Comment by jtheory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtheory | Hacker News Reader

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He's doing a good thing, and that should be lauded, but it can't make him the biggest hero on the podium.

It's an obvious oversimplification, but it be useful to think of measuring the good you do in the world in terms of game points.

Basically, if you're benefiting unfairly from a system since birth, you've started off with negative points. You owe the world something to balance off what you've gotten "for free" (really, at others' cost).

If you hate the system, you recognize the unfairness, and you actively fight against it, you can certainly move into positive points, but you're not starting off the same as people who grew up with the short end of the stick.

So when (for example) the vast majority of the white Australians at the time seemed perfectly happy with the awful system in place, and Peter Norman wasn't, and actually made this statement in a very public way, that was 10 minutes of serious bravery (and then many years of paying for it, afterwards -- which he surely knew was coming).

Also to his credit -- see the quote above about the statue. He pretty clearly wasn't putting himself in the position of "greatest hero on this podium" either; but rather probably shamed that more of his countrymen weren't even taking the smallest steps in the same direction.

-- edit -- I'm not saying he's "not a hero"; I think it's awesome what he did, and I'm not at all sure I'd have had the courage. I'm just adding some context to why saying he was "the biggest hero on the podium" rubs me the wrong way (and it would have rubbed him the wrong way as well).

Is this a parody or something? You're saying he cannot possibly be the hero because he's... white? Stop with the victimization schtick, evaluate actions for what they're worth and don't inject race, gender or whatever classifications you want to come up with into everything. The whole victimization game is quite literally just trying to invent your own new form of superiority over another group, a group who by virtue of some immutable characteristics (gender, skin color) is ineligible or somehow innately worth less than another group? I'm tired as hell of hearing everyone scream racism at every little thing, but that is flat out racism.

I don't understand how this is reacting to what I said...?

I'm not saying he wasn't a hero. I'm saying he's coming from a different starting point; and that he himself explicitly said he wasn't doing what the other two were (and didn't belong on the statue).

Victimization what? Who's a victim here? Whose superiority over whose?

I don't think anyone of any color/background/whatever is better than anyone else. I do think that if you spend your life benefiting from unfair systems (not just racism, all kinds of things in life are unfair), you owe the world some effort to right the balance.

-- edit: I thought of a better way to access this idea. Everyone seems to already agree to this implicitly when talking about money. E.g., if someone who builds an amazing business and gets rich, it's a bigger accomplishment if their parents were poor, they had a poor early education, etc., than someone who builds an equivalent business, but they went to the best schools, their parents helped fund it, etc..

I just apply the same approach to all the other areas in life where some people are simply born into unfair advantages; and extend it a bit to say that if you have a ton of resources handed to you by life on a silver platter, that's not the same as "earning" them, and (in my opinion) you need to make more of an effort before you'll be making a positive impact on the world.

I guess the parent is taken notice to,

>Basically, if you're benefiting unfairly from a system since birth, you've started off with negative points. You owe the world something to balance off what you've gotten "for free" (really, at others' cost).

Which is basically saying that no matter what you do, since you are white, your actions are of less value, and you should do more to achieve the same "points" as others. Which I would say is actually quite a racist view, but hey, no one cares about racism against whites, because that's just impossible.

Of course, I doubt that you in any way intended that interpretation, but am merely stating what the reaction is based on.

Your money analogy is a bit better, although I do not agree with the stance that white people (or wealthy, or any other group for that matter) somehow "owe" the public anything more than anyone else, simply because of their birth. That though, is entirely my personal opinion though.

> no matter what you do, since you are white, your actions are of less value

I'm saying, no matter what you do, your actions have the same value as anyone else's; but if on balance you've benefited from unjust systems, yeah, in my mind your starting point is different. This is part of how I judge my own accomplishments; I'm on the "favored" side in most of these systems.

It's not as simple as "if you're white", since of course there are a lot of unfair systems in place in the world, not just racism.

But just in the context of racism -- if Peter Norman had been aboriginal Australian, it seems quite unlikely he would have even been there, and thus never in a position to make a statement anyone would notice in the first place. Though it's hard to say, since this was still around the time the state was deciding it should stop forcibly removing Aboriginal children to be adopted into "proper" homes.

Honestly, it's a bit weird to me that this idea gets such a negative reaction. Most people have this as a basic moral principle on a small scale.

If you had an awful teacher at school who only liked kids with blue eyes, and he gave you a bag of sweets but nothing to the less-blue-eyed kids, would you feel some duty to share the sweets around on the playground, or would you sit in a corner and eat them all?

If you join a card game, notice the dealer is an old friend (and he suggests he can "help" you win a bundle)... do you switch tables, or just figure it's your lucky day?

On a small/simple scale we feel a responsibility to correct small injustices, and to avoid profiting from them. For larger, longer-lived (and more complicated) injustices... that feeling just tends to go away.

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