Comment by mdisraeli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdisraeli | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm glad it wasn't just me who felt like that. I'm white, middle class, and grew up in Britain as a native. But as a member of multiple minority groups, I've seen hints of this world, and it is not pretty :(

The worst part of all this? First thing I did was check the author's gender and skin colour. And then I read the article. I normally work hard to be free of the prejudice of this society we are forced to live in, and yet I realised I took this article more seriously because it was by a white male :(

That is why it is vital to understand privilege, and that we live in a society that is constantly pushing its values that we cannot help but to make such mistakes. That it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, how much of a meritocracy you think your community has, but if it isn't free from the constant pressure of our base society (ie, realistically impossible), you'll end reading something like this and trying to excuse away those thoughts I just admitted.

Interestingly, I assumed the author was female until well into the story. But speaking of privilege, I can't imagine even the most obnoxious cops treating middle-class white women that way.

>I can't imagine even the most obnoxious cops treating middle-class white women that way.

Umm do you remember the OWS protests?

Yeah, and I was on the ground for the 2008 Republican convention, too. I know what tear gas feels like.

But police behavior toward masses of people in crowd-control situations at protests (where everyone in sight is treated as a criminal) is fundamentally different from police behavior toward individual bystanders at a small, nonviolent emergency scene. So I don't think your exception is valid or applicable.

The essence of privilege is the default treatment you typically receive from strangers. Middle class white women are perceived as the least threatening stereotype by police. Men are more likely to be seen as a threat to be subjugated, non-whites more so, the obviously poor more so.

I did too, I think it's because the photo at the top is of a woman speaking. Knowing nothing about the author prior to visiting the site, it's not unrealistic to assume that it's a photo of the author. At least, that's what I think went down in my subconscious.

like this woman who's face was shattered by the cops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMWDxwL1Zog

I changed the photo to prevent this misconception. I fear that I may have received more sympathy and readership because of the false notion that I'm the attractive female in the photo. You can see me in the photo where I'm being loaded into the van. I'm a Soviet born Jew who immigrated to the US in the late 80s. At the time, I also had a beard. Here is a more flattering photo of me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgoralnick/6128547691/in/photos...

Just because you are prejudiced in favor of white people doesn't mean every other white person alive is also a racist.

There are shades of racism. At the extreme racist end, there are those who genuinely and explicitly believe that dark skin makes you a worthless scum. At the other end, there are people who feel, at a gut level, that skin colour is irrelevant. Between the two, there are people who will infer various things from skin colour, such as the propensity to crime, IQ, or whatever.

The sad fact is, a correct assessment of reality is racist to some extent. Not because of skin colour, mind you, but because of confounding factors such as income, or self-fulfilling prophecies such as racism itself. Correlation is not causation, but the correlation is still there, and we can still draw inferences from them.

As for my personal assessment of the credibility of this story, I assumed the guy was white to begin with. If I believed he was black, I would have been like "of course", and marked off the story as even more credible. Because I have this stereotype in my head about police being racist. I'm now wondering to what extent this is actually true…

Jesse Jackson said this: “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Does that mean he is a racist?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com