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Comment by jim_greco | Hacker News Reader

1) It's an offensive tweet. Whether you intend something to be offensive or not doesn't make it any less offensive.

2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.

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In my experience, the people who find these things the most offensive are the people the barb is pointed at. Privileged white people--who have nothing better to do than run around worrying about what other people are thinking out loud, trying hard to make sure that the whole world is protected from harmful speech, but who do nothing about actually solving things like the AIDs problem in Africa--are exactly the target of these kinds of comments.

These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive.

Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa.

If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.

Someone finally said it! I have often remarked that much of the so-called anti-racism is in fact designed to keep a lid on actual racism itself. People are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I totally agree. I was also surprised to see the author of the article defend the tweet as well.

>But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.

Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.

Everything is offensive to someone. In fact, the sentiment in these comments that a single bad joke on twitter should blow up publicly and cost someone their job I find disgusting. The trick is to not invoke mob justice every time you're offended by any little thing.

> It's an offensive tweet.

It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".

And segregation wasn't offensive to most southern whites. Your counter argument is silly because you could use it to argue that nothing is offensive.

> And segregation wasn't offensive to most southern whites.

Does racial segregation offend you, then? If so what are you actually doing about it? Are you putting your kids in a diverse school? Are you encouraging them to date people from other races? Are you married to one currently? How much of your social circle, other than acquaintances, involve non-whites?

There is no way you are going to "fix" societal issues without demonstrating a resolution in your own life.

Nothing is offensive or inoffensive, in and of itself. A person is offended by it, or they aren't.

Offensiveness is a function with two inputs; it depends on both the thing and the person in question.

You can't control what other people find offensive, and you can't avoid offending other people. You can control your own reaction to what you find offensive.

That's a very simple way to look at human interactions and it doesn't give you a licensce to go around saying whatever you want.

Even if we were to take the offensiveness of the tweet as a given, the reaction seems insanely disproportionate.

It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.

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