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Comment by _jgdh | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it requires a lot self awareness and external education to learn about your own privilege and how difficult (relatively) other people have it. It's not easy.

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It really does not in a place like India where differences between the rich and the ultra poor are everywhere to witness. You cannot miss it. 90% of the country is living in poverty.

Buddha may have been able to tell things were a bit weird for him as an aristocrat, but not everyone has that level of introspection.

It’s very easy to look at all one’s own struggles and think them similar to someone else’s struggles, even if that other person has struggled far more.

If it’s 1% possible to achieve something and you did achieve it, you may think you and the person for whom it is 0.01% possible are similar, but they’ve had experiences and struggles you can’t fathom. I use the general ‘you’, maybe not you-you.

Caste is not necessarily associated with wealth. My dad's old teacher in Hyderabad was a Brahmin and he lived in very modest circumstances.

Yes but caste is associated with education. And the current generation of the upper caste is succeeding because they are more educated than the rest and come from more educated families. Which I would say is a huge privilege given that a large majority of the country can't even read and write.

They are succeeding because the historical cultural norms keep the "competition" down, and because they have money. Everything else is a consequence, not a cause. Take 2 equally educated people from high and low castes and see how they behave next to each other and how they're treated doing the same jobs. One will be treated like a "natural born leader", the other like a "born to be a slave". That's because as much education as those in the lowest caste may have, the system is rigged against them by people who aren't inherently any better but can "invent" such an advantage.

Caste, like race or gender, is the kind of bottom of the barrel discrimination. When the other person is just as educated, or smart, or capable, or sometimes they may be even better, you pull out this card which is by definition impossible to fight. You can't reasonably change them. So some people will keep working to make these still "a thing", something they can always use to get an edge they don't deserve.

> When the other person is just as educated, or smart, or capable, or sometimes they may be even better, you pull out this card which is by definition impossible to fight. You can't reasonably change them. So some people will keep working to make these still "a thing", something they can always use to get an edge they don't deserve.

This could also be a 100% accurate description of affirmative action.

Of course at first sight "affirmative action" has a similar effect and taken to the extreme it can have just as many negative consequences. But it also depends on how narrow your view of what's happening is, how far you "zoom in". The intention of reasonable affirmative action is vastly different and yes, that matters.

If you take a narrow enough view, a criminal being locked up is no different from a person being kidnapped. Someone is deprived of liberty. A criminal taking money from the victim is no different from a victim taking back money from the criminal. Someone is taking money from someone else. If you take a step back you see a different story.

To the point, if you got a job purely based on such advantages as gender or skin color, then the fact that it's taken away via affirmative action is not as much discrimination as it is fixing an error. The devil's in the details.

> To the point, if you got a job purely based on such advantages as gender or skin color,

But even if someone did get a job based solely on their skin color or gender (increasingly rare in the US), there's no guarantee or even likelihood that the next random person who loses a job because of affirmative action ever got one because of his/her skin color.

To take the most obvious example, what if the losing party is just entering the workforce? How are they guilty, other than by their skin color?

No, you can't solve racism with racism. It only causes more ill will. It's not a popular opinion these days, but I'm quite sure it won't help us attain a more just, harmonious society. Only firmly rejecting all forms of racism will get us there.

In any case, it's increasingly clear these days that attaining a racially harmonious society is no longer an objective for many folks. It's all a power play, for themselves and their political or identity group.

The past 5-10 years have been utterly discouraging for someone who hoped we could move past racial thinking as a society. I was wrong to be hopeful, for a variety of reasons now clear to me.

Yes, but its not hard to convince yourself that you live in a meritocracy, and that your society is the natural outcome of sorting people by merit.

It's hard for a man to understand something, when his self-esteem depends on him not understanding it.

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