Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

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Well, it's an overtly, explicitly white-supremacist dating site. It exhorts people to "have white babies" because "only white people create white societies"; it links out to several lists of "pro-white" media including the aforementioned Daily Stormer, various "white genocide" blogs, and Stormfront; and it had forums full of posts on topics like "intentional miscegenation in advertising".

It would honestly be pretty hard for me to think of a more obviously racist website.

The thing is with this stuff… it kind of makes sense that you would find dating sites that revolve around a particular cultural or minority background. You'll find sites primarily for gay men, lesbians, Muslims, people with disabilities and so on. That's because the default culture of a "mainstream" dating site is going to be "generally mainstream able-bodied heterosexual white-ish", and people who have a cultural context that doesn't align with that can have a bit of a tough time with those.

A site focusing on "white dating"—at least in the Anglosphere—doesn't really have the same reason for existing. I mean on the surface level, something like "white dating" is the same kind of thing "muslim dating", and I could certainly see some circumstances in which it might not be deliberately bad. But the former is immediately super suspicious, and inevitably a peek behind the curtain shows it up for what it is.

The tell for this is that the term "white people" is used almost exclusively in discussions of race rather than culture, because "white people" are an internally diverse group without a unified culture.

You can find the individual subcultures all over the place in Irish pubs and Polish clubs and so on, where you can go and find people immersed in that subculture and not really expect to find a lot of Actual Nazis.

But if you go to a place that calls itself "white people" when that term only really gets used for race, what do you expect to find?

It's kind of a stupid idea for anti-racists to even keep using the term, given that the group has no identity outside of defunct 20th century pseudoscience notions of race and preserving and promoting the idea of it as any kind of coherent group is only fortifying tribalist lines we should instead be trying to dissolve.

> It's kind of a stupid idea for anti-racists to even keep using the term, given that the group has no identity outside of defunct 20th century pseudoscience notions of race and preserving and promoting the idea of it as any kind of coherent group is only fortifying tribalist lines we should instead be trying to dissolve.

yeah, this is kind of a tough one, though... because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification. and always saying something like "the cartel that calls itself white, where some members aren't even consciously colluding" is kind of a clunker. esp for people who don't think/read about this stuff on their own, and who just think of "white" as a simple and natural ethnic delineation, to the degree that any ethnic delineation can be thought of as simple or natural =)

race, including "whiteness" is a scientific and biological fiction invented and accepted to maintain (and hide) a caste system. but through the assiduous maintenance of that lie, it has become a different sort of social reality. not using the term "white" makes it incredibly hard to talk with most people about the issue. but using the term "white" as most people (superficially) think of it also helps cement its pernicious effects.

pretty difficult jam our society has gotten into there.

"the people who call themselves white" is the best terminology approach i've seen to dealing with this, but even that is still quite clunky, and may still make the speaker sound like a hand-wringing liberal to anyone who's not already on board with the viewpoint that race is a pernicious and unscientific lie.

> because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification.

The answer to this is to use it only when dealing with people who go around "identifying" themselves as white. You find a "white dating" site, you know they're the jerks, and then we have to have this discussion about why that's stupid and those people suck.

But there is also a modern tendency to use it in entirely other contexts. For example, it's more the rule than the exception that the good school district in an area is gated by high real estate costs. If you can't afford the more expensive house, your kid can't go to the better school.

It's easy to cast this and similar situations in racial rather than economic terms because the people who can't afford the more expensive real estate are disproportionately black. Then you get fake anti-racists talking about "white people" (implying the upper middle class) and "black people" (implying the poor), and for a specific reason.

Because that city will have 30,000 upper middle class "white people" and 25,000 poor "white people" and 25,000 poor "black people" and if the affluent can make it about race rather than economics then they get 55,000 votes to 25,000 in their favor instead of 50,000 to 30,000 against. It's an attempt -- often successful -- to preserve racism to serve as a wedge between poor black people and poor white people who would otherwise see that they have common interests.

Notice how many of the people who do this are college educated "white people" who for inexplicable reasons speak against the self-interest of their supposed ingroup, until you notice that the reason is actually quite explicable.

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