All material based on Robin DiAngelo’s work has since been removed from LinkedIn learning:
If the goal was to get people to be thoughtful about intentional or unintentional stereotypes they may hold, this was about as poor of a way of approaching the subject as possible. Starting out by telling every white person they were racist by the age of 3 is a pretty outrageous claim and a great way to shut down any constructive/thoughtful conversations about race.
Of course he criticised it.
https://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.com/2016/08/nigel-far...
Source: https://www.robindiangelo.com/
If that was contextually directed primarily towards white employees, it's offensive and inherently racist.
I didn't (and now can't) see the context, but context matters. "White before black" is offensive/racist in many contexts, but not in the rules of chess.
More opportunities for us to exploit their weakness, create real value and shape the future
And it goes without saying that the future we create and control will have no place for this drivel
When did we go back to the 1950s? I sure hope you don't feel comfortable being this racist in real life.
Trend these days is to encourage openly being a bigot, just as long as it’s against certain people.
Replace the word white with any other social group and perhaps you’ll see the problem.
Honest question after reading her wikipedia page. Is this all that is required to spend 20 years teaching everyone how race relations should work?
It seems like a bit of arrogance combined with some sort of grift.
This is obviously a minefield to debate online so I'll just leave it at that.
Racists exists in every human group, and they're predominately non-white outside the West. e.g Groups like Boku Haram are anti-White racists in Africa.
Yes, and you can confirm it yourself:
https://twitter.com/DrKarlynB/status/1362774562769879044?s=2...
That's far from obvious to me. Implicitly equating success with "acting white" is just as toxic as stereotyping all white people as arrogant, ignorant and defensive. These attitudes are the opposite of genuine inclusiveness.
EDIT: to the down voters - this is a serious question. First we need to know what DiAngelo means with being white.
The statement 'be less white' implies that all white learners of her course exhibit some negative traits.
What are those negative aspects?
How else can you change if you don't know what you're doing wrong in her eyes?
> To be less white is to:
>
> - be less oppressive
> - be less arrogant
> - be less certain
> - be less defensive
> - be less ignorant
> - be more humble
> - listen
> - believe
> - break with apathy
> - break with white solidarity
Basically associating everything negative with being white. If this is not racism, I don't know what is.
And the problem is these kids grow up and then one day have a female boss, or minority boss and if they aren't prepared they add subtle dysfunction to the team and it bruises their ego. I see this even today with my team, one of our employees seems to resent and refuse to learn from our developers in Central America. Or a buddy of mine that can't seem to understand the woman on his team is his boss and not his peer/subordinate so she should get to make the final decision.
Dr. DiAngelo was not the creator or facilitator of the LinkedIn Learning course “Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo.” She was unaware that her name, image, and work were being presented in this way and did not participate in or agree to the creation and distribution of an educational resource based on her research.
The course consisted of a selection of clips from an interview Dr. DiAngelo did for the outlet Big Think in 2018, in promotion of her book. The videos were re-edited and presented as an anti-racism training resource by LinkedIn Learning, who licensed the clips from Big Think. She did not provide the slides that were included with the video, and they do not represent the work she does for her virtual or in-person presentations, trainings, and workshops.
The course was removed voluntarily by the owners and creators of the content when it was brought to their attention that it was being used without her knowledge.
Strongly disagree. Talking about likelihood of having sickle cell anemia without talking about race would be absurd.
This probably sounds pedantic, but my point is that we should stop all of these emotionally charged over reactions, on both sides. Saying "attributing any characteristic based on skin color is racist" is almost as absurd as what you're arguing against. There has to be room for nuance.
Rhetoric like this is deeply problematic, especially for mixed-race people: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/anti-racist-education-is-anything.... About 1 in 6 children today are mixed race, and most of them have some white ancestry. What does it mean to a mixed-race person to tell them to "be less white?" I don't want my half-white daughter being told "be less white." (More like me, less like my wife?)
The thing is--if some random guy on the street said it, like when someone yelled "go back home" to my wife and daughter, I could shrug that off. You can't eliminate bigotry from society completely. But educated people normalizing this sort of rhetoric in Fortune 500 companies is intolerable. That's bigotry backed by a theoretical and ideological framework. That's something I can't just shrug off. I have been reading Thomas Chatterton Williams (an American writer of mixed heritage who now lives in France) lately. In my view, he has the better take on this: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/part-of-a-larger-battle-....
We also can't overlook what this rhetoric does to ordinary white people. "Be less white" is easy to say for educated and privileged white people like Robin DiAngelo. They aren't bothered by the implications of this because of their own status and security. They see it as harmless "punching up." Let me tell you, that's not how my grandmother in-law perceives it. To her, "white privilege" is an academic abstraction. She grew up in real poverty and never went to college. By contrast, "be less white" is quite easy to understand as a statement of overt racism. And, perplexingly to her, its overt racism that's evidently being given sanction at the highest levels of our society.
[1] An excellent assessment of DiAngelo's book: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi....
To make more money you create demand. How do you create demand? You make it obligatory training.
This one is about devaluing a culture for political reasons. But there are other topics like coöperation, teamwork, time management, etc. occasionally there are good insights. Mostly it’s regurgitated bullshit that has a stamp of approval and ticks off a compliance box somewhere. It’s a goldmine.
It doesn't just sound pedantic, it is pedantic.
The topic is clearly about personality traits not medical conditions.
where she states: > raising White children to be White is a form of child abuse
Feel free to read the full context. So no, she may have not provided the slides. But yes, this is on point for her if you read even the smallest bit of her papers.
"White" as what you call a "social group" was created in service of this power dynamic. Before, say, about 400 years ago, whiteness was not an idea used to identify a "race" of people.
So yeah, I'm all for being less white. I'm fine with just being like ... Irish.
You can research the history on this pretty easily, but a good place to start is a podcast series from Scene On Radio called Seeing White. My memory is a little fuzzy but I think the broad outline is correct.
Contextualizing it would make sense if you had not said "literally no context". This is my point, black and white language like this repels nuance.
There have been recent movements in Nigeria that specifically opposed whites in general, but they have generally been from an Afrocentrism perspective and often were just as mistrustful of Islam as Christianity, arguing for a return to indigenous African spirituality instead.
Apart from the that one carve-out, their point is correct.
However, ethnicity is only rough approximation for genetics as clustering is not perfect (obviously). Thus the cure for even this area is improved NGS testing.
So actually, their point is completly correct as-is.
That's off the rails! How many Fortune 500 companies were circulating her books in "recommended reading lists?"
So there is a real, devilishly difficult problem here. But it's not going to be solved by telling people to "be less white." That's an insane non-solution to a real problem.
I understand the academic underpinnings of that idea, but that's not how normal people understand the term "white." The Bureau of the Census, for example, certainly appears the believe that "white" reflects a racial category: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.
Neoracism. We need a word that captures the essence of such thinking and "neoracism" is a good candidate.
This statement is still true: "There's literally no context where attributing qualities to people based on their skin color is OK."
You wanted to be pedantic, so you ignored the context in which that statement was made. If you hadn't ignored the context, you would've known the statement was about personality traits and not medical conditions.
Nigerian Americans have on average 10 % higher incomes than whites.
EDIT: It is 5 per cent, not 10 per cent. I was mistaken. They have 10 % more than an average American household.
Czech Americans have on average 20 % higher incomes than generic whites.
Given that I am a Czech, are we silently running Czech supremacy in the U.S.?
Coca-Cola gives a lot of grants.
Yes it is.
> "White" as an idea to describe a group of (roughly) light skinned European people, came about in order to justify enslaving and subjugating other groups.
That's where the entire idea of distinct human “races" came about, and “white” was a pretty constant part of such taxonomies.
> Before, say, about 400 years ago, whiteness was not an idea used to identify a "race" of people.
Human “race" as a coherent, formalized idea is less than 400 years old.
Note that I'm not disagreeing at all with your idea of the role of whiteness, only with the idea that this somehow divorces it from, rather than grounds it firmly in, the idea of human “races”.
All modern concepts of race are artifacts of attempts to justify racial, and specifically almost entirely white, supremacy. The difference between them is that that basis has led to them becoming also groups of shared experience: largely, except for the white group, this is about the shared experience of being subjected to white supremacy, but for the white group it is the shared experience of benefitting from it.
I'd love to know the source on that, thanks.
After all, critical race theory books do not need any QA and, in current atmosphere, hardly any salespeople.
It is not surprising. Immigrants from Nigeria are the best educated immigrant group and income correlates with education.
> "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
It's equivocating and a preemptive setup for a Motte and Bailey. You can then say blatantly racist things like "be less white", the Bailey, and when called on it, retreat to "oh well when I say white I don't mean white, I mean <some tortured definition>", which is the Motte.
If it weren't intentional there would be very little reason to recycle words that already have established meanings and use them to mean something that doesn't explain the meaning with nuance, but supposedly changes it entirely.
Just be kind to one another!
We rarely get the chance to see that the idea of whiteness comes from a need of protecting an in-group from exploitation, while excusing and justifying the exploitation of outsiders to that group.
The census is an interesting example because for the first 70 years or so, starting in 1790 the US census had just 3 "race/ethnicity" categories. You could be "Free white male/Free white female", "All other free person" or "Slave". Which is part of the reason for creating the category of whiteness. There's also some really gross stuff right through the 1800s where the census was tracking people with various percentages of "black blood".
https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-u...
I suppose I'm just saying that the census, as part of the machinery used to implement and maintain white supremacy, is not necessarily the best authority on race.
An Indian dressed a in silk three piece suit and a Philippe Patek watch on his wrist will be treated with obsequious deference by the store personnel. A Roma guy dressed as stereotypical Roma will be suspected and followed. Their skin colors are identical.
At the end of the day, money talks.
This is flat wrong. For better or for worse, the modern "White" identity in the U.S. was heavily promoted by late-19th-c. and early 20th-c. Progressives so that light-skinned Europeans would stop trying to oppress and subjugate one another over their national identity. (To be sure, back in the day, these folks did not care all that much about whether other racialized groups got oppressed; they were quite big on "eugenics" for these groups, for example.)
I'm quite ready to admit that this was probably not an altogether foolproof idea, but now we get to live with the results - millions of people in the U.S. treat "white" as a deep part of their identity, no different than being, e.g, "Irish" for others. Many of them would likely take some offense at being told that they should "be less white", or that they need to denounce their white identity in order to "be less arrogant" and the like. Being in denial about how divisive these racially-connoted messages are is just not productive.
This kind of discourse has decades of academic background, but has only been culturally prominent in recent years. I am more inclined to believe that most folks are just repeated poorly understood half knowledge than engaging in subtle logical gamesmanship like Motte/Bailey. The whole public conversation is at the “Expert Youtuber” phase of subtly and sophistication.
And the unfalsifiability of religion.
Workplace inclusion is not about being less or more of anything but just making sure we are able to embraces diversity and work in a away where everyone is productive and satisfied.
Typical moat-and-bailey argumentation from the woke. These people are just dripping with bad faith, as if this Coca Cola presentation isn't in ideological lock-step with DiAngelo.
The saddest part is that this madness is already fueling anti-black resentment.
C'est la vie :)
If you're feeling angry at things you've heard before and reacting with things that have been said before, that is not curious conversation. That is ideological battle, in which people use hardened pre-existing points to bash each other's positions. We don't want that here—but please understand why: it's simply a question of preserving this site for its mandate.
Battle mode a.k.a. flamewar takes over threads completely if allowed to, and destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. Since we're trying to be a particular kind of website, we need a community which understands what the site is for and avoids using it for what it's not for.
Some accounts are not only using this particular thread for ideological battle, but are using HN primarily for ideological battle overall. That's the line at which we start banning accounts. If you're not familiar with how and why we draw the line at that standard, there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Ruby Bridges, the first black person to integrate in the south is only 66 years old.
But she doesn't state that; she states that someone else characterized an effect that DiAngelo is discussing in those terms. You just clipped that sentence to obscure that: “Acknowledging this, Thandeka (1999) argues that raising White children to be White is a form of child abuse because...”
> Being in denial about how divisive these racially-connoted messages are is just not productive.
I don't think it's denial, I think it's strategic choice made in the full knowledge of the offense and discomfort it might provoke. There's definitely part of messages like "whiteness is racist" or "be less white" that ii ... intended to generate offense & reflection and is a valid way of getting the work done. Being polite and working within the status quo can be seen to upload the status quo, and hasn't seemed to work at actually making chaneg. Sometimes to cut through people choose to say very challenging things. I'm personally fine with that, and even if I'm not I don't think it's up to me to tell the people affected by white supremacist ideas how to go about their business.
There is no uneducated white people who experience a massive income gap maybe?
In exploring the emo-cognitive performance of White neurosis we draw from the interdisciplinary approach to critical Whiteness studies. For example theologian, Thandeka (1999) argues that Whites have cultivated a deep shame about anything racial because since birth they have been reared to claim they do not see race when in fact they do. Acknowledging this, Thandeka (1999) argues that raising White children to be White is a form of child abuse because “the child learnsto silence and then deny its own resonant feelings towards racially proscribed others, not because it wishes to become White, but because it wishes to remain within the community this is quite literally its life” (p. 24).
Caveat: I have no idea about any of this stuff in terms of its correctness or not.
For every Bill Gates/Bezos/Musk there are tens of millions of "white" people with below average income living check-to-check, yet many media outlets treat them all in the same entitled bucket.
They (it's not a sole-author paper) are very clearly not endorsing it as a literal description, while also quite explicitly endorsing the detailed and nuanced description of the effects of inculcating White identity which Thandeka uses to explain that rather inflammatory summary description, and also, implicitly through scare-quoted back-reference, adopting the summary as a metaphor, though implicitly as one not free of problems.
I think the focus is on structural racism now because the more blatant forms are drastically less common than they used to be.
Racism: Believing that some ethic groups and/or their components are either better or worse as a conseguence of their ethinity.
Neoracism: Believing that a reasonable solution to racism involves the application of different focused racism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stith_Pemberton
They supported Nazi Germany against US embargo rules, inventing Fanta to keep business in the Nazi economy
https://timeline.com/fanta-coca-cola-nazi-845ee7e513af…
Theyve had Columbian union organizers murdered by right wing militias
https://prospect.org/api/amp/features/coca-cola-killings/?__...
They've built an empire off of oppression.
And now they want to shame middle and working class white people for OUR sins of birth?
Lol
I'm not sure where you got that idea, but structural racism doesn't actually require prejudice at all (it often involves it's, but includes institutional features which preserve disadvantage through neglect as well as active discrimination.)
> It was never intended to replace the common definition of racism
Yes, “power + prejudice” was, when coined in 1970, specifically designed to replace the common understanding of “racism” and explain why relatively disadvantaged groups (who those endorsing the definition tend to describe actually powerless rather than merely relatively disadvantaged) cannot be racists in the context of the society in which they are disadvantaged, no matter how prejudiced they were.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stith_Pemberton
They supported Nazi Germany against US embargo rules, inventing Fanta to keep business in the Nazi economy
https://timeline.com/fanta-coca-cola-nazi-845ee7e513af…
Theyve had Columbian union organizers murdered by right wing militias
https://prospect.org/api/amp/features/coca-cola-killings/?__...
They've built an empire off of oppression.
And now they want to shame middle and working class white people for OUR sins of birth?
D'Angelo gets paid 10s of 1000s to white wash corporate criminals as social justice heroes.
As someone who remembers being told, as a child, their father was stupid because 'Irish people are stupid', DiAngelo's work makes me feel exactly the same way.
If you're interested in doing some more research of your own I can recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynical_Theories
I also had to look up “white neurosis” to find out what it’s supposed to be (the previous articles assume it as an axiom). Amusingly, the top result on DuckDuckGo was an even nuttier website on the opposite side of the US spectrum¹ which quoted some academic as describing it as a new disorder that afflicts white people (presumably Americans) causing them to react “defensively, aggressively, or defectively” when they’re reprimanded for their privilege. I guess neuroses cover such a wide variety of mental states that you could make the case that an inability to relate with others of different skin colour is a type of neurosis but from the way the term is used, it sounds like it’s more loaded than that.
I stopped reading there because life’s too short and I started to become depressed considering that it’s likely only a matter of time before this sort of thinking crosses over to my side of the pond (as we refer to the Atlantic). The Covid-19 and other right-wing conspiracy theories have already caused enough societal damage. :(
1. https://needtoknow.news/2017/09/university-iowa-prof-identif... (the “Covid-19 is fake links on its side-bar were too much for me)
Ha, well said.
> This kind of discourse has decades of academic background, but has only been culturally prominent in recent years. I am more inclined to believe that most folks are just repeated poorly understood half knowledge than engaging in subtle logical gamesmanship like Motte/Bailey.
I don't disagree. Most of what we see is people regurgitating arguments they only tenuously grasp. I do believe the people initially generating those arguments are doing exactly as I described though. In fact, the first time I read about this concept it was from Nicholas Shackel (first described Motte and Bailey) showing Foucault using the tactic.
“emo-cognitive” is a rather obvious term for things that exist across both emotional and cognitive categories, that the two domains are viewed as cross-linked but that cross-domain terminology is unsettled seems clear (searching for “emo-cognitive” returns links like [0].)
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+taxonomy+of+emotion+a...
> I also had to look up “white neurosis” to find out what it’s supposed to be
The subject paper is largely about what that (in the sense it's title is concerned with) is; why would you “look it up” rather than reading the paper itself?
If I'm right about that, I think most people are misreading your comment somehow. If I'm wrong about that, I'm the one misreading it!
1. Make statement X that implies action Y should be taken.
2. Someone takes action Y, citing X.
3. Deny that your usage of X implies Y.
And this is extremely typical of woke rhetoric. In the present case, it's summarized by "Coca Cola didn't have my permission to use my ideas", with the implication that the idea was somehow used incorrectly.
Perhaps there's a better term, but it resembles motte-and-bailey to the extent that it involves playing on ambiguity to retreat to a more defensible position.
And what does the training teach you to do? To confront racism wherever you see it. Thus the training recruits you to become part of the howling mob to threaten the next business with.
It's so perfect that I can't tell if that's just an accidental side effect of following an ideology, or if it's a deliberate mafia-style shakedown with the added genius of a positive feedback loop that amplifies the threat as time goes on.
The statement was obviously about personality traits, that much was clear based on the context in which the statement was made (this HN thread). You are now ignoring the context in which the statement was made and instead focusing on the use of the word 'context' within the statement itself. To make it easier for you to understand, here is what was implied by the statement given the context in which it was made "There's literally no context where attributing PERSONALITY qualities to people based on their skin color is OK."
Your argument about medical conditions is not only wrong (as pointed out by another commenter), it's completely irrelevant and off-topic. The discussion was only about personality traits until you tried to derail it.
It should never have been possible for an ideology of this quality to co-opt all these orthogonal communities and organizations and workplaces. This climate of fear, intimidation, and dog-whistle-whistling is unacceptable if we're going to have a decent civilization. I think those of you who disagree with leftist ideology need to be a lot more vocal about it. When your employer, of all things, tries to shove this ideology down your throat, say No. Hard no. Make it clear that you're no more interested in such indoctrination than you would be in a Scientology brown bag or a mandatory prayer break. You need to surface your ethical and substantive disagreement with this political ideology, and to make it crystal clear that it is in fact a partisan political ideology that is being "taught".
This has gone on long enough. It's time to push leftists into the normal cult boundaries that any civilization must have. I think we need to take civilization a bit more seriously than we have – I wouldn't assume that civilization can survive arbitrary ideological assaults. And the stress that leftists are causing everyone, including themselves, is a non-trivial harm and ethically relevant.
You may also be ignoring the impact of immigration policy: there are a limited number of ways for Nigerians to (legally) get into the US - they no longer qualify for the DV program (unlike other immigrants who do not have a similar selection pressure). If you filter for educated Nigerians by leaving only F/M visa as a way to get into the country, you get mostly Nigerians who value education who qualified for the respective visa's (and their offspring) - there is nothing inherent to Nigerian culture there.
> The data showed 27 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans have bachelor’s degrees and 8 percent hold master’s degrees, according to the 2015 census. The survey also revealed that 4 percent of Nigerians in the U.S. have doctorates, compared to 1 percent of white Americans. And Nigerian-Americans’ education achievements top those of any other U.S. immigrant group. Asians come closest, with 12 percent holding master’s degrees and 3 percent having doctorates.
This article and it's viewpoint on the culture matches what my friends who are either Nigerian or have lived in Nigeria tell me. I believe it's also one of the main reasons that Jews have been able to do so well financially as a minority despite a long history of oppression -- education helps free you from being a victim to the dominate modes of sidelining a given group (I am Jewish and this certainly has been a big factor in both my family's values and others that I know, and has allowed my own family to escape poverty in Russia).
[1] https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/why-nigerian-americans-...
Proving my theory wrong would require showing a country that is subject to the same policy, but somehow not supplying educated immigrants. If "Asia" here includes the Indian subcontinent, then I believe the article bolsters my point.
The only other country I'm aware of, that is subject to the same immigration policy is India; while I do not have the stats on hand, my gut is that Indian immigrants have higher than average incomes, are generally more educated, and/or are biased to careers in technology since that industry makes heavy use of one of the more reliable immigration paths remaining to them - the H1-B.
Random immigrants (from anywhere on earth) outperform born-Americans on income and entrepreneurship - regardless of their prior education (you can chalk this to self-selection and/or motivation). Putting in an additional filter on higher education just skews the bias further
This is absolutely true and needs to more vocally and explicitly acknowledged. As explanatory variables go, financial means is by far the most significant determinant of a wide variety of important life outcomes.
However, it is also beyond question that there is at least some marginal disenfranchisement experienced by certain people purely on the basis of their appearance. Do I think it's as potent a handicap as being poor? Hell no. Do I think it's as potent a factor as many people who live in San Francisco would have you believe? Definitely not. But we absolutely do need to acknowledge that it's a nonzero consideration in socioeconomic stature.
Appearance, apart from race, is certainly a significant source of privilege for some and discrimination for others.
But I imagine you meant race, and I don't think that is beyond question. I find it hard to believe that race remains a significant obstacle in a country where university admissions offices give extra points based on race, most major companies preferentially recruit non-whites, and the current President publicly declared that being black was the first criterion for a Vice-Presidential candidate.
However, black people remain far more likely to be born in families and communities with limited financial resources, and that naturally perpetuates racial disparities. They are, on average, more likely to attend poor schools, more likely to encounter violence in their communities, and less likely to receive help from their families. These are fundamentally economic issues that affect people of all races.
Correcting the economic disparities for everyone would also solve many of the racial issues, while not dividing the country into poor people who receive help and other poor people who do not, in the way recent race based policies clearly have.
It’s also not just a parental income thing. Whites in the bottom 20% of the income spectrum have much double the income mobility of Black people in the bottom 20%. The structural barriers to Black mobility go well beyond income: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
IQ score differences are huge, and I'm not sure that anyone knows why. We might not have the full picture there for another 50+ years. At this point it would very difficult to even research it given that leftists will try to destroy your career if you do (e.g. the SPLC will smear you as a "white supremacist" if you research or discover or report group differences that are unfavorable to a non-white group, as they have smeared Charles Murray). The black-white IQ differences are greater than one standard deviation, which was very confusing to discover in graduate school – I had no idea. Since IQ predicts income, there is little chance of income parity anytime soon, unless we can find a sort of loophole around that relationship. But we won't be finding any loopholes or workarounds if we're not allowed to research it, so...
The out-of-wedlock birth rate and the IQ disparity are beefy predictors because they're so large in magnitude. Those two variables virtually guarantee a large income difference. There's really no way for a group to make as much money as another group if they're having 72% of their kids out-of-wedlock when the other group is at 20-25%, and also spotting the other group maybe 14+ points on mean IQ. Given those starting conditions, I wouldn't even worry about racism or talk about racism. I would focus on the things that I know are real and the I know are having a huge impact. There isn't any evidence of an equivalent effect of racism. That would be interesting to think about. For racism to be as punchy as out-of-wedlock births or IQ, we would need to see a situation like where basically black college graduates couldn't get jobs due to simple racial discrimination, at a really punchy rate. We don't see that. Systemic racism doesn't exist in the US by any definition I would think of based simply on the term. It seems to reduce to subjective construals through a leftist abstraction layer and symbolic/ideological framework. In other words, you need to be a leftist to see it, and if you don't see this invisible thing, you're a bad person. It's an arbitrary ideology at that point, and the timing is nothing short of predominant.
It's enough of a third-rail-topic that I can't even respond to this with my normal account; we're already seeing enough attempts at crime-by-association (SSC and the latest accusations) that combined with an apparently welcome tendency to examine all past actions for transgression, even if I thought I had something to say that was currently within the overton window I'd be hesitant to put it on the internet because of how the winds seem to be blowing.
I _certainly_ would not speak negatively of any of these programs at work, that would be an excellent way to end my career (putting this bluntly, you have more leeway than a white man does in speaking up about these things at this juncture; but even that has limits, look at the diversity chief of Apple who was let go.)
I worry this becomes a vicious cycle. We're already past the point that many reasonable voices disengage out of fear, so there is very little pushback until this has gone far enough to become untenable. (And this shouldn't be taken as some right wing dogwhistle, there have been HN articles lately detailing papers showing that this fear is present across the spectrum; and it's somewhat emblemic that I need to clarify this point.)
We're watching the iron law of oligarchy played out in an ideology.
Most of the focus today is on what’s called “systemic racism” which is a real thing and is based more on structural disparities associated with skin color rather than skin color in and of itself. For example, wealth in Black families undercut by redlining, etc. These disparities are not only real, they’re large, and they’re not shrinking.
We can (and should) talk about these things. But inverting that, and talking about “white privilege” isn’t either sound nor effective. “White privilege” includes, for example, the fact that the median Black person makes about the same income as a White person at the 33rd percentile of income. Put differently, a white person enjoys “white privilege” because there was a statistically better chance they’d be born into a higher income family. (Specifically, a 66% chance of having an income higher than 50% of Black households.) That makes sense from an academic point of view, to people with college degrees. It comes across as complete gibberish to my grandmother in law and some of my wife’s aunts, who are solidly in the bottom 1/3 of white incomes, and spent much of their lives below even that. The counter-factual hypothetical the income distribution of white people in general is meaningless to them. All they hear is that most Black people make more money than they do, yet they’re the ones being accused of having “white privilege.”
The problem is exactly the issue of applying generalizations to specific people. If you explained the statistics to my grandmother in law, that white people on average make significantly more money than Black people on average, she would get it. She didn’t go to college, but that’s within her ambit. It’s where you take the generalization about white people, and tell her as an individual white person that she’s somehow “privileged” despite growing up dirt poor that you’re going to lose her.
The lessons we 90s kids learned in school were the right ones. Don’t generalize about people based on their skin color. These new ideas from college professors are wrong ideas.
While it’s true that people don’t understand what “white” is, that’s no reason not to do the right thing. Be less white.
It doesn’t mean any of us as white individuals have to feel bad.
Being an unapologetic modernist and an enlightenment, for the lack of better word, fundamentalist, what struck me the most is how, whereas I used to think that "math and science are white imperialism" people are freak edge cases, they in fact represent the core beliefs of the movement and its philosophical roots. The conclusion that I drew (not in the book as such) is that the whole "studies" edifice has no more claim to truth and morality than Old Testament theology, or taking some other random philosophical notion like Letzter Mensch and running with it to characterize society.
Semi-related, the best way to troll a Silicon Valley SJW - tell them the truth; that my team at a TechCo is >67% "people of color", and that if I was hiring for my dream funded startup the first 3 people I would contact would all be "brown people". Alas, it turns out they are the "wrong" kind of "brown people"!
And the advance of remote work, internet media and crypto will mean that the US will have a hard time keeping itself together for a single more decade.
I mean, brainwashed HR drones trying to teach DiAngelo's nonsense is one level of problem. But dig deeper, turn over a few more rocks and the structural nature of the problem becomes apparent. It's not just white privilege that's a wrong and harmful idea coming out of universities, there are lots of such ideas, and there is absolutely nothing that can stop it. No mechanisms, no social conventions, nothing. Professors can just make up junk their entire lives and be continuously rewarded for it.
Indeed if you try and figure out where the line is between leftism and left wing politics, it rapidly becomes very difficult. Left wing political parties at least in the Anglosphere are all fully on board with this new leftism of racism, hatred of Anglo culture and history, and all that comes with it. To take a stand in e.g. the workplace against leftism by arguing it is an intolerant and hateful ideology is equivalent to arguing that all left wing voters are supporters of intolerant and hateful ideology. But many of them are not fully on board with all that stuff, even though their chosen representatives are, so to make progress here requires a way to distinguish between people who vote left because they want a higher minimum wage or something like that (reasonable, not the enemy), and people who vote left because they want statues to all be abolished, conservatives to be driven underground and white people turned into second class citizens in their own countries.
That in turn would require consensus around a term that describes the former, socially acceptable state of left wing politics: back when it was a sort of pro-big-government, pro-regulation, primarily economic belief system. Debates about economics and the role of government are far less fraught and far more intellectual than debates about the intrinsic worth of people based on gender or race, so splitting the left cleanly into the parts that want such debate and the parts that want ideological attacks and no-platforming seems like a necessary first step.
Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics. Thus the traditional wings get pulled along by the new strains, as they lack the intellectual and linguistic framework to push back or separate themselves from the parasitical takeover of their institutions.
Interestingly, Europe seems to have less of a problem with that. In Europe it's still common to describe the more classical centrist positions as "social democracy". This phrase is is widely understood to mean classical left wing politics focused on economics, welfare, higher taxes etc, but without the overt focus on race and gender.
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
> Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics
Yes, there are. You even used one of them with a “neo-” in front of it to describe new left-wing politics.
Also, many of your “new left wing" labels are inaccurate; “identity politics”, particularly, isn't specifically left-wing; there are progressive identity politics, center-right neoliberal identity politics (the dominant ones in the Democratic Party, which serve as a capitalist distraction from left-wing economic justice issues), and right-wing identity politics (in the US, various strands of White and/or Christian supremacism/nationalism are prominent here.)
DiAngelo bears some striking resemblances to Marx, and not only in terms of her binary, literally black and white worldview.
Marx was a wannabe academic who devoted his life to writing books about the oppression of the working classes. He lived off the largesse of patrons and supporters, notably Engels, but also his own family, and thus never had a "real" job in the sense the working classes would have recognised. DiAngelo is an actual academic who derives the majority of her income from preaching to her political supporters, although she cloaks it in the language of "training". A major criticism of Marx both in his time and after was that he had no real idea of anything he was talking about, for example he wrote extensively about factory conditions in England but had never actually been to a factory and in fact rejected his friend Engel's invitation to visit one. He wrote extensively about the working classes but had no working class friends or acquaintances beyond his housemaid, whom he abused terribly. Instead his knowledge of the world came entirely from reading books and thus ended up often distorted or wrong, for example, he had a habit of criticising factory conditions from decades earlier which had in fact been fixed via British regulation - something that in his world view wasn't supposed to be possible.
We can see echoes of all this in the way that DiAngelo (a white woman) and her followers (almost all whites) are obsessed with systemic racism, even though genuine systemic racism of the form "blacks may not enter this bar" was wiped out decades ago in the USA. Like Marx, they often rely on sleight-of-hand to argue the problem is still present and unfixable without enormous social change.
Marx's books were filled with impenetrable academic language and terms that nobody outside his small 'intellectual' circles would have understood, e.g. the term "proletariat" which had fallen into disuse since Roman times was revived by an obscure Swiss economist and then adopted by Marx, with nothing in between, thus only a tiny number of people would have understood this word. Marx's writings are still largely unintelligible even to modern readers well acquainted with his ideas. Consider this passage:
"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself."
The language is English but trying to parse insight or meaning from this paragraph is very difficult. Likewise "White Privilege" and the many similar articles are filled with text that feels like something written by GPT-2 to anyone outside the tiny circle of academics in that community. Here's an abstract from an academic paper of the genre (not by DiAngelo but someone very similar):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549420985852
"Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy"
Not only does this text have the similar highly abstract, rambling feeling of Marxist writing but it even uses the same obsolete Marx-only words, like "bourgeoise"!
The consensus on Hacker News has always been that we shouldn't, that any attempt to do so is a slippery slope that leads to tyranny, because free speech must be absolute and non-negotiable, regardless of content, truth or consequence. "I may object to what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," is the thought-terminating cliche often employed in the myriad other threads where free speech becomes a topic.
If this thread were about controversial right-wing speech, you would be shouted down as a bigot and a fascist for even suggesting that ideas can be "wrong" and "harmful." You would probably be one of the people doing the shouting down, as you've argued for free speech absolutism in other threads, and against deplatforming, cancel culture and other "leftist" and "SJW" attacks on free speech.
If it's not a problem when it's anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, racists or QAnon plotting a coup, it shouldn't be a problem here.
Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries. Yes, there were fringe wings that were openly Marxist but most left wing politics was committed to incremental change through the ballot box, not total revolution.
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
At least I perceive shades of difference in how they're normally used.
"Leftism" is used to refer to a rather extreme, virulent ideology, typified by the conviction that conservatism of any kind of a sort of evil that needs to be wiped out or suppressed. There are no mainstream parties in the west formally espousing leftism, although in the USA the Democrats are now becoming dangerously close to that with their explicitly racial/gender based appointment of Kamala Harris, and some of their recent demands to take Fox News off air.
Left wing politics is a far more mainstream movement found throughout the democratic world. Its focus is typically on economic issues that affect the working classes, they advocate for nationalisation and/or the general pulling of power to the centre, they recognise the legitimacy of their conservative oppositions and in many European countries often enter into coalitions or power sharing arrangements with them. Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair. Left wing politicians have up until very recently not been overtly promoting "leftism" in the hard-core sense seen today, but that's now changing.
To me the key difference is whether someone recognises disagreement as legitimate. Even when in very strong political positions, throughout most of the 20st century left wing parties have not tried to suppress their opposition. The exceptions are of course the communist countries, but those parties are hardly referred to as left wing, even though technically they were very much so.
Plenty of people use it for a phenomenon which includes, but is broader than, White supremacy.
https://books.google.com/books/about/White_Identity_Politics...
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18306125/white-identity-politi...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/who-does-t...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-disturbing-surpri...
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2019/the-...
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2020/10/14/the-uglin...
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/white-identity-p...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25704860?seq=1
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-trumps-use-of-white-...
https://newrepublic.com/article/138230/rise-white-identity-p...
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol87/iss4/4/
https://brill.com/view/title/55875
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-identity-polit...
http://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/identity-politics-election-2...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/opinion/trump-race-immigr...
> Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries.
In your original post you said “old left wing politics” not “post-1950s left-wing politics”, but even with the clarification, that probably depends on whether or not you include Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism within Marxism (I don't, but most of both the Right and people who agree with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism do). If you do include those things, Marxism is, if not covering the left of an absolute majority of countries, at least the single most dominant left-wing movement of the post-1950s and pre-about-1990s period.
If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.
> Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn
Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.
> And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair.
Tony Blair, like Bill Clinton in the US, was part of an 80s/90s center-right reaction against left-wing politics that took over previously left-leaning (overtly Socialist, in the case of the UK Labour Party, more confused in the US Democratic Party case because of the ongoing overlapping post-New Deal and post-Civil Rights Act partisan realignments) parties.
Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.
Though if you are using “leftism” to mean actual leftism and “left-wing" to mean 1980s-1990s center-right neoliberal “Third Way” reaction, then, yeah, they are very different things.
To the layperson, it's a box that can run software and probably had blinking lights, and that's good enough. Ask an engineer, they'll talk about RAM and CPUs. Ask computer scientists, and they'll talk about Turing completeness. Or even say something seemingly contradictory to an outsider, like "computer science isn't about computers". And even among experts, you'll get disagreements for things like "is a calculator a computer? An FPGA? An abacus?"
I don't want a society where white people are told at work they need to "be less white," or are forced to admit they are "gatekeepers of white supremacy." It's morally wrong--it's racism. But it's also contrary to my self interest as a brown guy with a beard living in a majority-white society. My mom, an immigrant from a Muslim country, texted me Trump's ban on critical-race theory training when it came out, apropos nothing. She thought it was a good idea, because it was "evil." My dad, who almost became a professor, is a bit more blasé--he thinks "this is just a weird academic idea and it's fine as long as it stays in academia."
But at the end of the day, white progressives who control the newsrooms of places like the New York Times decide what people of color to platform and amplify, and they don't pick people like my parents to speak for people of color. They pick people like Ilhan Omar, who has extreme views. (My dad noted the other day, again apropos nothing, that he was upset the media had turned Omar into the "face of Muslims in America.")
If white people feel free to agree that we should tell white people to "be less white," but not to disagree, if they feel free to agree with Ilhan Omar, but not express views like my parents, then people of color who agree with the common-sense view are effectively silenced.
What I don't like is a corporation including training material telling its employees to "be less white". This is confrontational, and in my point of view could cause more harm to minority groups. When you can, it is better to focus on teaching someone to reinforce positive aspects than to teach them to stop negative behaviours.
But as a general point of view of Western society in general, I do think it should be less white.
Exactly my point
All the profits from Fanta were kept away from the Nazi government by the American Coca-Cola managers in Germany and then handed over the parent company when the war was over. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...
The Columbia story has nothing to with racism. It's all internal Colombian politics, not one race raging a war against another.
John Stith Pemberton died 133 years ago and is irrelevant to any discussion regarding the current Coca-Cola.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...
"When people talk about identity politics it’s often assumed they’re referring to the politics of marginalized groups like African Americans, LGBTQ people, or any group that is organizing on the basis of a shared experience of injustice — and that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption."
Eh, call it a draw? I'm not wedded to the list of terms people use.
If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.
Yes, I suppose I could have explicitly stated I was writing from a European/American political context. That's usually the default assumption here on HN though.
Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.
According to them they are very much left wing, more left than anyone else in modern politics! Using a strict dictionary definition that would count the Soviet dictatorship as a left wing political party, yes you're right, but people (in the west) use the word communism to describe that, not left-wing or leftism. And my post is about how language is used today, and how it's changing.
Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.
He was left wing of a sort. For example he pretty massively expanded the state, but in obfuscated ways that even today are causing problems and haven't really been tackled, e.g. the growth of "quangos", the level of state funding of the charity sector, the large increase in student and academic funding.
To me the acid test is this: if a politician calls themselves left wing, and hardly anyone disagrees, not their opponents and nor their allies, then that's what the word means. Blair is the most ambiguous case because the hard left of his party did sometimes claim he was in reality not left wing at all, but that was never true of Corbyn or Sanders. Not even the rump communist movement would have been so bold as to claim that Corbyn wasn't genuinely left wing.
However, Corbyn and Sanders did not (to my knowledge) ever advocate for suppression of their political opposition. Thus I wouldn't describe them as engaging in "leftism".
This whole discussion is a giant rabbit hole though. Perhaps the terms "left wing" and "woke" are sufficient to distinguish between what I'm calling "classical post 1950 left wing politics" and "the ideology of leftism".
Not quite IBM's level of evil, but still scummy.
Hiding profits to avoid taxes is what they do now in every country. They're going to hide behind "hurr tax shelters, me no support nazis"? How about you just don't setup shop in Nazi Germany as US law demanded of US companies.
Yeah right, really evil, specially evil when they handed all their profits to the US when the war was over.
The US embargo was on exports only, which is why Fanta was invented in the first place when the Coke syrup was no longer allowed to be exported. Coca-Cola did not violate any embargos.
The company was founded in Germany in 1923 ten whole years before the Nazis took over, and when US had good relations with Germany. You can't fault them for doing business in a friendly country.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...