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Comment by bobabooey02 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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