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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

"I'm bigoted and racist but I'm not going to admit to that."

This one always gets me. We're told, over and over again, that these people are tired of being called whatever-ist and that we should start being nice to them if we want their support.

Well, I'm sorry, but if you weren't so freakin' racist, we wouldn't keep pointing it out. If you don't want to be called sexist and ignorant, stop electing people who try to enshrine sexism in the law and have no clue about basic human biology.

Apparently we're supposed to close our eyes and ignore the huge character flaws in certain of our countrymen in the vague hope that they'll start voting for people we like if we're really nice to them. I really don't think that's a good strategy.

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It's the "I'm not going to admit to that" part where the left gets it wrong. Pointing out that a person suffers from ignorance, racism, sexism, and bigotry doesn't need to come with the hostility and animosity or risk to their financial well being. These are states of mind that come from lacking context, from having an incomplete model of the world. If a person is punished for their incomplete model of the world they're less likely to make that visible and therefore ignorance is driven to the shadows. If a person received love and guidance when they showed themselves to be ignorant, you would still have the bigotry but at least there would be a pathway out of it.

tl,dr; so long as ignorance is understood to be a dirty word, people will focus on the insult and not the root problem.

I'm happy with driving ignorance into the shadows. The harder it is to express and the less support bigots have, the less likely they are to pass it on to the next generation.

That is the primary mechanism for reducing bigotry. The number of people who will self-correct is small. Big changes mostly come from waiting for bigots to die out, and not replacing them with new ones.

History seems to disagree. The views being expressed openly today couldn't have been expressed openly in the past. The KKK is still a thing. I'm not advocating we parade these ideas around, I'm firmly a believer in refusing to give bigotry a platform, but that's not the bit I'm focusing on.

People are wildly variant in their experiences and cognition but we all decipher meaning from layers in speech. It's possible for a person to fail to comprehend, fail to obtain the necessary context, fail to connect their actions to harm, but succeed in receiving the hostility encoded in speech. Eventually a person walks away with a model of the world that a person disagrees not because they see something but because they just don't like you. You can see this everywhere in that every criticism the left has of the right they turn it around on the left.

> Big changes mostly come from waiting for bigots to die out, and not replacing them with new ones.

Bigotry never dies out. It's a natural facet of our existence and our current methodology for addressing it exacerbates the problem because we live in a world where a person defeated in argument can rally with others. There is no making a minority of bigotry in an endlessly connected world.

I don't understand the first part. Which views being expressed openly today couldn't have been expressed openly in the past?

The views our political system is currently normalizing. The ones that enable white supremacists to occupy the highest levels of government office. The ones that claim Michelle Obama is anti-american for saying she hasn't always been proud of her country while Trump can be elected on a platform that America is not great and defend Putin as a "killer" by claiming we're not so innocent.

Those have been expressed for a long time. Some are getting more popular (white supremacist stuff) and some are coming from different people (saying America kills people and has no moral high ground was usually a leftist thing) but I don't see anything being said that outright couldn't before.

You're being literal? Yes, these views have seen daylight. No, these views haven't until recently been acceptable for those holding public office.

Strom Thurmond didn't die that long ago, for example. A mere half century ago, these things were not only acceptable for elected officials to say, they were acceptable to enact into law.

You win.

Is it appropriate to work with racists to end racism?

I don't really know how that would work. Can you elaborate?

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