Comment by lesuorac
6 days ago
That's the point.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
6 days ago
That's the point.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
This seems illustrative of the "boogeyman" points that many commenters are making. I think it is a very small number of people who don't want people to call black people "black", and that the majority of liberal people would find the notion "you can't call them black people" to be ridiculous.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
That's part of the problem, there is no silver bullet. I implement it by not being racist (or sexist or any other -ist) personally and refusing to support anyone who is.
That's largely all anyone can do (and I have a lot more ability to do something about it as a business owner than the average progressive), which I'm sure feels inadequate and leads to roving bands of thought police members looking for perceived transgressions to attack.
And how do you decide whether someone you're considering supporting is or isn't racist? Do you, by chance, use the way they talk about black people or other minorities (man that's a mouthful, maybe just shorten it to BIPOC) as a way to gauge it?
For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them? If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
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> That's largely all anyone can do
When you don't have an understanding of racism as a systemic issue, this ends up being the conclusion. Which is why "woke" people (the ones who aren't just adopting the aesthetics and being annoying) typically discuss social issues in systemic terms (prison, policing, discrimination, etc). Which requires not just individual actions but collective action.
The inability to understand this concept is really just a lack of imagination that comes from internalizing the status quo for too long. Not to the fault of anyone, it's only natural. But I think this is why "woke" looks like a bunch of nonsense from the outside.
For example: the US has 2M people in prison more than any other country. An insane number, but to live in the US is to accept that number as normal.
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It really depends on the situation.
Sticking with the hiring situation, if you notice that a recruiter only ever recommends hiring people with say the last name Pandit then ask them about it. A lot of times people are not ashamed of their views and will just straight up tell you that they could tell the other candidates were inferior because of their name.
But as somebody else mentioned, there is no silver bullet here. Racism varies from instance to instance. A solution to fix racism in hiring isn't going to fix red-lining. You need to be keeping an eye of things and looking for patterns that don't make sense for the given sample size.
What term would you use to encompass non-white folk?
Person of color is not for "non-white", see: east asians.
The question stands, then! What's your answer?
Why are you trying to divide people based on immutable characteristics anyhow?
"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people
That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? You've been doing these things repeatedly, they're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
From the article:
>>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
pg, and many anti-woke crusaders, employ examples of performative anti-racism to undermine the necessity of genuine anti-racism altogether.
Is it the critics of performative anti-racism or the actual performers of performative anti-racism who are undermining anti-racism?
How do the critics divine the intention here? At a certain point, we're going to get to anything short of a riot being labelled virtue signaling. I'd like to avoid riots altogether.
Do people that love Chipotle actually hate burritos? It's Sturgeon's law all the way down.