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Comment by sbi | Hacker News Reader

What charming casual racism. "It's pretty ghetto" ... "The ghetto way is just to run this on a machine" ... "The ghetto reversing is to run strings."

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Racism? Webster's definition[0] of ghetto (and that of any other respectable dictionary) makes no reference to any particular race. Would the phrase "the poor man's solution is to run strings" also be racist, by your logic?

[0] a part of a city in which members of a particular group or race live usually in poor conditions; the poorest part of a city

That's only one of the definitions in Webster. It also includes:

> 1: a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghetto

(Note: I'm not calling the article's author racist, just noting that the above claim about Webster is factually mistaken.)

In the US for the past many decades the word "ghetto" has referred to qualities associated with poor urban american neighborhoods, specifically black neighborhoods, and only has a historical connection to jewish ghettos.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/04/27/306829915/seg...

Webster's Dictionary does not discuss the pejorative use of the word "ghetto" and in any case is not an arbiter of racism.

Well I'm glad that you seem totally qualified to be our great arbiter of racism. What would we do without you?

Be very careful accusing people of racism. When you get it wrong, you undermine complaints about real racism.

Is that racist? I thought ghetto just meant poor/inelegant, across all colors and nationalities.

When sbi sees the word "ghetto", she thinks of a particular race. So this is a case of the pot calling the kettle...

Whoops! Never mind...

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