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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” [Ryan] Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”

He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”

Ooof. I predict Singer's next public pronouncements will be about "the evils of cancel culture" and he'll end up on Fox News or OANN.

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> If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.

This really sounded to me as "if I were allowed to tell you my true feelings about all this, a lot of you would be angry," or "oh, if it's open-season on white men, let me tell you I can dish it on the rest of you... lucky for you I'm not allowed to."

“This sounded to me like” is the problem.

Everyone hears what they want to hear for their narrative. Then it becomes a juicy internet drama rather than some mundane thing.

"If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive."

This sounds more like a threat than a promise. A promise he chose to carry out. Why should it be divisive, if you're actually going to listen? Is it because you'd end up saying things like "white supremacy is a myth" and denying the notion of institutional racism?

It sounds a lot to me like the continual "predictions" (threats) from some Republicans that there's going to be a "race war" or other war with liberals, if the left keeps doing what they're doing. They make it sound like it's something inevitable that they're predicting, but in reality they're simply saying what they want to do.

> Why should it be divisive, if you're actually going to listen?

Why should it be divisive, indeed. “America is not a racist country” was just the position expressed by Sen. Tim Scott in a national prime time address, yet it’s enough to force an employee from a company?

There is actually quite a bit of difference between the statements "America is a racist country" and "institutional racism exists" or even "there exists a belief of white supremacy."

And even between "America isn't a racist country" and "the people who talk about implicit biases are the real racists," which is closer to what he actually said (allegedly).

(And if we want to have this discussion, I bet we could do it in a way that wasn't "painful and divisive," because I have no desire to be those things, so I'm not going to predict/threaten it.)

> This sounds more like a threat than a promise

Rather it sounds like a person afraid to share his views for fear they would be misconstrued or met with emotional outbursts.

Employees were claiming Basecamp has a white supremacist culture, an indictment against anybody working there. The idea that you can't reject such preposterous accusations without being "complicit", or without the denial somehow serving as further evidence, is insane.

Let me ask this in a more general way: If a member of a weaker minority group tells a member of a powerful majority group that they feel they've experienced a supremacist culture, is that on its own a `preposterous accusation`? What would be a valid thought and fact-gathering process for that member of the majority group to decide whether to take the concern seriously or dismiss it?

> What would be a valid thought and fact-gathering process for that member of the majority group to decide whether to take the concern seriously or dismiss it?

The onus is on the accuser to provide evidence of their claims. Management agreed that a list of funny names does not count.

Yet the employee continued to make unfalsifiable assertions such as:

"the silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does...It doesn’t require active malice".

So denying an accusation of white supremacy is evidence of guilt, and remaining silent in the face of such an accusation is also evidence of guilt.

It's impossible to work with such people.

>Management agreed that a list of funny names does not count.

But why? What process led those people to decide it doesn't count? And why would only the management have a voice in that decision?

Does concluding that a list of funny names - mostly of western origin - is not evidence of white supremacy require a process? It's almost axiomatic.

Claims of white supremacy need to be backed up with proof.

Histrionic breakdowns and screaming at screens doesn't count as proof I'm afraid.

People did get angry at what he did say so there's no need to concoct thoughts in his head.

If the reporting is accurate, his words were twisted. He said "I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture" (meaning American culture) which another employee changes to "white supremacy doesn’t exist."

Based on what was reported, I don't know why Singer was suspended. I do understand why he resigned, given the reaction of many employees. He's not an avowed white supremacist.

Singer is very wrong, he needs more education, but it seems like many of the employees can't handle the idea of working at a place where someone so wrong works. At a large workplace, there was another worker who I saw coming in to work had a large sign on his bag making clear he was a 9/11 Truther. I saw he also sat at lunchtime with his bag prominently displayed (not at the workplace, in public). It made me really angry but I'd never do anything to threaten his employment or avoid all contact.

Because of what he chose to say. There was no need to go from "if we're going to talk about race" to "I will deliberately say things that will make everybody mad."

That was exactly my point.

So if someone disagrees that we live in a white supremacist culture, they should just sit mute and not challenge that claim?

Is a yes/no question about speaking or not really the best possible question to ask here?

When we are lacking metacognition on the subject, we can be at the point where we don't even know how to ask the right questions. This is because we can't assess how our beliefs and expectations constrain the range of questions we even know to ask. If you've ever chuckled over the hoary old tale of someone asking tech support, "where is the 'any' key?", you know how lack of understanding can lead to wildly incorrect mental models of a subject.

There are decades - nay, centuries - of writing about race relations, racial bias, and systemic discrimination. Before we ask a question, perhaps we'd be well-served to have at least a survey course level of familiarity with the issues, so that we might ask good questions.

That's the problem with extreme leftist arguments in general. If you don't have the same opinion, or even hold an opinion that falls short of the furthest left possible on the spectrum, you are either bulldozed into submission or, if you refuse to submit, "canceled" as racist or xenophobe. It's incredibly toxic behavior.

Nothing is considered an acceptable response except full submission to one side of the argument. Any alternate response is racist, abandoning the argument is white fragility, and silence is complicity in genocide.

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