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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Well his response to this:

"They tried their best. They called me every name in the book. They cut off my health insurance. They deleted all of my fucking stories, which like, what the fuck? And then they still lost. People keep asking, ‘Is it going to be weird going back?’ I’m like, yeah, for them.”"

I rather think it will be super weird for everyone.

Also the original joke, that was likely the one triggering the firing, was about his workplace:

“I work at one of these places that’s so woke it’s kinda racist,” the joke reads in part. “Like this lady asked my boss, she’s like ‘Yo, does Jad consider himself a person of color?’ because she was making a list of us. Fucking hell? Sick, alright. I get to be in this lady’s brown dude Pokédex.”

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Someone needs to take a stand, so not all work places end up being so woke they are racist.

Bring back common sense.

"Common sense" is how this mess, and the preceding messes that made people want this particular mess, happened in the first place.

Aim for uncommon sense instead.

That will be uncommon.

It truly is impressive that we went from Martin Luther King to a world where a term like "person of color" is not racist.

Incidentally, if anyone dares to call me that (I'm Japanese), I sincerely will not consider him a man of good character.

"People of color" was popularized in the 70s and 80s as a solution to the othering effect of words like "non-white," and not just by white people.

Dr. King preferred "citizens of color." What sets "people of color" apart? Both acknowledge the subject's humanity.

as an answer for you:

Political scientist Angelo Falcón argues that the use of broad terms like "person of color" is offensive because it aggregates diverse communities and projects "a false unity" that "obscure[s] the needs of Latinos and Asians"

more or less creating a group that simply ‘is not white’ is disparinging for all of the folks in that group that feel more unique than simply ‘not white’

To add on to this, it is racist to exclude whites.

It is racist to generalize peoples' heritages, it is racist to exclude whites, and above all it is racist to not simply consider your fellow man as just a fellow man just like yourself.

Racism is considering someone's race for something where race is not relevant, the intent behind the act is irrelevant.

most technically racist means systemic oppresion, but it is def discrimination

That’s not a technical definition of the word, that’s an academic/activist niche way to describe the word which is contrary to popular or historical usage.

I criticize the redefinition as seemingly wholly existing to narrow the number of cases in which racial discrimination can be considered racism and I wonder what ethical justification could possibly exist for PRESCRIBING this definition when people use the word “racist” in the common sense of the word. It seems to be a definition which exists wholly because some think it would be swell if a black woman calling an Asian man a slur wasn’t called a racist. Yet the people who argue for this I find don’t actually support this behaviour, they would discourage it, they just want marginalized groups to just never be called racist, because that’s too harsh or something.

Also what constitutes systemic oppression anyways? Take a majority subordinate under a minority boss. Can the minority say a slur without it being racist? Can the majority? What a stupid debate to have when this shouldn’t happen EITHER way, because this is RACIST. The original definition is more fair and simple and straightforwards and popular and less counterproductive than the redefinitions.

> To add on to this, it is racist to exclude whites.

Apparently that’s allowed now, at least by the people seem to think everybody else are the racists: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna129796

By this logic, calling people white is racist. White as an identity is completely arbitrary and seems to shift to change who it includes and excludes every few decades. It's a meaningless term that generalizes a vast and diverse array of cultures.

>> "Racism is considering someone's race for something where race is not relevant, the intent behind the act is irrelevant."

The people who popularized the term to describe themselves certainly didn't think it was irrelevant.

But the concept of race is not logical. You can ask questions about whiteness all you want, but those have the same quality of answers as questions about Asianness and Africanness.

Who says it has to be logical? It’s embedded in the social fabric of the United States. It can’t be dismissed out of hand. It must be recognized and addressed.

People should not fear talking about it. But steer away from phrases like “by that logic” —- it’s neither convincing nor rational to seek a more-logical view on race. It is only embedded in social fabric and not found elsewhere.

I feel like intent is totally relevant. Somebody can outright use a racial slur and people will argue it is not racist if it was not said with racist intent. Enough people think intent is important for intent to be important.

Unfortunately, racism exists, and the primary victims aren’t white people.

Racism existing does not excuse further racism, nor is racism addressed by further racism.

That doesn't answer the question. The question is: what sets it apart from Dr. King's use of a functionally identical term? Dalewyn specifically named Dr. King as the "good" point in a timeline that ends on the bad "calling people people of color."

women of color was a thrid wave feminist creation. it was made by white women to describe the non-whites that were asking to be seen. anyone calling anyone a person of color is def a latent racist, as it is always talking down. we can just chat with others wothout acting like we are 5 years old and need to show them we have identified a color or shape that is different!

1977 is just a bit earlier than third wave feminism's start in the 90s.

It’s OK to refer to persons of color (a classification), but it’s not OK to refer to a specific individual as a person of color. It can be offensive to acknowledge another person’s race, and it’s best to avoid doing this.

In the United States, the term means you would have been kept out of white-only clubs. The average idiot in America might have forgotten that this has happened in living memory. So when someone uses it to refer to Japanese-Americans they might be signaling that they recognize a white-only rule existed in living memory.

can you define common sense versus woke? the term woke has lost all meaning, and now seems to mean ‘whatever i find to be outside of expectations i have had set’, and i legit would love to understand it better so i am not misinterpreting all the argumetns i see

"Common sense" means focusing on first order effects. Don't prod your coworkers about their race because that will obviously make them feel uncomfortable.

Woke, in this case, is focusing on Nth order effects.. do prod your coworker about their race because abstract reasons justified by theories about social abstractions... Thinking about group effects that might kick in at the societal level instead of the effect you're having immediately on the individual sitting right in front of you.

The former, first order common sense thinking, is what normal people intuitively do. Focusing on the individual when dealing with an individual is the common sense approach. The second, focusing about abstract secondary group effects when dealing with an individual, is something people get trained into doing by sociology class in university, or being lectured on the internet, or being indoctrinated into a racist ideology. A traditional racist or a modern woke person doesn't see individuals, they see representatives of abstract groups that must be treated in some way calculated to have Nth order group effects.

'Woke' is 'red pilled' with a different colour tie.

Hahaha that’s pretty good

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