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Comment by cassalian | Hacker News Reader

The coco-cola incident made national news, I imagine there are better articles out there; I simply grabbed the first one on google - I should have sought out a better one to link to.

However, from the article, you can see several of the slides that are presented. I find it hard to believe that there's some other context than race being referred to in these slides. Do you have reason to believe that the "white" in the slides is referring to something other than race? And if not, could you provide a possible greater context that doesn't place these slides under the guise of making broad generalizations about a group of people based on their identity? I am trying to think of one myself; however, I am failing to do so.

Here's a more bland article on the incident: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/coca-cola-staff-told-in-online-t...

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One (of many) plausible scenarios:

Robin DiAngelo is talking about empathy. She asks people to put them self in the sues of a minority, knowing how boring it is, she puts the words “Try to be less white” on the slide in an attempt to humor.

Another possibility:

She has been working up the argument that whiteness is a social construct, and in this context, “being white” is the same as “being socially constructed to perceive your self as superior”. In that context asking people “to be less white” is not a judgement on the color of the skin.

It may be something entirely different though, point is it is not hard to come up with a context where these slides are not criticizing the color of people’s skin.

> It may be something entirely different though, point is it is not hard to come up with a context where these slides are not criticizing the color of people’s skin.

I agree that your above scenarios could change the context.

However, given that I perceived the slides in a different manner, and several others did as well (if no one perceived this to mean white people, then there would have been no news). Would you agree that using "white" to mean something other than the race in a seminar titled 'Facing Racism' is less likely than 'white' being used to refer to race? If not, would you agree that the Robin's usage of 'white' was poorly thought out, considering that people ended up with the conclusion that she was referring to race?

I do believe that Robin was referring to 'white' in terms of race; however, I'm willing to explore the possibility that this wasn't the case.

In the event that my assumption is correct - that Robin is referring to race - would you then agree that Robin is a member of the left who believes that white culture should be viewed negatively based on the content of the slides within the seminar?

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