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Comment by Digory | Hacker News Reader

Then, with respect, you are not listening to and understanding the people to the left of you. They deny that there is a mere undercurrent of latent intentional bigotry by those in power (racism).

Rather, they affirm that America is a system of power and social relations that keep the underclass just as effectively subjugated as slavery, without the need for intentional bigotry. And they intend to undo it.

George Washington is not being removed from school names because there is a tail problem with bigotry that we’ve made progress on. They believe they must deny Washington any place of honor, so that BIPOC children feel safe enough to succeed.

Of course we have not “solved racism.” But it is not a straw man to point out the false religion of the iconoclasts claiming to have a solution.

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Reference(s)?

The article in question provides several examples of public figures making these points.

I've personally encountered people and organizations that . Several who, for instance, decried white flight on one hand but on the other hand criticized whites (and Asians) moving into poor neighborhoods in San Francisco. One company I worked at set up a system of reserving headcount specifically for underrepresented demographics, while simultaneously declared that any notion that the company extended preferential treatment to said groups was hateful and not acceptable.

I think these people are well-intentioned but are too scared to confront controversy or navigate nuance in their views. So they resort to this sort of contradiction to try and avoid it.

I don't see the point. You're already ignoring the ones FTA.

There are two references in the TFA. Both of them are books. I haven't read them, so I will concede that these two books endorse the point of view being described.

However, McWhorter makes the claim that third-wave racism is mainstream. The existence of two books endorsing a point of view is not evidence that this point of view is mainstream, or even widespread. If it were, then flat-eartherism would be mainstream.

>I haven't read them, so I will concede that these two books endorse the point of view being described.

Better yet, read them! They answer your question.

>The existence of two books endorsing a point of view is not evidence that this point of view is mainstream.

Since "mainstream" is a judgement call, I don't think anyone can directly demonstrate that to your liking. If you're genuinely curious about this subject, this would be a good time to do some reading.

> Better yet, read them! They answer your question.

What question is that? I don't see how reading these books could possibly persuade me of anything other than there are two people who espouse some overly extreme ideas with regards to racism. And I will happily concede that without reading them. So I was wrong when I said that "absolutely no one" believes this crap. Two people believe it. Maybe even 100. Maybe even 1000.

But McWhorter claims that third-wave anti-racism is mainstream (his word) and so far I have seen zero evidence of that.

Between The World and Me spent over 100 weeks in the NYT bestseller list. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the other book cited, wrote another book, How To Be An Antiracist, which was a bestselling book in the U.S. 2020. Another bestselling book in this vein was White Fragility. Check out the sales figures from May-June here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/22/sales-o...

To which proposition?

That third-wave racism is mainstream. That there are large numbers of people who subscribe to the ten points that McWhorter lists.

Which of the ten are not mainstream?

Surely you agree some are held by significant numbers of people. Take his #3 for example. You haven’t heard people claiming “Silence is violence?” While decrying the Karens’ inability to just listen?

> You’d deny there are a significant number of people who believe three, for example?

"Silence about racism is violence."

Yes, I am highly skeptical that a significant number of people profess to believe this. It sounds like clear hyperbole to me.

Teen Vogue: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-black-people-speak-up-fo...

CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-silence-on-social-media-w...

Houston Chronicle: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/Speaking-up-ag...

Here is the Google scholar search, to show that the phrase is widespread, and not particularly used as hyperbole among scholars. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=“silence+is+viole...

So, beauty magazines, mainstream press, and the academy. What part of that is not widespread?

Ed: more, since this was only 1 for 4, in your mind. College administrators: https://www.naspa.org/blog/silence-is-violence-why-using-our...

Hockey players. https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/mark-fraser-racis...

Twin Cities teenagers, inspired by BLM protests: https://www.twincities.com/2020/07/22/roseville-teens-keep-m...

The editor of Governing Magazine. https://www.governing.com/now/A-Shattered-Complacency-When-S...

Sophie Turner, as seen in the Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8395851/Pregna...

What, exactly, is your quantum of proof here?

I followed all of your links. In the first two, the word "violence" appears nowhere in the text. There is a photo of a cardboard sign with the slogan "White Silence is violence" but that proves nothing. I can find photos of all kinds of crazy slogans on signs.

The Houston Chronicle story does feature an interview with Cherry Steinwender, executive director of the Center for Healing Racism, explicitly endorsing this point of view. That is the first actual data point I have seen.

The Google Scholar search brings up a lot of articles containing the phrase "silence is violence" but a lot of them are red herrings having nothing to do with the matter at hand.

So that's one valid data point. Better than nothing, but still a long way from a self-evidently mainstream point of view as McWhorter claims.

For what my anecdote is worth, I have seen sentiment like this across lots of social media, and it has gotten louder since the protests in June. I have even seen echoes of it on Facebook Workplace, where there has been a clear and strong encouragement to become more 'antiracist'. I do not think that this is hyperbole.

The slogan "Silence is violence" was all over 2020. We must move in different circles.

Just because a slogan is "all over" doesn't mean that people actually believe in its literal meaning. It's kind of like the difference between "black lives matter" and "all lives matter". The literal meaning of both of these slogans is clearly true and so on their face they are not at odds with each other. But there is a sub-text to both slogans that pits them against each other.

Likewise, "Silence is violence" doesn't literally mean what it says. What the people who recite it actually mean, I suspect, is that if you do not actively speak out against racism then you are complicit in it, which is a not-entirely-unreasonable position.

But McWhorter was not talking about the slogan. His wording presents it as a literal truth.

> But McWhorter was not talking about the slogan. His wording presents it as a literal truth.

You're making that up. This is everything he said about the slogan: "3. Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own." There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he is forcing a literal meaning of the phrase.

Originally you said "I am highly skeptical that a significant number of people profess to believe this." Now that your claim has been proven false, you're moving the goal posts to "people don't believe in its literal meaning" and trying to pretend that McWhorter suggested otherwise. Yet you accuse McWhorter of strawmanning. Ironic.

> There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he is forcing a literal meaning of the phrase.

Actually there is: the inclusion of the words "about racism". "Silence is violence" is a catchy slogan. "Silence about racism is violence" is less catchy, so it is not at all implausible that he did not intend it to be read as a slogan, but rather an actual literal assertion.

I'm at a loss to see how one could rationally arrive at that conclusion. It's self-evident from the article that McWhorter meant the phrase in the same sense as it's commonly understood. Anything else would be pointless, since he's discussing contemporary usage of the phrase.

One should generally try to figure out what the author's intended meaning was, rather than twist the meaning into something that's easy to argue against but the author would never approve of.

> Which of the ten are not mainstream?

All of them except #3 and #10, and neither of those are contradictions (the idea that #10 is involves the fallacy of division, the idea that #3 is...IDK what the shortest route to that would be; mistaking “a > b” for “b = 0”, metaphorically, I guess.)

And that's for “mainstream among radical antiracists” not, mainstream-mainstream.

> That third-wave racism is mainstream.

That antiracism can be meaningfully analyzed in waves and that, if it is, what McWhorter describes as Third Wave Antiracism is meaningfully one of them are all, for that matter.

AFAICT “Third Wave Antiracism” is just something McWhorter latched on to because it provides an excuse to dust off the template of standard establishment and right-wing critiques of Fourth Wave Feminism, including the implicit acknowledgement that the previous waves were good, and deploy them in defense of the continued neglect of the marginalized by elites in favor of victim and advocate blaming.

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