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Comment by Jack000 | Hacker News Reader

there are facts and there are "facts". If most cheaters are Chinese it does not then follow that most Chinese people are cheaters - this is the fine line between discussing a cultural phenomenon and racism.

eg. it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism

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> there are facts and there are "facts". If most cheaters are Chinese it does not then follow that most Chinese people are cheaters - this is the fine line between discussing a cultural phenomenon and racism.

Nobody asserted that. So why is racism being discussed?

>racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism

The fact that a conclusion is racist does not mean it is factually incorrect.

This isn't about what is "OK", this is about what is true.

I don't see the conflict here. I think it's very factual and true that most Black people are not violent, most Chinese people are not cheaters, and most White people are not racist.

Your original comment partly reads thusly:

> it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism

Your implication is that something cannot be true if it is racist. This is a non sequitor. Race should never have been brought up in the first place.

Drop the bone already, it’s not what he’s been saying. His point, and an excellent, nuanced point at that, is trying to explain that generalizing from limited occurrences within a community as resulting from the fact that the community is X, is racist. In other words I can say that there is a problem of white guys on the internet making arguments like yours and that’s fine, but if I try to extend that to a commentary on white guys as a group it isn’t. Most white guys aren’t disingenuous racists pointedly ignoring what someone else says to cynically repeat their own dogma. It’s the difference between trying to argue that there’s a problem of violence in black communities, vs. arguing that black people are inherently violent.

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