Comment by paranoiacblack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paranoiacblack | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I disagree. I think the biggest privilege one can have is a fair start. Being able to live as you'd like without picking up hundreds of years of stigma and injustices or having to work extremely hard to distinguish yourself as someone that can be trusted.

> I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who struggles with reading/writing skills.

Privilege isn't about odds of success, it's about proportional work to become successful. When someone doesn't trust you or has something against you because of your ethnicity or gender, you have to work two or three times as hard for the same success someone else has. That's the problem.

> I find it interesting that it is generally considered correct and fair that somebody has better income and quality of life because of high intelligence when this is a factor as much outside your control as race or gender.

This is just the American Dream blown out of proportion, as usual.

If you have a low IQ, the amount of extra work you have to put in in order to successful in a well paying career will be far higher than someone of high intelligence.

Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas, being dumb will work against you in any industry.

Yes, which is why plenty of people think that capitalism is inherently flawed. A system which rewards production over anything is a system in which those who can't produce as effectively will be punished. Unless you truly believe that production is the end-all be-all of human existence, that's not a fair system. (There's also the problem of capitalism being really bad at properly valuing things but that's neither here nor there.)

But what you're missing, Mr. Jiggy, is that the biases we're talking about extend way beyond "industry". They infiltrate every part of our culture. Politics, media representation, religious attitudes, the values we teach our children, on and on and on.

This incident with Adria is happening the same week that a number of news organizations were criticized for reporting on a rape trial and sympathizing with the rapists. CNN, NPR, Fox News all ran stories about how much it sucks to have your life ruined for raping somebody. Some even disclosed the name of the 16-year-old victim, so that people could email her rape threats the same way they've been writing Adria. And this wasn't an ambiguous case of "did they rape this girl" – the people shot video of the rape and posted it to YouTube with the tags "rape" and "offensive". Still we had people asking if the raped girl "was asking for it", and writing hatefully that she's just a "slut who ruined two good boys' lives".

I get that you feel there are other imbalances at play in society, and believe you me there are! But please don't make this about which particular imbalance is the outright worst one. Ours is a hugely misogynistic culture, and this unfortunate incident is triggering not only a huge bout of anti-feminist sentiment, but also convincing a lot of people that feminists are just assholes who need attention at the expense of innocent men. Which is about the opposite of true.

Again, if you want to start a thread to discuss other flaws in the system, be my guest! Hacker News doesn't see nearly enough of that conversation, in my opinion. But that's not really what this post is about.

It's not that various forms of discrimination don't exist. It's that some forms are considered more "just" than others.

If you are born with a low IQ, people will certainly judge you for it. You will also be punished for it, for example by scam artists who will take advantage of you. Then people will respond with stuff like "well, if your dumb enough to fall for that you deserve what you get".

So I think boiling down equality to a few pet issues as various movements want to do is a gross simplification.

As an example, poor areas in the UK are often considered some of the most racist. I think this is partly because people with low education and poor outlook will see an educated black lady complaining about equality on TV and think "wtf is she complaining for, I bet she earns more in a week than I do in a year!".

You... are aware that there's a huge movement against treating people with low IQs like they're subhuman, right? There's a thread currently on the front page in which people are arguing about whether or not the word "retarded" should be used as a casual insult.

I don't understand what your end goal is here. Either we talk about imbalances or we don't. And if we do, we have to talk about specific imbalances, or else they don't get fixed. This is a specific imbalance that's engendering (ahem) a lot of discussion recently, and it's about time that that discussion's being had. I'll say again that if you want to post about the disadvantages of having a low IQ, I'll gladly upvote it, but it seems like you're saying that because other types of discrimination exist, we should stop talking about this one. Which is absurd.

People will speak about discrimination against those who low IQ enough to be considered mentally handicapped, but there is a great class of people with IQ of say 80-100.

My peeve really is the "straight white guy" meme which seems to suggest "hey, you are straight and white you have it easy" which is necessarily going to alienate huge numbers of people from the debate.

I think the intelligence example is especially important because intelligence is such an amazing tool for overcoming over disadvantages.

> My peeve really is the "straight white guy" meme which seems to suggest "hey, you are straight and white you have it easy" which is necessarily going to alienate huge numbers of people from the debate.

Yeah but nobody says that. They say "if you're straight you don't have to think about what gay people go through", and "if you're white you don't have to think about what black people go through", and "if you're a man you don't have to think about what women go through", and this is all true. And I would wager that the shit your average woman or minority or gay person has to go through in their lifetime is overwhelmingly more severe than what your average person with an IQ of 100 has to face.

If you really want to get into this derail, I suggest you look at people talking about biases in education and education access, specifically at the conversations which deal with how lack of access to certain kinds of education make it vastly harder to deal with modern life. This is a conversation that people do have, and they have it often. But it is still not what this conversation is about.

> "Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas"

Racial and sexual discrimination goes much, much further than industries with strong, institutionalized stigmas.

The problem with discrimination is that sometimes it's so casual and so subtle. You do not, for example, have to hate black people to contribute to discrimination.

The struggle for being black or homosexual isn't so much being kicked out of a store, or barred from membership in an organization, or being actively hated in an environment - it's the subtle, everyday, casual things that stack up quickly. It's the furtive look, the different way people treat you, that little flicker of fear when they see you, etc etc.

This is the problem with explaining privilege - there are very few big, ugly examples you can point at (say, a cross burning on your lawn), but instead there is an avalanche of little things, each one of which is insignificant by itself. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Privilege isn't just your job. It can refer to where you live and shop and hang out. You might work in an industry that has no stigma against gay people. But if your local town does, then you're disadvantaged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com