I refuse to stand by while my students are indoctrinated | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to stand by while my students are indoctrinated

bariweiss.substack.com

Anti racism has all the qualities of racism. They want you to treat people of colour differently, to pity them, to assume they are weak and that they need to be saved by some massive act of guilt. They aim to never let anyone forget what race they or their associates are. They put race above individual traits. Then they go around reporting or flagging everything they disagrees, like the ops article

> They want you to treat people of colour differently

BIPOC people _are_ different. They have different experiences in America. It's not racist to acknowledge and respect this.

> to pity them, to assume they are weak

This is going way too far. No serious anti-racism activist says this.

> and that they need to be saved by some massive act of guilt

If you look at asthma rates in the Black community vs. the average, it's not guilt that motivates people to address it, it's rationality and decency. Although guilt wouldn't be wrong either!

> They aim to never let anyone forget what race they or their associates are.

...in the same way I don't forget my sex, gender, name, nationality, etc. These are core parts of one's identity.

> They put race above individual traits.

Insofar as race exists, it's absolutely an individual trait? If you're saying we should look past race into a person's merits, no anti-racist activist is saying we shouldn't. In fact, that's kind of the point. Unless you're making a weird reverse racism argument, which is hogwash.

> BIPOC people _are_ different. They have different experiences in America. It's not racist to acknowledge and respect this.

Yes, it is. Treat people based on their experiences, not on what you expect people with their skin colour to have experienced.

> If you look at asthma rates in the Black community vs. the average, it's not guilt that motivates people to address it, it's rationality and decency.

If high asthma rates motivate you to do something, it should be to help asthmatics. Not to treat people differently based on their skin colour, which is racist.

> ...in the same way I don't forget my sex, gender, name, nationality, etc. These are core parts of one's identity.

There is no reason why people's skin colour needs to be part of their identity any more than their eye colour.

> Insofar as race exists, it's absolutely an individual trait?

Not a relevant one, unless you are a dermatologist or a sun cream salesperson.

There's nothing racist about acknowledging and respecting the fact that BIPOC people have different experiences and are marginalized. You seem to be making an argument that that's prejudiced, but in America it's inescapable. If you're born Black in the US, you had a way higher chance of dying and your mother had a way higher chance of dying than if you were born white.

And besides, race is more than skin/eye color. It's culture and experience. For example, there are higher rates of asthma in Black Americans because we tend to put polluting things by their neighborhoods and schools.

But, broadly I think you're just being disingenuous. You can't seriously think this stuff is just about the color of someone's skin.

It is just the colour of someone's skin. Or aren't dark-skinned people who grew up outside the USA black?

> If you're born Black in the US, you had a way higher chance of dying and your mother had a way higher chance of dying than if you were born white.

Poor people have a higher chance of being criminal. Black people have a higher chance of being poor. Therefore (I assume) black people have a higher chance of being criminal.

Treating black people like criminals because crime is correlated with being black is textbook racism. Treating them differently because of any correlated trait is also racism.

> For example, there are higher rates of asthma in Black Americans because we tend to put polluting things by their neighborhoods and schools.

Why?

- If it's because they're poor, the root cause is not racism but poverty (or how the poor are treated).

- If it's because of their skin colour, the root cause is that treating people differently based on their skin colour is considered acceptable. Treating people differently based on their skin colour will not exactly help.

Someone I'm very close to is white. They're legitimately pale. They have blue eyes. But their father was Black, and where they grew up, that made them Black too. As a result, much of their experience was the Black experience, they married a Black partner, had Black kids, have Black grandkids, etc. But they have to tell people they're Black, because their skin and eye color pass them.

This isn't anecdata. This is using one case to show you that race isn't (ahem) black and white, or solely about skin color. It's about culture and experience.

Racism is racism, as far as I can see, it can apply no matter who it comes from or who it's applied to. If it's harmful, it doesn't get to only be harmful for qualified recipients. What's this reverse racism you speak of?

> Reverse racism or reverse discrimination is the concept that affirmative action and similar color-conscious programs for redressing racial inequality are a form of anti-white racism. The concept is often associated with conservative social movements and the belief that social and economic gains by black people in the United States and elsewhere cause disadvantages for white people.

> Belief in reverse racism is widespread in the United States; however, there is little to no empirical evidence that white Americans suffer systemic discrimination. Racial and ethnic minorities generally lack the power to damage the interests of whites, who remain the dominant group in the U.S. Claims of reverse racism tend to ignore such disparities in the exercise of power and authority, which scholars argue constitute an essential component of racism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism

I'm honestly surprised there is a Wikipedia article on this, but I suppose if you can dream it, you can put it up there.

My point stands, because regardless of how accurate your quoted text is (seems to me like it's just a term invented by zealots to shutdown an argument without participation), it's irrelevant in this thread. It's invalid to say this other thing (reverse racism) is false, therefore racism can't manifest in other ways than you're saying.

Sorry let me dig in a little more here.

It's pretty common to naively think that racism in the US is treating anyone of any race differently based on their race. Conservatives trot this out all the time whenever anyone treats white Americans differently.

However, they're wrong, and they've never been right. Racism in the US is a pervasive caste system that places white Americans at the top, Black Americans at the bottom, and others somewhere in-between. This is why "reverse racism" is nonsensical and why white Americans don't experience racism.

I understand why people want to hew to the simple definition, but sadly it doesn't really help anyone. Well, it helps people who don't want to fix racism but, that seems like a mark against it.

And, for what it's worth, the Wikipedia article is super well-cited [1]. There's a lot of good info in there; it's definitely not some liberal hack job.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism#References

I'm white, and have been in situations where I was singled out and harassed for being white, both in real life and online. I fully understand that I have never experienced systemic racism because I am part of the racial majority. But it was still hurtful.

What word should I use to describe these experiences if not 'racism'?

(This is anecdotal, but: Every progressive 'anti-racist' who I describe these situations to either quickly changes the subject, calls me 'fragile', or tries to argue that these experiences weren't all that bad. Not a single one, in my experience, will just level with me and say, "Wow, that sucks, I'm sorry someone said that to you." I don't think trying to explain over people how they should feel and dismissing their concerns is a core tenant of anti-racism but it sure feels like it.)

I don't think you're fragile, and I would never minimize the harassment you experienced. I am sorry any of that happened to you. You're right that it's not systemic racism but, it's still the case that no one deserves that. And I'm also sorry you haven't found sympathy in the anti-racist community. It's pretty easy to be deep in the trenches, snarky, and suspicious, and it seems like you're running into all of that.

That was a surprisingly kind response. Thank you :)

> These are core parts of one's identity. The problem with this line of thinking is that not everyone WANTS to be identified by their race.

This as was told to me by someone:

A white person doesn't have the mental weight of representing their race at all times over them this way.

As an example a white guy named jake at work, who is lazy represents jake being lazy.

A black person named jake at work who is lazy. Represents black people being lazy, and that is a huge burden to carry at all times.

Yeah definitely. This is good example of privilege.

That's why the call it anti-racism. Like how anti-matter shares all the features of matter.

It seems like there has been an evolution from my upbringing in the 90s. We were taught against judging people by the color of their skin and to reject racist notions in the name of equality. Now the teaching is that we didn’t go far enough with equality and to reverse racism we need to actively drive out hidden and structural bias. This is jarring after being indoctrinated with one set of beliefs and seeing them rejected in favor of a new system. I would expect to see different teaching in the next generation. I hope that we are on a dampening sinusoid towards something reasonable, where the ideals of equality can be realized and the structures that lead to unequal outcomes vanish. I think that’s both what the teachers of the past and today are hoping for.

The goal for this types of efforts is equity and not equality. For 70 years in Soviet Russia equity was also the goal and we all know how that went.

> we didn’t go far enough with equality

Given we have staggeringly high inherited inequality... No, aiming at equality demonstrably isn't going to deliver it.

But neither these ideas (or criticisms) are new. Unskilled white folks have been moaning about "diversity hires" since the 80s in the UK.

What might be changing is looking at things in terms of hereditary opportunity. But it's not easy to ask people to live with less, so others can live with some.

That's already done: taxes

Done? You fixed inequality? Awesome!

We do collect tax. Not nearly enough. The mega-rich have avoidance options akin to multinational corporations, and we celebrate this status with rich lists and awards?

It's not enough. If we can't pay a public school teacher a competitive wage, they won't be competitive posts, they won't be competed for; we all lose out. Rinse and repeat for every public service helping children and their communities.

And we set this bar, we choose to only afford the cheapest possible options for society's base level. We choose that because we can throw cash at private schools, tutors, summer schools.

I'm not a communist, but I think our tax and social welfare systems need serious help or it's all going to fall apart.

I never mentioned the rate of taxes. I mentioned that the method of doing it already exists.

Since I responded to:

> But it's not easy to ask people to live with less, so others can live with some.

US taxes are too low. I agree, but I don't live in the US. Taxes in Belgium are much higher.

Both countries have taxes and i wouldn't want communism either.

> What might be changing is looking at things in terms of hereditary opportunity.

please stop spreading eugenics ideologies on HN!

You're saying hereditary opportunity is eugenics? Hard pass. There is significant evidence that wealthy families stay wealthy generation over generation in most parts of the world.

It is exactly the terms by which the jews were prosecuted in Nazi Germany, the view was they had too much hereditary opportunities: too much wealth, too much influence and you know the outcome.

That's really disingenuous.

They were persecuted, not prosecuted. And this is HN, not 4chan.

Do better.

Thanks for correction. I will rather learn more English here than this other site you are suggesting.

Oh, you thought the 4chan reference was about your grammar. Further amazed.

I said nothing about genealogy. I really don't care for your comparison.

You inherit more than genes from your parents. You get a home, a country, an upbringing, varying amounts of security and nutrition and education... And many for many people in here, money.

This all translates into deep inequalities from birth that we do too little too recognise, let alone rectify.

As I am a caucasian living in a european country, predominantly populated by caucasians, I can only try to relate to how it is to be in a minority in your own country, and how tense the racial tensions are currently in the U.S.

That being said, reading that description of the sterile legal proceedure and idology fueled indoctrination that is being imposed on those kids genuienly scares me.

How will things get healed if a whole generation will be brought up in an environment where they are dissuaded from asking, or being asked, the tough questions. Where feelings of quilt or righteous superiority are instilled in them over aspects of their society that they have not had a part in shaping, yet now need to answer for.

My humble view has always been that conflict between humans can only be resolved by dialogue. And as humans are messy creatures, those dialogues will have to be messy.

Proceduralizing it like this will just cause more harm, than it solves.

I am not caucasian from a predominantly Caucasian European country, where we are indoctrinated to judge people by how they cook pasta, living in an even more caucasian European country when we are judged by the trash bag we used. Guess what? I live exactly like the others (I know how to cook pasta in the right way and I use the correct trash bag). Once again, I thank the divine Providence to let me born and live in Europe.

I didnt understand whos country it is, and who is the minority / majority?

As the article clearly mentions Manhattan as the location of the school, it can be deduced that the country is the U.S.

As for the population ratios in the U.S, a short internet search tells me that there are estimated to be 330 million people living in the U.S as of 2020, of whom it is estimated that 46.8 million are african americans and 60 million are hispanic. That comes down to 14.18% and 18.18% respectively.

So given some margin for error, and accounting for other minority groups, only 1 in 3 would be of another skin colour than white in the U.S.

There is a large generational gradient here which may be relevant. As of 2016 non-hispanic white is just slightly less than 50% of births [0]. The 1 in 3 number is a good estimate for the entire US population, but the school age population is trending toward the 1:1 we see in births.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/23/its-officia...

That is genuinely interesting.

I guess there will be a seismic shift for many things in U.S society over the coming decades, where one of the more interesting would be voting patterns.

The open southern border is a deliberate plan to change those patterns.

As someone born and raised within the Schengen Area I would never call the U.S border, anywhere, open in any way.

The EU polices its external borders far better than the US does.

I never suggested there was an open border policy to the greater world when it comes to the EU/EFTA.

Only that the U.S border cannot in any way be called an open border, as it does not allow free movement of people and goods across its borders when arriving from another country.

While selective in who it is open for, the Schengen Area can be called open as it requires no visa's or passports and allows complete freedom of movement for citizens of those countries that have signed up for the agreement.

ik that the US is the country, that wasnt my question ... But whos country is it? The "white man"s? It just struck me as a very strange thing to say.

I said ".., I can only try to relate to how it is to be in a minority in your own country."

That contains no statement on who's race that country is (as obviously it, as all countries, is not owned by one group of its citizens over others)

As a European, it would be interesting to know if this story is representative of the U.S. education or one of the worst examples.

The story is absolutely chilling. The indoctrination, vague "harm" accusations, the public humiliation and clandestine support all sound very familiar.

We had a lot of this in the 20th century. It is always driven by bureaucrats without any real talents who nevertheless want to enjoy a comfortable life.

The single party states always get some amount of of stupid indoctrination. You saw the same crap in the red states when the evangelical Christians had a lot of influence and tried to write evolution out of the curriculum. Now it's the blue states turn to give their kids a bad education.

Look at the feedback loops and who's accountable to who and who wants what in the US public education systems and it's clear why these things happen in the single party states. Basically people are trying to please people who they aren't specifically tasked with pleasing but have to as a practical matter. Local officials and administrators implement crap in order to please the loud vocal minority of the local overwhelming majority and the state officials aren't gonna stick their neck out to stop them. Ultimately nobody is accountable for teaching kids anything that can't easily be measured on a test and there's lots of incentives not to teach them to think critically.

Hrm. The USA has many faults but being a single-party state is not one of them.

What you describe however is true of any social structure. Vocal, highly engaged minorities dominate the discussion and thus steer normative process. The progression of the process is taken up by the silent majority and societies' overtone window is shifted.

It takes another vocal, highly engaged minority to change the influence how the discourse shifts. As soon as the shift in overtone window is noticed by enough members of society, this minority finds together and the shift is halted.

I think you misunderstood; by "single-party state", the commenter is referring to those US states that consistently return candidates from the same party. Of course the union is not single-party; but some of the component states are, in practice.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification!

I work at a US high school that's currently engaged with antiracist training for staff, and it's not like that where I am. The training we're doing basically amounts to how to not be a jerk, and some staff members, including sometimes me, need that kind of training. We have some more conservative leaning staff members, and they're broadly accepted.

Can't speak for the whole country, but at least where I work this type of training seems to be a positive thing.

It's good to hear perspectives like these, thanks for sharing. I hear a lot of damning things about this kind of training from a lot of different directions, but what you're talking about sounds sensible and healthy.

I have friends who have been accused online of being “cultural marxists” by right wing students because they corrected the students’ misunderstanding of the history of slavery and the civil war.

It is worth keeping in mind that this author have a strong opinion and wrote this article himself. Clearly he isn’t going to present these ideas in a positive light.

Well, segregating children in classes according to their perceived ethnicity doesn't really strike me as a good idea, now matter how it is presented.

I'm not convinced that this is being presented honestly. It just feels so similar to the straight lies I've seen written about friends.

I see. Thanks for sharing your concern.

I've been out of high school for several years and out of "traditional" public school for several years longer so my anecdata might not be the most accurate, but from what I hear and from those I know, this sort of curriculum is rapidly becoming the norm in most schools and has already become engrained in many.

There was a pair of articles [0][1] published in The Atlantic earlier this year that offer another account in another district. I found them very well-written and I think they went into more depth and from a different perspective than TFA here.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/should-bla... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/black-live...

>if this story is representative

Anti-racism education? Yes. This harmful form of anti-racism education? No, this is borderline non-existent. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't take it seriously where it appears. Unfortunately, there is a ton of noise around it. Just like anything you can split across ideological lines, party A would like you to believe this never happens, or is in fact a good thing, and party B would like you to believe this is quickly becoming ubiquitous and we must stop the oppressive monsters at any cost.

> it would be interesting to know if this story is representative of the U.S. education or one of the worst examples

This shocked my friends who are teachers in New York. Note that this is a private school [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Church_School

> a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting

What the flying fuck? Is this even legal in New York State? Is the author credible? (Noticed the article got flagged.)

I have younger relatives that are attending private schools right now in NY and can 100% confirm that this (zoom calls segregated by race) is happening.

The world's gone batshit.

Their parents should pull them out.

Full scholarship, competitive program, and only a year left. Not a chance.

It's time to knuckle down, shut the fuck up and get through with it.

The best part is one is mixed-race but presents white so she has to go to the whites-only zoom. Students and faculty collectively decided that she's not mixed-race enough (50/50) to self-identify.

> shut the fuck up and get through with it.

Silence is suspicious:

Teachers praise insights when they articulate the existing framework or expand it to apply to novel domains. Meantime, it is common for teachers to exhort students who remain silent that “we really need to hear from you.”

[..]

A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”

When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included [..] “just silence.”

Let me make sure I've got this right. I can be 100% genetically male, and present as male, but I can self-identify as female. But I can be 50/50 racially, and I can't choose to self-identify as one of those races, because I don't present as that?

But we're not following the one-drop rule, so I guess that's some kind of progress...

Maybe there will be some practical benefits in showing kids how to satisfy contradictory ideological requirements while still meeting their own needs (i.e., lying like rugs and doing what they want), if this is like the upper middle class world they'll have to be navigating in ten years.

She should play their game and identify as her non-white heritage. Let the school dare speak up so she calls their hypocrisy.

No, she gets no breaks.

She's an LGBT, mixed-race conservative. The only thing they see is that she looks white and is conservative.

It's been a multi-year struggle against a coordinated administrative effort to kick her off her scholarships and out of school. She mostly keeps her opinions to herself, but teachers and peers stalk her social media (including to the point of creating a fake profile of a family member and trying to add her to see her private posts) and pick ideological battles she wants no part of.

It's absolutely abuse and harassment.

We're not quite there yet, but it is interesting that the Wikipedia article about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

has "Cancel culture" in its "See also" section.

I hope her life will improve in a reasonable college (if there still are any left).

This is college ;) They're trying extra hard to make her life hell this year.

As much as I hate the way she's being treated, she's lucky to get her backbone early in life. She's already a very strong and capable adult.

Weiss kind of made a career out of pearl clutching and decrying the "intolerant left" in academia [0]. A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say, but Weiss (like most opinion columnists) is largely just in the outrage peddling business, deploying facts only sparingly and selectively. I include Greenwald - linked below - in this group as well, but it's difficult to find any kind of serious rebuttal against her from a non-columnist (because that's kind of the game that's being played here).

Anyway, Weiss is both a troll and a hypocrite, so it's easy to discount her posts as flamebait. That doesn't mean she's always wrong, of course, but she's got a well earned reputation which suggests one should take her with more than a pinch of salt (IMO, this is basically true for anybody who decides to "publish" on a substack blog).

[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...

All of that is probably a fair assessment of "fill in the blank" in media. I'm not saying it's right, but it's certainly not a problem of a few individuals, it is THE problem with information - all information - at this point in our history. Bari has to get clicks. CNN needs views. Rogan needs listens. Kendi and DiAngelo need to sell books. And outrage is currently the best way to build a successful business. The rest of us are just caught in the crossfire.

I miss the days when everything was about sex.

https://law.stanford.edu/2019/12/20/the-outrage-industrial-c...

This is hosted on Bari Weiss' blog, but Bari Weiss isn't the author of this piece.

In case anyone thinks that this is a new thing, we had a white-only freshman orientation session at a University of California campus, led by a black woman who lectured on the history of slavery and ongoing racism. As a hands-on demonstration she led us all in several rounds of Simon Says, in which she ordered us to do things like stand on one foot, and reflect on what it would be like to have to obey or die.

This was in the spring of 1980.

People keep flagging articles that offend them, it’s getting really bad. It’s happened to a lot of threads I’ve tried to follow over the last few months

For better or worse, the HN ethos is to avoid anything with more than a certain average emotional intensity associated with it. I guess I can see the reasoning, otherwise the most intense stories would rocket straight to the top and stay there permanently. There wouldn't be any room left to discuss tech stuff.

Well said, never thought about it but this is where HN strikes a good balance otherwise it would become a new Twitter/Reddit, and I do appreciate the honest discussions on cultural phenomena here.

The Department of Education had ruled that this violated civil rights laws at the end of Trump's term due to a case going on in Illinois.

Biden's very first EO caused the DOE to reverse course and suspend their previous decision that it violated civil rights laws and now creating racial affinity groups in schools is ok according to the DOE.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/07/education-dept-curbs-decision-...

You're going to get torn to shreds for linking the NYP here, but this is accurate.

Honestly, I'm at the point that pretending to say I believe in god is an easier thing to aqcuiesce than some of these downright irrational "anti-racism" campaigns in corporate america. If I see someone of minority status, the only time I'll bring it up is if we're friends and it's relevant to the conversation. It's a unique trait. For some reason the left has altered it into being a badge of honor that white people should feel ashamed for noticing. And for some reason management is falling in line. Nobody cares. If anything it just makes it easier to weed out individuals of both white and minority status by seeing who challenges it or tries to use it as a means to challenge management.

> The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

I wonder what will happen to the oppressor group once they become a minority. Judging by history, I'm sure it'll be something good.

Part of the problem is that traditional racism is so much more comfortable to the elite then any talk of class structures and inherited wealth/status so the system will try to re-frame any systematic/structural inequality issues to racism as a way to divert attention away from the actual socioeconomic mechanisms at play.

Racism: impossible to truly solve, deeply interpersonal/psychological, completely different for every person, depending on a constantly changing, kaleidoscopic array of individual, social, media, linguistic, and cultural values.

Economic Inequality: material, quantifiable, & immediately actionable -- for any person, regardless of social standing, background, or experience.

::thinking::

> I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.”

I have no words

Private schools have always found seemingly-authoritarian measures to induce their students into proper thoughts and acts, from dictating how they dress, how they associate and date, what substances they may not use, perhaps how they worship as well.

If a school is trying to direct it's students in something other than its core competencies (of education and maybe athletics), you know it's going to be nonsense. This latest iteration of private schools wielding wokeness as a cudgel is likely to be no different.

There's a ton of empty office space in NYC that is leased but unused, and unlikely to clear the sublease market.

There are a lot of parents of all races who feel that they'd prefer their kids to focus on more traditional academic skills rather than on identity issues.

There are a lot of teachers who would prefer to teach in less politicized climes.

NYC private schools that charge 57k use about 20% of that for scholarships, and another huge chunk to pay administrative costs -- e.g. headmasters routinely get 500k + a house.

So a group of teachers could partner with a company that would donate the office space in return for a tax write-off and an ex executive and recruit significant numbers of private school students by offering a better education at a lower price.

Regardless of the credibility of Weiss (as indicated by others might be sus), this essay reads almost like a primary source you'd read from the time of early Christianity, or during the Justinian plague. Looking back, they're events that seemed to have happened, but the accounts greatly exaggerated. Since we're living through it and can see the evidence, it begs the question of how exaggerated were the old writings?

When racism is the new anti-racism.

> A few days later, the head of school ordered all high school advisors to read a public reprimand of my conduct out loud to every student in the school.

This is a religious cult.

> "[...] we must work hard to undo this history."

Yeah, let's rewrite history. Smart. Reminds me of things like #LandBack and "decolonize" which are nothing more than "gee, it sure sucks these bad things happened" (true) but with a bunch of illegible academic theory slathered on top.

News flash: colonization didn't start with white European oppressors, and it won't end with them either. People of all races, genders, religions, etc have been colonizing others since the beginning of history. Whites are not special here. If you want to end colonization, maybe start by speaking out against capitalism and our banking system, which is the true "colonizer" of the day. But what's funny is that these people are acting in service to the ruling class. They are distracting everyone by speaking out against skin color instead of the real empire. It's the oppressor's wet dream.

Either way, I'm glad people are starting to speak out against this "movement." We can recognize that there are racial and gender groups that are oppressed and work hard to remedy that without actively becoming full-on racist again and without making an entire generation of people afraid to even talk about these issues.

Why has this article been "flagged" and by whom?

What does it mean, when a submission is displayed as [flagged] on hn?

From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> What does [flagged] mean?

> It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.

MLK Junior had --- to use a bit of satire but with a serious message --- had two choices:

1) Because the issue of racism and it's surrounding issues was a dead horse, elected to opt out and open a barber shop, preach, or become a lawyer. Thankfully he didn't.

2) Because the issue of racism and it's surrounding issues was a dead horse, he cause could has said enough talk, and went a violent approach for payback or retribution. Thankfully he didn't.

He took the middle road which requires more backbone, more intellect, more will power, better communication, and a better message. Thank goodness for that.

To the OP: the whining, and outrage is interesting at the periphery. But now what?

He was a modern-day Erasmus, something we desperately need right now.

Why was this flagged?

This is a discussion of a serious issue that will have very real consequences in American society ten years down the road.

It seems like every religion needs it's "Original Sin".

If this is real and not satire, can anyone here defend these practices logically? This can’t possibly be real.

This is a really, really well-written piece. Thank you for this.

We need MORE thoughtful pieces like this.

I am flabbergasted to see [flagged] on this post.

Meh, outrage peddling will always stir up the faithless.

Jordan Peterson was right... God i hope this BS stays contained to north america...

Private schools are definitely at the core of the problem.

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