid, but that's the most likely outcome. If this were pre-9/11 (pre-Patriot Act BS), I'm not so sure. Racism and prejudice to some extent is just part of the human condition. Perhaps one day we'll advance enough to make it a non-issue, but we need to stop the hysterics about "only in America" and "whites always get favored" without some concrete evidence and historical context.

1. I never said "only in America". Racism, and classism are prevalent all over the world. My example even lists both a US and Foreign example. And racism isn't only with whites.

2. There is tons of evidence that whites get favored in pretty much everything from home loans borrowing rates, being accepted to rent a house, pay, and the number of times they get pulled over by a cop.

http://www.jconline.com/story/news/2015/05/06/among-favored-... http://mije.org/mmcsi/criminal-justice/white-crime-victims-f... http://ndsn.org/march93/favored.html

Fair enough. I was alluding to some other comments I had seen.

As for your evidence, I think you're going out on a limb with "whites get favored in pretty much everything". While that may have been true up until the 1960s, we've progressed to Barack Obama and Oprah. Still a very long way to go with regards to the specific things you mentioned (some of which may be more socioeconomic factors rather than skin color), but your claim just doesn't hold water.

Are you conflating the phrase "whites always get favoured" with the notion of "white privilege"?

Perhaps. Can you give me a concrete example of "white privilege"?

Watch nearly any episode of the TV show, "What would you do". There are often examples of people giving some* the benefit of the doubt when they are in fact stealing, etc, while others are reported immediately to the police.

In the context of this show: * "some" are always white and/or female "others" are some white males, and all non-white males.

This "benefit of the doubt" is a privilege.

> This "benefit of the doubt" is a privilege.

I've never watched the show, but when one group of people is disproportionately represented in crime statistics, in some cases by a factor of 30x, then it's just common sense rather than benefit-of-the-doubt.

Since when does "the distribution of [whatever]" have anything to do with the definition of racism?

The problem with that definition is that it assumes all groups contribute equally to the larger collective. Or at least that if one group contributes less, it is entirely because the other groups have already disadvantaged it in some way.

There are a large number of examples where this is simply false.

That definition makes no assumption about a groups contribution; as the definition is indifferent of the socio-economic system at hand (free-market, closed market, communal, etc) if the distribution of privilege and goods is different for individuals depending on race then there is a system of racism at hand.

So if 1 racial demographic group does better than another group, and they profit (in some way related to privileged) from this, while the other group does not, how is this racism?

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