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Comment by bambataa | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that many of these ludicrous spirals are caused by self-proclaimed “allies” taking on the mantle of others’ oppression and calling out behaviour that is actually fine.

The original blog post behind this case (where the woman wrote about how foreign India seemed but how excited she was to visit) is a perfect example.

The people calling out her “colonialist” references to Mars claim to be speaking on behalf of their friends. Then you have actual Indian people coming along later, wondering what the fuss was about and welcoming the author to India.

My theory probably doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny but it useful to ask “is anywhere here actually saying that they’re personally offended?”.

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> The people calling out her “colonialist” references to Mars claim to be speaking on behalf of their friends. Then you have actual Indian people coming along later, wondering what the fuss was about and welcoming the author to India.

Eh. Actual Indian person here. I think it's pretty stupid to comparing a flight to India to "going to Mars". You have Pizza Hut, Subway, and KFC in India, for crying out loud.

In normal times, the person saying things like this would have been chided by a few of their friends. Now they are viciously attacked by the whole of the Internet – which is the real problem.

to be fair, (if india is anything like srilanka in that regard) she might be shocked when she finds the quality of the food is better. American ingredients are relatively poor. I remember having pizza hut in srilanka and it was delicious and used fresh pineapple. the American version was greasy and disgusting with meager portions of the canned stuff

That's not really fair, America is just like any other part of the world -- some places have good ingredients, some not so much. I had great food in India, but I also had some that gave me a major case of the runs. I've had plenty of really great food in America, but I'll grant that if Pizza Hut is your thing, then you're after something different from me.

Also, the woman in question was coming from the UK, as I recall, so alleged food quality in America wouldn't be terribly important to her.

I think the parent comment is trying to allude to Pizza Hut in india being higher quality than Pizza Hut in America. It's an apples-to-apples comparison.

That could be true. Every Pizza Hut in my area has been closed for years because they went out of business for making shitty pizza.

I know that the McDonalds in Germany at least used to be considerably better than the McDonalds in the USA. Pizza Hut being better in India sounds totally plausible to me.

> In normal times, the person saying things like this would have been chided by a few of their friends.

The first 50+ comments on the blog are supportive, as they would be "in normal times" as well.

https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...

In case anyone is curious, here is the paragraph including the "pretty stupid" comparison:

> I’ve wanted to go to India for as long as I can remember. I’ve a lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent. Photos of India fill me with longing like no other place. One of my closest friends from that pink-striped tube skirt era (we originally met at JC Penney) is Indian, and her family had offered back then that if I ever wanted to go with them on one of their trips, I could. To a suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder, that was like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars. It was fun to think about, but are you kidding me? I was so young and dumb then that I didn’t even partake of her mother’s Indian cooking. (Talk about regrets!)

From the quote it seems obvious that the 'flight to Mars' comment is really focused on her own limited experience as a ""suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder". Not saying India is so weird it's like Mars.

She could have said the same expression about New York.

That struck me too. One of the first casualties of this sort of purity spiral seems to be simile and metaphors, everything gets taken literally and in totality.

I agree, and take back my comment about it being pretty stupid.

Wait, you can't take back comments on the Internet?

Going to Mars might be overkill, but I did feel like it was a little bit of a mindfuck the first time I went. Especially when we left Hitec City and visited Charminar. I can totally see how that would seem really exotic to someone who's spent their entire life in a western European nation.

If you found charminar area different, please try sultan bazar area :-). It is quite an experience...

Black person here, and yes, this is a pretty good way to look at it. I think perhaps you can see two extremes, the theoretical annoyed white person who just wants things to not be complicated at all, and the going too far naive liberal who wants to call out everything.

And the answer is always "It's never an easy answer. You have to do your homework. And it might change, and it might get uncomfortable. Too bad."

> And the answer is always "It's never an easy answer. You have to do your homework. And it might change, and it might get uncomfortable. Too bad."

The easy answer is “I really don’t care.”

Correct, and I trust you're intending to point out that the easy answer is also an awful one?

I have a working assumption that most minorities I interact with would prefer just to be treated like any other human, not badly, not special, just normal. So that's how I approach it. So far so good, the only time I've ever met anyone that seemed oversensitive, it was a white woman. Because of course it was.

I appreciate this idea quite a bit -- but it strikes me as a little too simplistic and conclusory for the topic at hand. It's not this simple, which is why I'm harping on "homework." I think this is because you're presently talking about interactions with individuals, and the main topic is about dealing with groups and their dynamics.

There’s a lot of discourse going around these days about white people. Not much of it is positive. It’s understandable; just about every person of color has at least one story in which a white person made them feel terrible because of their race, whether intentionally or not. There’s a lot of pent up anger, and it’s socially acceptable to vent that anger now, so people do. As a result, there are a lot of well meaning white people who are receiving the message that they, and people who look like them, are making the lives of people of color hard. Some people react to that by getting angry, others react by looking for opportunities to prove they aren’t that kind of white person. When they see an interaction like this one, they feel compelled to act, and they do. Sometimes way out of proportion to the inciting incident. Other well meaning and anxious people react positively to the callout, which reinforces the perception that this is the right thing to do. The person who committed the offense often tries to clarify their position, which presents more opportunities to call them out. In situations like this, even apologies are often criticized. Each time this process unfolds, the line of acceptable behavior creeps ever backwards, and increasingly benign actions and statements end up on the other side of it.

I notice a big difference between how social workers and social "warriors" talk.

So far, universally, the people "on the ground", doing the work, are very nice to talk to. Informative, understanding, firm, kind.

Social workers help people based on their need. Social warriors help people based on their identity. It's not surprising the two work in different ways.

I thought the definition of a "warrior" here was that they didn't help people at all, they just screamed on Twitter.

(AKA isn't Twitter itself a huge part of the problem?)

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