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Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang=en https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/13059595759

• kevinmgranger 6y ago
  Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?
  • vlod 6y ago
    It's probably next to impossible to imagine an end goal. There will always be 'crazies'. I assume that most people would like to be treated by their characters. If everyone just started doing that, wouldn't the world be a better place? That's my take on MLK. Maybe it's naive.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      "If everyone just started doing that" - that's the naive part. Everyone isn't. What if you do it, but others don't? Then you're not directly responsible for the issues, sure, but you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. You may not be part of the problem, but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution.
      • vlod 6y ago
        > Everyone isn't. My point is that there are IMHO a lot of people complaining about this (here on HN) but I don't see a lot of concrete solutions that are actionable. > you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. I presented a way that would make it somewhat fairer (looks like the orchestra approach suggested that) till someone else brings something better to the table. Rinse and repeat has to be better than just talking. No? > but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution. It's easy to criticize others. I would be interested in exploring your solution to this.
        • lostcolony 6y ago
          Lack of proposed actionable solutions does not imply a lack of problem. Especially when just convincing people that there is a problem will help avoid the problem (i.e., if everyone agreed racism exists, and is a problem, there would be fewer implicit biases coming into play). Sure; you can create hiring processes that hide as much identifying information as possible. That doesn't address the issue in other parts of the workforce though. Trying to just be as colorblind as possible for yourself doesn't address the systemic issues, nor the biases coworkers/etc may have. It also doesn't force others to adopt the solution you propose. Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours.
          • vlod 6y ago
            >That doesn't address the issue in other parts of the workforce though ... nor the biases coworkers/etc may have. It also doesn't force others to adopt the solution you propose. Of course not, but it's a start. Getting X hired and in the door, means we can at least have the opportunity to tackle problems downstream. Hoping that we can solve X-ism (for the points you mention) and then everything will magically be fixed, is going to probably take at least another 3 generations. >Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours. All great points, however we've been doing gender/diversity training (at big tech companies at least) what ~20 years? and we are still having problems. I guess it's getting better slowly... Growing up in the UK (Ukrainian background), I was always taught to never trust Russians because they were the cause of ALL the problems of Ukraine. Completely idiotic I know. I had never meet a Russian and the people telling me hadn't either. Sigh. Working in NYC, yep, I was right in the middle of a team of Russians and what did I find? There was nothing crazy about them, they had a dry (similar to British) humor and I got on well with them. My prejudges fell away. Generally IMHO we can only change our view of X, by mixing with X and realize they're just 'normal' people and that previous generations/peers that manipulate us are a bunch of idiots.
  • betwixthewires 6y ago
    I'd say he was articulating a principle and a virtue. With something like that, the journey is the destination.
• zdragnar 6y ago
  Advocating race neutrality is argued by anti-racist training types as ignoring the historical oppression that various groups have faced. Basically, it is why "equality" is out and "equity" is the new buzzword. YMMV.
• wahern 6y ago
  > I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach? I recently heard a radio interview where the guest explained that part of her character was "blackness", and she was offended by intimations that her character could be separated from her racial identity. (The context was a caller who had recited MLK's famous line.) Taken at face value it necessarily implies a partial refutation of some of MLK's premises, and indeed of some of the premises behind the mid-century Civil Rights movement and even the American Experiment. Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans. That said, there's a ton to unpack there, and decades later many of the concepts that we as a society are implicitly discussing are quite different, such as what we mean by "character". (I seriously doubt MLK had a sense of self that was any less black than the guest speaker.) So the two sentiments may still be reconcilable. Certainly I don't think the guest's expression of her opinions would have been as well considered and articulated as MLK's. (Ditto the caller's.)
  • asdff 6y ago
    >Taken at face value it necessarily implies a partial refutation of some of MLK's premises Having a self respect for your cultural identity doesn't mean you prefer to be judged by the color of your skin rather than your character.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • wahern 6y ago
      When somebody says, "you can't understand because you don't know what it's like to live as a [insert minority] in a [insert majority] world", they're implicitly saying that someone's empathy and/or analytical insight is constrained by their physical relationship to society. That also implies that someone else's capacities in that regard are necessarily broader than your own. And when people make those arguments without even consideration of a particular person's potentially analogous lived experiences--maybe they lived as some other kind of minority (very often a minority in class dimensions)--then there's the implication that a person's character is so completely shaped by their particular lived experiences (as perceived by others) that we can never consider their arguments and contributions independent of that. There's nothing new about race essentialism. Anglo-American racial concepts are rooted in pseudo-scientific ideas about biological capacities, but that's a very peculiar flavor of race-ist scholarship. There are plenty of white supremacist groups who argue that equitable integration is impossible for various sociological reasons--i.e. racism cannot be completely extirpated and so will always impose an unacceptable burden on all groups in an attempt to achieve the unachievable, so all groups are better off segregated. But they didn't invent these arguments, either. These same fatalistic sentiments and conclusions (albeit from a much different perspective) can also be found in the writings of famous black authors such as Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon. They're similarly race essentialist--race may be a cultural construct, but it's a durable one that imposes mutually exclusive options for organizing society, similar to class in the Marxist worldview. Frantz Fanon, who grew up under French Colonialism, does an amazing job articulating the various often mundane ways in which living as a racial minority in society leads (necessarily in his view) to systemic oppression of the self and group. These authors likewise believe that a truly multiracial polity is fundamentally impossible. (In Fanon's broader philosophy, racial fault lines lend themselves to class-based oppression in the vein of Marxist class warfare. An observation echoed by modern black scholars like Cornell West and Adolph Reed Jr.--neither of whom is race essentialist, FWIW, though I think alot of West's nuance is lost on people.) In fact, a significant amount of African-American and, more generally, anti-colonialist literature came to these conclusions. And if you speak to many well-read activist black Americans of a certain generation, you'll find many strongly sympathize with these views. Famously Justice Clarence Thomas is of this view--he opposes all affirmative action and many Civil Rights initiatives because he believes that black Americans will never be able to live as unburdened by race as those in white society, and that in many cases these initiatives ultimately increase that inevitable burden. (IOW, Thomas is resigned to a fundamentally unequal America, and that informs his cost/benefit calculus. Thomas' legal opinions are far more peculiar than his racial fatalism, however.) I found Frantz Fanon quite enlightening, but I don't accept all his premises and his conclusions. I don't accept them intellectually, and as an American I feel obligated to reject them as anathema to our national moral framework--America may be a doomed experiment, but I have a civic duty to believe there's a way forward. My takeaway from Fanon, et al is an acceptance of the very deep, very systemic problems that multiracial polities face (in many ways no less today than 60 years ago); and an acceptance that the answers to those problems are still nowhere to be found. Fanon (better than any other author) not only taught me to recognize the depth and breadth of racism, but convinced me to be extremely wary of claims that it has been lifted. So I accept many of the premises, but not some crucial conclusory ones--e.g. that the absence of answers is evidence of absence. From my perspective it's actually not hard to see how anyone, black, white, or w'ever, could easily make the jump from these intractable dilemmas to the view that we simply cannot ever separate racial identity from our political character. (By political character I mean to say that while we may all be equal in God's eyes, such platitudes have no substantive meaning or application in the real world.) IMO, we live in an age where we've inherited many concepts from the radical literature of the 1960s and 1970s, but without an appreciation of the context or the consequences. I have no reason to doubt that the radio speaker more-or-less meant what she said regarding her character, and intended it to mean precisely that her perspectives on race (in particular, the burdens and graces of living as a black woman) are intrinsically out of the reach of contemplation by others and therefore of more value in the political debate because of her lived experience as a black person. That is actually a quite common refrain these days. I even sympathize with this. In many ways it's a reaction to white people (or some other majority or power-dominate group--these same dynamics play out in multiethnic societies everywhere) systematically dismissing and discounting claims of racism by rationalizing their inability to see that racism as a consequence of adopting a color-blind mentality. In that vein, I can totally appreciate the use of radical leftist race essentialist concepts from the 1960s to argue that, hey, race and therefore racism is more than skin deep. OTOH, if you confuse such pragmatic, matter-of-fact arguments with a broader cultural moral philosophy, then you're going to end up precisely where authors like Frantz Fanon did. And unfortunately I think a lot of people do precisely that, without an appreciation for where that ultimately leads. People want to be heard and recognized, and unfortunately sometimes resort to contradictory conceptual frameworks.
• subsaharancoder 6y ago
  CEO of Starbucks got eviscerated by the woke/CRT/Intersectionality mob for mentioning that he doesn't see color when evaluating who the best candidate for a job. The mob can't be appeased.
• kybernetikos 6y ago
  I think most people can agree with that. The debate is about how far from that we are now and what the appropriate methods to close the gap are.