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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I did not read that as inciting violence or discrimination against my whitebread self. So I don't think it's hate speech.

I think, as Wikipedia says [1], "The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social, political, and financial power in the United States. It describes a group whose family wealth, education, status, and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others. [...] When the term appears in writing, it usually indicates the author's disapproval of the group's excessive power in society."

It seems like a legitimate label here. Our notion of what a "proper" name looks like comes out of that cultural tradition. And as one of our own notes, that notion is often painfully wrong. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant

[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

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However, many other traditions are much more restrictive regarding personal names[1]. Some countries require the names to be gender specific. So blaming protestants from the British isles (and their American relations) is quite misplaced and inaccurate.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

Forget what the article says, about some people not even being allowed to use their own names — what's really important here is that we not write anything that remotely sounds like blaming white people.

You can blame Germans and French if you like. It would be accurate, in some contexts. But blaming protestant Anglos here is factually incorrect. Would you rather they further misinformation and mischaracterize people and history just because they feel like it?

I have no idea why you keep going on about various other countries' naming laws, when the passage in question wasn't even talking about enforcement at all:

> Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex.

Facebook, as an American company, inherited its ideas about names from mainstream American (i.e., WASP) culture. This was a poor choice, because those ideas do not also cover how some other cultures treat names. That's all this is saying. Your interpretation of this as "inflammatory" and "mischaracterizing history" is frankly baffling.

Is the founder of FB protestant, or maybe the leadership? Does vkontakte, a foreign company, in a country with no protestant culture offer less restrictive naming policies?

Characterizing the issue as one caused (and the inference is only protestant Anglo culture would cause) this kind of names requirement is disconnected from reality. Companies in non Anglo and non protestant places have similar and even more restrictive policies. And also this idea of names is not an Anglo concept, as it was characterized.

Amen. Even as a white guy I'm getting tired of Fragile Whiteness Syndrome [1]. Just pointing in the direction of the source of the standards that Facebook is enforcing and we're suddenly off to the races.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...

You seem to be arguing with something nobody said. There's no assertion that WASPs are the only people in the world to have ever decided that one sort of naming convention is normal.

What is being said is that our particular notion of names comes out of that WASP tradition. (Which, if you'll take 30 seconds to read Wikipedia, has important class and wealth connotations.) And therefore it doesn't apply perfectly to an extremely diverse society of immigrants, one with a long history of cultural, religious, and social experimentation.

It's an accident of history that a dominant strain in our culture is "protestants from the British isles". But it's still a pretty important accident. It leaves a mark. We still call that part of the country "New England", for example.

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