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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> Cancelling a cartoonist because he was shocked nearly half of 'black' people polled had racist views of 'white' people and decided he would stop supporting 'black' causes is not exactly earth shattering if you live in the bay area.

That’s not what happened: “it’s okay to be white” is a well-known white supremacist campaign which started on 4chan. Here’s a history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white

It’s designed to sound plausibly benign to people who aren’t paying attention — for example, anyone who didn’t stop to ask why someone felt the need to answer a question nobody was asking – but black people in the US are unsurprisingly not given the opportunity to be oblivious to racism. Ask a black person or a Jewish person what the neo-nazis are doing and they’re far more likely to be at least somewhat informed because a lot of people in their communities can’t afford not to be.

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Are we really this easily duped?

The entire EXPLICITLY STATED point of these /pol/ campaigns is to manipulate the media into acting as an engine of radicalization.

“It’s okay to be white” would have died on the vine right next to “Islam is right about women” if the media didn’t go into an amplification feeding frenzy.

Edit: and sure, the cat’s out of the bag and actual racists are probably using the phrase now. But clearly no lesson has been learned - ditching Scott Adams for supposedly making reprehensible racist remarks is going to absolutely set more than a few people down the path of radicalization when they look up what he said and see “it’s okay to be white”. I can only imagine the glee over on 4chan right now.

This is not the media going on a frenzy. This is Scott Adams knowingly misrepresenting a poll result as “see, black people are the real racists!” rather than “many black people have correctly learned who uses this slogan and why”. The only reason anyone is talking about it is because he’s trying to use it as a cover story, and the correct response is to recognize his true motives and ignore him.

> The only reason anyone is talking about it is because he’s trying to use it as a cover story

Why are people trying to make this guy sound clever and self aware? He sounds unhinged

I have complicated feelings about alt-right trolling. Here's the problem: alt-right trolling tactics usually act against a marginalized group. People often react very reasonably against someone acting to marginalize an already vulnerable group. But even the act of trying to defend against said trolling is now itself "taking the bait", so the only things allies "should" do to "not take the bait" is to allow trolling people to continue punching down on minorities. There's no winning here.

For example: It was common for alt-right speakers to find and doxx trans people at universities they would be invited to. Of course, allies would try to protest these speakers coming to universities because they would doxx trans people at them. But trying to keep them off campus plays right into the "we're being oppressed, academia is a leftist hivemind hellscape" narrative that the very same doxxers try to spin. So the only option is to let them come on and doxx trans people? I don't really know. It's nasty.

A lot of this comes back to money. There’s a propaganda network measured in billions of dollars annually which reliably amplifies these messages, and I think that’s probably the angle to pursue. A lot of this stuff would stay on 4chan if people weren’t pouring money into broadcasting it, and many advertisers will cave if asked why they’re funding white nationalists.

actual racists are probably using the phrase now

They've been doing it the entire time. There was no amplification feeding frenzy, but the racists have been patently forcing hte meme for something like 18 months with stickering, banner drops, coordinated shitposts etc.

going to absolutely set more than a few people down the path of radicalization

Who, the ultra-late adopters? Dilbert went on an anti-woke trajectory a few years ago.

You are literally the amplifier. This obliviousness drives me nuts. Stop feeding the trolls.

You mean calling out bad behavior? This is how we make society a better place.

> when they look up what he said and see “it’s okay to be white”

But that's not all he said at all...

He said:

"Black America is a hate group"

"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed."

"So that's what'd I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population."

"I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore"

...pretending all he said was "It's ok to be white" is completely disingenuous.

I understand the context of “it’s okay to be white” but it’s a broken clock right twice a day kind of thing. The people who criticize the phrase “it’s okay to be white” are actually racists and ad hominem doesn’t make them not racist.

Going on about how even asking the question is racist is a lame criticism. A bunch of white supremacists touched a nerve and revealed a bunch of anti-white racism in the population. It is how it is. The only way to fight against their propaganda is not to defame the people saying this - it’s to not be racist and to point out that mildly racist views on white people don’t nessecarily amount to much of anything in the real world.

You’re begging the question of whether the people objecting to that phrase are reacting to the surface message or the well-known subtext. Unless you have that data, it’s an error to assume it’s saying anything about anti-white racism.

For example, if you asked me whether it was important to secure a future for white children, I’d react negatively even though I am white because I know that phrasing and the related belief structure is tightly bound to the white supremacist movement. That doesn’t mean I don’t want white children to have a great future - as a father that’d be abhorrent - but I want that for all children and I specifically don’t want anything I say or do to be construed as supporting the kind of people who rally around the 14 words.

You pick your reactions based on 4chan?

Only in the sense that if I recognize something came from there I do not assume the question is being asked in good faith.

What question?

Fair enough I did make the same point elsewhere that this poll is worthless due to the effect described. It’s too politically loaded.

As to the “14 words” somehow I feel those are more loaded because it’s a pretty explicit historical reference to WWII German wartime expansionism which genuinely killed loads of people, which makes the word “secure” in the 14 words feel very uncomfortable. We know exactly what “secure” means and it caused much death.

> The people who criticize the phrase “it’s okay to be white” are actually racists and ad hominem doesn’t make them not racist.

That's only true if you're painfully context-blind, or if you live in a non-white-dominated society that's well known for centuries of discrimination towards whites (which you don't).

I am white and while the phrase taken at its face value is obviously true, I can't think of a context where I could use it without intentional racist subtexts - and that's without even considering the origin of the phrase.

I don’t treat racial groups as homogenous wholes and think that because some white people in 1870 had it pretty great an individual white person can’t either be the victims of racism or be self-hating racists with self-esteem issues. I don’t look at your experience as a white person and go “wow you must understand hundred of millions of peoples experience”

What I have seen is people who aren’t privileged and aren’t successful will hate themselves because they believe they are privileged and because they’re not successful that makes them bad even relative to other similarly unsuccessful people. Poor white boys in Britain have the worst educational outcomes in the country. I’ve heard countless times how affirmative action isn’t a problem because of legacy admissions mostly being held by whites, and it never dawns on people that this means the non-legacy spots for white students must’ve reduced if one is to maintain racial equity (which must of course be done because of centuries of privilege), resulting in a unique problem for people at the intersection of being poor and white which doesn’t happen to poor people in general. Same things happen in the workforce, if you try to achieve equity in a disproportionately white workplace without firing a bunch of white people, think about it, WHICH white people take the hit? Despite what I describe not showing that while people collectively are hard done by, my point is that looking at the collective situation is misleading and underestimates the potential for a white person to get screwed for having the wrong skin BECAUSE of the privilege of other whites!

There is one context in which I will say words to the effect of “it’s okay to be white” which is to counteract the toxic effects of treating whites as a homogenous whole with “white privilege” which can destroy peoples self esteem when they don’t live up to that privilege and think dark things about themselves and people who look like them.

The wiki you linked opens with a claim that is provably false.

> "It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is a slogan which originated as part of an organized alt-right trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017.

Countless search results pre-date this and not on 4chan. [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22it%27s+ok+to+be+white%22&...

When I checked a few of those results, it was just showing that Google's date parsers were either wrong (there's a neo-Nazi band's song denying the holocaust listed as 2001 but the actual page is from 2021) or news stories which predate 2017 but do not mention that phrase anywhere except in something like a “top news” box which happened to feature a story about Scott Adams when Google most recently crawled that page. Twitter appears to have a similar issue with things like pinned or related tweets where the date Google shows in their snippet doesn't block to a tweet with that phrase.

The other thing to remember is that there's a difference between whether anyone in human history has ever combined 5 words together before and the organized campaign promoting that as a catch-phrase aiming to boost white supremacy. If we find a few neo-Nazis using that phrase before 2017, it doesn't meaningfully change the idea that the reason almost everyone else has heard of it is due to the /pol/ campaign — to call that into question you'd want to see if there was non-racist use prior to that date.

Here's considerably more detail about how they moved that from 4chan to Fox News: https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-its-...

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