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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

> There are a lot of poor, underprivileged white people in the country

So your argument is that if a particular race of people had it a little easier than other races, there wouldn't be any poor people in that race?

On the whole, the white male does have a slight advantage.

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Fair enough, but that advantage is well deserved if they worked to build it.

Honestly, if you want to be on top in 10 years, spend your weekends toying with bitcoins, drones and/or 3D printers.

These areas will give birth to the new Facebook, and it's mostly white males who are playing with them right now. Get into it now, don't come whining in 10 years when a Hollywood movie is made about it and it suddenly becomes cool.

> Fair enough, but that advantage is well deserved if they worked to build it.

But the point is we didn't work to build it. Merely being born were I was gave me extremely high odds of being amongst the richest people in the world.

At most you could claim my ancestors "worked to build it", but that's still a massive stretch - the main reason for the wealth I grew up around was oil and European imperialism.

yay lets nerf those undeserving white men. that will make the world a better place

How does recognizing you are lucky imply "needing" them? Telling well of American children to keep in mind their privilege and that most people in the world don't have what they have hardly seems like Marxism to me.

'Privilege' implies shame. 'Culture' implies pride.

I prefer to teach our kids culture.

Pride (or shame) in other people's actions seems irrational to me (unless you had some involvement).

Why should I feel proud that I am from the same country as Isaac Newton? Or shame about the bombing of Dresden? I had nothing to do with either of those things.

No. Wrong. Privilege implies no such thing. Privilege is not a moral judgment: it is a description of a condition. You are privileged when you have advantages due to your religion, birth class, sexual orientation, or other socially relevant criteria.

You are a dick when you refuse to recognize when you are privileged and act to reinforce your privileged position.

"well deserved if they worked to build it"- does that still apply if it involves centuries, decades of colonization, oppression, slavery?

" if you want to be on top in 10 years, spend your weekends toying with bitcoins, drones and/or 3D printers."

how many black kids- or poor kids in India, for instance (consider Ramanujan) do you think are going to have the OPPORTUNITY to spend their weekends toying with bitcoins, drones and/or 3D printers?

There's a REASON it's mostly white males who are playing with those areas, and it's not "White Men Work Harder".

African mothers work harder than anybody else, walking tens of miles everyday to bring home water to their kids. Where's their well-deserved advantage?

You realize that when someone says 'white male' they are saying it in the context of other types of people in the same society? Ie we're still talking about the First World - just juxtaposing them to black males, asian females, white females, etc.

The existence of 5-odd billion non-white people around the world isn't really discussed :)

Aren't there plenty of minorities in the western world by now? And Bitcoin mining could be done by anybody...

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