Hacker News Reader

I doubt the phenomenon you are trying to describe is at all unique to the people who would usually be called white.

In China, ethnic Chinese probably feel the same way compared to immigrants or people of other heritage. Or ethnically Japanese people in Japan. Or Saudis in Saudi Arabia compared to minorities there.

In other words, there is a certain power inherent to being part of the dominant ethnic or cultural group in every human society.

(Although, still need to see research demonstrating membership in these dominant groups leads to same degree of empathy atrophy as the research in the article demonstrates for high status individuals like CEOs.)

> I would also posit that "white" is not an ethnicity, it's the fiction of a lack of one's ethnicity.

I would put this differently: I would say that "white" is a refusal to identify yourself with a group based on ethnicity. Which for many people who are labeled "white" by others makes sense, since they do not have a single "ethnicity" anyway. I am an example: my genetic ancestry includes Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic, Mediterranean, and Native American, and I am adopted, so my cultural ancestry includes a few more things thrown into the mix. No ethnicity comes anywhere close to describing me, so I have no interest in or reason to identify with one.

As far as "fictitious power dynamics", if my choice to not identify with a group based on ethnicity gives me any power, it's a power that anyone can have by making the same choice. So I don't see how it gives me any advantage over anyone else. After all, what I said about not having a single "ethnicity" anyway probably applies to a majority of humans on this planet at this time, and even if it doesn't apply to you in a strict genetic sense, that doesn't mean you can't make the choice to not identify with a group based on ethnicity.

You're implying that all white men have a sense of entitlement and power, an assumption that is racist and sexist, much like saying black people all like watermelon or women all are overly emotional. You're blurring the line between cultural differences and racial differences which, if left unchallenged, lead to discrimination. There are millions of white men that aren't in a position of power or don't get ahead because of their skin color. In fact, due to affirmative action policies, if anything white men are being pushed out. What makes you think white men are privileged when as a whole, they've been seeing a decline in income?

Edit: to those downvoting me, could you please explain why?

This is a particularly bad misreading of the comment you're replying to.

The commenter quite explicitly said that they're not referring to all white men. Nor even that being white or a man are among the qualifying conditions.

They are referring to the degree to which people buy in, consciously or subconsciouly, to the notion that their whiteness or masculinity are inherently or naturally good/powerful/dominant.

The problem is acting like definitions are fluid when we're not. If I write a huge paragraph about how black people are violent, but mention in one sentence that I'm talking about black people as a symbol for power and not as a race, that doesn't change the fact that I just talked about an entire race as a whole. It's still ignorant, and blurring the line between race and culture is a dangerous rabbit hole.

Definitions are pretty fluid and the top level poster did take time to try to qualify the definition for the purposes of discussion. The problem is that fully qualify a definition often results in a long essay that nobody wants or has time to read, and trying to come up with a new label that's both accurate and accessible to the casual reader is a very slow and difficult process.

Since HN is a well-educated community, on the whole, it's not unreasonable to expect a little more work on the part of potential readers than for the same comment posted on a broader platform like Facebook. Unless I know from prior experience where a particular poster stands, when I read a comment I find attitudinally startling on HN I try out a few different interpretations before making assumptions about what was meant.

Personally, I agree that unclear or shifting definitions are bad for discourse.

And in this case, I would agree that there are better ways to express the idea.

I used a stronger tone than necessary about your original reading, I didn't mean to be hostile. But I did think it was clear that the poster was not generalizing as broadly as you took it.

Short answer: Yes.

What is more, your line of thinking is a good one.

Edward Said constructed basically this same argument - persuasively, I think - in Orientalism, his book on the history of western writing about the east (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)). If you can get a copy, I recommend it strongly: as you can no doubt see, the consequences of this idea are extraordinarily complex. For instance: what exactly determines Whiteness, if it's a concept that is defined only as "not-ethnic"?

Along those lines, Noel Ignatiev's (note: a controversial figure) book How the Irish Became White details how Celtic immigrants were NOT considered white in the antebellum South. Anyone in America, I think, with Irish or Scots ancestry knows the long history of American racism against the Celts. Ignatiev argues that the Celts 'gained' White status by setting themselves up as anti-Black by becoming strong proponents of slavery and speaking racist ideologies. I found this interesting and persuasive. The historical evidence of horrible and inhuman Irish anti-Black sentiment is obvious, but where other scholars have proposed things like "oh, the Irish came over and were racist just like everyone else" Ignatiev proposes a more universal truth about the way constructions of race interact.

I find issue with the very first posit that you mention. White isn't an ethnicity, yet somehow Black or Hispanic, or whatever is?

You presume then that attempting to be a white masculine man leads to brain damage, but what about black masculine man? Do they somehow not suffer the brain damage? Why is it considered damage in the first place? They did get in power, maybe what you see as damage is instead optimization.

I don't think black or Hispanic are really enthicities either. They're racial categories.

I think black men suffer some of the same brain damage as white men.

Women with masculine personality traits probably suffer it in some conditions too. If it's real, it's a fuzzy cluster around men, not a strict aspect of manhood only.

I see no reason to give your identity politics fetish air time. As other commenters have pointed out, you posit definitions that are both absurd and insulting.

I am in the camp that we should give insulting ideologies air time, so that they might be dissected early and often and publically. I split from many of my fellow leftist friends on this matter.

I think what you are getting at with "'white' is not an ethnicity" is that in post WW II United States culture, white is the default ethnicity. Earlier, say in pre WW I USA, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant was the default, and Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Catholics, were the "other" discriminated aganst and looked down on by those of default ethnicity. (Note that these are over-generalizations that might not be true for any particular individual).

I think that white people don't usually identify as being white. Minorities will identify as being their ethnicity. Like it's a tribe they belong to. They will mention it when they describe themselves. They sometimes form groups around it and say they are "proud to be X". Most white people don't identify by their race any more than by their hair color. Their first identity is often to their country or their city.

"White" people routinely identify themselves as Italians, Polish, Irish, or Germans. They have parades! They're very well attended! The Irish even have a holiday.

Black people do indeed identify themselves as "black", and not "Igbo" or "Yoruba" or "Zulu". But there's a reason for that: "black", in the sense of "African American", is an ethnicity we created, by kidnapping millions of people and stripping them of their original culture. Most "black" people in the US share a common culture and linguistic tradition, one that happens to have been created here.

So it makes sense that there is "black pride" and "Irish pride" but not "white pride". Of those three groups, "white" is not really an ethnicity.

In the past that may have been true. At least in my experience most white people don't even know their country of origin, and if they do it's really not that big of a deal. Ethnic festivals and holidays mostly just continue on as tradition now. They aren't signs of seriously separate cultures. You can't tell whether someone is Irish by how they talk, by how they dress, who they hang around, etc. The fact they are Irish is not an important part of their identity at all. These separate white cultures have mostly melted together over time into just "American culture".

Yes, "default ethnicity" might be a better term for what I am referencing than "white". Thank you.

While it's totally understandable once one looks into the historical context and notes similar patterns in other non-caucasian cultures, the use of the term 'white' in this context has become so confusing and problematic as to perpetuate the very problems it's trying to identify. Unfortunately a lot of the obvious alternatives are similarly problematic, and I haven't been able to think of a good novel one. My favorite term is 'authoritarian' but 6-syllable words are also a good way to lose a large part of your potential audience :-/

To me what you hint at is that since the 15th century, europeans were into the imperialism race. They were the most recent and largest default ethnic group.

If you look historically, “white” was still the label of the default ethnicity, but people that today we'd think of as “white” (and who would fit the use of “white” as a racial identifier, as in fact Hispanics quite often do) simply are not thought of as “white”, but rather as some distinct ethnicity.

It's worth researching, and indeed 50+ years ago, other communities were scapegoats. How and why these shifts is important.

You might enjoy this speech from Angels in America [1] As I think it hits pretty similar points to what you're saying: labels are about power dynamics and much less about the underlying descriptiveness of them.

1 - https://youtu.be/98fBiOVEcyI?t=250

All culture is a lie. There isn't such a thing as "white culture" except that which a 'bunch of people' get together and say "that activity over there, we'll call that 'white culture'".

There is no such thing as "America" - this is a social construct which only persists because, every day, people get out of bed and say "well, there is America, and it is 'that thing over there'" and, well, if enough people get together and say something is, the way it is, then thats the way it is.

All culture is a lie. It doesn't hold up on its own, under its own characteristics, like .. say .. Plutonium the Element does. In order to persist, the lie must continually be told.

So really, your invention is as much a lie as anything else. What you really want is to alter culture - and really, who doesn't want that, these days?

> All culture is a lie.

You clearly haven't met people from cultures other than yours, have you?

In fact, I've met many, which is precisely why I think that culture is a lie. We humans create such arbitrary lives.

erikpukinskis, did you read the article? There isn't a single mention of race (at all). The article is about people in power start making bad decisions, and it's clear this is not restricted to any single race/gender group. see: any conflict, ever, in any country.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but it doesn't seem like your comment is responding to the article - it's responding to the headline, and you're projecting some things onto it and responding to them. Please don't do that - it's what we see on every other news forum/website, and it degrades the quality of the conversation.

In all of the responses you've gotten so far, people seem to be caught up on the colloquialisms we employ when referring to ethnicities, such as "white" or "black".

Indicating "white" may not have been best term to use for the phenomenon he or she was trying to describe.

While I think there may be something to that pov regarding "whiteness", I think that pov about masculinity is quite wrong.

"Masculinity" is an appropriate idea, and masculinity is not a bad thing.

There may be some cultural associations with masculinity which don't need to be there, but I maintain that there is a sense of "masculinity" which ought to be recognized as appropriate in some circumstances (primarily among people who are male)

Well, women enjoy many privileges versus men. For example, men are profiled by police after violent crimes. They are more likely to be sacrificed in war, to be homeless, to be in prison. Women are ushered into clubs without paying, while men have to get $300 bottle table based on their gender.

If any of the above was done by race, it would be an outrage today and obvious racism. So, does that mean, in some aspects, you can just manipulate symbols from the article and claim women have similar forms of brain damage simply from their being a woman?

I think femininity probably has it's own associate brain damage too, yes. Different, but probably less extensive due to the demands of feminine people to understand the other. Although quite debilitating in important ways. Same for non-white folks. I am more reluctant to speculate about those things because of their history as popular notions ("women and blacks are retarded"), and the fact that I have no direct experience of it. I experience my own developmental delays all the time and I'm a white man.

And I agree with you there are many negatives to manhood and masculinity, many positives to womanhood. I don't see that as contradicting my theory.