Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
That's largely all anyone can do (and I have a lot more ability to do something about it as a business owner than the average progressive), which I'm sure feels inadequate and leads to roving bands of thought police members looking for perceived transgressions to attack.
For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them? If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
The same way I determine anyone's beliefs on any other topic, which is watching their actions over time, including what they say.
> For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them?
Probably, but context matters.
> If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
And here we go. I'm not censoring anyone by not continuing to associate with someone I don't agree with. I'm also not digitally screaming to ostracize someone I disagree with over terminology, as is the case with cancel culture advocates.
> On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
See what I said above about how I assess people. But if someone is a closet racist and I know nothing about it, what am I supposed to do?
> Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
Knock it off.
Exactly what term would you use for the groups of terminally online people who dig through decades of social media posts looking for something like a mildly offensive tweet to blow out of proportion?
When you don't have an understanding of racism as a systemic issue, this ends up being the conclusion. Which is why "woke" people (the ones who aren't just adopting the aesthetics and being annoying) typically discuss social issues in systemic terms (prison, policing, discrimination, etc). Which requires not just individual actions but collective action.
The inability to understand this concept is really just a lack of imagination that comes from internalizing the status quo for too long. Not to the fault of anyone, it's only natural. But I think this is why "woke" looks like a bunch of nonsense from the outside.
For example: the US has 2M people in prison more than any other country. An insane number, but to live in the US is to accept that number as normal.
Sticking with the hiring situation, if you notice that a recruiter only ever recommends hiring people with say the last name Pandit then ask them about it. A lot of times people are not ashamed of their views and will just straight up tell you that they could tell the other candidates were inferior because of their name.
But as somebody else mentioned, there is no silver bullet here. Racism varies from instance to instance. A solution to fix racism in hiring isn't going to fix red-lining. You need to be keeping an eye of things and looking for patterns that don't make sense for the given sample size.
>>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
pg, and many anti-woke crusaders, employ examples of performative anti-racism to undermine the necessity of genuine anti-racism altogether.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it.
[update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?
"Wokeness" is a fake bear the right has built up to distract from class issues and sow dissent amongst workers and stave off class solidarity. Progressive policy is largely embraced by the majority of Americans [2], but because the right (and its newfound grifter-billionare tech exec class like PG, Musk, Zuck, etc.) have convinced an overwhelmingly large amount of Americans that their woes are because we have gender neutral bathrooms (instead of wage theft by the C suite), it is peddled and use as a smokescreen to continually push through policy and regime changes that will only every serve the .1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-suppor...
It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy".
Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour.
Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
A perfect example is when gay marriage was illegal and some straight people loudly announced that they wouldn't get married until gay people could.
OK. Your motives are good but how exactly is this going to help legalize gay marriage? And why did the world need to know about it?
I think a better analogy is people who would criticize other heterosexual couples for getting married when homosexual couples could not, as it is both pointless and needlessly antagonistic.
Also, you're projecting. You don't (and can't) know what a person's true goals are. Framing these actions as them communicating they are morally superior to someone (you?) is a thought in that other person's head, not the protestors. Maybe these straight people truly believe this form of protest (not getting married) will bring attention to a cause and maybe change some people's minds. Did it? Who knows. But good on them for at least trying.
Beginning by changing the language is so fundamentally flawed that I have a hard time believing you seriously think it could ever be effective.
Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.
Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...