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Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

Geeze, I appreciate the point about him needing to provide evidence for his unsubstantiated claim; however I don't appreciate the chance to call him a racist. Identifying racism has become a witch hunt that undermines the importance of criticizing actual racism--if every criticism of people which are from a race other than White is racist, then we need to actually find a new word for racism as its definition has turned in to meaning: politically incorrect criticism of an individual.

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You think the claim that "they", here referring to immigrants (not defining skin color), isn't racist? It's a generalization on a group of people. And it's a negative one.

Groups of people do bad things all the time. If that group happens to be a protected class you simply can't criticize them w/o fear of this.

What would be racist is if he said "since they are brown, then..." But that isn't what the user said.

Not long ago in human history witch hunts swept across Europe and eventually to America. It was no small thing: millions of innocents were either murdered, tortured or imprisoned... And for what? Better to forget this history about humans exhibiting troubling psychology such as this... You might get labelled a witch yourself, or a Jew, or a racist.

To be fair, we are progressing a lot at least in the sense that racism is actually a real phenomenon, and an undesirable one, but beyond that the witch hunt psychology is part of the same thread through history.

Negative generalizations are, at best, tangentially related to racism. Racism is most fundamentally, "I think blue people are better than green people, because they're blue." Speaking negatively, or positively, of blue or green people would not be racist. Refusing to associate with any green person, because they're green, would be racist. Considering a specific blue Nobel prize winning nuclear scientist to be dumb, because blue people have a statistically lower IQ on average, would also be racist. Observing that mentioned IQ difference and considering that it would be expected to result in a lower than average distribution of aforementioned Nobel prize winning nuclear scientists, would not be racist.

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