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Comment by bayfullofrays | Hacker News Reader

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Would you please not post ideological rants to HN, like this and your other recent comments? That's definitely not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of ideology, because doing it destroys the intellectual curiosity this site exists for. So if you could please (re-)read the guidelines and not use HN that way, we'd appreciate it.

But that's a racist and sexist statement.

You are fundamentally seeing people as 'White' or 'Men' instead of as they are, people. A persons ability to be racist or the victim of racism is solely dependent on if they are committing racist acts or having racist acts committed against them. Their race has nothing to do with it.

Although I don't really have a dog in this fight, it's important to note that the contemporary literature in the fields of philosophy, sociology and critical race theory generally considers racism to be involving not only a prejudicial element, but also "acts" (it's important to not restrict racism to acts but also to include ideologies) directed from a position of power. The characteristics (i.e qualitative differences) absolutely matter, along with the history which forms both the perception of what's being said (giving words and actions their meaning) but also may provide context for the action to point towards analysing the act critically.

Regarding a related topic, there's a wonderful paper by Swanson[0] on the use of slurs (in particular racist ones) and the ideologies they hail, and the ideologies hailed absolutely depend on who's using them, in a similar way that the use-mention distinction most people would agree exists.

But there's another point here: you have directly assumed a subjectivist-individualist interpretation of racism (and perhaps even race, for a fresh look at the relation between race and racism see "Racecraft" by Fields and Fields[1]), but while you may account for individual actions of prejudice based on "race", it won't account for structural (going by structure driven through ideology) interpretations of racism.

[0] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ericsw/research/Swanson,%20Sl...

[1] https://www.versobooks.com/books/1645-racecraft

Historical period extends around 5000 years ago and has plenty of examples that disprove your theory. From the Old Egypt always in war against other mediterranean people, to how the Roman empire talked about the so called barbarians or the proto-Islamic expansion in the caucasus and south of Europe.

Paraphrasing Prince, you can find snakes in every color, every nationality and size.

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