> The difference is hundreds of years of slavery and institutional discrimination specifically target toward blacks and all the accompanying cultural baggage. Part of that baggage is a deeply ingrained suggestion that black people are intellectually inferior but innately athletic. How can you say this with complete certainty? How could you ever be sure?
My argument is that history matters. You're welcome to argue otherwise.
Where is your evidence? I think the null hypotheses, i.e. we don't know, is more probable then what a appears to be an unsubstantiated conclusion that you wrote.
Did you ever think it might be the way you dress or your demeanor? Obviously, it could be racial also, but how could you know that?
His clothes or demeanor can’t possible be the same for n > 100, but his race sure is. Let’s face it, the TSA blatantly discriminates against race and it’s not a secret.
Assuming it is race, do you really think the whole TSA does? Wouldn't it have to be codified in order for them to do so?
I think it would probably be more likely a few racist employees he unfortunately has to deal with.
HN reflects the society at large, so of course it proves the article right in that sense. Otherwise the article wouldn't be about the world. Any divisive topic is going to show up as divisive in any large-enough population sample. But there are at least as many comments pointing the opposite way—more, in fact, but we tend to notice the ones we dislike, and to weight them more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRang…
Would HN ever consider possibly adding location as an optional profile field? That may actually be useful in a lot of discussions and avoiding misunderstanding. I realize you can easily add this in your bio, but the explicit field will encourage more people to add it who may not yet understand the reasoning. I'd say a tooltip could be added for context, but that seems even farther from the HN profile philosophy that…
Sure, we'd consider it. But in a community that cares a lot about privacy and getting more so, I wonder if enough people would turn such a feature on to make it worthwhile. Also, would we show it by default on every comment? I think probably not, but then it would be less useful for preventing misunderstandings, since most readers won't click through to a profile.
Systematic exclusion of black people from social programs, like the GI Bill and Social Security, and redlining, which prevented black Americans from building up wealth through homeownership the way white Americans were. "The Color of Law" is a good book on redlining. To expand on the bit about Social Security, farmworkers were excluded, since farmworkers tend to be not white. It was a nice sneaky way to be racist wit…
One of the things that confuses me quite a bit is the focus on laws that expired or have been abrogated 50-60-70-150 years ago and make it as if everything wrong with contemporary American society is caused directly by such laws and nothing else. * GI Bill: adopted in 1944, expired in 1956. * Social Security: adopted in 1935, unclear what the impacts were at the time. Unclear what the impacts are today. * Redlining:…
I agree that poverty and inequality in general is the real problem. But one must be able to point out that the shitty situations African-Americans are in today is the result of a whole bunch of dominos that fell over and if you follow them backwards they lead back to red lining, slavery etc.
Everybody is a product of the past. Hell, Anglo-Saxon’s are still worse off then Normans in the UK 1000 year after William the Conqueror.
There are people who never lived under communism who have to deal with the stain and prejudice of being an Ossi in modern Germany.
I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment/defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who "just wanted to get the hell out of there" after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO. I've recently been reading/watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic raci…
I know this is probably not a podcast that is frequently brought up here, but Chapo Trap House recently discussing their issues with the book White Fragility and brought up many of the same issues here (it's marketing material for a anti-racism instructor, the author is white, racism is presented as an issue that must be constantly atoned for in perpetuity [because DiAngelo would like to be hired in the future], it's geared towards the workplace which is inherently not a place people associate with emotional openness, it's geared towards what not to do as opposed to what to do, etc etc). I'm a longtime fan but I enjoyed it because i didn't know anything about White Fragility besides it's constant recommendations within the last few weeks.
Yeah. Pick up a book by James Baldwin, or read an essay by Frederick Douglas. Read anything by black authors on the experience of their lives. I believe strongly these are more valuable than non-black corporate anti-racist consultants...
Certainly black voices are best to understand the black experience. What I found useful from Robin DiAngelo was her description of white fragility.
I'm skeptical about Robin Diangelo, I read her book a few months ago, and it only seems to be an advertisement for her services as an anti-racist instructor. Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. There are much better books for foun…
There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income. I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.
> I'll be contrarian
Why do right-leaning libertarians always have to pretend they're being contrarians?
It would be clearer to just say something like "if you're interested in a conservative take on this issue, check out Thomas Sowell."
I flagged it because it is an article written to promote further bias, while under the guise of 'exposing racism'. If you think promoting race politics is the goal of HN, I will find a different forum. My time in SV could not have been more different than what this boased article proports. Fuck identity politics and fuck bloomberg, and fuck you for promoting this drivel.
This pairs nicely with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23431559 .
Hahaha let the radicals battle it out themselves, bravo.
I'm skeptical about Robin Diangelo, I read her book a few months ago, and it only seems to be an advertisement for her services as an anti-racist instructor. Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. There are much better books for foun…
There was a very interesting article by Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker last year untitled "The fight to redefine racism" which contrasts the work done by DiAngelo with the positions taken by Ibram X. Kendi. [1] Sanneh is not convinced either. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-r...
This is quite the burn:
> This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else. At least, that’s my interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo will be grateful to hear it. After all, I am what she would call a person of color, and whatever I write surely counts as “feedback.” Maybe that means she is, indeed, doing well.
> Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. I admit I only just started reading her book, so can't comment on that, but I would say that's not the takeaway I got from any of the online videos or interviews I've seen of her, most definit…
The video you linked espouses the same ideas. To be anti-racist isn't to simply understand the things one can and cannot say. To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power. It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired. Anti-racism provides the tools t…
Maybe it would be more productive to hire more black people and give them more venture funding to start businesses?