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Comment by aSanchezStern | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, but saying that you have privilege is not the same thing as saying you've done something wrong or are guilty, right? Even if you were born into an overall advantage, it wouldn't mean you had done anything wrong.

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Saying that due to my skin, regardless of my actual life and heritage, I have some “privilege” for which it’s okay to discriminate against me as an institution is the definition of institutional racism:

Racial bias + power.

I’m uninterested in your semantic game to justify that racism.

I think if you could be a little more specific about what institutions think it's okay to discriminate against you in particular, it would really help.

I think we are starting to get sick of even playing these gaslighting games. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know this whole game is bullshit and you’re trying to reinvent language to justify racism against whites, sexism against men, and so on for every category of persons who made it on the fair game hit list.

You’re not communicating with authenticity or decency, it’s just rhetoric all the way down. It’s at the breaking point where we all know you aren’t a good faith actor.

Let's say you had a company which only hires 9 people. You decide that your next hire will be of a specific race and gender and not other candidates need apply. Would that be discrimination?

It is irrelevant insofar as it build expectations on the basis on your skin color. I do think that being white provides advantages even today, but it is an arbitrary criterion. Being born in the US offers vastly more privilege than being born in Afghanistan, even if you are white. So it is just another approach to frame a distribution debate between groups, which is not too conductive for any solutions and in the worst case is just an expression of real racism, which I start to assume that it is.

This is a result of theirs and others' complete lack of understanding of what "privilege" means in the context. It is certainly a "both sides" kind of issue, where those with privilege think that their current standing is not commensurate with the having of privilege, as well as those who interpret it as these people need to give something up to make up for their leg up.

It is about liability not guilt. The end goal for a large part of the anti-racist movement are reparations.

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