Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I'm older than median around here but still firmly working age. A black man was lynched in my hometown during my lifetime. There was no trial.

One of the things most consistently infuriating about discussions of american policy on HN is how firmly committed we are overall to not reckoning with this. This is very recent history, they didn't just admit defeat or become wholesome ex-segregationists for the most part. The policies continue to have effects, and the intergenerational nature of wealth imbalance means even if they didn't we'd still expect to see consequences into the present.

I jokingly refer to the way the civil rights era is taught to elementary school children as "and then the last racist killed MLK." I don't think that's necessarily even an inappropriate way to first bring it up with young children. But I wish people here expected more of themselves.

View on HN

It is not only that people even here on HN believe that discrimination of black people doesn't happen anymore, but worse there is a vocal group that thinks that white men are now the major victims. They quite literally state that white men (mainly if they receive pushback for racist/mysoginist statements) have it as bad as black people in the 60s.

As an external observer of American news, I don’t find it surprising when race is increasingly stressed, occasionally in not directly relevant context. E.g. there was a cnn headline recently along the lines of “Black and Latino man got in the car of White policeman and disappeared” with the races capitalised from source. No matter if the intention is against racism, the capitalisation and emphasis on races does not help from my vantage (and admittedly remote) viewpoint. Now if the story was definitely a racist one it would make sense but I did not get that in the context of the article itself.

I think we all tend to victimise ourselves. The people in advantage will do so even more.

It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."

The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.

A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.

There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.

The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.

> It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."

> The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.

> A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.

> There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.

Unfortunately, that's the entire point; it's not a coincidence that questioning "why make it about race?" is overwhelmingly from people who benefit from the history you mention. It's just another form of the same cognitive dissonance of that much-overused but often apt Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Class war disguised as a culture war. The old gits still play the same games.

And no I don’t care about ageism; not when the elders hid climate change from the young.

Tacit ageism against next generations constantly wrapped up in equivocation and appeals to authority embedded in long dead mens political documents.

Generational churn of post war shell shocked paranoids that went stupid drinking lead, huffed leaded gas and other crap before bans on industrial messes needs to go faster

>It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more.

Common, unhelpful, and selective. The whole idea of "race" is arbitrary and meaningless. Ask someone to come up with a specific definition of who qualifies as a member of what "race", and they won't be able to, because it doesn't exist. Obviously we are saddled with the barbaric vestiges of the past, but that doesn't mean that we are forced to carry them on, codify them, and pretend like they have any sort of objective meaning. All the identify fetishists, racialists, and those who insist on codifying the nonsensical racial nonsense from the past are part of the problem, do a disservice to society and prevent us from moving forward.

The most unhelpful opinion is "pretend history doesn't exist and pretend people formed their opinions from the collective worldwide knowledge of when I made this comment". It is of no use in the actual world that exist and just is an idealized version of what people who haven't experienced the problems wish to be true.

My real life experience is that people who benefited directly or indirectly from racism and inequalities from the past, want people to not question their status and would rather pretend that living memory is something that was fake.

Edit: Petrov, your entire post history seems to be riddled with whataboutism and seemingly bad faith arguments

Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Race is arbitrary but that doesn't mean racism is imaginary? Arbitrary things can have profound material effects on our lives, racism is actually a powerful example of this.

This works the other way too. People see an article about a crime that doesn't mention race and they'll go out of their way to track one down that does to confirm their bias that certain people are criminals. There's no reason for that though. Either way it's a very unhealthy way to view the world and worse it's entirely one sided. You don't see headlines like: "Black man pulled over by White cop, has friendly interaction, let off with a warning"

The media knows that fear and outrage generate views and ad impressions and that's what they push at us while we wonder why everyone is so fearful and angry all the time. It's not healthy. The news should report race in headlines where it's actually relevant to the situation and provide details and historical context in the text of articles. It does little good to stoke outrage and confirm bias at a glance.

Sadly true. You only have to jump across to the thread on Rosalind Franklin to see the crypto-racists out in force.

Lynching.

Is such a major part of Americas history especially from 1863-1950

EJI has a very cool and sad interactive map of Americas recorded lynchings by county.

https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore

That's fucking appalling. I am horrified.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com