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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

So should we also ask how they confront the people who feel free to pin all bad things on white males and white privilege whether relevant, provable or not?

I've come across a few people from these companies and it's not that hard to come across people who have strong biases against whites and white men in particular. Sadly it's become a way to signal you're in the in-group.

Diffusing hostilities isn't achieved by becoming the thing you're trying to overcome.

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The standard rule of thumb seems to be that it's okay to punch up, but not down.

A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.

Just like the apocryphal rule of thumb, there is no rule of punching up (or down) It's either you allow punching or you don't. LKY knew this. Else you wind up with an opposition bigger than the affected who get fed up with things after the affected begin punching more then they should.

See: dynamics of older and younger siblings.

People seem to have an intuitive sense of punching up/down. There's an intuitive sense of abuse of power, and an allowance for people without power to use tactics which we'd abhor if those in power used.

The idea "well, no one can punch!" is rhetorically clean, but pragmatically problematic. There is a long history of people who had to punch up to break a ceiling that should never have existed.

The weirdest thing is watching what happens when one group thinks they're punching up, and everyone else thinks they're punching down.

You see massive disconnects.

The problem with punching up (a revolution, an insurrection, whathaveyou) is that it's indiscriminate. At its worst it's a collective group against an individual rather than indiv-vs-indiv or group-vs-group.

So, while it looks like punching up, having a group "punch up" at someone is actually punching down at an indiv.

Yep. That definitely happens. Individuals become totems of their group, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly.

But it's near impossible for a collective group of people to perfectly balance their outrage in just the right way, at precisely the right people, for exactly the right amount of time.

We just accept the tradeoff that progress is messy.

The problem it that they're "punching up" against people that could very well have had their own challenges in life, some of which may be even grater than group doing the punching. Don't expect a white guy that grew up in a trailer park with alcoholic parents to feel like an upper class black woman is punching up to his privileged position in society.

Yeah, that happens. It's near impossible for two strangers to know and take into account every perspective and challenge someone else has faced. And everyone's individual struggles feel enormous to them.

But still, people "punch up", and progress gets made.

A minority may think they're punching up at someone they consider to be in the majority based on obvious characteristics, and yet if they don't know the individual they may actually be punching down.

Assuming a person's privilege based on race, gender or other immutable characteristics is imprecise and counterproductive.

Perhaps, but that's how humans work sometimes.

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