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White Women Need Not Apply
- t-writescode 6y agoI thought everyone was supposed to read Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” in high school. Maybe it should return to being required reading.
- reaperducer 6y agoYou can tell by the way people write on the internet that they have never read a book, let alone a classic with an important lesson to learn.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Reedx 6y agoI have a feeling a lot of people missed that one, along with the writing of George Orwell.
- Izkata 6y agoThe message was very easily missed because the story doesn't actually start until halfway through the book. Most of our class had already given up on the book by that point. There's a movie based on it called Easy A [0], set in highschool, that gets across a similar message except it actually works because it's a comedy that keeps you interested. (And I only say "similar" instead of "the same" because although I can remember what the A was, I can't remember anything about the narrative in The Scarlet Letter) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_A
- t-writescode 6y agoI wrote this hours ago and I want to remark that it seems that story isn't relevant to the facts of the situation gone on here and I shouldn't have invoked it. It's too late to edit my original post, which is fine, because I can still recant in a secondary post. The story that this article is referencing may not be about marking those we dislike with an emblem meant to separate them; but, something more complicated and with many details I don't know; so, I want to roll back this particular comment.
- pugworthy 6y agoI don't mean this as a joke, but I'm actually rather hesitant to express any thoughts on this after reading it. I'll just leave it at that.
- alexpetralia 6y agoCould you imagine _any_ of the comments here HN affixed to that Twitter thread? You could seriously jeopardize your career. What I wonder is how people can live in such wildly divergent realities? I suppose social media (which includes both Twitter and HN) plays a primary role.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoSocial media no doubt exacerbates the problem, but I think it also makes the problem a lot more visible and easier to draw connections with. If some similar spat had happened in the 90s - with none of the participants or their organizations being tremendously well known - how many of the people reading this thread would have ever heard about it?
- lykr0n 6y agoHave a different online identity that's not associated with yourself?
- spuz 6y agoMaybe it's because of the way Twitter is designed. On Twitter, the root of a discussion thread is a post made by a particular user on their feed. If I want to talk about another person's post, I don't need to reply on their thread - I can just create my own. Maybe this leads to an explicit bifurcation in conversation and similarly in perspectives and point of view. For example, if I disagree with something that Donald Trump said, I won't simply reply to his tweet where everyone including his supporters can see it, I will reply to in on my timeline. Similarly, my followers won't follow Donald Trump to hear what I have to say about him, they will only follow me directly. Given the root of discussion is always a person rather than an idea it forces people to judge in advance the content they read based on who said it. Perhaps if Twitter didn't allow retweets and separate comment threads, this kind of division in commentary wouldn't happen so much. PS - I hardly use Twitter at all, the above is just speculation.
- nooyurrsdey 6y agoI feel like I'm so burnt out from reading about conflict. I can't even comment on who is right or wrong...it feels like such an overinflated digital age argument.
- macspoofing 6y ago>it feels like such an overinflated digital age argument. It is and if it just stayed on twitter it would be a nothing burger ... but somebody's real life career, good name, and business was destroyed. It wasn't the first time this happened in the past 5 years (but especially in the past year) From the article: "Roost’s podcast network dropped her show; her producer publicly denounced her character (“We stand against racism”)" Isn't it ... terrible that her producer performed this public shaming ritual where they denounced their former coworker and friend and labeled them a racist? Imagine seeing your friends, family and coworkers publicly denounce you because either they themselves are afraid to stand up to the mob, or maybe because they have something to gain. There have been people who were ostracized because they wouldn't sufficiently (and publicly) denounced their family or if they attempted to defend their children (!!). In a few years, these kinds of shenanigans are going to be characterized as a moral panic, in the same vein (though orders of magnitude more broad) as the "Satanic ritual abuse" in the 80s, and heck, even the "Salem witch trials".
- infoseek12 6y agoI agree, I think a lot of people are going to look back on this period with more than a little embarrassment. What will make it worse for them is that so much of what they said and did will remain preserved forever. It is kind of entertaining in a guilty sort of way. Like Jerry Springer or a car crash it can be hard to look away. And they do seem mostly to be going after one another so it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for the victims.
- umvi 6y agoI swear it's a modern day Shibboleth[0]. I mean, just look at the picture in that article of the pogrom. Villagers displaying pictures/support for Jesus during pogram == internet denizens (and companies) showing that they denounce racism. Or to use another biblical analogy, I suspect a lot of times when a company publically denounces racism, what they are really doing is painting lamb's blood above their doorway in the hope that the "destroying angel" (mobs) will pass by them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
- ziroshima 6y ago"I am really tired of white women's tears." This is a plainly racist comment.
- umvi 6y agoJustification is "it's okay to punch up, just not punch down"
- User23 6y agoOne might argue that pragmatically being a member of a group that it's unacceptable to punch is superior to being a member of one that it is. For example historically in pretty much every culture the persons of civil and religious officials have been inviolate. The modern USA culture of contempt for leadership is clearly unsustainable and thus it will end. A Chinese colleague told me a joke a few years ago. "An American asked a Chinese, 'how does it feel to not be able to publicly criticize your President?' And the Chinese replied, 'How does it feel to not be able to publicly support yours?'"
- kelnos 6y ago> A Chinese colleague told me a joke a few years ago. "An American asked a Chinese, 'how does it feel to not be able to publicly criticize your President?' And the Chinese replied, 'How does it feel to not be able to publicly support yours?'" Gonna put on my pedantic buzzkill hat for a second. I do actually find that joke to be funny, but it hides potential discussion of real differences behind a pithy comment. Being jailed for criticizing your president is much much worse than suffering social backlash for supporting a president that your chosen community has judged to be bad. Depriving someone of their freedom through legal force is not the same thing as people getting mad at you on the internet (even if that anger causes you to get fired). > The modern USA culture of contempt for leadership Give me leaders who aren't contemptuous and then we'll talk. They do exist, on both sides of the aisle, even though they sometimes seem to be in short supply these days.
- deleted 6y ago
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI find stories about cancel culture both interesting and vexing. I disagree with so many of the premises behind such alleged behavior that I want to write off the entire topic and its participants. And I'm vexed and dismayed by the issue because, by it's very nature, I hold no hope of resolving it by polite but critical discussion. But there's a small part of me that suspects its a low-probability risk I need to be aware of. I find it eerily reminiscent of trying to live near someone with poorly managed mental illness.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baggy_trough 6y agoSojwal is certainly a disgraceful racist, but in our neo-racist culture, it's taboo to say so.
- idea_heroin 6y agoThis is a big reason for Trump’s appeal - being able to rally behind someone who can so effectively withstand constant derision from all directions. Moreover, the apologists on this site and elsewhere will continue to excuse this behavior until they are backed into a corner and enclosed into a tomb of their own making.
- reaperducer 6y agobeing able to rally behind someone who can so effectively withstand constant derision from all directions Americans love an underdog, from baseball to politics. Whether or why Mr. Trump is an actual underdog, or plays one on TV is left as an exercise for the reader.
- krapp 6y agoOne of the fascinating aspects of the Trump phenomenon to me is how a globalist billionaire celebrity who started his career with a million dollar loan from his father managed to convince a demographic that hates globalists, billionaires and celebrities that he was the scrappy underdog and hero of the common man running against someone with a fraction of his net worth, a better pedigree of political advocacy and who actually held down a real job at least once. Granted, it amounts to the difference between a silver spoon and a platinum spoon but it's still surprising.
- reaperducer 6y agowho started his career with a million dollar loan from his father I've never understood why people keep repeating this line as if it's derogatory. I know a fair number of first and second generation immigrant business owners, and they have almost all started their businesses with help from their families. This has been very common in America for the last couple of hundred years. Probably longer. Why is this now considered a bad thing?
- plorkyeran 6y agoIt is a bad thing to claim to be an underdog when you started with a massive advantage over what most people start with.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> “Not here to play” was an understatement: 48 hours and more than 7,000 retweets later, Roost’s career was toast. In hindsight, this was probably inevitable. Nobody gets canceled quite so enthusiastically as a middle-aged white woman accused of racism Here's a Perry Bible Fellowship comic that first was funny, but now I realize is prescient[1]. We're beginning to see something akin to Newton's Third law of social justice. 1. https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/
- pjkundert 6y agoI’ve been “blipping the throttle” to add accelerant to these kinds of absurd happenings for exactly this reason. The sooner society recoils toward valuing personal liberty and responsibility again, the better! These absurdly tone deaf and hateful “anti-fascist” fascists are going to go down in the history books as one of the most ridiculous groups of thugs we’ve seen in the short and violent (but mostly peaceful) history of America...
- ta1602267597 6y agothis comic in a way is backed by science https://www.tidalequality.com/blog/dont-do-unconscious-bias-training https://www.tidalequality.com/blog/dont-do-unconscious-bias-...
- notsuoh 6y agoA lot of drama here that seems to spill out into real life. Two opposing sides. But, they're largely on the same side it seems like. One seems to have made a mistake in submitting her article unknowingly to a blog that doesn't accept articles from white women, and the other wasn't happy about this or the tone from the first person.
- darth_avocado 6y agoThis entire situation is so absurd. Two people who are equally rude are offended by each other and then air their grievances on Social media to gain sympathy and blow this out of proportion. And everyone around them is trying to distance themselves from the blowout inadvertently creating an even bigger blowout. It's almost as if people forget that there's consequences of everything you do, especially on the internet.
- Diggsey 6y ago> But, they're largely on the same side There's no such thing for the people who buy into this kind of identity politics. Any difference in views, no matter how small is irreconcilable. No leeway is allowed. The best option for any reasonable person is to keep quiet, stay as far away from these hypocrites as possible and hope that when they inevitably self-destruct, none of the fallout lands on you.
- loopz 6y agoSuch bullying and racism need to be called out. Calling it politics is wrong.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> made a mistake in submitting her article unknowingly to a blog that doesn't accept articles from white women I am still pretty aghast that the liberal side thinks that is acceptable without irony.
- zamadatix 6y agoHence the need to think in more than a 1 dimensional description of the entire political landscape.
- Yetanfou 6y agoWell, I'm not. This is nothing but a load of racist and intersectionalist tripe uttered by a brainwashed zealot who starts her twitter bio with a preferred pronoun. It represents a lot of what went wrong between the 90's and now. The solution to these problems might just be to a) totally ignore these self-proclaimed representatives of 'oppressed' groups and b) do exactly those things which they don't want you to do. Yes, white people have just as much right to speak their minds as people of any other skin colour. The thing is, skin colour does not a person make, nor does any other inalienable characteristic. It is the content which matters, not the container that content is carried in. So be gone, you person of pronouns. Shed your intersectionalist skin and you'll be welcomed back, keep it and prepare for a life of loneliness behind your barricades.
- reaperducer 6y agointersectionalist This is a new word for me. I Googled a bit, but didn't find anything helpful to fit it into the context of your comment. Can you explain it a bit?
- pianoben 6y agoI believe "intersectional" comes from gender and ethnic studies, and refers to different axes of oppression. The idea is that different kinds of privilege/opperession intersect in individuals - such as a white (privileged) woman (disadvantaged). There's a whole body of theory around intersectionality. That's probably the term to look up in Google.
- t-writescode 6y agoFrom my understanding, intersectional feminism believes this: Not all women experience the world the same, or have the same struggles. You can subdivide people's struggles further. For example, women and men experience the world differently. Black people and white people experience the world differently with what sort of things they can take for granted and things that other people will assume about them. And it goes further. A white woman and a black woman, though both women, will each experience life a bit differently. A black woman and a black man, too! And even further, A gay black woman will experience life differently and have a different, more specific set of struggles than a straight black woman. Basically, it's not just ethnicity, not just gender, not just sexuality, not just [insert method of subdividing people that can be imagined] that changes a person's experiences and struggles in the world, but the collection of all of them that changes their experiences of the world and the sorts of privileges and prejudices, etc, they experience.
- aluminussoma 6y ago1) If people are really interested in the topic, they should read the source material and draw their own conclusions. I thought the article's characterization of Westervelt's tweet was incorrect. The author claimed that Westervelt "inadvertently revealed how the fear of being tarred by association motivated (Westervelt) to turn on (Roost)". Instead, Westervelt's opinion comes across as more nuanced. 2) I am happy I keep semi-anonymous accounts. In an age where it's easy to be the internet villain of the day, I thank the heavens that Natural Language Processing hasn't reached the point of deanonymizing me yet.
- kelnos 6y agoI agree with your point about the mischaracterization of Westervelt's tweet, after reading some longer explanations from her on Twitter. However, I do think it's notable that she'd had repeated, recurring problems with Roost in the past but didn't actually do anything firm about it until there was a big public brouhaha that could make her look bad if she didn't do anything. That doesn't absolve Roost from any blame here, but I think it does suggest that Westervelt's motivation for cutting Roost loose was at least partly informed by a desire to not suffer backlash herself. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se, but let's not pretend that everyone here is doing things solely for the right reasons.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y agoA few thoughts here: 1. Who are all of these people? I've never heard of them. Is this a storm in a teacup, or is the implication of the article that this incident is a taste of what's to come? 2. The story seems almost too conveniently negative towards Sojwal. As someone who's well on the opposite side of radical intersectionality and radical feminism, this article feels written for people like me who will get outraged at the behaviors of the villain in the story. Makes me suspicious of actually having all of the facts and context here. Seems.. too easy? 3. Ironically, if the current trend continues, Sojwal will soon find herself in a lower intersectionality caste, and will herself be accused of taking space on platforms that are restricted to members of the BIPOC group. She, being an AA and a non-elite PoC, will not be invited.
- neffy 6y agoForm your own opinion here: https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal?lang=en https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal?lang=en I think it's worth observing that mob rule is never good, and racism is actually pretty universal, as are bullies, it's just the target group that changes. But as you point out, the bullies are subject to instant replacement once the mob decides to switch its allegiances.
- aaomidi 6y agoAnd this context: https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424 https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424
- Animats 6y agoIs this a storm in a teacup?" It's a storm within the academic liberal arts community. See [1]. That community has big problems. Once they ran education. Now they're not very influential. Many small liberal arts colleges are going out of business.[1] This sort of thing is a cry for attention. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/colleges-with-empty-campuses-face-an-uncertain-financial-future https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/colleges-...
- peteypao 6y agoI am so sick of cancel culture. Roost did not deserve this.
- aaomidi 6y agoPlease get some context on why she was "cancelled". https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424 https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424
- leephillips 6y agoThat she uses “Latinx” is all you need to know about this Westervelt.
- kelnos 6y agoAfter reading those four email screenshots, my conclusions are: 1. Roost should probably do a better job in the future figuring out who she's trying to send her work to. 2. Sojwal's reaction was way out of proportion to any slight or offense, real or otherwise. 3. Roost's further reaction was foolish and condescending; taking Sojwal to task for her response was never going to be well received. 4. Sojwal's further escalation was ridiculous; equating "sending an essay that doesn't meet the submission requirements" with "racism" is just bonkers. Beyond that, Roost should have just left well enough alone; it likely could have ended with that email exchange. Whining about the interaction on Facebook and threatening to report Twitter posts would have been a bad look even if she had been completely in the right. I don't think Sojwal looks great here, but Roost had plenty of opportunities to put down her shovel and climb out of the hole she'd dug for herself, but instead chose to keep digging. It's just disappointing that public discourse around race has devolved so far that this sort of thing happens at all. The excesses of cancel culture are a symptom, not the cause.
- foogazi 6y agoSee it in the context of a job application What are the race/age/gender expectations of the hiring manager? Would an applicant ever have to apologize for applying to the wrong job or having the wrong qualifications?
- spuz 6y agoI don't really feel like this article explores the situation fully. Why are there no quotes from either Roost or Sojwal or their respective supporters? For an article that talks about the concept of keeping an open mind to the other side of a story I feel like we really only hear one side. Maybe one needs to be actively following everything that happens on Twitter in order to get the necessary context before reading this article?
- adjkant 6y agoIf you look at the previous pieces of the author, it becomes clear that this is not about the people involved here but the larger narrative the author wants to write about, with is cancel culture. You can see this with another piece, asking basically if the Amy Barrett case went too far. https://arcdigital.media/karens-all-the-way-down-cd530b0c0a0d https://arcdigital.media/karens-all-the-way-down-cd530b0c0a0... This is more or less in line with HN's general "slippery slope" sentiment, and is likely why the piece was originally submitted. It doesn't seem like many here care about the particulars, and the affected community appears to be small. So the article as posted is just rehashing a macro debate with no contextual add or news. This thread gives actual perspective from a coworker of Roost's, the aforementioned cancelled podcast. A lot more nuance there. I made a post from what I could glean from the actual situation as an outsider here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24832827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24832827
- spuz 6y agoWow thanks for this reply and the other reply that you linked. I think it just goes to prove how valuable it is to do your own research before passing judgement but sadly this takes a lot of time and effort that many people (including me) don't have.
- PradeetPatel 6y agoAlthough I normally agree with the notion of "In order to allow the voices of the less privileged to be heard, some voices must be limited." especially when it comes to hate speech or divisive topics. However I'm not sure how I should feel about this scenario, one could argue that she's on a platform reserved for PoCs. Alternatively, the colour of her skin shouldn't play a part in her opinion.
- umvi 6y agoThe dark side of xkcd 1357 rears its ugly head... again...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoThere is a name for this: Oppression Olympics [1]. For almost any group you can think of, there's a more oppressed group that feels entitled to rave against the former group. Fortunately most people are not that bitter, I certainly hope so at least. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics
- emmelaich 6y agoAs a card game .... (comedy sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2X-qQ-uMW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2X-qQ-uMW8
- drinker 6y agoIs Senji Sojwal a pseudonym? I can’t seem to find that this is a real person. When searching for “Senji Sojwal” in a search engine, this article is the only result returned.
- porphyra 6y agoIt was misspelt in the article. If you clicked through to the Twitter thread you'll see that her name is Senti, not Senji.
- aaomidi 6y agoRe: The podcast getting cancelled. This is what Amy Westervelt (who cancelled her) has to say. She also provides context on what lead to that decision and it wasn't just a random twitter fight. https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424 https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424
- t-writescode 6y agoDoesn't this kinda feed into the larger statement of the message about how a larger apology is required by the collective when someone stays allied to the current deplorable person for longer? From what I read, I still don't know what happened (I don't care, either); but, the discussion on Twitter is so devoid of details that nothing can be learned or obtained from it, except that the person now cancelled seems to come from a different generation and that there have been numerous things that need to be changed about scripts, or something, and that she's generally pretty okay with it, if a bit difficult - but then, if a script you write, or whatever, has experienced a death by thousands of cuts where the implication of story decisions are continuously assumed to be, or explained how they could be interpreted as malicious when they weren't intended that way, that could get a bit tiring and one's tolerances might get weak. Everybody continuously needs another dose of empathy. Everybody. Again, I have no opinion on the matter, I don't know any of these people. Everyone seems to be painted in a bad light in this story (not just the twitter post) and the Amy Westervelt just seems trapped in the middle of it all, attempting to be very diplomatic about everything.
- adjkant 6y agoThe article in this case seems to be a very bad source for the actual details and is much more concerned with painting a macro picture of woe. Reading the actual twitter thread and email exchange[1] plus this pretty helpful Westervelt thread, here's what I gather: 0. Roost has a history of having some racial blind spots in their field 1. Roost emails Sojwal to submit something that wasn't really what Sojwal was looking for, more or less as already made clear through public info. 2. Sojwal rejects rudely in frustration 3. Roost responds rudely, lacking contextual awareness 4. Sojwal responds in turn .... 5. Roost goes and complains about the rude rejection 6. Sojwal gets mad about this complaint out of context 7. Roost digs in and then attempts to report to Twitter Step 0 and Step 7 are the keys here it seems, and Westervelt added a lot of important context for me. This was a straw that broke the camel's back for Roost it appears, not an isolated incident. Reporting someone on twitter for a personal spat at best from a misunderstanding is not putting Roost in any sort of decent light, and her prior context doesn't appear to have earned her any goodwill. I know nothing of either until reading this either. I suspect Sojwal's response was anger out of frustration. Rude, absolutely. But I think reading what the org is about [2] really sheds light that it would be clear this isn't an outlet looking to publish stuff from Roost. If Roost read that before responding and took a second, this response [3] would probably have not been a good idea. While the original rejection is rude, I actually don't see the "assumptions" that Roost is trying to defend, and that backhanded apology isn't going to sit well with anyone. She didn't even need to apologize, but the apology + you're wrong about me (along with the submitted piece's perspective) doesn't look good. And then that's where the prior history comes in for the dominos after. Roost had many points they could have dropped this at and didn't, which seems to me like it was a common issue from Westervelt's thread. Westervelt doesn't seem to be caught to me so much as disappointed in a friend they were trying to help, who seemed to just refuse to learn. Both, but more disappointment than posturing. To be clear, this is far from cut and dry and I can very much understand why there are so many confused or hesitant commenters. It took me a decent deal of digging and nuance to get this picture of what happened. This all could have been avoided, and this 100% seems to be twitter drama that escalated needlessly, and certainly may be reflective of some negative parts of this world we're getting a glimpse into that an article like this could have critiqued with nuance. But to me, the issue is far from what this piece seems to diagnose. To make this about cancel culture and the title, "White Women Need Not Apply", misses the point, just as Roost did with what originally went wrong. [1] https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320 https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320 [2] https://aaww.org/about-us/ https://aaww.org/about-us/ [3] https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320/photo/3 https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320...
- echelon 6y agoHonestly, I think the furries have it right, at least in concept. (I know a surprising many of them.) They've solved racism and sexism by abandoning the vestiges of these notions altogether. I wish the real world was just as blind. Why do people have to behave like the tribalistic great apes we descended from? It's 2020 and we have rockets that travel to Mars and beyond. So many people love to bully...
- grawprog 6y agoI'm not sure how well this is going to go over, but whenever I read something along these lines, I can't help but wonder, what's the end goal of all this? Complete segregation? Apartheid? Set up bubbles where only people of certain colours or orientations can go, work, etc? Why would anyone actually want this? I've met a lot of different people from a lot of different places, the things i've found the least important for determining the character of a person are their colour or orientation or any other equally superficial thing like the colour of their hair, or eyes or how tall they are or any of these other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the character and personality of a person. Dividing, segregating, judging or making any kind of decisions based on a person's skin colour just overall makes you a shitty person. Regardless of who you are or how much privilege you think that person has over you.
- ApolloFortyNine 6y agoSocial media is truly terrifying, it seems to be leading to more and more extreme takes by each side of any issue. There's 0 middle ground, as should be obvious here (the article in question was about hate crimes against 3 Muslims!).
- leephillips 6y agoThis Sojwal is obviously a bully and a racist; as bad as anyone covered with Aryan Nation tattoos. But she didn’t destroy anyone’s career. No one bully can do that. That was done by a mob of cowards.
- apta 6y agoThis is the natural outcome of far leftist identity politics, nothing to see here.