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Comment by rockmeamedee | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it would be.

Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters. But that's actually what happens with gentrification. Diverse neighbourhoods get plowed over with rich white people.

Using race in an analysis doesn't make it racist. OP saying they wouldn't want to live in the places with fried chicken, in the context above (KFC->black people) would be.

I'd say the piece itself rides the line. It has a sarcastic tone throughout the piece, more of a "let's find out where the gentrification is" than "let's go live there".

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"the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters"

Unless I missed something in the article (please feel free to chew me out if I missed it...) you have just completely put words in the author's mouth. I have no idea where you got that correlation from, but I don't see it anywhere in the blog post.

Here's to hoping that you're just trolling. Your reply injects very specific racial and socio-economic biases as if they were already assumed and understood. Which, in this context, is basically racism.

How can you accuse parent of injecting biases, when the parent was reacting to the claim of racism?

I spent one sentence (the middle one) out of the three sentences in my reply explaining why I thought it could be (please note, "could be", as in, I did not say it was, as in, I did not accuse) interpreted as such. My reasoning was perfectly explicit and plain.

Because the parent comment stated "Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters" as if it were a matter of fact. The blog post makes no mention of skin colour at all (that I can see) and the racial connotations are entirely those of the parent - hence injecting racial bias.

The neighborhoods gentrying in Chicago right now aren't Black > White. They're Latino/Mixed > White/Mixed. There's no friend chicken places to go out of business. If anything craft friend chicken is popular now and entering the gentrified neighborhoods.

A more rational metric would be payday loan stores, laundromats, budget cell phone stores, etc.

Ask a black person if that sounds racist to them. Or does that not matter?

Doesn't matter. A particular group doesn't get to define racism for the rest of the population.

That's empirically false. "Racism" is whatever speech will convince enough people to call you "racist", and one person in twenty is more than enough to do it.

Whats empirically false changes person to person and culture to culture as demonstrated by your arbitrary definition of racism. I do not define Racism as actions other find racist.

I'm not interested in a debate about the meaning of truth - replace empirical correctness with everyday practicality and my point stands. You're free to define the term "racism" however you want to. However, you might regret ignoring your personal and cultural context if you care about not getting called racist.

Have their opinions ever really mattered to the "majority?" Any clear thinking person looking at history (both distant and recent) would conclude mostly no.

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