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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Of course AA is flawed, but the status quo is flawed too. That's the point of AA. It's supposed to be a counter weight to structural imbalances in order to let minorities get a foot in the door with the hopes that in the future it will not be necessary.

Note that I'm not claiming that AA works or is for the best, I really don't know. But just that you can't have this discussion honestly without acknowledging that there are subconscious biases working against certain groups of people. The whole basis of Maddox's quote assumes that people are objective and have no biases—that's a myth, just like the idea that all players in an economy have perfect information and are rational.

This is where the whole "check your privilege" thing comes in. From one white man to another, we are not qualified to judge how much hard work and talent is required for a woman or a black person to succeed and be recognized.

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You could achieve just as much, and more, by using affirmative action to target people who are actually disadvantaged, i.e. the poor. It would target mostly the same people (blacks and hispanics), but not thosethat don't need assistance. Obama, a black man, surely needs help from the government much less than the genious poor white kid from the ghetto. Plus, it's not racist, so you win twice!

Of course there are biases against minorities. It's a big problem, particularly with respect to police violence.

However, if you want to completely derail a reasonable discussion with a white male, just use that phrase: "check your privilege".

It'll work every time, guaranteed.

I'm open to listening to reasonable arguments for or against AA, but I'm not going to be told "check your privilege" by anyone and continue to take them seriously; "check your privilege" is a phrase which erases the individual and invalidates any personal struggles they may have gone through (extreme poverty, abuse, disability, learning disability, etc.).

Even by itself, "privilege" is a really terrible, loaded word. People like George Bush are privileged -- most white people are not.

Privilege is relative in general, not just relative to you. Somebody is to you as you are to George Bush.

I apologise if what I just typed seems obvious, but it seems to contradict your assertion that only Presidents of the United States of America are privileged.

> I apologise if what I just typed seems obvious,

No need to apologize, since what you've typed is far from obvious. To begin with, I did not assert that only Presidents are privileged. Not even close. For example, I would consider neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama to come from privilege like George Bush. And George Bush would have been privileged whether or not he was president. I would have thought that was obvious.

And if you're going to dive into relativity of life suckiness, they surely the white refugee child from a poverty-stricken family in the Caucasus, whose mother and father have been gunned down and most of her village killed, would be relatively unprivileged compared to almost any American, regardless of skin color. Same for the refugee child from war-torn Afghanistan, usually ranked as one of the very poorest and unhealthiest countries in the world, unless you decide to exempt South Asians from the magical category of "privileged".

>People like George Bush are privileged

I had to pick some meaning for this phrase to have. The 'like' here is problematic, because we are all like George Bush in many ways.

What did you mean to say here?

>And if you're going to dive into relativity of life suckiness, they surely the white refugee child from a poverty-stricken family in the Caucasus, whose mother and father have been gunned down and most of her village killed, would be relatively unprivileged compared to almost any American, regardless of skin color. Same for the refugee child from war-torn Afghanistan, usually ranked as one of the very poorest and unhealthiest countries in the world, unless you decide to exempt South Asians from the magical category of "privileged".

Yes, these are people who would think that you or I are privileged. I'm wondering why you think they're wrong.

> extreme poverty, abuse, disability,

This was me and, in America, I am still more privileged than a black person in my position when it comes to education, loans, work, law enforcement and discrimination in general.

You have no way of knowing whether or not this is true.

The way people come to the conclusion it's harder for black people to get loans is to throw out all the traditional lending criteria like credit history, income, and assets.

I[0] don't[1]? [2]

[3] [4]

[5]

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/bla...

[1] http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2015/05/27/blacks-leas...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/nyregion/15subprime.html?e...

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/minorities-more-lik...

[4] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/02/09/Study-shows-its-mo...

[5] http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/news/local/well-off-b... dayton specific

Nope. Like I said. You can only get there by ignoring lending standards.

EDIT: Did you even read the links you posted, or did you just do a quick Google search and copy links without reading?

>Even by itself, "privilege" is a really terrible, loaded word. People like George Bush are privileged -- most white people are not.

Yep. It's the apex fallacy.

> However, if you want to completely derail a reasonable discussion with a white male, just use that phrase: "check your privilege".

This is a typically a response of frustration when said white male does not realize that his entire worldview is shaped by never having experienced the situations that lead to the other's viewpoint.

If you want to have empathy sometimes you need to swallow your pride and just shut up and listen for a while. Because, frankly, no matter how much you believe in your own intellectual honesty, if you are a white male you don't know what it's like to be a woman or an oppressed minority, and you are better off for it. To say that only upper crust trust-fund twits like George Bush are privileged and all other white people have no privilege demonstrates that you emphatically do not understand what white male privilege is.

Sure it hurts to be dehumanized that way, but guess what, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the dehumanization that any black man in a major US city has experienced by the time he turns 18.

From one white man to another, we are not qualified to judge...

Why would you assume that an unknowable piece of information somehow supports one position over another?

And why doesn't this go the other way also - why aren't non-Asian minorities unqualified to judge how much hard work and talent is required for an Asian to succeed?

This is such a weak argument. It's misleading to include white people in the discussion of affirmative action, because, almost paradoxically, the program only strengthens the white-power hierarchy.

There are millions of things we can do to reduce racial inequality that don't involve discrimination against Asians: ending the drug war and funding rehabilitation programs, reducing police brutality and discrimination, ending for-profit prisons, voting rights for previously convicted, quality hospitals and healthcare access for the poor, funding mental health programs in urban neighborhoods, monitoring and reducing discrimination against colored people in the court systems, actually investing in poorer neighborhoods, funding quality public transportation, seriously funding low-income schools, enacting regulations against companies that take advantage of the poor (payday loans, for-profit colleges). The list goes on and on and on.

Affirmative action has effectively increased the white power structure in this country by reducing the power of Asians, while simultaneously used a delaying tactic for real justice for poor African Americans.

Otherwise interesting comment, but "colored people"? Seriously? Maybe you meant "people of color"? The former is evocative of Jim Crow, the latter a common term used by both races today.

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