>I don't accuse, or segregate, or treat the other party as lesser
1. Drawing the category is in itself an act of segregation.
2. Claiming to know each person in a class of people better than they know themselves is inherently treating them as lesser. It is the definition of claiming superiority.
"Don't worry, silly white males, it's not your fault that you don't know The Truth, because you're silly white males! Here, let me tell you what's up!"
This is a good example of focusing on the negativity. It could have been interpreted in so many different ways and I am sure your interpretation is not what the author meant.
Before responding any further please re-read your message , then read it one more time.
In the nicest way possible: You are coming off as extraordinarily abrasive. If you think that doesn't matter because "facts are facts", you must be new to human society.
I don't mean to come off as _extraordinarily_ abrasive, though I do mean to convey my sentiment strongly. I do not think that overlooking the actual content of what somebody says in the name of "thinking positive" is good, or healthy, or itself positive at all.
When somebody says the equivalent of "X group of people have Y attribute", they are making a category distinction. This is what the person I originally responded to said. Yet the person explicitly stated that (s)he did not segregate. That is a contradiction.
I get what OP was probably trying to say, but (s)he emphatically did not say that. I see it all the time on HN and elsewhere: trying to fight one form of category-based discrimination (e.g. misogyny) with another form of category-based discrimination (e.g. misandry). As though this leads to some sort of mystic equilibrium where poof! all discrimination disappears. If human history can teach us anything it's that this equilibrium never happens. So maybe instead of allowing sloppy categorization and overlooking it in the name of staying positive, we should admit when we draw faulty distinctions and take pains to not make draw in the future.
> When somebody says the equivalent of "X group of people have Y attribute", they are making a category distinction. This is what the person I originally responded to said.
So, look, here's the problem: that never happened. I shouldn't have to quote something that's just a few comments up, but here it is: "... I can't help but think "Of course a white male programmer wouldn't see an issue with that". To be very clear, not because I think all white males are mean-spirited misogynists. ... But because being part of the majority blinds people to minority issues."[0]
Mind you, that's not the post you responded to. The post you responded to was a bit of a backpedaling from that utterly inoffensive statement. From that you read, quoting again, "Don't worry, silly white males, it's not your fault that you don't know The Truth, because you're silly white males! Here, let me tell you what's up!"
That sentiment or anything like it exists nowhere in anything that was said. That goes quite a bit farther than simply not assuming good faith. I used the term "extraordinarily abrasive" quite deliberately, since where your parent reads as reasoned and contrite, you come off as slightly psychotic.
If that's the sentiment you intended strongly to convey, you have succeeded.
[0] Neither here nor there, but as a white male I find nothing the least bit challenging in that. It's completely true (if a bit oversimplified).
>So, look, here's the problem: that never happened
Yes it did. You quoted the very sentence. Twice. Now try parsing it.
>From that you read...
Because that is what it says. Here, let me break it down.
"Of course": of course
a white male programmer": a person who fits in the categories "white" and "programmer"
"wouldn't see an issue with that" can't see sexism or code of conduct violations.
The category: white male programmers. The attribute: blind to sexism and code of conduct violations. Necessarily.
>The post you responded to was a bit of a backpedaling from that utterly inoffensive statement.
That statement is orders of magnitude more offensive than making a joke about a dongle. Classifying an entire sex and race and telling them (or others) what they see is the road to atrocity. And it wasn't a backpedal, it was a rationalization/justification referring directly to the OP (>I don't accuse, or segregate, or treat the other party as lesser.).
>That sentiment or anything like it exists nowhere in anything that was said
That sentiment is the _basis_ for what was said. OP felt (s)he had superior knowledge and insight to white males and used this position to explain to them how they perceive the world.
I'm not even going to comment on your trivialization of mental health issues. Nice one!
>but as a white male I find nothing the least bit challenging in that
I'm not sure what to tell you, except that, like the post you replied to said, "Of course [you] would think that" is a common rhetorical device in idiomatic English that in this context really, really does not mean what you seem to want it to mean. Your parent clearly does not think nor did express any statement of the form "all X are Y", and took great pains to make that, and their actual point, clear, and your "parsing" of that one sentence to make it into something close is exactly what the damn blog post is about.
I'm sorry that you feel I've trivialized mental health issues, but I will say that I've known psychotic people IRL, and again, I used the phrase "slightly psychotic" quite deliberately.
I think you need to read the post again. It's not unreasonable to think that white males don't necessarily understand minority issues as they are vastly the majority in this community. He never claimed it was inherent or universal or even insurmountable. I don't even view what he said as negative, just trying to remind people of their potential biases.
Anyway, get off your high horse. We all stereotype, it's natural, and it's often very useful for seeing patterns in populations and hypothesizing a cause or correlation. There are definite trends that aren't just people stereotyping: men don't generally wear dresses, women don't generally go around topless to the same extent men do. Those are complete stereotypes that're pretty essential for understanding society.
1. Drawing the category is in itself an act of segregation.
2. Claiming to know each person in a class of people better than they know themselves is inherently treating them as lesser. It is the definition of claiming superiority.
"Don't worry, silly white males, it's not your fault that you don't know The Truth, because you're silly white males! Here, let me tell you what's up!"