Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

> What if we didn't encourage a world in which people identified with and advocated for their own race?

I think you're flipping cause and effect here.

We can see plenty of examples in the history of the US of people, when left otherwise unencumbered, either ignored the needs of others at best or put their own race first at worst. The idea of segregation isn't being introduced here, existing segregation and related behaviors are being responded to. They aren't saying "this man is unable to perform this role due to his race" in a racist-against-this-person way, they're putting additional structural checks in place as a preventative measure.

So here people are trying to make that structurally more difficult. Which is arguably a more realistic and rational choice than simply saying "things will be fine if we get better people."

View on HN

I don't disagree with a lot of your above reply, but this part in particular picked my interest, mostly because I don't understand how its not racist.

> They aren't saying "this man is unable to perform this role due to his race" in a racist-against-this-person way, they're putting additional structural checks in place as a preventative measure.

Its not about the intention of the emitter, its about the receiving end of it.

It seems that if we flip this so that the receiving end is part of a minority we would all think this is utterly racist independent of the intention, how is it not?

edit: typo

I understand what you're saying, and to be clear I'm not suggesting that woke progressives invented segregation. But the racial lanes that divided us historically have been progressively weakened--indeed, "racial progress" is largely synonymous with desegregation. So the idea that we can make racism/segregation "structurally more difficult" by reinforcing racial lanes is completely paradoxical.

Can we not agree that categorizing people by their race is going to reinforce their racial identity at the expense of a broader collective human/national identity? And can we not agree that reinforcing racial identities and weakening the collective identity is going to create competition among and animosity between the different racial groups? And can we not agree that it is this racial animosity that births all of the evils of racism? If we can agree here, then surely this does the opposite of making segregation/racism "structurally more difficult"?

> Which is arguably a more realistic and rational choice than simply saying "things will be fine if we get better people."

Desegregation isn't "things will be fine if we get better people"; it's the active dissolving of racial lanes ("dismantling racist structures" might be a good phrase if it weren't coopted to mean the exact opposite). And it has been the only thing that has worked so far, so why should we think that it's a worse choice than segregation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com