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> Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community?

> Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have? The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.

car_analogy 4y ago
Do you demand this strict moderation and sensitivity also when it's white people that are being accused of discrimination?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Not the OP, but I think the same principle applies. Whenever you accuse an entire race of something (as opposed to isolating your criticism to individuals or even systems), you’re engaging in racism, and this is unfortunately common in DEI trainings and among “race activists”. I don’t think strict moderation is necessary in the general case (especially since a lot of the most credentialed people who would moderate are themselves the sort of race activists who agitate)—rather, I think we’ll work through it in time. It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
  - istjohn 4y ago
    After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news, and a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo, I agree we've been set back decades. But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists. Woke activists might make some white people more uncomfortable than tiki torch-wielding Caucasians chanting "Jews will not replace us" or Dylann Roof shooting up a black church, but that doesn't make them comparable in any way.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      > After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true. > a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types"). > But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy. Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
      - istjohn 4y ago
        You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it." There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
        throwaway894345 4y ago
- naravara 4y ago
  I didn't used to, but after seeing how noxious communities get when you normalize the kinds of reflexive confrontationalism and assumptions of bad faith you find online I changed my tune. I haven't seen a single place improve once people start treating and talking about structural discrimination as some sort of original sin that individuals need to repent and seek absolution for. It's generally much more useful to focus on individual behaviors people are engaging in and pointing out the ways in which they are helpful or unhelpful at creating an inclusive community.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    Useful to whom? Presumably not the people who want structural changes
    - naravara 4y ago
      Why would you presume that?
throwaway894345 4y ago
> The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”? But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews. I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”? The word means basically nothing on HN, outside it’s use in political slurring.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  The central issue with discussions about Israel is a failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity). (And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not) Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    > failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity) That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
causi 4y ago
a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  This is a very sober and real world answer. And that's not a good thing.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
  - causi 4y ago
    Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
- naravara 4y ago
  > Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs." I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust): > The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this. > Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc. > Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc. http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples. For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants. The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  > Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated. Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?
leoc 4y ago
That's definitely a genuine factor. But much the same blasts of hot indignation were released when, for example, people in the US tried to address domestic racism in the era between the end of WWII and the Civil Rights Act. And by and large there wasn't any threat of a serious backlash against most of the US' white majority. Instead the anger was driven by the desire to go on being racist without facing criticism for it, or sometimes more by just "but ... but ... I'm the sympathetic Main Character!" attitudes. Clearly both causes are at work to some extent in the backlash against discussions of caste in the USA. It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. But I have to say that, without being really familiar with the situation, to me it looks as if it's mostly the latter at this time.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.

car_analogy 4y ago

Do you demand this strict moderation and sensitivity also when it's white people that are being accused of discrimination?

throwaway894345 4y ago
Not the OP, but I think the same principle applies. Whenever you accuse an entire race of something (as opposed to isolating your criticism to individuals or even systems), you’re engaging in racism, and this is unfortunately common in DEI trainings and among “race activists”. I don’t think strict moderation is necessary in the general case (especially since a lot of the most credentialed people who would moderate are themselves the sort of race activists who agitate)—rather, I think we’ll work through it in time. It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
- istjohn 4y ago
  After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news, and a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo, I agree we've been set back decades. But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists. Woke activists might make some white people more uncomfortable than tiki torch-wielding Caucasians chanting "Jews will not replace us" or Dylann Roof shooting up a black church, but that doesn't make them comparable in any way.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    > After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true. > a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types"). > But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy. Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
    - istjohn 4y ago
      You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it." There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
naravara 4y ago
I didn't used to, but after seeing how noxious communities get when you normalize the kinds of reflexive confrontationalism and assumptions of bad faith you find online I changed my tune. I haven't seen a single place improve once people start treating and talking about structural discrimination as some sort of original sin that individuals need to repent and seek absolution for. It's generally much more useful to focus on individual behaviors people are engaging in and pointing out the ways in which they are helpful or unhelpful at creating an inclusive community.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  Useful to whom? Presumably not the people who want structural changes
  - naravara 4y ago
    Why would you presume that?

throwaway894345 4y ago

> The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.

mrcartmeneses 4y ago

Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”? But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews. I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.

the_only_law 4y ago
> Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”? The word means basically nothing on HN, outside it’s use in political slurring.
ethbr0 4y ago
The central issue with discussions about Israel is a failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity). (And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not) Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity) That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.

causi 4y ago

a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
This is a very sober and real world answer. And that's not a good thing.
nemothekid 4y ago
>Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
- causi 4y ago
  Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
naravara 4y ago
> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs." I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust): > The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this. > Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc. > Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc. http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples. For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants. The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.

throwntoday 4y ago
> Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated. Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?

leoc 4y ago

That's definitely a genuine factor. But much the same blasts of hot indignation were released when, for example, people in the US tried to address domestic racism in the era between the end of WWII and the Civil Rights Act. And by and large there wasn't any threat of a serious backlash against most of the US' white majority. Instead the anger was driven by the desire to go on being racist without facing criticism for it, or sometimes more by just "but ... but ... I'm the sympathetic Main Character!" attitudes. Clearly both causes are at work to some extent in the backlash against discussions of caste in the USA. It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. But I have to say that, without being really familiar with the situation, to me it looks as if it's mostly the latter at this time.

wolverine876 4y ago
> It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.