Comment by esja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esja | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with benlumen. I think there is a group which is trying very hard to redefine what racism means, in order to advance a different ideology. It seems to be working, at least in America.

For those people, To Kill a Mockingbird is very dangerous, because it espouses the MLK philosophy (colour blindness) which most people agree with, but which they hate.

For these modern "anti-racists", we must instead see race everywhere, and factor it into every aspect of our lives, making constant calculations and adjustments which we can never hope to do correctly, and which contain internal contradictions we can never resolve. This hands those people tremendous power.

They are like parasites who have taken over a host. It took massive effort to reach the point in society where almost everyone agreed racism was unacceptable, and legitimately feared being called a racist. Like all "isms", we reached the point where almost everyone stopped thinking about what these terms actually mean, and just started substituting the word for a value judgement: racism bad, anti-racism good. This is the perfect setup for someone with different goals to hijack the concept.

MLK’s philosophy was not color blindness. This is just what people hear if they listen to one line from one speech from his entire career.

He also explicitly stated that programs that specifically benefited black people and only black people as a mechanism to address prior injustice would be justified.

“A society that has done something special against the negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the negro”.

Sure, but that's not important to the point I'm making. If you asked almost everybody even two years ago what "racism" or "anti-racism" meant, and what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness" and probably some reference to MLK, because that one speech is what they consider the best expression of the view. Whatever else MLK said is irrelevant - it's about the specific idea that most people associated with anti-racism.

The modern "anti-racists" have very different beliefs, which would have very little support if the implications were spelled out clearly to everyone, and therefore these beliefs need to be laundered and disguised as something more respectable. Hence the language games.

Of course it is important. Because it is moral justification for why "color blindness" is morally superior to alternatives pushed by a subset of anti-racists. By referencing MLK, a figure often revered as a moral compass, your post presents anti-racists as a corrupted extension of the valid work done in the 60s.

My point is that if you want to complain about modern anti-racists, you are very likely also complaining about MLK's beliefs too. That can be a thing you can do, but your moral foundations become less automatically rock solid and require some justification.

The point was not that modern anti-racists are wrong because they disagreed with MLK on some topics, it was that they are wrong because they completely reject colour blindness, of which MLK’s famous statements are one well-known example. Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.

Again: It’s about the specific idea, not a person. And the idea is what is being hijacked, to mean almost the opposite of what was generally accepted.

> Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.

I agree. MLK is consistently used as a cudgel to defend color-blindness despite never supporting that approach.

> If you asked almost everybody [...] what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness"

Eh. I like to think someone might have answered along the lines of "you shouldn't throw people in jail for crimes they didn't commit".

No, it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. It was not well accepted if the accused was black. The challenge was to persuade people (many of whom were racists) to see the accused man as equal to a white man before the law, and deserving of the same treatment as a white man would have received. In other words, to persuade people to be blind to his colour in their assessment of the case.

There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.

> it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.

I can agree in general, but the case in To Kill a Mockingbird is a little more complex than that. Tom Robinson actually committed the offense of having sex with a girl whose father didn't approve of him. This was shoehorned into the legal system by accusing him of the crime of "rape". This approach is quite current today under the name "statutory rape", and is applied in a race-blind manner.

So it's plausible that if Tom Robinson had been a comparably undesirable white, something very similar would have happened. A lot of things that did happen were specific to him being black, but the very basic framework of the case wasn't.

The whole point of the story is that he is black and gets treated unfairly (accused of a crime) because of that. It’s fundamentally about the racial discrimination that was rife at the time.

Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today. It’s also not clear Harper Lee would have bothered to write it.

> Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today.

It would be Bridge of Spies, which makes the same comments on what it should mean to be a lawyer, and on the nature of mob justice, while making the two changes that the defendant is (1) white and (2) actually guilty of the same offense he's charged with.

I think there is a good reason why people who consider themselves anti-racists think we should see race in many places, and why they think 'color-blindness' is not enough.

The main reason is that, if people of a particular group have been treated very badly by society for a long time, simply stopping that treatment is unambiguously a good thing, but it leaves that group in a disadvantaged position which can persist long after the persecution stops. Black people start off life (on average!) with a substantial disadvantage, so if we want people to have equal opportunities to achieve great things regardless of the colour of their skin, you have to do something to redress the balance.

This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.

An analogy sometimes used is that of a house on fire. If your house is on fire, you'd like the fire brigade to focus their attention on your house, rather than nearby houses that are not on fire. To an anti-racist, the idea of ignoring the colour of people's skin entirely is as misguided as the idea of fire-fighters focussing on all houses regardless of whether they are on fire.

Is an Asian child who is born poor less deserving of help than a black child who is born poor? If so, why? If not, why not?

And if your ultimate goal is a society where race is irrelevant and we all treat each other equally, exactly how does doing the opposite get you there?

I believe that society remains biased against black people and as such, if we have limited resources to help people escape poverty then they should disproportionately be used to support poor black people.

To me, ultimate goal is a society that is not biased for or against any racial group. Currently society is biased against some racial groups, so to redress the balance I believe that we should give more support to those that society is biased against.

Maybe it's a silly metaphor, but imagine a seesaw. Currently more weight is on the left than the right, so it's unbalanced. I'd like it to be equally balanced so at the moment, I think the best thing to do it place more weight on the right.

How is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?

How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?

And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?

And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?

Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.

I think we agree more than you realise!

Of course there are millions of dimensions to account for. That doesn't mean that you give up on trying to address them! That line of argument lets you discredit any attempt at doing good.

Help black people who are discriminated against in the workplace? But what about asians!

Make life easier for deaf people by adding accessibility features to websites? But what about people who can't afford a computer!

Save the rainforest? But what about the arctic!

> So why deliberately move in the other direction?

Because western society is not currently colour-blind, in a very particular direction! That was the point of the seesaw metaphor: not to say that race is one straight line with black at one end and white at the other, but to say that if you want people to have equal opportunities regardless of their race then you have to help the people who are currently at a disadvantage.

> Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.

Me too :)

The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that you should not take action to help one disadvantaged group if that action excludes a different disadvantaged group. Is that a fair summary of your point?

Do you think this applies to all disadvantaged groups, or just when discussing issues of race?

> I believe that society remains biased against black people

What's more common: black people attempting to pass as white, or white people attempting to pass as black?

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make, could you explain? Are you making the argument that society isn't biased against black people?

> This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.

I hadn't thought of equality of opportunity in this way before, but it does appear to be an innate problem of that approach.

As a counter-argument, I think the preferential treatment approach is upside down. Hiring less qualified people to redress historical inequalities is a top-down approach, authoritarian and minimally impactful. The individuals you hire help them, but not the disadvantaged community at large. We should be taking a bottom-up approach where the disadvantaged are afforded more community funding to bring up their access to opportunities. It is a slower approach because it takes a few generations to see the results, but it leads to long-term change, not band-aid fixes which I feel preferential treatment delivers.

As a counter-country-argument, why not take both approaches? There's something about trying to fix a wrong with more wrongs that I feel will damn the entire system.

Fortunately we agree almost completely :)

Preferential treatment can mean many things. For example, you can provide programs for ethnic minorities to retrain as developers. It could mean scholarships that are only available to black people, or immigrants, or deaf people. It could mean training recruiters and interviewers so that they are less biased in their evaluation of candidates - in ways that they might not even realise.

That said, aiming to hire more people from disadvantaged groups can have positive effects beyond just the people that you hire. It gives young people a wider variety of role models. It can increase your team's performance because you have a wider variety of viewpoints. It can lead to wider cultural change in the company as a whole, making qualified people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel more comfortable applying for senior roles.

And it doesn't have to mean hiring worse people. Perhaps it just means focusing more on problem solving and creativity and less on education and 'culture fit' in your interview process, or advertising your jobs in places where they will be seen by a more diverse group of people.

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