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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

I think the blanket insistence that anybody who has an argument for this must be racist is breathtakingly hypocritical.

> anybody who has an argument for this must be racist

Anybody who believes people of one skin colour should be treated different than people of another is, in my books, a racist. There's no conversation to be had here.

Well I do, I think groups of people who were treated badly in the past should now be treated a little better for a while.

It's not enough to say, okay, let's all be fair from now on. I think this misses the acknowledgement of all the past violations of this principle, and any attempts to make this right.

Also it's important to realize how recent "the past" is. My grandmother (who's relatively young; she had my mother when she was 19) grew up in a government sponsered residential school which told her she was too stupid to learn anything

Hypothetical scenario: Before I was born, my father murdered your father, and got away with it.

Now, after my father has passed away, the truth is revealed.

What should my punishment be?

For the record, I lean toward the theory that creating balance will eventually return the scale is equilibrium, and that is probably better in the long term than giving the scale a push to get to equilibrium faster.

However, your analogy doesn't make sense. No individual should be explicitly punished for the sins of an individual ancestor. But if some huge group of ancestors commits an atrocity against a target group that has effects lasting generations, to the point where that target group still suffers the ancestral hatreds to this day (just look at the dead posts in this thread - on Hacker News), then it's not exactly an outrageous occurrence if the society gives some boon to the targeted group. Of course, society is a zero-sum game, and a boon to any is a burden on others, but that's how the entire system works - there's no getting away from the physics of that. But to say the other groups are "punished" with no further context implies something worse than that. There's no way to compare this scenario with an individual person committing a crime against another.

That sounds reasonable on the surface, but actually it's even worse.

Groups are just sets of individuals. And "boons" are punishment if they are forced.

So to adjust the example: a group of people who look like my father killed a group of people who look like your father. What is my punishment?

It sounds absurd because group identity is absurd.

Are there individuals who need help? Let's help them. We do already, but we can do more.

Are there individuals committing crimes of real violence? Let's stop them.

That's not absurd at all.

If they used that murder to reap profit & you inherited that profit, you could pay some of it back

The saying goes "Two wrongs don't make a right", and I think it applies here.

Beyond that, Facebook doesn't just operate in the USA, so, honestly, american history is completely irrelevant to how a big part of their users is going to perceive this "good" discrimination.

Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. Receiving benefits because of your assigned groups rather than your individual merits must become a positive thing. We are all incentivized to add importance to further categorizations of people, so we might gain some favour. The more of your remedy we get, the worse off we will be.

How do you imagine this unequal treatment for good will come to an end "after a while"? When all organizations are geared up to divvy up resources among these groups? When even more people in power got there as champions for specific categories? It will be very hard to get out of that situation.

I'd much rather make up for past violations of "equal treatment for all" by implementing more "equal treatment". The more of this we can manage to get, the better of we will be. And there will be nothing to wind down "after a while".

I just wanted to highlight that this is a reasonable comment, and it's hard to find these among the noise that permeates the same half of the opinion gradient that it falls on.

@rags2riches I'm with you against these authoritarian structures built around redistribution. But one can (and you, too, can) treat some groups of people a little better without literally giving them stuff, creating weird power structures, or encouraging a culture of victimhood.

Say I was organising a poetry meetup. There are many aspects to making its attendees enjoy themselves, but evenly distributing my effort would not create the most equitable event. If I want the event to go well, most of my effort should probably go to people for whom the barriers are biggest. This could involve making sure the venue is accessible to wheelchair users, extra encouragement for the person who seems to never have heard that their poems can be worth something, or creating a speaking convention that benefits everyone equally, but puts the most burden on those who are bravest and loudest.

> Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups.

> It will be very hard to get out of that situation.

Interestingly, not in the case of what the posted article is about! Facebook can decide on its own to give extra priority to checking comments for (what its moderators consider) anti-black racism, and it's also the kind of thing that will eventually make itself unnecessary.

No, the key difference is: Facebook isn't putting more effort into fighting anti-black discrimination; it's changing its algos to ignore anti-white racism that it is already capable of detecting.

I guess both are a slightly different phrasing of the same thing - they're aligning their moderation effort in some way, but I'm not sure why you choose it.

If it's okay to ask: has anti-white racism been a significant problem for you in your life? For example, are you a white person who experiences anti-white bias from people you interact with?

> There's no conversation to be had here.

then why engage in one? If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences?

If yes, then, well, maybe there is no discussion to be had, it would be an inane claim.

If no, some racism has more consequences, then this insistence that "its all racism" is pointless at best - the term is mostly useful to describe harmful relationships and ways to combat that harm.

This sounds like justification that some forms of racism aren't as racist as others. Sounds a lot like "separate but equal" reasoning. Disgusting.

I would argue that while both are just as bad the anti-white racism can have worse consequences as it will increase the distain that whites have for blacks and at the end lead to even more discrimination against black people.

One has to be blind to not see that this is already happening.

I remember reading an essay a while ago where someone argued that this played a big part in the 2016 US elections but this is not something that I can verify.

> If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences?

Even if they have different consequences, you can still click Delete on both of them.

I think you should spend less resources actively searching for the one you consider less serious, because the resources are limited, but if someone else reported them, and you are already spending your attention looking at them anyway, you might as well delete both.

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