4 ms·

I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged". I don't

by haolez 4y ago

I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged". I don't agree with this view and I think "reverse racism" is just as racist as normal racism. I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.

nerpderp82 4y ago
At the risk of _going there_, I think if you are optimizing a system, freeing resources that are most easily rescheduled is a globally optimal solution. Senior engineers can be slotted into nearly any task. It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jrs235 4y ago
The greatest minority is the individual. "Reverse racism" harms people too. Let's stop pretending it doesn't. Discrimination based on race is bad no matter the source. When can we start looking through an individual lens? Edit: I concur with parent comment.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.
coding123 4y ago
Most people that are white that I know (I'm half Indian - as in the country India - and half white) are actually now more racist (not like going out of way to join kkk) because of the anti-white and reverse-racism stuff that's been more and more out there. I sit on the sidelines like, what the fuck.
- paperwasp42 4y ago
  I am not sure why you're being downvoted, because I not only have witnessed this happening within my own family/friends (it is sad and scary), but we are now having studies show that some common forms of anti-racism training has a "backfire" effect that produces more racism. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?" I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns. I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.
  - snek_case 4y ago
    What bugs me immensely about this whole situation is that we can't really discuss it in public. I feel like if I dare express disagreement with current policies and predominant views, I could be fired. I could be publicly attacked and shamed, even for what seems to me like rational arguments along the lines of "let's take a step back and look at this problem from multiple angles". Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.
    - paperwasp42 4y ago
      I agree, it's creating a very unhealthy environment that is breeding resentment and worsening the issues it's trying to solve. Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.
nyberg 4y ago
It's not "reverse racism", "normal racism", etc; it's just racism. Putting a modifier on the word to make it seem "different" doesn't do the word justice. It has nothing to do with "privilege" or lack there of as it's purely discriminating based on race alone.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Saying as a blanket statement “white people are privileged” is racist af :)
- qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  Say that to West Virgina kids scraping meals off the floor because the coal mines their fathers work have been closed.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Saying billionaires are privileged is rude when you're saying it to a billionaire dying of eye cancer. I don't think that implies much about anything. White people aren't the only class that is privileged in the US, and you can be a member of other classes that more than offset being white. Like 65% of Americans are white. It offers opportunities over the median black person (or native, or hispanic etc.), not the median person, who is also white.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
andrei_says_ 4y ago
Depends on whether you choose the word “racism” within the context of historical and current institutionalized oppression or not. People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot. The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.
- thatswrong0 4y ago
  Academia seems to have redefined racism to mean systemic/institutional racism, and the result a whole slew of confusion and counterproductive conversations. Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  For the record, this is my most downvoted comment on HN to date. As a privileged person I happily stand by it.
racl101 4y ago
> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged". As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. Two wrongs don't make a right.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.
- munificent 4y ago
  > I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area. You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    These complaints are always so interesting because it is like they are discovering intersectionality (privilege/oppression isn't a binary yes/no thing) and treating it like this is a big new observation when the "woke" community has been steeped in this idea for 30 years. If it were the 70s then sure this would be a legitimate criticism of a lot of activism but things are way different now.
protomyth 4y ago
White people aren't privileged, privileged people are privileged. I sure as heck didn't get any privilege by growing up poor on a reservation. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of my college applications were thrown away because of rural circumstances. So, this new, fashionable racism bugs me a bit.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Coming up from rural circumstances is far more likely to trigger positive discrimination than negative.
  - protomyth 4y ago
    I always felt looked down upon by those who grew up in the Twin Cities, so I never had a positive experience.
pessimizer 4y ago
> I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue. This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations. Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.
- haolez 4y ago
  Fair enough, but how far back should we go? AD 1500? AD 500? 300 BC? The Roman Empire had a majority of white people as slaves. This argument is just silly and solves nothing.

by haolez 4y ago

nerpderp82 4y ago

At the risk of _going there_, I think if you are optimizing a system, freeing resources that are most easily rescheduled is a globally optimal solution. Senior engineers can be slotted into nearly any task. It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jrs235 4y ago

The greatest minority is the individual. "Reverse racism" harms people too. Let's stop pretending it doesn't. Discrimination based on race is bad no matter the source. When can we start looking through an individual lens? Edit: I concur with parent comment.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.

coding123 4y ago

Most people that are white that I know (I'm half Indian - as in the country India - and half white) are actually now more racist (not like going out of way to join kkk) because of the anti-white and reverse-racism stuff that's been more and more out there. I sit on the sidelines like, what the fuck.

paperwasp42 4y ago
I am not sure why you're being downvoted, because I not only have witnessed this happening within my own family/friends (it is sad and scary), but we are now having studies show that some common forms of anti-racism training has a "backfire" effect that produces more racism. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?" I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns. I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.
- snek_case 4y ago
  What bugs me immensely about this whole situation is that we can't really discuss it in public. I feel like if I dare express disagreement with current policies and predominant views, I could be fired. I could be publicly attacked and shamed, even for what seems to me like rational arguments along the lines of "let's take a step back and look at this problem from multiple angles". Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.
  - paperwasp42 4y ago
    I agree, it's creating a very unhealthy environment that is breeding resentment and worsening the issues it's trying to solve. Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.

nyberg 4y ago

It's not "reverse racism", "normal racism", etc; it's just racism. Putting a modifier on the word to make it seem "different" doesn't do the word justice. It has nothing to do with "privilege" or lack there of as it's purely discriminating based on race alone.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Saying as a blanket statement “white people are privileged” is racist af :)

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
Say that to West Virgina kids scraping meals off the floor because the coal mines their fathers work have been closed.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Saying billionaires are privileged is rude when you're saying it to a billionaire dying of eye cancer. I don't think that implies much about anything. White people aren't the only class that is privileged in the US, and you can be a member of other classes that more than offset being white. Like 65% of Americans are white. It offers opportunities over the median black person (or native, or hispanic etc.), not the median person, who is also white.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

andrei_says_ 4y ago

Depends on whether you choose the word “racism” within the context of historical and current institutionalized oppression or not. People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot. The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.

thatswrong0 4y ago
Academia seems to have redefined racism to mean systemic/institutional racism, and the result a whole slew of confusion and counterproductive conversations. Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.
andrei_says_ 4y ago
For the record, this is my most downvoted comment on HN to date. As a privileged person I happily stand by it.

racl101 4y ago

> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged". As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. Two wrongs don't make a right.

pessimizer 4y ago
> white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.
munificent 4y ago
> I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation. Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area. You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  These complaints are always so interesting because it is like they are discovering intersectionality (privilege/oppression isn't a binary yes/no thing) and treating it like this is a big new observation when the "woke" community has been steeped in this idea for 30 years. If it were the 70s then sure this would be a legitimate criticism of a lot of activism but things are way different now.

protomyth 4y ago

White people aren't privileged, privileged people are privileged. I sure as heck didn't get any privilege by growing up poor on a reservation. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of my college applications were thrown away because of rural circumstances. So, this new, fashionable racism bugs me a bit.

pessimizer 4y ago
Coming up from rural circumstances is far more likely to trigger positive discrimination than negative.
- protomyth 4y ago
  I always felt looked down upon by those who grew up in the Twin Cities, so I never had a positive experience.

pessimizer 4y ago

> I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue. This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations. Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.

haolez 4y ago
Fair enough, but how far back should we go? AD 1500? AD 500? 300 BC? The Roman Empire had a majority of white people as slaves. This argument is just silly and solves nothing.