When your enemies are by definition bad, and your side is by definition good, you can do anything. Any evil is excusable, because it's done by "good" people against the "bad" people.
The people advocating this idiocy are unaware of history. The end result of their advocacy is genocide. They will end up being accused of the things they oppose, by people even more radical than themselves.
For me, all of the despotic ideologies are the same. This kind of political correctness, communism, anti-semitism, etc. They all want "good" people to destroy the "bad" people.
Reality be damned. Consequences be damned. Humanity be damned.
I guess. As someone who grew up near Evergreen (and knew a few classmates who attended), Evergreen's always kinda been this way. At least for the last 20+ years.
I (and many others I grew up with) think of Evergreen in the same way I think of avant garde fashion: It's sometimes a precursor of trends to come, but those trends are heavily watered-down and altered versions of the original.
I don't worry about a cultural revolution stemming from Evergreen any more than I worry about a nazi uprising stemming from 4chan.
EDIT: That is to say, both can be influential in their own way but in both cases their particular viewpoints get really watered-down by the time it becomes "mainstream" in any way.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Academia. 'Anti Whiteness is pro humanity,' according to a professor teaching a course "The Problem with Whiteness," who UW Madison defends[0].
"In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor's motto, 'treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"
Any professor teaching anti-(any other race'ness') would be instantly a pariah and unable to keep a job.
> Any professor teaching anti-(any other race'ness') would be instantly a pariah and unable to keep a job.
Whiteness isn't really a race, so that's not the same thing. In America, it's been a social construct whose members have shifted over the years.
> I have a question. When I grew up I heard 'colorblindness' was a good thing. What happened to that? It appears we are going in the opposite direction.
People started to realize that it ignores the lived experience of black people.
I feel like I don't understand this. Consider the hypothetical courses: "the problem with Jewishness," or "the problem with Blackness." Are those at all acceptable? I am certain they are not! So what is acceptable about "the problem with Whiteness?" I think you are saying that Whites do not constitute a race in the same way that Blacks do?? Does that make sense?
They don't seem to be making a cultural distinction here by calling it only "whiteness". A dynamic that both racists and rabid anti-racists so often ignore to their own detriment.
Culture is the issue. And by bypassing that and focusing on race it instantly makes the conversation taboo and kills any progress through conversation and public discourse.
This happens often in society and it's a shame, especially when cultural defects result in oppression or mass inter-community violence. These are serious problems that can't be addressed honestly.
I'm not certain I understand your objection. The point is that whiteness in America isn't a race at all; it's a social construction made to exclude people that the in-group at the time didn't like, like Irish (who were not considered white until, gradually, they were). Where does culture enter into this?
i think irish being not-white (and a number of similar propositions) is either ahistorical or equivocating in some manner.
where irish ever required to use 'colored' restrooms? did anti-miscegenation laws outlaw 'white and irish' marriage or sexual relations?
consider that 'paddy wagon' is a term from irish association with policework in the 1800s... does it seem likely that 'white' citizens of that time would be content with 'non-whites' arresting them and carting them off to jail or court?
For one you cite a phenomenon that was unique to a certain time/place (the irish).
> The point is that whiteness in America isn't a race at all; it's a social construction
My objection is how this misses the forest for the trees. There's a weak correlation between some rednecks in appalachia who hate blacks and, say, the hiring behaviour of wealthy whites in business, or the politics driven out of middle-class America which push out ineffective criminal justice policy.
These need to be confronted on a culture-by-culture basis.
For example, just look at how so many people with honest concern about violence in ghettos often blame it on the black race, or because of the popularity of the former, non-racists who criticize it will get dismissed as merely being racists. But just because they are primarily black doesn't mean the problem is racial nor does it mean their race is entirely why they got into that position. There are plenty of non-black ghettos with high violence and low educations in many countries.
If you lump it all into a racial issue you will only get a huge push back as we see here in this thread. For good reasons too, it's as reductive and irrational as the racists or anti-semites.
You could get all social-science academia about it, but all cultures are partially social constructs. And pretending it's only a social construction is similarly reductive, there is more than enough resesrch on the genetic S culture.
So, this whole thread started because people were freaking out over a college professor calling whiteness a racist concept, yes? I think we've been over how it has been exactly that historically. So what's the issue? Are we just in violent agreement here?
The concept of whiteness in America was invented to keep out groups that the in group did not like at the time; this goes back to the late 1700s. For example, Irish people for a long time were not considered white (now, of course, they are). Most European immigrants were originally not considered white and looked down upon.
What does the box on college, job, and other forms mean when it says race: "Black," "White," "Hispanic," etc??
So Whites select a social construct, while all others select a race? This is remarkably convoluted and confusing. Maybe I am just not smart enough to understand this.
I do see a valid point to be made about historical racism and how the definitions of who is accepted into the acceptable category (what you call White) has changed over the years. What I don't understand is how White people are also not a race, but a social construct, which literally makes no sense.
The history of America, and of whiteness in America, is race. When whiteness has as an entire category changed to exclude undesirables and then include them when they were no longer as undesirable, it's hard to see whiteness as anything but the racist social construct that it has always been historically.
I personally estimate that in 100 years Hispanics are going to be considered white as they lose their undesirable status, just like happened to the Irish.
I don't think you understand the philosophy of colorblindness. We can't expect everyone to treat everyone else identically, but we can expect everyone to treat everyone else with respect.
Colorblindness advocates that while you may subconsciously classify people into different groups, you shouldn't let that classification get in the way of evaluating a person as an individual.
The problem with tribalism is that it doesn't allow me, someone trying to view another as an individual, to do so. It asserts that we can only view each other as faceless expressions of 'our' groups. This is counterproductive and the essential problem with identity politics.
This form of cultural eugenics serves no ideal purpose to western society. What are the merits of basing everyone by the hue of their pigmentation? This is exactly the same position that individuals advocating bill C-16 in Canada so that people are forced to acknowledge others transient or sexual state. Again, these ideas only serve to segrate groups and will likely lead to create civil strife.
> What are the merits of basing everyone by the hue of their pigmentation?
This is a strawman; it's not what I'm advocating. What I am advocating is to recognize that black people have a different lived experience than white people. Colorblindness erases that.
> Again, these ideas only serve to segrate groups and will likely lead to create civil strife.
Everyone has a different lived experience than everyone else. If certain people are experiencing life in a negative way because of superficial characteristics, then we should advocate for a world where those superficial characteristics don't get in the way of our judgement of them: a colorblind world. You think that adopting a colorblind perspective ignores racism, but it is actually a solution to the problem of racism.
There are many problems in many communities (poor rural white, inner city black, etc.) that are caused by the actions of those in the communities themselves, rather than by oppressive outside forces. Attitude and behavioral change within those communities is necessary for any lasting improvement in the lived experience of it's members.
>[A student] cited Christopher Hitchens’s variation of Occam’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
>[a person who helped organize the Day of Absence] observed that because Hitchens’s razor is an “Englishman’s popularization of a Latin proverb,” it “would seem to itself be the product of at least two traditionally hierarchical, imperialist societies with an interest in disposing of inconvenient questions.”
.
.
Wow, you really can't make this up.
Evergreen officially asked "white" students to not show up to campus one day.
Those who protested this decision were told that because their logic is of English and Latin origin, it's racist.
Evergreen is $25k/year, so while not quite as egregious as Oberlin at $65k/year, it's enough that anyone enrolled there is highly privileged themselves. Particularly those without a direct route to monetise their degree such as those taking professional subjects.
Why is this article considered suitable for Hacker News? It's political fodder, not sci/tech.
In any case, there appears to be many overheated claims around this event, with precious little context. This was a voluntary event, where both minority and white students were allowed to go off-campus for discussions around "identity politics";
That's a valid critique of identity politics. The original article is not.
And again, I didn't think HN was a forum for debating these sorts of political / cultural issues in the first place. What does this have to do with science, technology, or startups?
HN has a constant stream about current events and opinion discussed on the front page pretty much every day. You can use the hide button if it does not interest you.
I agree this article isn't a good fit for HN but...
> What does this have to do with science, technology, or startups?
...this has never been the criteria for a good HN submission. It has always been "something a good hacker would find interesting" -- this includes history, philosophy, good psychology, etc.
Am I the only one who sees this stuff and the thinly veiled neo-Nazi ideology of the alt-right as two wings of the same movement?
They operate as a kind of dialectic with the antics of both sides serving to strengthen the other. Under the hood they share the same intellectual foundation in biological determinism, identity politics, postmodernism, and anti-rationalism.
the 'alt-right' isn't composed wholly of white identity politics; however such people are clearly there. their boldness has been stoked by anti-white identity politics. between this willing visibility and an ad-dependent 24-7 news cycle hunting for eyeballs, some get the impression that this group is much larger than it is.
> Media professor Naima Lowe...said that “white supremacy is literally ingrained in everything.” In other words, merely defending oneself against the accusation of “white supremacy” is evidence of guilt.
Hmm, now what kind of professor uses such an utterly insane attempt at reasoning?
Honestly, reality is becoming a parody. Why are people with apparent personality disorders (not to mention, intelligence deficits) allowed to wield such influence?
Somebody mentioned the Cultural Revolution. Go read Philip Pan's excellent 'Out of Mao's Shadow'. The pages on struggle sessions read exactly like the tales coming out of Evergreen. An excerpt:
> But Mao rewrote history and added a new section setting limits on what could be criticized....The lively campus debates over ideas became denunciation meetings, and at times they got physical, with students shoved to the ground and forced to bow their heads....One by one, those who had voiced “Rightist” opinions were identified and summoned to self-criticism meetings, where they were told to confess their crimes, implicate colleagues, and renounce friends.
Perhaps we can also look at this in terms of power dynamics. It's possible many of the students are not as devoted to their cause as it may seem. Instead, the cause has given these students power, over administrators, and others. That power can be intoxicating. So the students will use any opportunity they can to exert power over others, and expand that power. I think Evergreen is worth examining through the lens of Lord of the Flies.
The book "Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands" has a recurring theme about how this obsession with viewing everything in the world through the lens of 'power' has resulted in misguided, irrational, and just plain wrong thinking. Often from otherwise smart people.
Power plays a role but it's only one of many. But reducing everything to that is a recipe for missing the big picture.
Foucault's work is one of the great examples of this. He loved to reduce complex systems with many competing motivations as merely the products of power.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
53 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] threadThese retaliatory attitudes towards 'white' people are hostile and racist and do not work towards building an inclusive society.
Edit: Why was this flagged?
That swas the sentiment of many before WW2 broke out. Holocaust happened. Cultural Revolution took off.
The people advocating this idiocy are unaware of history. The end result of their advocacy is genocide. They will end up being accused of the things they oppose, by people even more radical than themselves.
For me, all of the despotic ideologies are the same. This kind of political correctness, communism, anti-semitism, etc. They all want "good" people to destroy the "bad" people.
Reality be damned. Consequences be damned. Humanity be damned.
I (and many others I grew up with) think of Evergreen in the same way I think of avant garde fashion: It's sometimes a precursor of trends to come, but those trends are heavily watered-down and altered versions of the original.
I don't worry about a cultural revolution stemming from Evergreen any more than I worry about a nazi uprising stemming from 4chan.
EDIT: That is to say, both can be influential in their own way but in both cases their particular viewpoints get really watered-down by the time it becomes "mainstream" in any way.
They ruin it for the rest of us.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article is that.
"In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor's motto, 'treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"
Any professor teaching anti-(any other race'ness') would be instantly a pariah and unable to keep a job.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/23/health/college-course-white-co...
I have a question. When I grew up I heard 'colorblindness' was a good thing. What happened to that? It appears we are going in the opposite direction.
Whiteness isn't really a race, so that's not the same thing. In America, it's been a social construct whose members have shifted over the years.
> I have a question. When I grew up I heard 'colorblindness' was a good thing. What happened to that? It appears we are going in the opposite direction.
People started to realize that it ignores the lived experience of black people.
You got the answer yourself:
> I think you are saying that Whites do not constitute a race in the same way that Blacks do?? Does that make sense?
Culture is the issue. And by bypassing that and focusing on race it instantly makes the conversation taboo and kills any progress through conversation and public discourse.
This happens often in society and it's a shame, especially when cultural defects result in oppression or mass inter-community violence. These are serious problems that can't be addressed honestly.
where irish ever required to use 'colored' restrooms? did anti-miscegenation laws outlaw 'white and irish' marriage or sexual relations?
consider that 'paddy wagon' is a term from irish association with policework in the 1800s... does it seem likely that 'white' citizens of that time would be content with 'non-whites' arresting them and carting them off to jail or court?
You are free to disagree with the thesis, of course.
For one you cite a phenomenon that was unique to a certain time/place (the irish).
> The point is that whiteness in America isn't a race at all; it's a social construction
My objection is how this misses the forest for the trees. There's a weak correlation between some rednecks in appalachia who hate blacks and, say, the hiring behaviour of wealthy whites in business, or the politics driven out of middle-class America which push out ineffective criminal justice policy.
These need to be confronted on a culture-by-culture basis.
For example, just look at how so many people with honest concern about violence in ghettos often blame it on the black race, or because of the popularity of the former, non-racists who criticize it will get dismissed as merely being racists. But just because they are primarily black doesn't mean the problem is racial nor does it mean their race is entirely why they got into that position. There are plenty of non-black ghettos with high violence and low educations in many countries.
If you lump it all into a racial issue you will only get a huge push back as we see here in this thread. For good reasons too, it's as reductive and irrational as the racists or anti-semites.
You could get all social-science academia about it, but all cultures are partially social constructs. And pretending it's only a social construction is similarly reductive, there is more than enough resesrch on the genetic S culture.
So Whites select a social construct, while all others select a race? This is remarkably convoluted and confusing. Maybe I am just not smart enough to understand this.
I personally estimate that in 100 years Hispanics are going to be considered white as they lose their undesirable status, just like happened to the Irish.
Black people often don’t either, but are forced to based on skin color.
No, it's not.
> How does it ignore the experiences of 'black' people?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/26/do-not...
Colorblindness advocates that while you may subconsciously classify people into different groups, you shouldn't let that classification get in the way of evaluating a person as an individual.
The problem with tribalism is that it doesn't allow me, someone trying to view another as an individual, to do so. It asserts that we can only view each other as faceless expressions of 'our' groups. This is counterproductive and the essential problem with identity politics.
Wow, that escalated quickly.
> What are the merits of basing everyone by the hue of their pigmentation?
This is a strawman; it's not what I'm advocating. What I am advocating is to recognize that black people have a different lived experience than white people. Colorblindness erases that.
> Again, these ideas only serve to segrate groups and will likely lead to create civil strife.
Like racism isn't causing civil strife right now?
There are many problems in many communities (poor rural white, inner city black, etc.) that are caused by the actions of those in the communities themselves, rather than by oppressive outside forces. Attitude and behavioral change within those communities is necessary for any lasting improvement in the lived experience of it's members.
>[a person who helped organize the Day of Absence] observed that because Hitchens’s razor is an “Englishman’s popularization of a Latin proverb,” it “would seem to itself be the product of at least two traditionally hierarchical, imperialist societies with an interest in disposing of inconvenient questions.”
. . Wow, you really can't make this up.
Evergreen officially asked "white" students to not show up to campus one day.
Those who protested this decision were told that because their logic is of English and Latin origin, it's racist.
In the case of scholarships, that's a golden opportunity that is being squandered - an even greater exercise of privilege.
In any case, there appears to be many overheated claims around this event, with precious little context. This was a voluntary event, where both minority and white students were allowed to go off-campus for discussions around "identity politics";
https://evergreen.edu/multicultural/day-of-absence-day-of-pr...
It sounds more like an event encouraging and celebrating tribalism.
And again, I didn't think HN was a forum for debating these sorts of political / cultural issues in the first place. What does this have to do with science, technology, or startups?
> What does this have to do with science, technology, or startups?
...this has never been the criteria for a good HN submission. It has always been "something a good hacker would find interesting" -- this includes history, philosophy, good psychology, etc.
They operate as a kind of dialectic with the antics of both sides serving to strengthen the other. Under the hood they share the same intellectual foundation in biological determinism, identity politics, postmodernism, and anti-rationalism.
Hmm, now what kind of professor uses such an utterly insane attempt at reasoning?
https://thebadger14.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/lowe.jpg
Ah.
Honestly, reality is becoming a parody. Why are people with apparent personality disorders (not to mention, intelligence deficits) allowed to wield such influence?
Somebody mentioned the Cultural Revolution. Go read Philip Pan's excellent 'Out of Mao's Shadow'. The pages on struggle sessions read exactly like the tales coming out of Evergreen. An excerpt:
> But Mao rewrote history and added a new section setting limits on what could be criticized....The lively campus debates over ideas became denunciation meetings, and at times they got physical, with students shoved to the ground and forced to bow their heads....One by one, those who had voiced “Rightist” opinions were identified and summoned to self-criticism meetings, where they were told to confess their crimes, implicate colleagues, and renounce friends.
This nonsense has to end.
Power plays a role but it's only one of many. But reducing everything to that is a recipe for missing the big picture.
Foucault's work is one of the great examples of this. He loved to reduce complex systems with many competing motivations as merely the products of power.
https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-Left...
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.