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Comment by borepop | Hacker News Reader

>There is simply no possible way this country can survive when the value systems are so opposed to each other.

That strikes me as a rather hyperbolic take. It's rather like the Jordan Peterson vision of reality in which certain ideological shifts in the educational realm are portrayed as being a wholesale reworking of society in general rather than what they actually are -- namely, just some aspects of the life of schools, which don't actually do that much to change or affect anything in the power structures that overwhelmingly dominate the rest of life.

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I dunno, dude - I think to the rational folk on HN it does indeed seem hyperbolic, but there are a lot of really pissed off people who are a little beyond the point of rationality.

For instance, a recent survey showing 29% of respondents would support breaking up the US: http://brightlinewatch.org/american-democracy-at-the-start-o... The source is apparently legit and founded by Yale / Dartmouth professors.

Combine this with the increasing demands of the new ideology, the massive inequality of the modern age, the future automation job losses, and tons of pressure from foreign nations who would love to see a weaker US - I think in 10 years there could easily be some crisis.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I don't think this is constrained to the educational realm. I can certainly tell you that in Big Tech Company Inc, we get emails every day about ending white supremacy, anti racism, yada yada.

Well I agree that there are some bigger societal shifts going on that are indeed pretty destabilizing. I was just commenting that nuances of the curriculum of high schools, or even undergrad education, around questions of race/gender/capitalism (or whatever woke themes) is not really quite as consequential as I think some folks, including the author of the article that is the subject of the post, make it out to be. All these elite schools, no matter what their political posturing, are still basically just manufacturing future elites who will be perfectly content to perpetuate the status quo in whatever way is advantageous to them. If that involves more racial equity, or different pronouns, or whatever, nobody actually gives a shit as long as their own economic ox is not gored.

They are not nuances, and they aren't even 'curriculum'. They are a fundamental reshaping of our world view.

'America is a State of White Supremacy' is a pretty fundamentally different want to think about the US than any time in history.

Even during times of black chattel slavery, when native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands, and Asians and Middle Easterners were suing in court to be recognized as white, so they could enjoy the benefits of first class citizenship?

You mean the time when slavery was common throughout the world, and that literally every spot on planet earth was fundamentally ethnocentric?

So yes, if we want to talk about racial issues during the foundation of America and world history, then sure, but it has not so much to do with America and also, it has little to with White Supremacy and more to do with Ethnocentrism.

Literally today in 2021, in almost every single nation outside the New World or the West, a White person would always be considered an outsider by virtue of their race.

That fact is completely ignored by the woke crowd who want to somehow decontextualise all of this to make it a 'white problem', when it's not. Frankly, I suggest there are a lot of racist impulses behind a lot of the woke smokescreen.

You mentioned "any time in history", and for most of its history, the US was explicitly a white supremacist state. Legal segregation only ended in the 1960s.

Yes, other places in the world were like this, but that's irrelevant, isn't it?

I think the exchange got off on the wrong foot. I think the point to be made is that American history being seen as simply a history of racism and white supremacy is a new thing, and a sad thing. Because, as you know, other things happened here.

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