Comment by RIMR
2 days ago
It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.
He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
I'm black, and I can ignore Adams' "overt racism", because I understood the context of his words, and I can empathize with him. Please don't speak for an entire group of people.
Unlike Scott Adams, no struggle sessioner cares what black people actually think. They’ve been promised lordship over other men and today line up at his wake to collect.
Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.
This may be the most meaningful comment out of 1500+ currently.
No, they will go ahead and speak for an entire group of people...but at least you are safe from downvote into oblivion. The virtue signal meter is fully maxed on this one. To the credit of HN I am not seeing comments stating things in response like "I'm going to get a haircut and grab some dinner" that you find on Reddit.
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Ahh yes being politically correct aka not being a racist maga
Scott Adams said that Black people are inherently dangerous, and that white people should move to enclaves to get away from them.
While you're out here conducting pseudoscientific IQ readings of internet commenters you disagree with, some of us are actually aware of what overt racism looks like.
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I'm not sure the comment is saying to ignore the racism.
"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."
Can you clue me in? I only knew about Dilbert, and “drilbert”
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The term isn't racist. Whitewash is a lime-based "paint" often used to conceal faults, and is literally the most direct a metaphor could be for glossing over a person's faults. Please educate yourself.
Agreed. But you're fighting a losing battle. "Calling a spade a spade" is similar. Has nothing to do with race, but can't use it in modern context.
Whitewashing literally means applying a wash (which is white, typically being lime or chalk) over a surface. The wash covers whatever was underneath with a uniform coating that hides what's underneath. It's like paint, but ancient.
Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.
As a metaphor, it means exactly the same thing -- hiding the parts underneath with something that covers them.
Whitewashing is not sanitizing. Sanitizing something actually fixes it. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.
More generally, not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are demonstratively opposing here.
Then everyone should embrace blacklisting, and master-slave system architecture. But they don't, and it's time to extend that sentiment all the way. We need to stamp out all hint of racism, lest we all be bigots.
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