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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Good advice but I'm curious about:

"Jason Fried is the fastest white man you'll ever meet."

Is Jason actually really fast and/or was he an athlete at a prior time?

Jason, I found a little bio of you that said, "Jason Fried is the fastest white man you'll ever meet. He has curly hair and a sunny disposition. He loves to travel, play hoops, and watch sunsets from his roof deck. He wishes he could break dance." Is that all true?

JF: That was an old bio that someone wrote for me. I guess it's probably all true, except for the break dancing part. I really don't have any desire to do that.

http://www.tompeters.com/printer_friendly.php?print=1&no...

That whole interview was a good read, thanks.

That stood out to me too... is there an inside joke? What's the white have to do with it?

Seems like a throwaway joke to me; nothing to over-analyze.

Well, Most Asians have awesome APM or are great at table tennis. Black people tend to be great at running really fast. It makes sense doesn't it?:)

Yeah, it was really weird hitting the bottom of the article only to find a vaguely racist nonsensical byline.

I don't think is racist. I'm hispanic and I don't feel offended of white people calling themselves white :-) because they're white.

I suspect the racist tag was applied because stereotypically white men are slower runners than black men. But as far as racism goes that's... not to mention that it's a white guy talking about himself.

While I'm generally happy with the position that white guys can take it, I think it's still racist to imply white men are slow, whether one is a white guy or not.

It's not really racist to say something like that especially when there is strong supporting evidence.

Racism is where you advocate treating somebody differently because of these differences. So it would be racist to say "White men are too slow therefor should be banned from taking part in the olympics"

No, it isn't. It is not at all racist to acknowledge the physiological differences between different ethnic groups. It is well established that a higher leg-to-torso length ratio correlates with faster sprint times. Conversely, a lower leg-to-torso ratio correlates with faster swimming.

Racism has nothing to do with facts. It is all about promoting hatred based on superficial differences.

While certainly a seemingly off-color (no pun intended, I swear) remark, this is an interesting topic that came to my attention during the London Olympic games. Of the ~80 men who have run a sub-10 second 100m dash, only one or two of them have been Caucasian, though Jason Fried was not among the list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-second_barrier#Ethnicity

I'm not going to defend the byline (because it's cheap and inappropriate for the context) but there is a distinction between racial humor and racist humor. Not everything that addresses the concept of race is automatically racist, especially when it's not mean-spirited or demeaning.

It's a line that I'm not clever enough to tread, but other people seem to pull it off. Look at Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. Very racial, not really racist.

> especially when it's not mean-spirited or demeaning.

This is a common misunderstanding about the nature of racism. Read about Asian Americans and the model minority.

I don't see how you get from "model minority" to "absolutely any discussion related to race is racist".

Sure, some things that aren't mean-spirited or demeaning are also racist, but that doesn't mean that everything is. Am I missing something? Serious question.

Yeah, this jarred me as well. Vaguely racist.

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