Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

He talks about "throw[ing of] slurs" and "denying rights to others", "wishing violence on people because of their heritage", and that type of thing. Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?

Do you think these people will be able to do good technical work if they're constantly beset by this kind of thing? Or do you think they will retreat to somewhere where they don't have to do with that?

And secretively hiding who you are is not a solution. No photographs. No video meets. No YouTube videos. Can never discus anything personal. No conferences.

View on HN

> Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?

It depends whom you ask! There are certainly some people both off- and on-line who seem to think that uniformly slurring all white, male, cis-sexual, whatever folks as "oppressors" - and even occasionally suggesting, apparently as a serious political proposal, that "Whiteness" (whatever that means) is something that should be forcibly done away with - is an effective way of advocating for diversity.

I suspect this is a pretty fringe position. I read quite a bit of center to left coded media, and I haven't seen it.

I will say that I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or tiktok though, so I might be missing a cultural moment.

I have seen people point out that the concept of "whiteness" has shifted over time, and doesn't really have an immutable meaning.

DEI trainers/programs (like you get at work) are informed by CRT (the stuff above).

> "Whiteness" (whatever that means)

Maybe you could look it up instead of dismissing it out of hand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory

Feel free to disagree afterwards, but the words do have meaning. And not knowing them is not an argument against it.

Holy smokes that is quite a page

Hmm yeah it's quite badly written. Either way, let's just say it's an example of a place where one can look stuff like this up.

"Ending whiteness" does not mean "killing all white people" or "eradicating all European cultures" or whatever the parent comment was implying. (Or am I reading too much into it?) Though perhaps you can find some moron calling for that on Twitter.

It's flatly racist. I'm not sure what other meaning you could get from these words.

Are other phrases of the form "ending ____ness", where ____ is a racial qualifier, also acceptable, then? Someone using that term could similarly argue that they're not advocating for the eradication of ____ people - just the identity and behavior associated with ____ people.

Are you arguing that calling it "whiteness" is a bad branding move by the sociologists? In that case, I fully agree. There's other similar bad branding moves like "toxic masculinity" or "racism = power + prejudice". I wish they would change those words.

Or do you mean that sociologists who speak about "abolishing whiteness" secretly mean "abolishing the behavior and identity of white people"? No I wouldn't agree with that. I think they mean what they say, and when they tell you their definition of "whiteness", that's what they're referring to. Not some other thing.

Going from "hey, maybe we shouldn't kick trans people in the teeth?" to some rant about "help help I'm oppressed because I'm white!" is quite the stretch. Why don't you just come out and say that We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children? God this site truly is infested with white nationalists up to its tits these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com