Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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The specific case of “White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them” isn't the greatest cause for a deletion and a ban (albeit temporary). Far worse things are said all the time without a peep. It seems like a case for a warning rather than a block.

I don't expect consistency. There's just too much to do. And for all I know the user already had at least one warning, in which case a (temporary) ban isn't unreasonable. It would shift the burden of proof to say that they're going after that kind of racism and not other kinds.

I'll note that I have said similar things myself. It obviously doesn't apply to every single white male (I am one myself), but I've seen it happen so much that I've said the same hyperbole. And if they wanted to warn me, then worse when I continued, I'd accept that -- as long as I had reason to think that they were also applying at least roughly similar standards to other people.

Maybe if it was "Some white men", but to make a blanket, generic statement like that about a single group defined by sex and race seems pretty clearly to be hate speech to me.

Just imagine another description prefixed by another color and another sex and think how that would go down.

I don't think racial identity is commutive. People seem to think it's commutive where if you swap the values the classification of racism remains the same, and I disagree with that. I don't fully understand it yet, but I think it's because our society on whole (in the United States) is sufficiently racist that it invalidates the premise of the substitution being commutive.

Where commutivity of addition is a + b = b + a.

Commuitivity of racism would be black person called a white person something bad for behavior x which is not equivalent to white person called black person something bad for same behavior x.

In this case "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" in response to Liam Neeson’s confession that he once roamed the streets looking for Black men to harm. Is not equivalent in a sense of the speaker being racist as "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them" in response to (I'm making up a fictional situation to find some equivalent scenario) where let's say Denzel Washington saying a confession that he once roamed the streets looking for White men to harm. Do they have racial overtones? Yes. Are they equivalent? Absolutely not. The world Liam Neeson lives in is a white person's world where the dominant culture is white and a black person has to be searched for. He was caught in his mind demonizing black people and being racist searching for them to harm for it. In this hypothetical Denzel Washington is clearly a minority, not only targeted and put upon by white people but also other minorities. To find a white person, he only has to step outside and walk a block at best.

Even the construction of this sentence seems so ridiculous: "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them". Black people have had to deal with racism and being the odd person out due to their race since they gained social awareness as a child. They've dealt with that BS long since being alive. White people like Liam Neeson "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" makes sense since he's encountered so few black people and he's built up this false belief about Black people from the racist media and his social group and he has to try to find black people to hurt.

:%s/white/mid_white/g :%s/black/white/g :%s/mid_white/black/g

is not valid.

A guy living in Japan who is not Japanese is greatly discriminated against, much worse relatively than black people in USA. However if said guy goes around in Japan beating up Japanese people I'd still say he was an insecure racist even though all institutions are against him.

In your example I would say his anger is reasonable even while it is being misdirected. I can empathize with that expression of anger even if it is ultimately misguided, counter productive, and ultimately probably feeding and perpetuating the racist stereo type.

While the Japanese person in Japan being racist against this non-Japanese person and seeking him out to beat him up deserves no such empathy. This person would be the more misguided of the two and is the racist initiator.

The two are simply not equivalent. I'm pointing out that people think it's an equivalence relation based upon commutivity of the races, and that is wrong.

Racists say "see they're being racist too" as if they are equivalent. They aren't.

Thanks, this general idea is inescapably true and constantly ignored in favor of trying to score points in shallow arguments. I just wanted to say that I still think the example is reasonably bannable, despite not being equivalent to a racially inverted example.

Using "some" is a pretty thin fig leaf. It may be technically correct, but it leaves an enormous amount of wiggle room such that the person can say "I meant a few" but people can hear "practically all". It might be sufficient to tip a moderation judgment from "racist" to "just barely not racist enough", but I don't think it substantially alters what was said.

And that's exactly what's being discussed here: what people hear, regardless of the language. That's precisely what "white fragility" is all about: the way some white men jump on every perceived slight. Because there are so many of us and we're so relatively powerful, people hear us when we say it, when less favored groups are dismissed.

So when you say "what if it were some other group", the fact is that we're not some other group. When minorities say "We demand equal rights" and white men say "Well, if you're getting more rights, then so should we", you can understand why people get grumpy.

There isn't an easy general solution. But in going about looking for a better one, it does help to listen to what people rather than just the surface meaning of the words. The surface meaning is often the least important.

Since you seem to have been inappropriately influenced by Robin DiAngelo’s White Guilt scam, I suggest you also get the perspective of a far more qualified black man and check out “White Guilt” by Shelby Steele.

A few points.

By saying "all" you leave no room for a generically accused group to have members that can feel they are being unfairly assigned a behaviour they may not be conducting. This flames the fires and creates more us and them, because now some (in this case, white men) then might feel, well these are bad people, they don;t deserve xyz, because they continually accuse me in no uncertain terms of doing/being something that is not true. Quickest way to turn someone bad, is tell them they are bad.

Power. Power is in the eye of the beholder, what some people feel is power, the holder may feel is an entrapment or inescapable obligation. Unil recently, even now in many places, if I as a man valued to stay at home with my children and raise them day to day, I may well not have the "power" to enact such an outcome, but it only matters if the power to make that choice is important to you.

This raises the issues about rights. Many "rights" shouldn't be rights for anyone, they should be opportunities. Not a whole lot of things in life are really rights, you have to work for them, taking the opportunity. When these opportunities are denied or deliberately stacked against a section of society, thats when rights are trampled on.

Whic leads to my last point, just because a section of society was treated badly historically, doesn't gie them the right to be treat others as less to make up for it, that is not called equality, it is called revenge. And revenge only perpetuates the cycle by creating inequality, but now the roles are reversed and if thats how it's going to be an undamped isolation will ocur and no resuluinevery achieved.

Straight away he labeeling by salient differences has to sto to stop the grouping, which is the root of much of the problems.

Anyone who makes ridiculous statements like White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them should not be taken seriously by the intellectually honest. It’s an absurd statement and deserves excoriating - as would you, in my opinion, if, as you say, you made such an asinine and racist suggestion, especially as a white male who should know it’s demonstrably false (you haven’t seen it happen by the way, what you saw was a failure in your own understanding and the limits of your capabilities to empathize).

Yet it deserves neither a warning nor a ban. Even more ridiculous than the statement itself is the idea that someone needs to protect our eyes from seeing it, and that FB’s random content moderator contractor knows what is best for us and will be our protector. I am familiar with someone who used to do content moderation working for Cognizant in AZ. He seems plenty likable, but he is certainly not someone who knows what opinions will hurt me. And even if he were, I shouldn’t expect to be protected from hurt feelings when engaging controversial topics. That’s for me to navigate, and if it proves more than I can handle, it’s incredibly easy to block people.

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