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As another person of color, I agree. What really makes me nervous is the talk of "white privilege". Although it is not meant as such, it is saying that in the

As another person of color, I agree. What really makes me nervous is the talk of "white privilege". Although it is not meant as such, it is saying that in the world as is, all things being equal, white people are superior to people of color. For example, if you had to evaluate totally objectively whether you should hire a white CEO or a person of color as CEO, and they were otherwise equal, if you believe in the framework of systemic racism/white privilege, you should hire the white CEO. Moral persuasion, and aiming for an ideal world, will only be effective so far, and then people will turn to what gives them an advantage.

xupybd 6y ago
My main problem with White privilege is that is drawing a big line between white people and people of color. IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. To start seeing people as individuals of equal value, based on their character not group identity. I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish. That said it's not a bad thing to look for areas in society for race based discriminations and eliminate them.
- tstrimple 6y ago
  > IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. This never happened. You can't just eliminate explicitly racist laws from your books and expect all the racism and bigotry which led to those laws in the first place to disappear by magic. Pretending like there aren't different outcomes and general experiences between races also doesn't magically eliminate those differences. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it applies to racism as well which is why understanding and talking about systemic racism is so important.
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    >>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 of racial prejudice did surface, it was clearly marked as a backwards and wrong-headed way of thinking. These TV shows (and movies, books, etc.) were fiction, and did not change the reality of racial prejudice or de-facto segregated communities on the ground. However, they did set my and many childrens' expectations for how the world should be, and how people of different races should treat each other (i.e. as equals and as they would want to be treated). I see the then-mainstream prevalence of such messages, and absence of countervailing messages, as a tangible victory of the Civil Rights Movement. I worry that today's mainstream cultural programming will have an opposite effect. Teaching children to focus on racial differences, and constantly drawing attention to race more generally, only teaches them to divide each other along racial lines. I believe a happy medium exists where concrete examples of racial prejudice get called out, but race is not otherwise constantly in focus.
    - neartheplain 6y ago
      Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this: https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS 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...
      - dang 6y ago
        Wow! I've never seen anything like that.
      - pvg 6y ago
        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
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. That’s, yes, the central complaint about White privilege. But from the rest of your comment I suspect thst you actually meant to attribute this problem to mentioning White privilege, rather than to White privilege itself. > IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. That...didn’t happen. Though the same kind of White moderates whose indifference Dr. King complained of did, after the successes of the 1960s, like to say that it had as a new rationalization for the same indifference. > I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? American society has drawn strong lines on race [0] forever, and, yes, that has special (not necessarily uniquely bad, but distinct) impacts on those of mixed race. (Source: nearly half a century living mixed race in America.) > To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish. Black and White in the US isn’t a simple divide of culture, its a divide of shared experience of still-prevalent racism. [0] Particularly black/white, which is not to say others aren’t issues, but, e.g., the One Drop Rule, intermarriage bans through most of thr country through the mid-20th Century (and the entire South until struck down federally in 1967), and other things particularly focussed on the black/white divide.
  - xupybd 6y ago
    Yes I worded that poorly. If I were to go back in time, I would have written. "one of the big civil rights achievements was to move towards getting rid of that divide." Also yes, the problem is not the concept of white privilege. As a metric to show the experience of individuals in society it's not a bad thing. As a way of defining individuals it's bad, and as a focus it's not great.
renewiltord 6y ago
There are systemic injustices. If you're chasing pure outcome it is advantageous to be aware of them so that you can access underpaid underprivileged people or back people whose performance is boosted by privilege. If you think that a founder being black makes it very hard for him to access debt because of systemic bias and his company plans heavily on debt financing, then yeah, it makes total sense to pass on it if you think the risk is too high. On the other hand, if you're a black founder and the company you want to build requires you to heavily rely on debt financing, it makes perfect sense for you to spend less time worrying about injustice and more time making this thing work however you can knowing full well that people will pass on you (perhaps "unfairly"). After all, you can play and maybe lose or not play and definitely lose. A founder I knew used to look for schools that had strong candidates but had low social cachet. He believed he would have an advantage hiring from there. One particular liberal arts college had him hire almost their entire founding CS year. Almost all of those graduates were great. Other times the strategy didn't work out.
- rayiner 6y ago
  That’s a good point—there is a difference between knowledge you’d want policymakers and academics to be thinking about, versus how you socialize children to view the world to maximize their individual potential.

xupybd 6y ago

My main problem with White privilege is that is drawing a big line between white people and people of color. IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. To start seeing people as individuals of equal value, based on their character not group identity. I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish. That said it's not a bad thing to look for areas in society for race based discriminations and eliminate them.

tstrimple 6y ago
> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. This never happened. You can't just eliminate explicitly racist laws from your books and expect all the racism and bigotry which led to those laws in the first place to disappear by magic. Pretending like there aren't different outcomes and general experiences between races also doesn't magically eliminate those differences. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it applies to racism as well which is why understanding and talking about systemic racism is so important.
- neartheplain 6y ago
  >>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 of racial prejudice did surface, it was clearly marked as a backwards and wrong-headed way of thinking. These TV shows (and movies, books, etc.) were fiction, and did not change the reality of racial prejudice or de-facto segregated communities on the ground. However, they did set my and many childrens' expectations for how the world should be, and how people of different races should treat each other (i.e. as equals and as they would want to be treated). I see the then-mainstream prevalence of such messages, and absence of countervailing messages, as a tangible victory of the Civil Rights Movement. I worry that today's mainstream cultural programming will have an opposite effect. Teaching children to focus on racial differences, and constantly drawing attention to race more generally, only teaches them to divide each other along racial lines. I believe a happy medium exists where concrete examples of racial prejudice get called out, but race is not otherwise constantly in focus.
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this: https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS 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...
    - dang 6y ago
      Wow! I've never seen anything like that.
    - pvg 6y ago
      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
dragonwriter 6y ago
> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. That’s, yes, the central complaint about White privilege. But from the rest of your comment I suspect thst you actually meant to attribute this problem to mentioning White privilege, rather than to White privilege itself. > IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. That...didn’t happen. Though the same kind of White moderates whose indifference Dr. King complained of did, after the successes of the 1960s, like to say that it had as a new rationalization for the same indifference. > I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? American society has drawn strong lines on race [0] forever, and, yes, that has special (not necessarily uniquely bad, but distinct) impacts on those of mixed race. (Source: nearly half a century living mixed race in America.) > To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish. Black and White in the US isn’t a simple divide of culture, its a divide of shared experience of still-prevalent racism. [0] Particularly black/white, which is not to say others aren’t issues, but, e.g., the One Drop Rule, intermarriage bans through most of thr country through the mid-20th Century (and the entire South until struck down federally in 1967), and other things particularly focussed on the black/white divide.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Yes I worded that poorly. If I were to go back in time, I would have written. "one of the big civil rights achievements was to move towards getting rid of that divide." Also yes, the problem is not the concept of white privilege. As a metric to show the experience of individuals in society it's not a bad thing. As a way of defining individuals it's bad, and as a focus it's not great.

renewiltord 6y ago

There are systemic injustices. If you're chasing pure outcome it is advantageous to be aware of them so that you can access underpaid underprivileged people or back people whose performance is boosted by privilege. If you think that a founder being black makes it very hard for him to access debt because of systemic bias and his company plans heavily on debt financing, then yeah, it makes total sense to pass on it if you think the risk is too high. On the other hand, if you're a black founder and the company you want to build requires you to heavily rely on debt financing, it makes perfect sense for you to spend less time worrying about injustice and more time making this thing work however you can knowing full well that people will pass on you (perhaps "unfairly"). After all, you can play and maybe lose or not play and definitely lose. A founder I knew used to look for schools that had strong candidates but had low social cachet. He believed he would have an advantage hiring from there. One particular liberal arts college had him hire almost their entire founding CS year. Almost all of those graduates were great. Other times the strategy didn't work out.

rayiner 6y ago
That’s a good point—there is a difference between knowledge you’d want policymakers and academics to be thinking about, versus how you socialize children to view the world to maximize their individual potential.