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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't see much distinction between teaching people about structural privilege and suggesting they admit they benefit from it. Difference of degree, perhaps, but not much.

You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?

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But do you see the difference between teaching people about structural racism and having them stand up and declare "I am a racist" and "I am a gatekeeper of white supremacy?" Two things about that are outside acceptable norms:

1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and

2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.

It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.

How does that change the normal interaction dynamic?

I generally try to avoid racist people, because they'll treat me and many of my friends poorly. That's what "racism" meant in the culture I was brought up in - a racist person was by definition one who treated certain races poorly.

Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.

So it's a matter of definition, not behavior. Because the point of unconscious bias training is to help people see the ways in which they are racist even if they don't think of themselves as racist.

In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.

It's a magical, shifting definition that means whatever the high priests need it to mean at the moment.

Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.

Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.

If only there were some kind of, I dunno, training to help clarify and de-magic these words. ;)

Do you believe racists should be shamed and fired?

I don't believe people should be shamed and fired for having unconscious bias and confronting it.

There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.

And, we're back to the magical shifting definition.

If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?

That's a question for the English language and dictionary authors, not for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...

Any thoughts of your own on the matter? We're way in the sidebar, don't worry about downvotes. Tell me why.

Benefitting from structural privileges is very different from being a racist though.

In computer security, we often talk about the lack of distinction between malice and ignorance---if the security system is bad, it doesn't matter if the attacker is intent on causing harm or merely innocently curious and hack-sawing away through your computer security for fun. The outcome is the same.

I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.

I'll bite, what the fuck is passive racism?

The unconscious biases people walk around with in their heads. They're things people pick up without realizing it that lead to friction for minorities in society.

Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).

So a bad way to say unconscious racism.

"Ism" is a suffix that implies a philosophy. An ism is a suite of beliefs. Anything that is unconscious is, by definition, not an ism. Racism refers to people with a philosophy of racial hierarchy, or ideas about race that evoke or imply such a philosophy.

For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.

> suggesting they admit they benefit from it

Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.

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