Comment by noen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noen | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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