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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Asians (read: a minority in the US) throwing a spanner in "diversity" and revealing the whole charade for what it is is hilarious (for all the wrong reasons) every time.

"Diversity" is supposedly all about "helping minorities", except when those minorities are too successful for the narrative. Can't have success, oh no! Minorities are supposed to be oppressed and victims in need of saving by the good diversifiers!

And so asians quite often get rounded up with whites.

Fuck that noise. Meritocracy is by far the best system we have to figure out the good people from the bad. Judging by the quality of one's character rather than the color of one's skin. We are all humans, race literally doesn't and shouldn't matter.

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You can't forget about ethnically Jewish people, another minority group that has disproportionately good outcomes. All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people who (according to some notable activists like the BLM founders) have even more whiteness than the normal white people.

> All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people

Latin@s are going through this development right now. A growing number of them are choosing to identify as white and reject the whole framing of racial grievance mongering.

I’d just like to appreciate your use of “latin@“; I’ve never seen it before but it’s so much better than “LatinX”

"Latinx" is used because it avoids an unfortunate implication intrinsic to "Latino", "Latina", or "Latin@": the gender binary.

So does "Latin", but the point is to publicly signal virtue, hence the eye-catching and bizarre "x".

You can't forget about "womxn" and "folx." The insertion of an "x" seems to be more of an attempt to colonize/Lysenkoize the lexicon than to actually be inclusive.

It's about power and control.

He who controls language controls thought. He who controls thought wields absolute power.

Sticks in your craw, doesn't it, that x? Kinda like how trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people do in our cisnormative society. It is deliberate, and it's intended to acknowledge the presence of something that was always there, but absent from our culture's understanding of the world.

Alternatively, you could just use normal Spanish

True, I should have specified that actual Spanish should be preferred over any bizarre artificial alternatives

Why does one minority group having good outcomes in an environment invalidate all claims that other minorities may need assistance? Are you suggesting the solution to all our woes is that i.e. a black or latino student just needs to be more asian if he wants to thrive at university?

"Acting more Asian" certainly would've helped me. Probably wouldn't have made me happier, but more successful, absolutely.

Why do you need to bring minority into this? Why should a poor white person not get the same help. Why should a rich minority get extra help?

What is it about being a minority that is important?

We're talking about DEI, it's already in the picture. How can we discuss diversity and inclusion without considering the needs of minority groups?

What makes you say 'rich minority'? Can you really treat a group of millions of people as a monolith and say they're all rich and don't need help?

I know of some black people in the C-suite at large companies (i'm not aware of any CEO, but a few one step below). While we can argue if they earned that or not, either way they are clearly rich making more than a million dollars per year.

I'm not claiming all minorities are rich, I'm saying a few are and yet their kids get advantages that others don't have beyond their advantage of being born rich.

I'm saying I know poor white people who have all the same problems as the black and Hispanic families living in the same area, but they get less help.

The concept of "rich minority" is fundamentally unsound. We know wealth distribution is uneven and we should focus our efforts on helping people who need it. If your model is built on things like "a few minorities are rich" or "white families have the exact same problems as black and hispanic families" you're missing a lot of important details, like how the needs of racial and social groups groups are different, if only due to the historical oppressions they faced and not due to any current ones. You simply can't ignore those things just because you know a few counter-examples. We have to look at the breadth of humanity and not just a few hand-picked negative or positive cases. There are problems unique to the average white family too! True inclusion means making sure everyone has a fair and equal shot, and if that's done properly it doesn't mean white families are going to be left out.

Because it begs the question of why the outcomes are different, and hence challenge some narratives concerning systematic racism e.g a lot of those narratives put the outcomes on factor external to those communities i.e. "the system" - but Asians are in the same system, and have/had a similar relationship to it.

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