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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the american obsession with race (well, and sexuality).

I live in a small EU country on the edge of the balkans... what the hell should I write if I wanted to get hired? I'm white... everyone here is white... but just by living here, I might have a more "diverse" worldview (compared to a white american is massachussets, with enouh knowledge and money to attend MIT) than someone of a different race (also living in massachussets, with enough money and kowledge to attend MIT). But as to "what i've done", I can only put "saw two black people this year, both were tourists, saw a couple of buses of chinese tourists, or maybe japanese, I don't know".

Engineering schools should keep to engineering, killer robots won't care about your race, no matter if you're the one building them or the one making the weapons to fight against them.

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The American obsession with race is deeply rooted in historically having a large, enslaved underclass that was kept down using racial justifications and against which there is still measurable bias across all areas of life (hiring, police stops, criminal sentencing, etc.)

It’s not unique to America but it is a major differentiator from other countries.

A key thing to note is that many homogeneous countries are extremely racist but don’t notice it because it doesn’t hugely impact day to day life. A mot-so-malicious example of this is that when my brother went to Korea to teach English, the parents wanted him (a white man) instead of the Asian American who was born in America and also going to the same Ivy League school. Obviously there are much less fun examples of racism but that one was… interesting. In the US that level of open racial preference would have been considered socially unacceptable, especially among the upper middle class college set.

The US has required an "immigrant class" since before and after slavery ended. People forget that we didn't like the Germans, Irish, Italians, Polish, etc

At one point in the South there were jobs only Irish were hired to do bc they were very dangerous and slaves were too valuable to expend on that labor.

Immigrants are necessary for our economy and have been since the beginning. This isn't a great truth but it's the truth.

Yes but Black people in the US have been historically treated _worse_ than immigrants, which is entirely unnecessary and leads to a lot of efforts to fix the results of previous subjugation.

> A key thing to note is that many homogeneous countries are extremely racist but don’t notice it because it doesn’t hugely impact day to day life

It is 10 years old, but WaPo created a map of how people responded to a question about someone of another race being their neighbor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

to add to what you said, racism probably doesn't impact anyone they know either. In that sense maybe it isn't a "problem" in homogeneous countries, but it does seem like a powder-key just waiting for the fuse to be lit. Particularly in an increasingly global world.

Wow, this is an illuminating map. Restores a bit of faith in Western values.

Didn't you guys do the same to every other immigrant? Italian? Irish? Even us, slavs?

And isn't affirmative action a form of open racial preference? In my country, there's no way a race would play any benefit in eg. college acceptance... tbf., colleges don't even see the candidates until they're accepted (with few exceptions).

Every immigrant was treated poorly initially, but nothing compares to the special hell inflicted on African slaves brought to this country. With the possible exception of the Native Americans.

Sure, but you don't look at that, but look at race.

For example, would affirmative action policies give priority to a white irish man/woman, a descendant of the poorly-treated irish people ~100years ago, or to a black person whose (grand)parents immigrated to USA after the slavery was abolished?

Yeah I think there are plausible arguments that affirmative action is not the right way to solve the problem. Mostly I’m trying to explain the dynamic that causes affirmative action to exist.

I think favorable treatment for direct descendants of slaves is a much more defensible position, than favorable treatment based on “race”, which is difficult to even define.

This is done to every immigrant group, but generally most immigrant waves assimilate and are treated more or less equally. Through all those waves Black people were consistently and persistently treated badly, with things like official segregation, anti miscegenation laws, voting restrictions, redlining, and other unofficial policies and extra-judicial public murders.

Not sure what country you’re in but the fact of a permanent visible racial/ethnic underclass that has only recently won the right to vote among other things creates that dynamic.

> The American obsession with race is deeply rooted in … [history of slavery]

I think that’s part of it. But Europeans invented (or at least widely commercialized ) this instance of slavery, and they aren’t fretting about it. I think America’s fiery vivisection of its own morality Probably comes more out of Its role as “world saving hero police” in WWII.

The ‘suddenly thrust upon them heroism’ caused them, in the subsequent decades, to then intensively examine all the ways they were, perhaps, not living up to it.

And also, I think there’s a more fundamental thing that by being in a role of “world police” you necessarily have to use violence, but whenever you use violence, there’s always inevitably guilt and shame attached to that somewhere in the psyche, or the collective subconscious.

So… while much of the violence may have been done under the idea of righteousness, I don’t think the American people can easily escape the guilt that comes with that and I think that’s one of the reasons they kind of have such Tumultuous self reflection, about how good they really are or not.

Pretty complex national psyche.

Yes Europeans invented slavery, but the deadliest war as a percentage of the population in American history was the American Civil War. This lead to a period of violent segregation and repression even after the Union won. In many places Black people had effectively fewer rights than naturalized and second generation immigrants and until at least 1964.

I agree that there is other complexity for the US psyche but slavery and segregation is huge.

Europeans did not in fact invent slavery.

I was responding to this person’s more precise comment with shorthand. But yes, specifically Europeans invented transporting Africans from Sub-Saharan Africa to plantations in the Americas to do labor intensive harvesting of sugar, tobacco, and cotton.

His point was that Americans didn’t uniquely invent that institution, not that there was no slavery outside of Europe.

Hmmm, war is often fought under a 'banner' that is different from the fundamental motivations. This the the classic "Jihadi's Dilemma": you need to craft an ideology to recruit those willing to die in the name of it.

Race has been a reliable 'cause-de-celebre' in the US politik for long eras, seemingly. I think you ought focus less on these superficial causes and more on fundamental ones: economics, resources, capital.

Which sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of white privilege. If I grow up dirt poor, with uneducated parents, in a rural dirt poor region where there wasn’t anyone except other white people in a 100 mile radius for me to be favoured over, apparently I’ve still benefited from some sort of systemic or inherent bias in favour of myself on the basis of race. Which apparently needs to be corrected and puts me at a disadvantage when applying to certain schools or jobs.

The term "white privilege" is a bit of a misnomer. What it's mean to convey is the fact that a white person is much less likely to get passed over for something than a person of color. It doesn't mean an actual privilege, more the lack of a hardship.

That doesn't mean one didn't experience hardship, just that it's unlikely to have been due to the color of your skin.

Which may have been true in 1970s, today I get told in emails to pass over White and Asian candidates because we need more diversity. The sheer hubris of putting racism in writing makes me feel like I'm in a topsy turvy 1950s.

Yeah, it's especially confusing trying to understand how it's the Asians fault, too.

Yep, on one hand, concetration camps in US for japanese people not that long ago, and now discriminated against when applying for college...

It is true in 2024 also, just that you have to choose a location different from US; go to Southeast Asia to see it in action everyday, where everyone is extra nice to white people - sales people are extra polite, people laugh extra hard at everything white people say, the lady at the counter pays first attention to white people among the group of folks waiting and so on. I have heard white people say "I loved the experience, everyone was so nice"... Of course it was, of course they were.

To be fair, there are flip sides to this too e.g white folks are more likely to be overcharged, more likely to be subject of scams etc but that's just the other side of the same coin.

So in South East Asia they are nice to minorities? That's nice.

And so the cosmic scales apparently require that this person be discriminated against, not on the basis of anything they’ve done, or have had done for them, but because of the colour of their skin and what wasn’t done to them. Regardless of all other hardships and lack of opportunity they may have experienced their whole life.

I still don’t follow the logic, if you’re claiming there is some to be followed.

> And so the cosmic scales apparently require that this person be discriminated against [...] because of the colour of their skin and what wasn’t done to them.

The scale was already tipped because of race. Is it unfair to try to tip it back? Is there no way at all to reasonably apply pressure?

Even if your answer is that it's unfair, it should be easy for you to understand why some people try.

And if any attempt to adjust the scale counts as "discrimination", then "discrimination" is not necessarily a dirty word.

> not on the basis of anything they’ve done, or have had done for them, [...] Regardless of all other hardships and lack of opportunity they may have experienced their whole life.

Well, if you had a way to measure that, it would help a lot. But if you don't have a way to measure it, I feel like disregarding it is probably reasonable.

"Don't try to fix problem X, because for some people problem X compensates for problem Y" is a pretty bad reason not to try to fix X. (With problem X being racism and problem Y being the other discrimination this white poor person faced.)

To steel man the "white privilege" argument, would be to say a black person growing up equally poor as you, would still be at a disadvantage to you in terms of how they would be treated.

(And yes, that's ironic if you are then discriminated against specifically due to the assumption you are inherently privileged.)

> killer robots won't care about your race

that is not necessarily true... while i agree with most of your sentiment, this statement is specifically why I believe everyone is racist, and nobody knows how racist they are if they only live in a homogeneous place. "this" being not understanding that being race-blind also being blind to correcting disparate treatment.

Regardless, DEI went off too far in the track of identity politics instead of correcting all forms of socioeconomic disparity so wtv. I am not surprised that you could not see the best argument in all the noise and the chaos.

But wouldn't race-blindness treat everyone the same?

For eg. college acceptance, in my country, there is no was to prefer any kind of race, because colleges don't even see the candidates before they're accepted (with some few exceptions), and things like american "affirmative action" would be seen as directly racist.

that would require assuming everyone is race blind. That isnt the case and we should stop pretending it is.

And people still find ways to infer race.

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