Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry what seems to be satirical about my statement?
"only" a quarter million
Some people have tunnel vision.
Why People Feel Like Victims
241–250 of 510 posts
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this 100%. The problem is that I present white (although I do not identify that way) and so I have been stripped of the right to even suggest the very point you just made under extreme penalty of being labeled a “racist”. Which is…the worst thing you can be in American culture. My voice isn’t worth much and I am afraid, but if you stand, I will stand with you.
That treatment by the way, is extremely problematic. White people are empowered to amplify people like Ilhan Omar, who are extremely unrepresentative of their group, but are discouraged from amplifying people like my dad, a Biden voting Bangladeshi immigrant who hates being called a “hyphenated American” and wants to live in a “colorblind” society.
It's funny, because the two groups you've described are diametrically opposed. The former are red solidly red, while "color blindness is racist" is pretty solidly blue.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#243I always considered the current culture of cultivated-victimhood to be rooted in the manner Western people fundamentally define themselves by their triumphs against adversity. In the absence of real adversity, people seek and create surrogate adversity for themselves to triumph over. From this process they can rationalise themselves as having the inner-strength to overcome such barriers.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. >This never happened. Speaking as an American raised in the 1990s, the cultural programming of my childhood at least made progress in that direction. I was raised on popular TV shows like Sesame Street, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers, which showed people of all races coexisting in settings where race did not divide them. When the issue o…
Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this: https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...
Could easily be on your end. It'd be strange if memory corruption just affected the (encrypted) payload but left everything in the rest of the network protocols perfectly intact
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#245As someone who was abducted and kidnapped at gun point, PTSD and trauma are experienced differently by different people. PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress. What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stre…
The article says TVI is learned, not PTSD.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think American culture has potentially gone down an ever-worsening path that comes from assuming blacks and whites are inherently identical. That leads to the belief that the persistent differences in life outcomes must be caused by oppression. That means there's an oppressor who is evil and deserves punishment. What if the fundamental assumption isn't true? How long do you keep punishing the oppressor for? Not to…
Wait, what? We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism." This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful ou…
>This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it.
You just hopped onto it to say you want off of it?
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudi…
There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects. Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or C…
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Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#248As someone who was abducted and kidnapped at gun point, PTSD and trauma are experienced differently by different people. PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress. What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stre…
The article says TVI is learned, not PTSD.
> But the people who score very high on TIV are generally those who have experienced some kind of trauma, like PTSD.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be nuance for sure. People are still responsible for their own actions and the only way to guarantee you wont succeed is to not try. At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot…
You're missing the point. The current narrative of systemic racism and the victimhood culture it creates isnt helping, it's exacerbating the issues and reinforcing itself. By conditioning people into believing that an outside force is the primary, if not only factor impacting their lack of success, you demotivate them from trying to adjust other factors that could improve their situation. The issue isn't that we addr…
You seem to be missing my point. There ARE systemic disadvantages to being black.
I get that you're of the opinion that telling people about racial inequality can demotivate them and make them feel fatalistic about their futures, but I don't necessarily agree with your assessment to the degree this is the case and you seem to think there is no room for nuance here. We must stop talking about this immediately. People are too simple to understand that there is still some unfairness that needs to be resolved, but that they should do their best regardless. No we must lie to them and tell them the system is fair and through their ignorance they will magically overcome the disadvantages they face.
You seem to think fear of systemic racism is a bigger obstacle to the success of black people than actual systemic racism and I just think that's absurd. Your basic premise that fear of institutional racism can be demotivating is valid and worth consideration. You're elevating it to the root cause of all problems is absurd. A black job applicant will receive half as many callbacks for job interviews compared to an identically qualified white applicant. There are little obstacles like that all over our society. Can they be overcome through tenacity and perseverance? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't work to fix that %#@#? Hell No!
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of just saying systemic racism exists, why not point out examples? Then people can judge for themselves what effect it may have on them instead of feeling like there's this oppressive "other" which is the cause of anything they don't like about their life and there's no point struggling against it because it'll just crush them anyway.
This list is more tailored to highlight systemic racism in criminal justice, but the economic side is just as important. There are much higher levels of poverty in black communities and that can be directly tied to the fact that in many ways black people were systematically prevented from building wealth for most of US history while white people were provided trillions of dollars in government subsidized economic opp…
Is there a way I'm missing to save comments on HN besides also commenting on them so they can be revisited later? I'd like to save this. This is one of the best meta-summaries I've ever seen, on any topic.