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My main problem with White privilege is that is drawing a big line between white people and people of color. IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. To start seeing people as individuals of equal value, based on their character not group identity.

I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish.

That said it's not a bad thing to look for areas in society for race based discriminations and eliminate them.




> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

That’s, yes, the central complaint about White privilege. But from the rest of your comment I suspect thst you actually meant to attribute this problem to mentioning White privilege, rather than to White privilege itself.

> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

That...didn’t happen. Though the same kind of White moderates whose indifference Dr. King complained of did, after the successes of the 1960s, like to say that it had as a new rationalization for the same indifference.

> I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess?

American society has drawn strong lines on race [0] forever, and, yes, that has special (not necessarily uniquely bad, but distinct) impacts on those of mixed race. (Source: nearly half a century living mixed race in America.)

> To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish.

Black and White in the US isn’t a simple divide of culture, its a divide of shared experience of still-prevalent racism.

[0] Particularly black/white, which is not to say others aren’t issues, but, e.g., the One Drop Rule, intermarriage bans through most of thr country through the mid-20th Century (and the entire South until struck down federally in 1967), and other things particularly focussed on the black/white divide.


Yes I worded that poorly.

If I were to go back in time, I would have written.

"one of the big civil rights achievements was to move towards getting rid of that divide."

Also yes, the problem is not the concept of white privilege. As a metric to show the experience of individuals in society it's not a bad thing. As a way of defining individuals it's bad, and as a focus it's not great.


> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

This never happened. You can't just eliminate explicitly racist laws from your books and expect all the racism and bigotry which led to those laws in the first place to disappear by magic. Pretending like there aren't different outcomes and general experiences between races also doesn't magically eliminate those differences. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it applies to racism as well which is why understanding and talking about systemic racism is so important.


>>IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

>This never happened.

Speaking as an American raised in the 1990s, the cultural programming of my childhood at least made progress in that direction. I was raised on popular TV shows like Sesame Street, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers, which showed people of all races coexisting in settings where race did not divide them. When the issue of racial prejudice did surface, it was clearly marked as a backwards and wrong-headed way of thinking.

These TV shows (and movies, books, etc.) were fiction, and did not change the reality of racial prejudice or de-facto segregated communities on the ground. However, they did set my and many childrens' expectations for how the world should be, and how people of different races should treat each other (i.e. as equals and as they would want to be treated). I see the then-mainstream prevalence of such messages, and absence of countervailing messages, as a tangible victory of the Civil Rights Movement.

I worry that today's mainstream cultural programming will have an opposite effect. Teaching children to focus on racial differences, and constantly drawing attention to race more generally, only teaches them to divide each other along racial lines. I believe a happy medium exists where concrete examples of racial prejudice get called out, but race is not otherwise constantly in focus.


I share this concern and miss the 90s. It created a positive desire to promote diversity because it is the right thing to do and there aren't downsides.

Nowadays, many people may reject POC in social and business settings because of political fears. For instance, if I hire, could I fire without being viewed as racist? Or, if I befriend someone, could they end up accusing me of racism in a devastating way?


Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this:

https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS

Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...


I’d suspect that the problem with low-level client-side libraries – not necessarily hardware-related. I’ve had corrupted rendering/display of web pages when I had a couple of hundred tabs open while running Firefox (GNU/Linux) on my old computer with 4GB RAM. Sometimes pressing “refresh” would resolve it or switching to another application and then switching back.

Memcheck never reported any problems with the RAM itself. I haven’t experienced any such problems after installing the Auto Tab Discard extension which allows me to have lots of tabs opens without suffering excessive memory pressure.


Could easily be on your end. It'd be strange if memory corruption just affected the (encrypted) payload but left everything in the rest of the network protocols perfectly intact


I've never seen this on the web, but I get something very similar after I put my computer to sleep with an ongoing mosh session.


Wow! I've never seen anything like that.


The fact that these fictions didn’t change the fact that in real life the races where separated. Different schools, churches, neighborhoods.

At the end of the day we will never be color blind. Color is just too obvious of a characteristic. At best we can view the colors as equals. But we need to get rid of the systemic biases to do that.




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