Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

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Newdiscourses seems to be a website dedicated /entirely/ to taking down the author and the book. A sampling of their articles over the past 2 weeks:

"In Defense of the Status Quo"

"White Silence is NOT Violence"

"A Principled Statement of Opposition to Critical Race Theory"

"Eight Big Reasons Critical Race Theory is Terrible for Dealing with Racism"

Further investigation shows the site owner, James Lindsay makes his entire living being an activist against gender studies and critical race theory. There's an extraordinary amount of resources dedicated to pushing back against the Robin Diangelo. Having heard her speak and having read at least a bit of her book, most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance. Its insisting that you do something actually about it rather than patting yourself on the back for doing what you think is the right things. It takes a great amount of twisting about to ignore the main points, and all of the writers you linked have done so.

What you call the "dogma" of dealing with a racist culture I call people lived experience. Its heartbreaking to me how very conservative-minded and flat out defensive on issues of inclusion and race the HN community has been when the subject of race is allowed to be a thread.

Lindsay isn't just some activist, he was one of the three authors of the "Sokal Squared" papers.

Casting those who question dogma as the other (conservative or "alt-right", commonly) is an effective silencing and compliance technique. "You're not one of us if you don't stay in lockstep" has a real chilling effect and is doing serious damage to the left. Obama warned about this too, but unfortunately wasn't well heeded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification.

And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJbrLs_8_0

I don’t necessarily think that everything needs to be put on a left to right scale. But you’re also ascribing things to me that I haven’t said.

Conservative just means you want things to stay the same or have things to back to how they were when you decided it was good enough to “conserve it”. In this case the fight is about frustration over lack of progress and lack of acknowledgement that police violence and systemic discrimination both very much exist and are actively harming black people. Most of the working world just sees it through a tiny keyhole in that there’s maybe 1 or 2 black software developers in a company of 1000. We need to get better as stewards of society and the companies we work in.

In order to have a complete picture, one also has to ask which "foo/bar dominated" cultures are inclusive if white/male dominated ones aren't.

As far as I'm aware, the majority population in any country, irrespective of skin color is intolerant to various degrees toward minorities, ranging from genocide and internment camps to harassment and minor discrimination.

The US is certainly not leader of the pack, but not exactly terrible either, when one looks at the constant amount of outrage. It seems to me that a group of people in the US concerned about the topic of race in their country is projecting its distorted view of things on the planet and has furthermore chosen an approach which is doomed to fail. Good luck with that, but maybe this time the US could try to not also damage the rest of the world in the process of fighting a war on abstract nouns.

Edit:

Someone in a nuked comment said "Why on earth does one have to make a broad comparison of cultures to rank badness at racism before dealing with this instance? And are you saying 'inclusion' is quantitative or something? "

Because by doing this comparison one can check if the problem of bias is universal (yep) and ingrained (yep), therefore suggesting that focusing on black vs. white in the US is counterproductive. Instead we should do research into individual and systemic biases and see how those could be kept under control.

Punishing individuals is hilariously bad. In fact there's a direct parallel between this and safety engineering, where clueless organizations will punish an employee which made a mistake while they continue to lumber from incident to incident.

I'm not even sure what you're saying here. The US literally imported slaves against their will from Africa and had slavery endowed into the constitution via the 3/5ths compromise. Then for literally 4 centuries they were beaten and oppressed and denied rights - literally jim crow laws were taken down only decades ago.

Its literally just talking about the US here. There's no projection elsewhere - this isn't just "minority rights", this is attempting to break away from a culture of systematic oppression that half the country up until last month didn't believe was a thing!

You said "most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance."

The US is an immigration society where many white people from countries which weren't involved in US slavery and now they're all painted with the same brush. It's not reasonable for someone from say Russia to be attacked for the deeds of American slave drivers hundreds of years ago. And as far as I know white immigrants were strongly discriminated against in the US in the past two centuries.

We as Americans live in a society were responsible for. We as managers, owners and employees are responsible for the culture of the companies we own.

A Russian who moved here in 1998 certainly didn’t have anything to do with racism. But he is participating in a society that claims to be a just one, in which he will get preferential treatment over a Black person just because the color of his skin. Is that his fault? No. Is it his moral responsibility as a participant in society to help create a more just society? Yes.

That sounds like some cult thinking. Collective responsibility by just doing nothing? By virtue of your genetics at birth ?

Then you're responsible for the climate problem, the extermination of native Americans, the Vietnamese death, the Iraqi deaths, etc... ? From what you preached you can only answer "yes" to all these. Then : what do you do to make amends for all those horrible crimes?

The US has a deeply unjust society and with with the exception of some periods after WWII always has had. The US does not have any moral authority to tell other countries or people how they should deal with racism and very limited moral authority in general in the past years of the Trump presidency.

Other countries and people need not and should not accept sharing the blame for US sins against black people.

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