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Comment by eagsalazar2 | Hacker News Reader

I hear you (I also have kids) but I always feel like the level of hype here is 75% about that pretty, white "before" photo. Yes it is tragic but what about the 1000s of disadvantaged kids that yearly fall into crime and drugs, ruining their lives, being incarcerated or killed, because of institutionalized indifference to the poor non-white members of our society and the corresponding negative feedback loops that trap them generation after generation. No personalized stories about them. No years of Jean Benet follow up, nothing except vilification and blame from the right.

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Stop seeing everything through a racial lens. It is the first time an incredibly complex surgery has been performed, the race of the person is irrelevant. If this surgery was in China and performed on a Chinese person it would be just as groundbreaking.

Sorry, I definitely disagree with you and I'm not going to stop. I don't see everything through a racial lens but I do think there is a lot of racial injustice and it should be called out and discussed where it makes sense, like here (IMO).

It doesn't make sense in this context though.

Uh it was the clinic's third face transplant and the world's 40th.

I believe the novelty here was that the patient was young.

There are definitely stories that are sadly under-reported, but I do think that this story is an interesting feature that would’ve been done even if the patient were not a young white woman.

While I agree with you that stories about the plight of the underprivileged are certainly underreported, I strongly disagree with you that most of the hype around this story is due to race. Face transplant is a very new, highly risky, and highly experimental medical procedure that only recently became viable. There is an extremely non-trivial amount of scientific research, R&D, and funding that has gone into developing this procedure, and this story is nothing short of groundbreaking, regardless of the race of the patient.

For this particular instance, I think your claim is essentially the inverse of #whataboutism.

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