Hacker News Reader

Comment by GaryNumanVevo | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical about Robin Diangelo, I read her book a few months ago, and it only seems to be an advertisement for her services as an anti-racist instructor. Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. There are much better books for foundational education about race.

Even within her book she claims that no amount of training will solve the issue, it seems that "White Fragility" is just another way for White people to tamp down the anxiety of race relations in the United States, rather than take any meaningful action towards changing it.

If your goal is to truly understand the Black american experience, it's best to start with actual Black authors. The House That Race Built by Wahneema Lubiano is a great set of essays about race and class structures.

View on HN

There was a very interesting article by Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker last year untitled "The fight to redefine racism" which contrasts the work done by DiAngelo with the positions taken by Ibram X. Kendi. [1] Sanneh is not convinced either.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-r...

This is quite the burn:

> This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else. At least, that’s my interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo will be grateful to hear it. After all, I am what she would call a person of color, and whatever I write surely counts as “feedback.” Maybe that means she is, indeed, doing well.

I was trying to remember where I’d heard her name before and this was it. I’ll toss in my recommendation for the piece and its conclusions too. I remember finding the article balanced, humble, and reflective.

Yeah. Pick up a book by James Baldwin, or read an essay by Frederick Douglas. Read anything by black authors on the experience of their lives.

I believe strongly these are more valuable than non-black corporate anti-racist consultants...

Certainly black voices are best to understand the black experience. What I found useful from Robin DiAngelo was her description of white fragility.

Which she is certainly able to speak about.

There's also the works of Thomas Sowell.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thomas+sowell

It's really telling how during this entire BLM revival, white people have been recommending this particular book - written by a white author. Even in the midst of a racial awareness campaign, black voices are muffled.

Your post highlights something I can't grasp; your post is explicitly and openly racist, yet you are complaining about racism. Why is that?

"People are recommending a book by an author." Fixed that for you.

I'll give you the BLM, that's an instance of necessary discrimination. The rest ... if the authors advice is wrong, criticise it, if the book or person does something bad, criticise it. Don't just pick out the skin colour of the author, or of someone recommending the book, and use that as a reason why it's bad. That's racist.

[Please note I haven't read the book, and do not know the author, and am categorically not promoting either.]

You can most usefully talk about a topic you have extensive personal experience with and which forced you to think about the topic deeply.

I can usefully talk about MySQL because I used it in a multi-year project that pushed its performance to the limit. I cannot usefully talk about Cassandra - the most I have done with it is install it.

Similarly, I can usefully talk about the experience of a male Russian immigrant to the US. I cannot usefully say much about the experience of a black woman who lived in the US since birth - I have not lived it, all my sources would be second-hand; my listener would be best served by referring to the sources directly.

I may suggest that to find out about the experience of black Americans, it's best to refer to the words of actual black Americans.

>"I may suggest that to find out about the experience of black Americans, it's best to refer to the words of actual black Americans" //

Absolutely.

And to say "this opinion is not grounded in experience" is a worthy note, but doesn't make their conclusions wrong.

As a generality people suffering a situation aren't able to take a measured approach - emotion gets the better of us - so it's not just a case of experiencing a situation. Not being subject to something doesn't discredit your viewpoint.

If you tell me I need to do sharding to improve my database performance, or whatever, and I say "this is a database of Chinese people, your opinion is invalid as your not Chinese" then I'm just being xenophobic.

People can have way more in common with others of different skin colour than they have with someone of the same colour. It's a people issue.

Focusing on segregating people's arguments by skin colour, rather than by validity of their arguments is so antithetical to the whole object of removing unnecessary discrimination that's why I felt I needed to comment, and I stand by that comment.

This also made an impact on me: "Traveling While Black" on the Oculus Quest https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2121787737926354

You should be skeptical. Here’s an excellent piece from John McWhorter delving into why:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-reli...

> Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational.

It's also problematic because the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions" and various forms of otherings that effectively sow more division than actually get non-whites anywhere.

The author is particularly clever for writing a book for the target of anti-racism, because the market for "look who's racist" media is thoroughly saturated.

Since race is becoming a greater and greater issue, I imagine it will continue to become a get-rich-quick scheme for some adept to the English language, or the language of CorporateSpeak.

> the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions"

Did you pick this idea up somewhere else or think of it yourself? I've not heard that concept, and it makes way too much sense.

The term was coined in 1970:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression

I think poster was referring to the fact that workplaces are naturally fun of microaggressions regardless of race or sex, so it's easy to point the finger. It's analogous to how everybody's speeding, so everybody's guilty, and anyone can be pulled over (but usually the black person will happen to be the one pulled over).

>usually the black person will happen to be the one pulled over //

Which country are you in? Have you checked that statistic or did you assume it?

US, and no, I didn't need to check the statistic. Do you also think people shouldn't be protesting because they haven't proven black people are being targeted disproportionately by police to a 95% confidence interval?

I prefer to base my views on facts. You need to check the statistics because it's very easy to be wrong - we all have biases and limitations.

I gather statistics show USA police are not targeting black people ("damn lie and statistics" though, so I'm Caruso's about that result), contrary to how I imagined it. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it possibly means the problem is more concentrated - ie in general the police are doing well, but specific groups/officers are being highly discriminatory.

I find it CorporateSpeak to say that race is becoming a greater and greater issue. It's long been a great issue. Wars have been fought over race, and the concept of race.

> It's also problematic because the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions"

Its also the only place in adulthood where people willingly or unwillingly must work together with people different than them and not necessarily of their choosing to reach a common goal.

The only place?

Can you think of others? Maybe sports?

Charities. Church. Musical groups. Schools (PTA, etc). Local government.

None of those places is a literal requirement for sustenance, but you do need to work somewhere, and for most people, that somewhere is anywhere that will take you.

Pedantically you are mostly correct. Practically I'm not convinced your distinction is useful.

Practically speaking, having freedom of choice is a big deal. And we are free to choose our churches, whether to engage in our PTA, etc.

We're also free to find new jobs if we don't like them, but it sure is harder than those other choices.

For me it is. Everywhere else I choose who I do and do not interact with, I go to stores where only “my people” go, I live in a neighborhood where only “my people” live.

Even that common goal often ends up being an IRL McGuffin when the real point for most people is to get paid. For some, reaching that goal may be counter to their employment or workplace comfort. The common goal may not actually be so common, especially if the means to reach that goal elevates some over others, which almost certainly will happen in any hierarchy.

Your skepticism is well warranted. Unfalsifiable theory, dogma you can't question, purity tests, good vs evil, original sin, heresy, excommunication, self-flagellation and so on... It's a religion and Kafkatrap, but not yet widely recognized as such.

Further explanation:

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/intellectual-fraud-robin-d...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-haidt-on-the-cultural-...

https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-w...

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I find it interesting you choose the word 'explanation' as opposed to 'counter argument'

He also chose the word "kafkatrap", a word coined by a notorious racist.

Using a kafkatrap against an opponent you can't beat in debate when they have just pointed out the tactic is probably ill advised; perhaps try something else; Ad hominem or motte and bailey for example.

"Kafkatrap" is a meaningless term, beyond "stop calling me a racist just for saying racist things".

Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.

Well lets see... oh that's odd, that meaningless term appears to have a real meaning https://debate.fandom.com/wiki/Kafka_Trap . Now why would you be willing to lie about that?

Seems it's a perfectly accepted logical fallacy; and the only people who deny it are the sjw crowd largely because it is such a favoured tactic within their ranks.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/kafkatrap?s=t

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kafkatrap

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=kafka...

Yes those are dictionary's for definitions of words not a repository of debate tactics; if you'd checked you'd also notice that there's no entry for "motte and bailey falacy", "Appeal to Ignorance" or "appeal to authority"; funnily enough it doesnt prevent those existing either.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

Still not seeing it.

Well yes if you purely limit yourself to a single college of liberal arts list of definitions then you won't, however search engines are your friend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

And desperately clinging to any page-not-found of whatever website you can find to display it isn't exactly the most secure display of debate.

Ah yes, Wikipedia, with one source form a libertarian propaganda rag. Very reputable.

Nobody but libertarians looking for excuses for racism use that term, deal with it.

And at last you've taken my advice

> Using a kafkatrap against an opponent you can't beat in debate when they have just pointed out the tactic is probably ill advised; perhaps try something else; Ad hominem or motte and bailey for example.

Allow my to quote from one your trusted sources: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

> Ad hominem: This is an attack on the character of a person rather than his or her opinions or arguments.

Feel free to provide me wrong by showing a non-libertarian source that takes this term seriously.

Appeal to authority (points for variety at least) is a logical fallacy that I literally pointed out earlier.

You really don't understand how logical fallacies work at all, do you.

Well I must admit I haven't had as much practice at them as you have.

Ironically, you're employing a fallacious debate tactic (ad-hominem attack) while incorrectly trying to label a different debate tactic fallacious.

It describes a fallacy and have no idea who coined it. First learned of it on HN, actually.

You don't know who coined "coined", but they may well have been a racist. Are you going to stop using it if so? Does that mean it's no longer useful for communication? Are you going to investigate every word on the chance it might've been and strike those from the lexicon?

It is, in fact, not useful for communication, because it does not honestly communicate anything. It exists only to undermine people who try to call you out on making bigoted remarks. It was coined by ESR, and is popular mainly with people with a strong affinity for bigotry, like him, and also libertarians.

Don’t forgot literal washing of feet and prostration in public gatherings! Some of the scenes from these protests bear an uncanny resemblance to Easter services.

To be clear, I don't think Anti-racism isn't a kafkatrap or "religion". I take issue with the polite white-centric material made to further coddle and remove liability from future racist incidents.

Newdiscourses seems to be a website dedicated /entirely/ to taking down the author and the book. A sampling of their articles over the past 2 weeks:

"In Defense of the Status Quo"

"White Silence is NOT Violence"

"A Principled Statement of Opposition to Critical Race Theory"

"Eight Big Reasons Critical Race Theory is Terrible for Dealing with Racism"

Further investigation shows the site owner, James Lindsay makes his entire living being an activist against gender studies and critical race theory. There's an extraordinary amount of resources dedicated to pushing back against the Robin Diangelo. Having heard her speak and having read at least a bit of her book, most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance. Its insisting that you do something actually about it rather than patting yourself on the back for doing what you think is the right things. It takes a great amount of twisting about to ignore the main points, and all of the writers you linked have done so.

What you call the "dogma" of dealing with a racist culture I call people lived experience. Its heartbreaking to me how very conservative-minded and flat out defensive on issues of inclusion and race the HN community has been when the subject of race is allowed to be a thread.

In order to have a complete picture, one also has to ask which "foo/bar dominated" cultures are inclusive if white/male dominated ones aren't.

As far as I'm aware, the majority population in any country, irrespective of skin color is intolerant to various degrees toward minorities, ranging from genocide and internment camps to harassment and minor discrimination.

The US is certainly not leader of the pack, but not exactly terrible either, when one looks at the constant amount of outrage. It seems to me that a group of people in the US concerned about the topic of race in their country is projecting its distorted view of things on the planet and has furthermore chosen an approach which is doomed to fail. Good luck with that, but maybe this time the US could try to not also damage the rest of the world in the process of fighting a war on abstract nouns.

Edit:

Someone in a nuked comment said "Why on earth does one have to make a broad comparison of cultures to rank badness at racism before dealing with this instance? And are you saying 'inclusion' is quantitative or something? "

Because by doing this comparison one can check if the problem of bias is universal (yep) and ingrained (yep), therefore suggesting that focusing on black vs. white in the US is counterproductive. Instead we should do research into individual and systemic biases and see how those could be kept under control.

Punishing individuals is hilariously bad. In fact there's a direct parallel between this and safety engineering, where clueless organizations will punish an employee which made a mistake while they continue to lumber from incident to incident.

I'm not even sure what you're saying here. The US literally imported slaves against their will from Africa and had slavery endowed into the constitution via the 3/5ths compromise. Then for literally 4 centuries they were beaten and oppressed and denied rights - literally jim crow laws were taken down only decades ago.

Its literally just talking about the US here. There's no projection elsewhere - this isn't just "minority rights", this is attempting to break away from a culture of systematic oppression that half the country up until last month didn't believe was a thing!

You said "most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance."

The US is an immigration society where many white people from countries which weren't involved in US slavery and now they're all painted with the same brush. It's not reasonable for someone from say Russia to be attacked for the deeds of American slave drivers hundreds of years ago. And as far as I know white immigrants were strongly discriminated against in the US in the past two centuries.

We as Americans live in a society were responsible for. We as managers, owners and employees are responsible for the culture of the companies we own.

A Russian who moved here in 1998 certainly didn’t have anything to do with racism. But he is participating in a society that claims to be a just one, in which he will get preferential treatment over a Black person just because the color of his skin. Is that his fault? No. Is it his moral responsibility as a participant in society to help create a more just society? Yes.

That sounds like some cult thinking. Collective responsibility by just doing nothing? By virtue of your genetics at birth ?

Then you're responsible for the climate problem, the extermination of native Americans, the Vietnamese death, the Iraqi deaths, etc... ? From what you preached you can only answer "yes" to all these. Then : what do you do to make amends for all those horrible crimes?

The US has a deeply unjust society and with with the exception of some periods after WWII always has had. The US does not have any moral authority to tell other countries or people how they should deal with racism and very limited moral authority in general in the past years of the Trump presidency.

Other countries and people need not and should not accept sharing the blame for US sins against black people.

Lindsay isn't just some activist, he was one of the three authors of the "Sokal Squared" papers.

Casting those who question dogma as the other (conservative or "alt-right", commonly) is an effective silencing and compliance technique. "You're not one of us if you don't stay in lockstep" has a real chilling effect and is doing serious damage to the left. Obama warned about this too, but unfortunately wasn't well heeded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification.

And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJbrLs_8_0

I don’t necessarily think that everything needs to be put on a left to right scale. But you’re also ascribing things to me that I haven’t said.

Conservative just means you want things to stay the same or have things to back to how they were when you decided it was good enough to “conserve it”. In this case the fight is about frustration over lack of progress and lack of acknowledgement that police violence and systemic discrimination both very much exist and are actively harming black people. Most of the working world just sees it through a tiny keyhole in that there’s maybe 1 or 2 black software developers in a company of 1000. We need to get better as stewards of society and the companies we work in.

im so glad i didnt have to scroll too far to see rebuttle to the cult handbook that is "white fragility". Thank you for your post and links

did you generate this reply from hncynic?

There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income.

I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.

I'm skeptical of any American "Libertarian" especially when it comes to race. Sowell is a class-reductionist, which would make him a terrible pick for this topic.

What is a class reductionist?

Class reductionism is basically saying that disparities that appear to be due to race, gender, orientation, etc. are really just economic differences, so if you can "fix" the economic bit the rest just solves itself.

The term is, somewhat ironically, often applied in a reductionist manner.

Uh... I think that is more palatable viewpoint than blaming them on genetics

Who here blamed genetics?

Robin DiAngelo explicitly said "Biologically, race isn't real. But socially, race is a very real set of socialized worldviews shaped by segregation and superficial anatomical features. The white experience of both the majority and systemically powerful is one which normalizes a rejection of the existence of our own bias and enables us to ignore the existence of radically different lived experiences."

A bias towards normalizing whiteness and being blissfully ignorant of the lived experience of others is being blamed, not genetics.

I think that the alternative is supposed to be official policy of pushing some groups away and unconscious racism/sexism.

So it's not really about race, then, but about politics all along? I think you'd agree with Sowell a lot more than you imagine in that case!

Sowell has the advantage of being black, which makes his view closer to home than the vast majority of anti-racism activists, who seem to frequently be white people telling other white people what black people find offensive (see: comments on the GitHub master/main discussions).

Sowell also ends up on the receiving end of genuine racism, at least according to his own claims, in particular racism of the form "why are you conservative and telling black people to solve your own problems when you're black?", as if being black actually requires him to be on the left, or makes him some sort of race traitor if he isn't.

On the contrary, there's not a lot of money to be made, and people constantly question it.

Would-be spoilers get educated about their own unrealized bias, racism continues to be a huge problem in this country, activists are vindicated and the world moves on.

Can someone get me an actual number so I know what to think?

Estimated at $8 billion dollars a year [0].

I found this book review [1] to be spot-on with my reading of the DiAngelo book, and this is also where I learned of the above estimate from the Washington Post.

> As a business journalist, however, I’ve chronicled the slow progress people of color have made in the corporate world, even as companies spend, by one measure, more than $8 billion a year on diversity initiatives.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/despite-spending-bill...

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-is...

For comparison, US film industry revenue is around $11 billion a year.

Nitpick: the $11B is US domestic ticket sales only. The US film industry is much bigger than US domestic ticket sales, however. (International ticket sales, cable licensing, etc.)

This is more or less obvious given that the top 10 grossing movies in 2019 took in ~ $13B in global ticket sales and < $2B of that went to non-US studios. (Also nuts is the percentages of 2019 global ticket sales attributable to the Avengers franchise and Disney.)

In 2017 US film industry revenues were ~$43B according to

https://deadline.com/2018/07/film-industry-revenue-2017-ibis...

The executive coaching industry is $16B/year. (And the film industry is in the hundreds of billions. That's just ticket sales, which are a tiny fraction of revenue.)

i don't think we're at the diversity training incorporated stage yet, so while there may be a lot of money to be made and more to come currently I assume what is being made is a lot of very comfortable livings.

That said while I haven't read the DiAngelo book the scenario I imagine for situations like this is generally not someone waking up and saying I will write something to get some money out of these people but rather I will write something about this situation, later getting offers of more and more money and then behaviorism takes control of the journey.

It is difficult to get someone to change what they're doing once they start getting paid for doing it.

This is of course all separate from whether I might agree with the book if I read it. I can still agree 100% with someone and think that their perspective is constrained by how they have begun to profit from it.

Keep in mind when people give you examples of industry numbers like games and movies when they compare it to something funded by workers income tax.

What would convince you otherwise? Like what would suffice in order to convince someone like you that massive sums are spent on this?

Should be in relative terms to other aspects, like health care or should it be in absolute values?

Revenue isn't profit. The executive coaching industry is far bigger and it's not remotely a cash cow.

Revenue and profit implies business, I am talking pure funds transferred from taxes. What does that fall under?

> I'll be contrarian

Why do right-leaning libertarians always have to pretend they're being contrarians?

It would be clearer to just say something like "if you're interested in a conservative take on this issue, check out Thomas Sowell."

Relax, I was contrarian in contrast to the parent, why bring your political baggage into the mix?

I doubt your definition of "right leaning libertarian", belongs to someone who adheres to pragmatism, meritocracy, multiracialism and Asian values or communitarianism, right?

> why bring your political baggage into the mix?

That is my point. People were having a discussion with content and you dropped into a stock political response.

Leave your baggage out of it with your claim that people espouse anti-racism for the money, your shots at high tax countries and your need to link to political dogma.

I get that it's free karma on HN, but it lowers the quality of the discussion.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt-BM

contrarian =/ smart. Sometimes you are objecting for the sake of objecting.

Not discussing the content, but you picked a 3 minute clip out of a 36 minute long videos as if the clip was pre-made to discredit him, I understand certain people fear a black man with a contrarian point of view as it disturbs their senses, but this is a bit too much.

I didn't even watch the clip, but if a THREE MINUTE clip is discrediting, you're either discredited on your ideas or catastrophically bad at presenting them in the format.

Right, and nothing can be ever taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative in this day and age? Seriously, I have to argue that context is a thing?

Nothing about his political denial of science is out of context. If the video was 30 min of him denying climate change or 3, that doesn't change anything.

> No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income.

Questioning those things is basically mainstream conservative discourse. You’re questioning them right now.

Right, the last guy to do that, got fired from Google.

Damore worked at Google, i.e. in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has a certain political bent (left), and running counter to it has real consequences.

But other places in the country have a different political bent (right). Chick-fil-A's anti-LGBT stance actually increased its sales (for a time, anyway). [1]

You can see this effect play out similarly when Trump says something that rankles the Twitters of Silicon Valley and New York, but which gets him even bigger approval ratings in the red states. All this to say - your points might feel like activism in the Bay Area, but that doesn't make the above poster's claim that it's mainstream conservative discourse false.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people

Criticism doesn't only come from conservatives. To think otherwise is fundamental to those people believing these "things".

> You’re questioning them right now.

... very cautiously, very anonymously.

Ah yes, the widely known and widely invested capital pursuit of opposing institutional bias. Definitely the big money

The diversity industry is worth $8 billion per year these days. So... yeah.

(Also FYI, it's not about opposing institutional bias, it's about signaling and corporate power games.)

Where’d you get this number? First time hearing about it.

Chapo Trap House episode about the White Fragility book.

And for some strange reason, for equal-rights activists it is abad thing to make a living and earn money fighting for these rights. The usual argument is always "they are paid to further an agenda", indirectly undermining the message, the messanger and the issue at hand.

This doesn't seem to aplly for the otherside. People like Alex Jones make a load of money representing the opposite opinion. For him, making money all of a sudden isn#t a problem anymore.

No. It's perfectly fine (and even amazing) to make a living from a cause that is important to you.

But it's disingenuous to believe that activists 1) will not see what "obsess" them everywhere (that's a common psychological bias) and 2) will not try to make their cause as important as they can by inflating the numbers.

You assume some sort of industry I’m talking

Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. They’re is getting paid.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-revolution-comfor...

lol are you kidding me? If "anti-racism" was actually accepted, then we would have much less racism. If gender-science were actually accepted, then we would have less discrimination against trans folks.

First of, what is ascribed of homophobia and racism today is a moving goal post.

When transgendered Vietnamese Jane Doe got assaulted and robbed, racism and homophobia was at play

But not when it happened to Andy Ngo.

Certain animals are better than others and thus get to set the feeding time tables, ya?

> Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything.

I admit I only just started reading her book, so can't comment on that, but I would say that's not the takeaway I got from any of the online videos or interviews I've seen of her, most definitely not from the youtube one I linked.

The video you linked espouses the same ideas. To be anti-racist isn't to simply understand the things one can and cannot say. To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power.

It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired. Anti-racism provides the tools to contextualize and understand why certain phrases are racist or biased.

> Anti-racism provides the tools to contextualize and understand why certain phrases are racist or biased.

Can you expand on this a little bit? It sounds a lot like:

>It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired

With extra steps. What are these tools and how do they avoid accidentally putting the cart in front of the horse in terms of goals vs. reality?

It's the difference between actually understanding what makes something offensive, and not just the knowledge that it is offensive.

> To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power.

I thought “fundamentally understanding the lived experiences of the black community” was impossible for non-black people. What white person has achieved this goal? If none, is it impossible for a white person to be “anti-racist?”

I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.

>What white person has achieved this goal?

I know at least one person who has.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/27/black-like-me-...

I know it's not possible for everyone to do what John Howard Griffin did, but reading that book and living that experience vicariously can be a start.

I don't think that's the best example. How does one separate: "They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person" and "They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person"

Rachel Dolezal?

I read this book. He fooled people both black and white.

FWIW, I think reading it would help some people understand.

You just made his point. "They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person" and "They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person" translate to "They're treating me poorly because of the color of my skin".

Fundamental being the key operative here. Understanding the Black lived experience is an approximation of the actual experience. Of course there's no singular Black experience, but there are fundamentals underlying all, which can be understood and approximated by people with non-Black lived experiences.

> I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.

I’ve always been a “treat others as you would like to be treated” person. But a lot of this anti-racist concept is appearing on all my pod casts. And now I have to see race?

I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts. Frankly I wish we’d stop importing US culture. Australia isn’t perfect but we largely agree on things like universal health care and getting rid of guns. So I think we can combat racism without having to look at the US for guidance.

> I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts.

Based on that statement alone I think I can accurately conclude you are not an indigenous Australian (aboriginal).

Seems they share quiet a lot in common with native Americans from stealing of their lands/displacement, mass killings, enslavement By colonists, to ongoing racism that continues to carry on today.

I’m not indigenous. I said we have to combat racism. I never said there are not similarities with what indigenous people went through.

But it seems racism in the US has a lot of deeper cultural implications so they came up with anti-racism. Australia needs to figure out what equality means to us and make our own cultural changes. Not copy the US.

Excuse me if I except the Australian solution to be "ignore it" for a few more decades. How can the cultural implications be worse than they are in Australia?

I'm surprised there are any natives left there at all, the way they have been treated.

American concepts around these things are not based on native Americans history, but on African American history. It is true that Americans tend to project own culture and history into other groups and then get offended when those tell them "wait our history and prejudices are different".

Even more, Americans assume that sexism elsewhere must be the same as sexism in America. They just seems to be completely confused about other countries having somewhat different gender stereotypes and different expectations on genders. The end result is that local sexism is combined with American version of sexism - end result is not more equality, it is less of it.

Yeah. It's funny how the pro-diversity, pro-egalitarianism, etc don't see their ideological blind spot when they use the same tools (propaganda and medias) to propagate their views of society, and what is Good and Wrong, in the same imperialist way as their conservative ennemis ...

What does understanding one community extremely well have to do with anti-racism?

Anti-racism is being against making judgement based on race. Nothing more. No laundry list of buzz words or actions.

Understanding 'the Black community' doesn't even make sense at all. Like all Black people are part of this community where if you truly understand and experience the worst pain only then you can start to find racism in society and yourself.

Racism can come from anyone and be directed to anyone or group.

Exactly. And the irony is that by saying such things, they essentialize black people, denying their individual qualities, merits and experiences...like you know...back in the slavery days...

Baldwin said that the only way for a black American to know the racist or anti-racist stance of white America is by the state of their institutions. There is something to be said, from our perspective, for people simply exemplifying anti-racist behavior, because I can never know what's truly in your heart; I can only know you by what you do.

If you learn anti-racist behavior and perform it only to manipulate, eventually you're caught, with ramifications for your life or your legacy.

In any case, white America certainly needs to try to understand black America better, but also of great importance is that they begin to understand themselves better. Their history (e.g., "The Lost Cause" is a myth), their personal and communal psychology (e.g., white fragility and guilt), and their behavior (e.g., white flight and opportunity hoarding); and to square that with what they claim are their higher ideals.

Maybe it would be more productive to hire more black people and give them more venture funding to start businesses?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com