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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

This is a very strange article. The author spends the whole time arguing against calling groups of people by the terms they prefer, with an extra focus on trying to excuse racism (such as claiming that "all lives matter" was perfectly innocent for the first week, despite the fact that it arose specifically as a counter to "black lives matter", and incidentally using ageism to make this claim). It's pretty obvious without even looking that the author is a white man.

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The entire top level point of the article, the part that is literally the focus of the title, is a recommendation not to call groups by names they don't like.

Did you read the article? Or did you read the first two paragaphs and decide it was wrong thought and go to yell to the internet?

In fact, the point of the article is an attempt to reason about the mechanism that determine why groups prefer that others don’t use this or that word to describe them—not to argue in favor of doing it.

No that's just the point of the first two paragraphs. Everything past that is claiming that we're taking this idea too far. It specifically used the hypothetical situation of Asian folks deciding that being called "Asian" was bad and that they should be called something like "People of Asia" (I forget the exact replacement phrase and the article isn't loading for me right now) as something that shouldn't be respected. I believe the point was something like the slur for Japanese folk was rooted in actual discrimination and so that's an understandable reason for not liking the term, but if a group of people just decide they want a different term, that's bad and we shouldn't respect their wishes because it makes life harder for white people.

I cannot tell whether this is sarcastic, or if you missed the point of the article. In either case, you did it spectacularly!

You're spot on - it's the idle thoughts of a privileged white man trying to justify racism, but he presents no new arguments, and dresses the whole thing up in academicese.

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