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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.

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Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.

I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.

Parent was not talking about the origin though. Present day obsession with so called "race" is absolutely a US phenomenon. Classifying people as "caucasian" for instance always trips me up because it's something that people would call you a nazi for elsewhere.

You live under a rock if you think "race discourse" originated (presumably recently) from US media or the US at all.

I don't think paganel's claim is that all race discourse is derived from the US. Rather, that (1) the race discourse in the US is stupid and (2) that much race discourse elsewhere these days is derived from the US's and is therefore similarly stupid. (Other independent race discourse might also be stupid but in different ways.)

Race discourse in the US is not stupid. Nazis from Germany mass murdered people because of white supremacy before US critical race theory. It's important to talk about Nazis and white supremacy instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away by itself.

It is possible for something to be important to talk about, and for the way it's talked about to be stupid. In fact, I think it's quite common. I agree with paganel that a lot of US race discourse is stupid. I agree with you that sometimes it's important to talk about race. There's no contradiction between those.

(But I don't think "white supremacy" is a good way to think about the Nazis' hatred of Jewish people. They were white supremacists, but they hated the Jews for other reasons and if by some miracle they had abruptly stopped being white supremacists I think they would have gone right on persecuting Jewish people.)

Yes that is how it reads now that they’ve edited to say “the US race discourse.”

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