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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Yes, by progressives - and don't start the "no true scotsman" fallacy please.

Also, your second statement maybe applies to the US, but there are many countries where white people are not the majority, or where there were virtually no other races than white. Saying that e.g. Norwegians or Italians are privileged by institutional racism is absurd. I am from a post-communist country that was always 99.9% white, saying that “White identity is grounded in racism” is absurd and of course totally racist.

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> saying that “White identity is grounded in racism” is absurd and of course totally racist

Sticking my neck out a little, and leaving out my personal positions, I think you are interpreting "White identity" as "any identity held by people who are white", where dragonwriter meant something more like "holding White as an identity"?

I never asked for a white identity, but it is being applied to me by other people.

Any way you spin it, it is not ok. The color of my skin is my immutable characteristic, any derogatory statement about the whole white race will always be wrong.

The alternative interpretation I proposed doesn't say anything about anyone based on the color of their skin, doesn't say anything about the individual members of "the whole white race" where that label is assigned to them by others, and if we restrict "the whole white race" to those who voluntarily choose to identify as such then it only says something about that particular choice not the individuals more broadly.

You could reasonably argue that I have misinterpreted dragonwriter, that dragonwriter's interpretation doesn't match that of the other progressives who use the phrase, or that there are other problems with that interpretation (I don't, here, even endorse it). But your particular rant is off base enough that I don't think you understood it.

> Also, your second statement maybe applies to the US,

Since we are discussing a distinct American center-left faction’s position on domestic group relations, I don't know why you'd think the positions ought to apply to conditions elsewhere.

No, we are not. Progressivism spread from the US to the whole world long time ago. There is literally a party called Progressive Party where I am from that even adopted the "white male privilege" narrative even though, as I said, my country never had any racial minorities (other than jews, if you consider it ethnoreligion a race) or colonial history. It would be comical if it wasn't tragic.

If you are talking about a whole race of people, but you actually mean only a specific subset, then it is up to you to define the context, not up to the reader.

(And even in that case you will still probably end up with a racist generalisation.)

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