Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjhh244 | Hacker News Reader

Privilege is primarily about money, not race. If you want to help poor people, then tax the rich more regardless of race and underprivileged minorities will benefit naturally more.

All this obsession with race is just a way for the elites to urn attention away from actual solutions which would hurt their profits.

View on HN

> Privilege is primarily about money, not race.

In the United State our history makes it absolutely about race too. The legacy of slavery and racial segregation didn't magically disappear in 1965. The limited amount I know about Canadian history is that something similar could be said about the treatment of First Nations.

Of course discrimination has greatly affected wealth distribution in the past. Still, I believe wealth re-distribution through Scandinavian style welfare state is the answer, not lectures about white-privilege and minority quotas. These days simply being white doesn't make you privileged if you were born into poor family, and being black doesn't automatically make you underprivileged if your parents happen to be wealthy.

There are privileges that come from race completely independent of wealth. Henry Gates Jr. getting arrested for "breaking in" to his own home while black is an anecdotal example of the kind of thing I'm talking about but it is shown in the data on policing and race too.

If you agree the US has a history of slavery and racial segregation, of course it will still offer privileges to white people because that's historically how the system was setup. When do you think that stopped affecting black people?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com