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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

> Working at Silicon Valley is one of the most racist places I've lived, and I'm from Louisiana

It's manifested in ways that are "acceptable" to the local population because everyone does it.

Racism as a catch-all term makes for really unproductive discourse. There's a difference between "I deeply hate people of a certain race from the bottom of my heart" vs "I generally hate the behavior I have observed of a certain race because they are different from my expectations." The latter is probably more common and it's because humans don't like things that are different from them. The former is evil and is what used to come to mind when people used the term. I would like to see these two things conflated less.

Both of these things are evil and racist.

Your comment seems to be gaslighting. The other of those is inexcusable bad behavior whereas the other is a fundamental human survival instinct. Calling that racist is perhaps defensible, but "evil"? Preposterous.

Both cases are very abhorrent examples of racism. Perhaps it is convenient to justify tribalism as a “[…]fundamental human survival instinct” but that’s the same useless lizard brain justification that people use to justify unacceptable behavior, namely sexual assault. We’re so far past being tribal hunter gatherers so there’s absolutely no point in trying to 1. Predict how people behaved back then 2. Use animal behaviors to justify how present day people behave 3. Apply these bad inferences as excuses to the norms we have in place today. All forms of racism are unnatural and prejudices might “seem” justified if you’re an animal, but the prejudices we have were obtained during our modern day lived experiences and not some deeply in-grained natural response. So no, you can’t just say racism is some kind of animal adaptation that we maintained through prehistory.

You're conflating possibly offensive human behavior with clearly evil fascism, thus downplaying the worse evil. That is not acceptable and I think you should stop it.

I think you should stop trying to justify racism on pseudoscientific grounds and just making up silly unfounded excuses for such behavior.

I disagree. One is a hatred of a an immutable characteristic (race) whereas the other is a hatred of an action. There is a big difference. This is not a justification of hatred of actions but people seem to conflate the two.

I think you're proving the point. Both of these things absolutely 100% meet the definition of racist.

Is vs ought. It /might/ be a biologically rooted tendency (and there is evidence suggesting this is the case) but that does not imply that is how we should be. After all, humans also have the opposite tendency, i.e. to love what is foreign, or an orthogonal one, i.e. to insist on mutual respect.

Human rights have no ontological basis, but they are a valid marker of any form of human civilization.

The dichotomy in popular discourse is even stronger. "I generally prefer to avoid the behavior I have typically observed of a certain race because they are different from my expectations," is also often called racist and evil. In which case, I don't care if I'm a racist by that definition.

There's a difference between killing someone and assaulting them but both suck.

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