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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as awfully glib. My parents aren't racists and they empathize with the police reforms that BLM is advocating for (so do I).

But they were raised with the belief that racism was due to prejudice. To them, racism is judging someone by their skin color / background rather than the actions of that individual.

They don't buy into the idea of microaggressions and implicit bias. To many nowadays that makes them racist individuals. To me that begs the question, what behavior today might be seen as racist decades from now?

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"We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.

The self-interest: The Portuguese had to justify their pioneering slave trade of African people before the pope.

The racist idea: Africans are barbarians. If we remove them from Africa and enslave them, they could be civilized.

"We can understand this very simply with slavery. I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.”

https://theundefeated.com/features/ibram-kendi-leading-schol...

We're absolutely doing things that future generations will find abhorrent. And as our thinking as humans evolves, I hope we'll also change our behavior. But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. When we are aware that behaviors and symbols are hurtful to other humans, and we genuinely believe that other people should be able to live without fear, then we should change both.

We're not going to get it 100% right, or find 100% of the situations where we're screwing it up, or even come up with the right solutions right away, but it's too often that conservatives simply want to throw their hands up and either downplay or outright ignore the problem in order to say it's not solvable or not worth solving. That's just cowardice, and we can do better.

>When we are aware that behaviors and symbols are hurtful to other humans, and we genuinely believe that other people should be able to live without fear, then we should change both.

Some of us believe that the answer to a world which is chock full of scary things beyond our control is to learn to live internally without fear, not to impose our personal delicate sensibilities on upon others. This isn't cowardice and this kind of shaming only turns moderates away from your cause. Furthermore nonsense like microaggressions are effectively a form of thought control and when whiteness is treated as some original sin together with a completely subjective system of rules you have a social structure which is effectively designed to be abused for the transfer of power, while ostensibly claiming to be a champion of equality.

Are you really surprised that people turn away from an ideology which treats them as though they owe the world something, or need to change their behavior, for the color of their skin? We used to call that racism. Now it's increasingly normalized and shoved in our faces if we want corporate work. Frankly, people are tired of the bullshit and I'm worried about how far the pendulum is going to swing back.

Again, I ask. How do you think people of color have felt for the entirety of this nation? WE the people are tired of the bullshit. Enough is enough.

Anger is not proof of anything, and that's something this entire movement does not understand. There is fundamentally no evidence to support the notion that equality of opportunity leads to equality of outcome. That goes for the justice system.

I imagine you're very much in favor of proof but also very willing to reject foundational sociological tenets.

If you mean tabula rasa then yes, that's obviously nonsense.

That's why I can never be a conservative. I think sometimes the left is absolutely full of it, but the voices I hear from the right sound as if they're saying "let's do nothing about our current social problems," at least to my ear.

I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress.

>I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress

Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. The fact that there is a problem doesn't mean that someone has to do something when there's nothing productive to be done.

People are apparently unaware that we are living in an unprecedented globalist diversity experiment, and there's no reason to believe that forcing disparate cultures to live in such close proximity to each other will end positively. In fact history has repeatedly shown the opposite.

> Progress for the sake of progress is not progress

In our current moment, it's progress for the sake of not letting police get away with murder.

What part of the unprecedented peace we find ourselves in makes you uncomfortable?

His "people" weren't getting murdered, obviously, so this is all inconvenient.

"I'm all about change, but this is heading in the wrong direction!"

- Conservatives at every step of the way as the rest of us have been busy correcting society's worst injustices

That's a little racist, don't you think?

I can imagine some day in the future where people start tearing down statues because they were meat eaters.

> [...] too often that conservatives simply want to throw their hands up and either downplay or outright ignore the problem in order to say it's not solvable or not worth solving. That's just cowardice, and we can do better.

I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of conservatism. My perception is that conservatives disagree with me over the problem set, not the idea that we should solve problems.

Well, I'm not trying to delve into the deeper philosophy of conservatism -- it's moot for what I'm talking about. I mean I see all these obvious problems in America, and the right doesn't seem to have real solutions to solve them.

If I'm being honest, most of the conservatives I've talked to seem more interested in undermining progress because it's coming from the other side of the aisle, or because it implies that government should have a hand in helping it along.

Out of curiosity, how many conservatives have made someone lose their job this week for having an incorrect opinion?

Sometimes conservatives even agree on the problems set, but disagree with the proposed solutions. That isn't just obstructionism. If you actually care about solving problem X, then a "solution" that won't actually help isn't useful. Opposing the proposed solution doesn't mean that you don't care about problem X, or that you're part of the problem, or that you hate those who suffer under X, or whatever. It may mean that you think the proposed solution won't work, and that pouring all our time, energy, and money into that solution isn't the answer.

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