Hacker News Reader

Hmm... I'm a white man who doesn't consider himself half as "woke" as the (I'm certain a bit exaggerated) descriptions of what happens on Twitter and none of that feels particularly offensive to me?

"I dropped my black star into a sea of white and it hurt" -> "I see so many beautiful black stars, why don't more of them get this wonderful opportunity?"

"A natural instinct to want the very best for people that look like them" -> Isn't the author displaying this own natural instinct in the very previous excerpt you chose about the sea of white? I'm hard pressed to say I'd find it inconceivable that humans empathize more strongly with people who are closer in appearance to them.

"a much longer and darker legacy where whites have abused black girls and women with impunity" -> I mean, yea... that's definitely back there for sure.

"Perhaps it's time to focus our inquiry on white people who may have complex emotions regarding their changing position in society" - race is a complex issue and maybe we should examine it from a few more angles? Sure, that seems fine?

"White people kill Black people with impunity" -> Chauvin's conviction was almost certainly the exception in cases of police homicide is my understanding, especially when the victim is Black and the police officer is white (or in many other instances of white on Black violence).

I don't get the sense this person's painting all white people with broad strokes really? Maybe just thinking critically about a system which traditionally has undermined certain segments of our population and may finally be in some position to come to grips with that.

In some sense he appears to be saying "Hey lets take a look at why people may be feeling in some manner" and not "Wow, I can't believe people would feel that way, those <insert name calling here>".

It's also possible that it's hard to offend me and I give people the benefit of the doubt a lot.

None of those excerpts are concerning on a personal blog. I assume his removal is based on something more substantive.

Maybe you're imagining the reaction if "black" and "white" were reversed in the writing. It would be very different because it's very different to be black rather than white in America.

> It would be very different because it's very different to be black rather than white in America.

That's a race essentialist myth[^1]. There are no "white experiences" or "black experiences". We assign "white" and "black" labels to diverse individuals with diverse experiences who process their experiences differently. The average black person may have a different experience than the average white person, but the variance is so large (more variance within a race than between races) that this is utterly useless for talking about any individual (the "average white person" and "average black person" don't actually exist).

[^1]: I would say "a racist myth" but that's a bit overloaded these days and it carries some judgmental connotations that I don't want to imply, but it is no less racist than other racist myths.

Do you believe the acknowledgement of race or racial difference to be intrinsically bigoted?

My intuition from reading these quotes is that this person spent a lot of time thinking about socioeconomic differences in relation to race[0], so they see things through that lens. It can come off as hostile, but the more generous interpretation that they simply emphasize this theme.

[0] I dislike the term "race" in these contexts. In biological terms there is only one human race currently alive as far as we know. Every time I read or use it I feel like the pseudosciences such as social darwinists have won.

A racial construct has been used to shape every facet of our society and we can't make right those wrongs with out maintaining an awareness and understanding of that construct. We can't undo the historical (and current) harms of racism with out continuing to see race.

This is why the colorblind approach to solving racial issues failed. All it did was make us blind to the continuing harms of racism and there for unable to change those systems and solve those problems.

Kendi expands on it in great detail in his book "How to Be an Antiracist"

Here's a TED talk version of the explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCxbl5QgFZw

Good point and thank you for the book recommendation.

My comment was not on why the term is being used today but merely the fact that I don't like it, because it solidifies the racist pseudosciences in our culture in a way. It just feels wrong to me to speak the lingo of an enemy.

At the same time, as you said the term is here for a reason, so simply changing or ignoring it won't change the underlying problem.

Thinking about it, it might even be a good thing that using, reading or hearing the term stings. It reminds us of how incredibly frustrating the problem is. It appears so simple and arbitrary, is insufferably harmful and it should not exist in the first place, but here we are still.

On this topic I strongly recommend Racecraft by Karen and Barbara Fields.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/233136/racecraft-by...

"Race-blind" anti-racism is like "money-blind" anti-poverty programs. You can't effectively fight racism when you ignore its most fundamental product.

>A racial construct has been used to shape every facet of our society and we can't make right those wrongs with out maintaining an awareness and understanding of that construct.

This is a dangerously myopic view of the development of this country and more importantly it ignores progress over the last few decades.

The fact that blacks have not achieved representational parity or wealth equity yet does not mean that that the path of race blindness was not working. By all metrics it was working, and there must be room to discuss the internal cultural issues within the black community that account for the remaining lack of progress.

Instead by silencing any such criticism we are falsely blaming whites as a demographic for cultural change that is beyond their control, and artificially forcing transfer of power and wealth from said demographic in a misguided attempt to correct past wrongs, in a manner that is fundamentally at odds with the principles of meritocracy that are critical to a functioning society. Hiring minorities for the color of their skin is no better than hiring whites for the color of their skin.

The combination of a fundamentally racist theory/policy and vicious cancellation of anyone who publicly criticizes the movement is going to lead to severe backlash. It's immoral at its core. You can't have your cake and eat it too - either racism is acceptable and we have the freedom to discuss when and where it is acceptable, or racism is unacceptable. Wordplay with euphemisms which disguise the racist nature of CRT inspired policies is intellectually dishonest and not sustainable.

About [0], in Portuguese we have abolished the usage of the term "race" for human beings for exactly that reason. Now we exclusively use the term "ethnicity".

Edit: What about the downvotes? Are people going crazy?

Which is why Brazil is such a beautiful post-racial utopia?

Using more precise terms in language has nothing to do with being an utopia. Really, as a native Portuguese speaker it sounds really weird to ask about the race of a human being.

Compared to Latin America as a whole? Yup, pretty clearly so. They're on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.

> They're on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.

Having spent time in Brazil and as a luso-American, that is ridiculous. Brazil has an even bigger problem with racist police violence and extra-judicial killings than the US does!

Both Brazil and the US are really large countries. I'm not sure if comparison is so simple.

In fairness the U.S. has been on a regressive trajectory for the last ~10 years, so anyone who isn't similarly regressive is "on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.", strictly speaking.

Just because problems are more visible does not mean they have regressed IMO.

When the racism is more visible because the racists feel more comfortable broadcasting their messages, and indeed when the media and academy effectively and institutionally endorse and promote those messages, that seems like textbook regression.

The issue is that other people think in racial terms, and you need the nuance to be able to describe that thinking.

The confusion between skin color, race and culture seems to be one of the root cause for many problems in the US. Their history with minorities seems to have unfortunately unconsciously tied skin color and culture, ignoring the fact that it's the definition of racism. Not saying it's all rosy elsewhere, but at least it seems not that deeply ingrained and perpetuated.

So to candidly answer your question, yes there are of course physical differences between people, and correlations between people sharing a set of physical attributes, like skin color. Now if you attach culture and values to skin color, yes it's intrinsically bigoted, no matter the group. The corollary is that people with different skin color can have the same culture, and that criticizing a culture is not racist.

It's one thing to acknowledge differences. It's another to define ourselves by them.

Or to conflate "this is true on average for this group of people" with "this is true for everyone in this group".

Do you believe white people kill black people with impunity in America?

This is a question that's so loaded its disingenuous without context. You weren't asking me but here's what I think about it.

Do I think that police involved in bad shootings or another type of unjustified death have a really good chance of getting away with it? Of course.

Do I think that the scenario above of an unjustified police killing happens more to people of color? Probably, I haven't looked up the numbers though and I don't know where to find them.

Do I think the overwhelming majority of police killings are justified? Yes. But that doesn't mean it isn't a big deal when unjustified deaths go unpunished.

Do I think most white people in the US could get away with murdering a black person? No, and keep in mind this is closer to the question you actually asked than the question you wanted an answer to.

So the author claims X, and then it is asked "Is X true?" and that is now a loaded question? What is loaded about it?

The original statement "It is true that white people kill black people with impunity in the US" is problematic without contextualizing it.

If he means in a general sense (which he most likely didn't) then its obviously a false statement. If I as a white man in the US murdered a person of color, most likely I would be arrested and convicted.

If he means in the literal sense that in a country of 350 million people that its possible for a white person to kill a black person and get away with it, well then you could probably say that about any demographic vs any other demographic because its impossible to make sure that never ever happens in a population that size.

What I suspect he really meant is that there's a problem with American police getting away with it when they are involved in unjustified killings of black people. But he chose to word it in an exaggerated and inflammatory way for emphasis. Then you also have to take into account that we were presented with that one sentence out of a larger blog post so perhaps he added the context that would have made that sentence make sense.

One of the failure modes I see often in today's discourse is that using a group term as a subject makes the associated verb profoundly semantically ambiguous. If I say:

"Brunettes like smooth jazz."

It can mean any of:

* There is at least one brunette who likes smooth jazz.

* Some brunettes like smooth jazz.

* Most brunettes like smooth jazz.

* All brunettes like smooth jazz.

* Brunettes are more likely to like smooth jazz than people with other hair colors.

* Brunettes are more likely to like smooth jazz than people as a whole.

* Liking smooth jazz is a defining characteristic of brunettes.

* Liking smooth jazz is a defining characteristic of people who identify themselves as "brunettes".

* Disliking smooth jazz is a defining characteristic of non-brunettes.

* Liking smooth jazz causes (some|most|all) people to dye their hair brown.

* Having brown hair causes (some|most|all) people to like smooth jazz.

When the group term has a long history of power imbalance (unlike brunettes for the most part) and when the verb has deep moral implications (like "murder"), then obviously these different interpretations connote wildly different things.

When you take that ambiguity and place it in the context of the Internet where context is stripped and nothing is known about the audience who will be interpreting it, you are setting yourself up for misinterpretation.

When you do that in a political environment where people are seeking power and stand to benefit from willful misinterpretation, you get, well, much of what US online culture looks like today.

There are obviously many deep systemic problems, but one technique to try to improve the quality of discourse is to simply avoid using groups as subjects in sentences. It almost never conveys anything that can't be better expressed in some other form.

Less so today than they did before BLM highlighted the way they repeatedly did so.

EDIT: I mean, two people actually think the recent spate of prosecutions of white law enforcement officers for unjustified killings of blacks is because in the last few years American law enforcement officers have just become violently racist in ways they previously weren't, and not a change in accountability resulting from public attention to the issue?

Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?

> Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?

Well, no, but that’s not germane to the issue being discussed.

Your asking that question in this context embeds several assumptions, at least one of which is incorrect.

> acknowledgement of race or racial difference

Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position; that there is an essence to being a certain race that sets it apart from other races. Doesn't matter if that position casts the purported essence in a positive or negative light, it is bigotry in one way or the other.

> Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position

No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct, which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race. The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

> No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct, which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race.

That is still essentialism with extra steps. Social or not, your category hinges on purportedly durable and universal attributes, whether they arrived from within or without.

> The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

That's a strawman argument I haven't made. I am against conflating pragmatic categories with essentialist categories. There is a difference between using x as an ephemeral demographic category to address the material issues you allude to vs overplaying it to an x'ness as an essentialist identitarian concept.

You can acknowledge that there is a social construct called "race" that some people believe is useful for predicting things about individuals without subscribing to those beliefs yourself.

E.g., some people argue that white people are unfit for certain roles because they haven't endured the sufferings of people of color which is clearly expressing a belief that (1) race is real and (2) race is useful for predicting things about individual white and non-white people. This is racism, race essentialism, etc. But I can also acknowledge that those people are more likely to treat white people (i.e., the people that they put into their "white" category) differently than nonwhite (i.e., the people they put into their "people of color" category). This is not racism or race essentialism or etc.

What the U.S. calls "races" would simply be considered subcultures in the rest of the world. (Bordering on ethnicities, but not really - they're way too integrated within mainstream culture to be true ethnic subdivisions.) You can acknowledge subcultures without clinging to the absurd notion (that is, absurd to much of the civilized world) that "race" is a legitimate term at all, even for a socially and culturally-bound construct.

I don’t think that’s correct considering people from Nigeria, France, or N-th generation Americans can all be considered “black” provided they have a certain set of physical traits even though these people very likely have very different cultures. So the American notion of “race” spans cultures and it is derived from physical traits, not cultural artifacts.

Whether African immigrants qualify as "truly" Black is actually a very contentious point within Black culture itself, and that's despite widespread solidarity with Africa and Pan-African ideals. This makes 100% sense if you regard this U.S. notion of "race" as a pure social construct, something not dependent on any fixed set of physical traits or purported ancestry.

Within American culture, it’s not contentious that dark-skinned African people are “black”, certainly no less so when they immigrate to the US. But that’s race.

There is also a distinct notion of “black culture” which is a subset of American culture (people who identify with black culture also tend to be racially black, but not every racially black American identifies with black culture). That there is a “black culture” doesn’t mean that the American notion of race is incorrect.

Yes.

Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do. They look at it like hair color. My twin brother and I were literally the only white kids on our school bus, attending mostly black public schools in a mostly black county in southeastern Virginia. We were never really aware of skin color as a thing, just "this kid let's us borrow his gameboy and is nice", vs. "this kid punches us in the back of the head on the bus cuz he's psycho". Race was a useless proxy for good/bad when you are in a heavily integrated school system, because it's ALWAYS been a useless proxy for judging human character.

People that speak like this publicly ("sea of white children") are THINKING like this constantly.

In my opinion, he projects his own bigotry and obsession with skin color onto everyone else around him. That's what bigots of all colors do.

Through my childhood I would agree with you. By the time I was in high school this was no longer the case. Had many black friends, and once we all pass puberty and got cars, the world changed.

The first time I was with a black friend who got pulled over for no reason, and seeing the cop visibly change his demeanor when he saw me (white clean cut male) in the passenger seat, changed me. Talked with my friend after - this was already normalized for him. I was angry beyond belief.

It’s a useless proxy for judgement and yet US society does it to black and hispanic people with alarming consistency and frequency. It hasn’t gotten better since my youth.

This is the crux of white privilege and why “cancel culture” is bullshit for snowflakes who can’t imagine that the world is as systematically unjust as it really is.

I’ve listened to many black activists who ARE anti-white, who do self segregate, and I don’t blame any of them for a second nor hold any animosity towards them. They spent their lives being lied to, despised, tricked, and crapped on. Why would anyone want to continue that cycle?

Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think.

Not that you've spent a minute of your life in one.

Ever met a coder from that background? Didn't think so.

Class is the issue, but putting it all on race let's the man off the hook, which is why this so called revolution is corporate sponsored.

Both are an issue. Trying to reframe all racial issues as only class issues is as dumb as trying to claim all class issues are racial in nature.

Few people who think about racism deny class has impact though. An intersectional analysis would suggest that a rich black, rich white, poor black, and poor white experience would all be different.

> Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think.

Right, I can't tell if your argument here is that you don't think a poor Appalachian person would be up on the intersectional lingo, or you think that they can't critically analyze different kinds of privilege, or you think that they think that there's some kind of moral argument that poor white people can't also have advantages over black people and I'd feel bad talking to them about that? In any case, you're wrong.

Also you realize that Appalachia has a significant black population right, its 10% of Appalachia vs. 12% of the US population. Appalachia includes large swaths of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. (also it includes major metro areas in Pennsylvania, so trying to paint "Appalachia" as a rural-white-poor thing is dumb and misrepresentative of Appalachia).

Look I'm not going to quibble about what is and is not Appalachia. My definition of Appalachia part of the South that was inaccessible to rivers and navigable waterways and had poor soil and was therefore not remotely of interest for plantation owners. Therefore there were no native populations of slaves when the civil war ended.

My point is that a plurality of people in the United States who live below the poverty line happen to be white. And when you talk about class have you ever seen Google or any tech company talk about making sure they are hiring from a diverse set of classes? Of course not.

Show me a bunch of googlers and I'll show you a bunch of people whose parents were college-educated no matter what their skin color is.

All of this is just laziness at it's core. Treating humans differently because of their group membership in person-to-person interactions is the epitome of bigotry. It's not acceptable when cops do it and it's not acceptable for you to give passes to people of certain colors who have become bigots despite probably never experiencing extreme racism themselves. My cousin was murdered in Virginia Beach by a man who happened to be black in 2006. It would be inexcusable for me to hold that against other people that share that man's ethnicity. But if the colors were reversed you would have no problem giving me a pass because you have low expectations for people that don't look like you.

Kids do not write laws or have political agendas. In an ideal world, skin color would be an afterthought. But that is not the world we live in. I grew up as a white person in a 99%+ mexican/hispanic area. I grew up thinking the same. I didn't think much of people's race, but other people did. I was treated differently because I was white. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't seeing the world from the minorities point of view because I wasn't a minority. If you try to ignore race completely, you ignore the issues minorities are facing.

> Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do.

Infants show racial bias toward members of own race and against those of other races: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.ht...

Do note that the issue, in the media reporting of the incident, mentions and highlights one and not the other.

Has anyone else noticed how often the loudest voices have the most baggage in the very subject they advocate against?

It seems like it's always the more "holier than thou" that are the most evil and corrupt.

And, the ones who are always preaching "inclusive" the most tend to be the most bigoted.

Cancel culture is not about canceling people who say racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc things. It is about canceling (read: disenfranchising and taking revenge on) straight white males, who are at the bottom (top? intersection? whichever) of the intersectional hierarchy. Kamau Bobb is not a white male, therefore this does not apply. He is receiving the same treatment that any powerful person, regardless of skin color, would have received 10 years ago in the western world: tuck them away until the scandal blows over.

What? This event seems to match the collectively assigned definition fine.

"Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "cancelled". The expression "cancel culture" has mostly negative connotations and is commonly used in debates on free speech and censorship.

The notion of cancel culture is a variant on the term call-out culture and constitutes a form of boycotting or shunning involving an individual (often a celebrity) who is deemed to have acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner." [1]

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

I don't agree with the guy above, but take a look at what Nick Cannon said and how he is still employed.

That definition is neither empirical, nor is it collectively defined. It is selectively assigned and selectively enforced. And here we are, in a thread where the top level post provides an obvious example.

Miriam Webster also seems to agree. [1]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cancel-culture...

Miriam Webster is even further from "collectively defined" than Wikipedia is.

I'm more concerned with individuals attempting to rewrite the modern lexicon to their own benefit.

Then go have a chat with Jimmy Wales about diversifying the political beliefs of his editors. And good luck.

Great, now also link me to a cacophony of Twitter activists who've defined it the same way, I am proven wrong.

But, and of course it's a silly request, can you provide any objective large-scale studies as to who (their demographics) is being canceled, for what categorization, and the net effect of their cancellation? It doesn't matter, granted, because the Wikipedia definition of highly politicized terms is, of course, what counts.

Not quite. It's about ideological alignment and purity. The cancel mob just got Antonio García Martínez fired, for example. And they are constantly trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald, a gay man married to a minority POC, and with minority kids.

I don't know Antonio García Martínez's ethnicity, but he looks and sounds very much like a straight white male, so I would not consider that a counterexample. Also, certainly there are no absolute laws of who is always targeted and who is never, just clear trends.

However, it is true that to some small degree I am oversimplifying something quite complex, partially because the cited example was James D'Amore. Other examples you might cite include Dave Rubin or Ric Grennell. Certainly gay white men and straight white women (specifically if they are Republican) are targeted. What happened at Disney with the treatment of Gina Carano vs. Krystina Arielle is evidence enough of that.