When it comes to race and gender, oppressed people can be oppressors too | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to race and gender, oppressed people can be oppressors too

theguardian.com

55 pointsBerislavLopac29 comments

Humans are human and therefore fallible and tribal; film at eleven.

In a kind of backhanded way, this nebulous notion that “only X people can be racist” or “only the big oppressors can oppress” or “there’s only one big oppressor right now and it’s X” undercuts itself from the get-go.

Because I don’t think it has anything to do with race or oppression, it’s about power. Identifying a group, calling it racist to undermine it, and then through public humiliation and derision, force it to do some thing. That thing could be anywhere thing from better treatment and awareness, to reparations. It’s all about power.

It took me a long time to understand this. Not to say I whole-heartedly endorse it, but the sentiment is reasonable. Unfortunately, the language used elicits such visceral emotion, folks have a hard time divorcing their interpretations for a moment to hear someone out.

Certain parts of it do make sense, but it can also cause a feedback loop whereby the shift is away from concrete policy goals and towards power seeking behavior. Much of the present day political toolkit is postmodern flavored which unfortunately erodes the role of reason in communication and makes it less likely that that power is wielded towards concrete policy objectives.

> folks have a hard time divorcing their interpretations for a moment to hear someone out.

I think the key here is that in our current political landscape, "interpretation" and "hear someone out" don't really mean what they used to mean. Communication today is increasingly performative and less oriented towards synthesis and common understanding. In many of our recent political discussions, the topic hasn't been a specific policy or proposal, but a vague nebula of idea and mindsets that some would like people to adopt wholesale.

It may undercut itself from the get go, and that may be a common take down the road, but as a weapon, it’s very effective in certain times and certain places against certain people, now.

>Humans are human and therefore fallible and tribal; film at eleven.

However many seem to have missed the news.

The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

I'm getting a Chesterton vibe (big fan). I've probably read this before, I remember the twist about the cat :-)

yeah, it’s early on in Orthodoxy.

> In lumping together black and Asian people in an amorphous group assumed to have a common experience of racism, ...

> Be wary of the white, straight men who call out lesbians and women of colour as bigots...

In awe of the mental gymnastics to achieve this level of cognitive dissonance.

I don't see a need for antagonism. "Mental gymnastics" and "cognitive dissonance" are very common jabs in shallow arguments. Both of those points you're quoting parts of sound totally arguable - in a generalized sense - and not contradictory.

A lot of criticism of opinions about -isms seem to take on this form of "if you encounter a similar situation twice where the only significant outward difference is the (race/sex/etc) of the participants, then you must have exactly equal thoughts and opinions about them in every way, or else you're a hypocrite", as though in the end those situations always play out the same after the fact, have the same consequences, and have the same motivations and contexts. It's just not realistic. People love to isolate race/sex/etc as the only variable in the universe when talking about -isms, because it makes it easy to create arguments for your favored opinions and against others.

> Both of those points you're quoting parts of sound totally arguable

Her _whole_ article is how you can't lump people into a group and then she does it in her conclusion. How is that not contradictory? Do a search on twitter for 'TERF', count up how many tweets are from woman/men and then tell me it's legitimate to generalize to white, straight men.

> Be wary of the white, straight men who call out lesbians and women of colour as bigots because they refuse to comply with the version of liberation they deem appropriate, and who pat themselves on the back for being an “ally” for doing so. Their naivety gives them the luxury of childishly dividing the world into goodies and baddies. The rest of us live with the consequences.

So close, and yet so far to getting it. Using white, straight men as scapegoats only cheapens the message from the article which is that yes: making swiping generalizations is bad and that discrimination happens everywhere, even within marginalized groups towards other marginalized people.

This reminds me a phrase from the Israeli writer Amos Oz:

"For centuries, both jews and palestinians suffered from European oppression. When they achieve liberation and comes the time for them to live in peace, they can't escape behaving to each other like the Europeans did to them. The mind of the oppressed is quite often a mirror of the opressor's mind".

I believe that every hate and prejudice is learned from the experience of oppression. And it is learned both by the oppressor and oppressed. It takes a long walk under democracy to unlearn it.

Parent - child. Manager-employee. Soldier-sergeant. And on and on. It's sadly, part of what makes us human.

Why "sadly"?

We could achieve the same or even greater attrocities without ranks of any kind.

"I was only following orders"

A quick skim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(region) says Palestine was controlled by the Mamluk Sultanate since 1260, then by the Ottomans since 1516. So by "European oppression", is he referring to the brief 1915-1948 period, or the pre-1260 Crusader period, that apparently made all the difference?

"Centuries of European oppression" is a very easy anti-White dog whistle because it's often fairly accurate, so it's easy to toss it in to bludgeon a person into submission in a discussion. How unfortunate for the commenter that they peppered in the phrase in one of the few contexts where it's not especially accurate.

>For centuries, both jews and palestinians suffered from European oppression. When they achieve liberation and comes the time for them to live in peace, they can't escape behaving to each other like the Europeans did to them.

Well, "to each other" underplays that one side has been left with 1/10th their land.

A gentle reminder that the UK press, especially the Guardian, are hugely transphobic and routinely print blatant lies.

This is the entire basis of the Indian caste system in which oppressed castes play a significant role in oppressing other castes. It also makes it a much more stable system as opposed to binary oppression systems where oppressed and oppressors are neatly divided.

Obama talked about human rights and the oppressed. He then went on a war/bombing/drone/genocide spree on muslims and non-whites in more than 7 new countries ranging from Libya, Yemen (see his memoirs for the justifications on killing children), South Sudan, Somalia.... In addition, he embraced alleged anti-muslim leaders like Ang Syu Kyi (Nobel Peace prize winner) and Narendra Modi.

His genocides, actions and killings of non-whites and muslims are considered to be the hallmark of American liberal democracy and Nobel Peace prize material.

Trump the white oppressor failed to bomb one NEW muslim and non-white country.

So how would the author address this “anomaly”?

Trump is self-interested and lazy. He found no benefit to his objectives of being forever President in bombing a 'NEW' foreign country. This is why he spent so much of his time focused on combating internal enemies. This combat was just as racist as any action of American foreign policy conducted under Obama.

>This combat was just as racist as any action of American foreign policy conducted under Obama.

Really? What did this "combat" resulted to in actual terms (mean tweets aside)?

Because even for immigrant deporatations at Mexican borders, Obama had a much larger number of such. Same for police shootings.

I also like the hypocrisy and gal of playing actual bombings and murder of peoples and destruction of countries the same as the toil (and what toil exactly? in what numbers? with what impact?) of "internal enemies".

Hypothetically, Trumps administration could be biased and target deportation of dark skinned Mexicans only while Obamas administration was competent and neutral in its enforcement for the law.

This would lead to a case where the racist policy resulted in less deportations but a more humiliating and unfair treatment of deportees.

Remember the goal is not to deport fewer people, but rather to be fair minded.

A similar comparison can be made to racist cops who arrest black criminals. The issue isn't that they arrest criminals, but that they choose their targets by race alone.

It is tricky at first, but one must learn to accept both that there is only one human race, and also that some people are so bigoted that they will treat skin colors and countries of origin as excuses for denying human rights.

The article's best line is, "O’Brien ends up reinforcing the very idea he wants to challenge: that someone’s identity must define their politics." Because classical liberals are encouraged to selfishly vote along their identity lines, they become inured to the idea that we live in a society and we need to vote in ways that improve all of our lives.

I’m not sure about classical liberals, but this is generally the same concern I have with respect to the identity-obsessed strain of progressivism—that it conditions everyone to reject their broader collective identity (humans, citizens, etc) in exchange for racial identity, and to ultimately vote and lobby on behalf of their race. Further, proponents of these kinds of views regularly make arguments that suggest that race tells us about one’s politics (the same sort of idea TFA rails against), experiences, wealth/privileges, and even competence and virtue (consider the “white male” sneer). This is bad juju.

That's a good line to take away from it. I read through the article and was struggling to reconcile the premise laid down by the article with the occasional nod to the straight white man pulling all the strings.

I'm not sure how that connects to minority communities having varying levels of oppression within themselves, as there are between the many different groups that comprise LGBT and the politics within it. Or with the diverse groups of racial minorities.

That said, the point is made well and it's a problem in itself if you take an 'all people in X must be the same' mindset, and go as far as ostracising 'traitors' for not being aligned. Insular communities like that will grow to be toxic in themselves.

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