Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

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Diversity initiatives are like a graduated social tax. As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color. Just like I can pay more in income taxes than people in different financial situations.

It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.

Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.

What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.

"As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color."

How is this true? What if someone is a broke straight white man with three kids and someone else LGBTQ person of color is a young childless heir of fortune? How is the first person possibly privileged in comparison with the second one?

Looking from Europe, America seems to be very determined to recast its very obvious class problem as a race (or even gender) problem, even if it means introducing disadvantages based on immutable characteristics AGAIN. Two wrongs do not make a right and this farce will bite you again in the future, just like slavery and old style racism did.

I mean if you compare a rich person to a poor person yes the rich person is going to come out ahead in most social metrics but we're not speaking of wealth inequality, but social divides outside of it.

That said, in the United States, non-white men were systemically marginalized and prevented from participation in society to the same degree. There are numerous examples of this over the last four centuries, but they did not decrease in fervor until about a generation ago. For many reasons, our class divide is correlated to our racial divide. That doesn't mean we don't need to fix both, just that the there are two problems to fix there.

Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide. Is it so hard to recognize that we have different social problems, and a different history? And that things we talk about might be colored one way, because race, gender, and sexual orientation impact real people on a daily basis? Do you reject the idea that bigotry exists independent of class and it's something we need to work on?

"Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide."

That is the Internet - Americans commenting on Europe, Europeans on Islam, Muslims on Israel, Israelis on India, Indians on China etc. The distance may make you wrong, but it also may make you notice more general outlines of the forest you are commenting upon, while the locals see only individual trees.

Theoretically, complex societies should be able to fix multiple problems at once. In practice, it is very easy for one topic to exhaust ALL the oxygen in public debate.

2020 was all about race and other immutable characteristics in America. Among all that, class problems such as enormous healthcare bills that destroy lives every day, are basically forgotten.

Of course that there are many facets of bigotry out there. But: would you rather be a black upper middle class than a white unemployed person without good marketable skills?

These days, I would say that the answer is very different from the KKK days.

There are still absolutely situations where I'd prefer to be the first person over the second. For example, when interacting with a police officer, or when visiting certain towns. Or when attempting to get medical care (there's strong evidence to suggest that physicians are worse at treating black patients, and are prone to ignoring complaints from women, independent of class).

While class problems do, absolutely, exist in the US, race problems also exist.

In America, class isn't just about how much money you have. It's also about what accent you speak with, where you went to school, and very obviously what you look like. Many people who aren't necessarily familiar with how this works have an idea that money is all that matters, and that e.g. a black woman has the same opportunity as anyone else to attend the right schools and speak with the right accent and then get a high paying job at Google, and thereby enter the highest level of the professional class. But of course, you can see in this very thread many examples of how someone who has done all of these things can be considered to not have earned the right to speak out or have academic disputes with prominent people.

The first problem is you’re making the issue worse, not better. It feels good to some white men to publicly announce that they are unworthy of anything positive in their life, but if anything is reductionist, it’s that. Trying to justify racism to combat disproportionate representation (which is not an indication of racism or bias whatsoever, and we know this) is the type of evil behavior (not to mention mental gymnastics) that have no place in a society that has made so much progress. Also, your usage of “caste” is highly inappropriate.

> It doesn't bother me

How fortunate for you. On the other hand, other people are hurt by the explicitly racist policies you endorse. You don’t speak for them.

> in my own caste

Why don’t you speak for yourself, instead of speaking for others and assuming they’re “in your caste”, whatever that means?

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