Comment by dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dos1 | Hacker News Reader

>I cannot afford to take white people’s shit anymore. That’s been my mantra this year, and I’m still on it, even if that means getting the law involved.

From the comment above (and several other parts of his article) he certainly appears to be just as racist as the people he's trying to demonize. Not to mention there's a crazy amount of self entitlement going on.

>I had a whole month of potential creative and community building energy stripped from me for the sake of this company’s profits. That shit ain’t cool.

A "whole" month of your "potential creative and community building energy"? Really? I have LOTS of months where I don't get to focus ANY time on any sort of creative or community building endeavors because I have other things that need to be taken care of.

I do not condone what he experienced at his workplace and that's terrible that it happened. However, his tone in the article and apparent prejudice towards white people makes it difficult for me to summon a lot of nice things to say.

he certainly appears to be just as racist as the people he's trying to demonize

There are several definitions of racist talk, one is essentially "making references to someone's race and implying everyone in that group is the same (in some attribute)". Lots of people like this definition because it's nice and simple and it means black people in the USA can be racist to white people if they say things like "Dumbwhite".

There's another definition, which is talk that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among races. Right now, if modern USA life was a video game, "white male" would be an easier difficulty level than "black male". There are statistically less problems for the "white male" group. Racist talk is talk that re-enforced that imbalance. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means you can't just do s/white/black/g and make it just as racist.

So no, it's more racist to say "dumbblack" than "dumbwhite"

Please keep repeating this as many times as it needs to be said. I hate how the word racist has been watered down to the point of meaning anything that acknowledges someone's race. It's a game of false-equivalency that lets, ahem, white people ignore actual racism because "black people are racist too". The fact is, there is a world of difference between systemic racism and this kind of "racism" that the author is guilty of. Trying to equate the two and thus water down the severity of real racism is despicable.

It's not illegal for the author to be racist.

It's rather illegal for an employer to be racist in their workplace.

Yes, I'd rather there were a better whistleblower than this guy. You seldom get things to align perfectly.

Imagine you hear a story about a guy whose house gets burned to the ground. All of his possessions are destroyed. My thought is that you'd naturally feel sympathy for the victim.

Now say you found out the victim was himself a serial arsonist who had burned down other houses. Do you still feel as bad for him?

In my opinion there is no difference between that story and this one. A racist man is angry that another racist man made racist comments toward him.

The analogy doesn't hold up unless he actually expressed racist views in the workplace. He's not a serial arsonist, he's just a guy who builds bonfires in the privacy of his home.

I second this.

By the way, the law works through deterrence.

Say this is a douchebag workplace mistreating a douchebag employee, and they get punished.

Now they serve as example to the next douchebag workplace, who hesitate before mistreating their employee, who may not be a douchebag.

Are you serious? You read the description of events in the author's post and your response is to complain about how you have it worse because you're busy?

This isn't an "article". It's someone screaming in pain.

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