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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

No-one (who knows what they're talking about) says prejudice against the dominant group(s) isn't a thing.

Anyone who does say that is, I submit, either confused, or trying to confuse.

The position, whether you agree with it or not, is "Racism is prejudice plus power". Disenfranchised groups don't have the latter, but they damned well can — and often do — have at least as much of the former as the enfranchised.

EDIT: Or is somehow your position that the prejudices held by enfranchised and those held by the disenfranchised have no meaningful difference in their affects?

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I'm not the parent.. but I think you overstate things when you say "Disenfranchised groups don't have the latter [power]".

Power is relative. A minority manager has a certain power over those working beneath him/her, for example.

While there's a dearth of minorities in top positions in the economy... it's incorrect to take this generalization, and then say no minorities have any power.

There are minorities in positions of power, and they can use that to take racist actions.

Therefore, I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism (using the prejudice + power definition).

> There are minorities in positions of power, and they can use that to take racist actions.

Which means the definition holds. Give someone power, they can be racist, and not merely prejudiced. It doesn't matter how much power objectively. It matters that they have relative power, over someone who is the object of their prejudice.

How is this so confusing?

> I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism...

Me too. Can you please clarify where you found a position to the contrary in my commentary?

I understand this position, but I still would say that it's muddying the semantic waters a bit. If you had "prejudice plus power" against someone in the LGBTQ community, would that also be called racism?

In general, I think the most common interpretation of racism would be "prejudice w.r.t. race" rather than "prejudice plus power". I would suggest that perhaps oppression is a more appropriate word to use for "prejudice plus power".

That's a fair argument.

Unfortunately, I wasn't appointed Plenipotentiary in Charge of How Controversial Terms Are Used in Academic Discourse, so my powers here are limited to explaining the position, as I understand it.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

I think no one here on HN finds this definition hard to understand, even though not everyone agrees with it.

I think the most contentious point is that "prejudice without power" has become a socially acceptable phenomenon while a decade or two ago people were campaigning for no prejudice of any kind.

> I think the most contentious point is that "prejudice without power" has become a socially acceptable phenomenon while a decade or two ago people were campaigning for no prejudice of any kind.

That's really insightful point! To my ear, condemning someone for engaging in "prejudice" has far less sting than condemning them for engaging in one of the "prejudicial isms" (like racism or sexism). The extra sting comes from the widespread and deep understanding that those isms refer to totally unacceptable behaviors.

I only see the "prejudice + power" definition of racism come up in defense of racially prejudiced comments. The effect is to (relatively) sanction and normalize forms of racial prejudice. Personally, I find that to be a totally unacceptable effect.

When the word is used this way, it's also implied that "power" means an amorphous and ideologically-defined racial hierarchy (ex., a black CEO is lower on the power totem pole than a homeless white person, etc., because of the attributes of the groups as a whole).

It's only a problem linguistically because of jumping levels - context-switching from broad social generalization to specific instances of specific individuals. Frankly, that's the flaw at the heart of 99% of such arguments.

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