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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> I'm from an Eastern Europe and my family never was rich

Then the comment does not apply to you.

I don't think you quite understand how deep the rabbit hole of this form of "whiteness" goes; as a social construct it implies people from Western Europe or North America. Surely you have experienced how there are people from there who treat Eastern Europe people as less "civilized? Similarly for, say, Mediterranean ethnicities.

White male privilege might not (fully) extend to you, but that does not disprove its existence.

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This sort of response is typical for someone from NY(yes, this is also racist).

I'm white in the US. There is so much ignorance and illiteracy in the way white male racism is portrayed in the USA. It's a beautiful display of how you preach openness and then completely disregard all nuanced world views. You may not have known them then, but you sure as hell don't listen when someone is trying to explain it aaron.

A huge portion of people that are on the receiving end of racist systems are white male by your definition.

The thing that's so offensive about your kind and the authors kind of attitude is very similar to when some spoiled american female brat who's parents can just easily lash out tens of thousands a year for an ivy league school tells me how would i know anything about discrimination because i'm too white.

Theres even a funny 1974s movie about the miserable life of an italian immigrant in switzerland? Pane e cioccolata. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Chocolate

But if you really care how about you take a look at interview invites in Germany/Central Europe.

I didn't know this movie, interesting

> This sort of response is typical for someone from NY(yes, this is also racist).

Gee, assumptions much? I'm a mixed race straight male from the Netherlands. I have definitely been on the receiving end of racism plenty of times in his life, and even then there's still plenty of privileges that I got to enjoy and that I wasn't aware of until my late twenties.

These are not binary mutually exclusive concepts.

Pointing out privileges is not an accusation, or at least it shouldn't be. It's just saying: you take <x> for granted like a right, but not everyone get's to enjoy that, and the reason they don't is a lack of being male/white/straight or combination of such. Let's put in an effort to make <x> equal for everyone.

> tells me how would i know anything about discrimination because i'm too white.

Except that this is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that privileges exist at many levels, and there's gradations of privilege.

GP is a white Eastern European man. This brings a number of societal privileges. It also means he missed the boat on a number of others, and had to endure racism against certain stereotypes.

The point is that "whiteness" as a race is a exclusionary social construct that exists in gradations, and not as a yes/no binary thing based on skin.