The point remains, the overwhelming majority of people will not take offense to the phrase "it's okay to be White" and will be perturbed by the people who do take offense to this phrase.
> [He] wanted to emphasize his own view that being white is not something bad.
Obviously. Perhaps emphasizing that view in this context does more harm than good? Is that possible? Perhaps when someone says something obscene and stupid, you don't pile on with additional obscene and stupid responses?
How do you interpret "it's okay to be X" to "it's not okay to be non-X"?. When somebody says "it's okay the be gay" they're actually saying it's not okay to be straight? This line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny.
In my view the phrase "it's okay to be White" means exactly what is says: that it's okay to be White. It's totally fine to say "it's okay to be White and it's okay to be {Asian, Black, Latino, etc.}".
> Obviously. Perhaps emphasizing that view in this context does more harm than dood? Is that possible? Perhaps when someone says something obscene and stupid, you don't pile on with additional obscene and stupid responses?
But there's nothing obscene or stupid about saying "it's okay to be White" or "it's okay to be gay" or "it's okay to be X" (at least as long as X isn't something illegal or otherwise objectively harmful).
What's stupid are the people getting riled up about the phrase "it's okay to be White". It's needless outrage that fuels resentment. The fact that it got started by 4chan makes it even worse. The people that insist on taking offense are fostering needless outrage and they're being played by 4chan.
I'm particularly confused at why you persist in trying to condemn the phrase when you are fully aware that 4chan intended for people to condemn the phrase and thus portray themselves as harboring negativity towards whites. Why are you doing exactly what 4chan wants you to do?
The article you posted even advises against the bevhavior you're engaging in:
> Lundberg’s expert suggestion is not to reject the phrase. “I think that the best response is to deny them the pleasure of the fight—of course it is ok to be white: now how can we make it ok to be a person of any color?”
This is evidently not correct, since a significant portion of the population is offended by the phrase "it's okay to be white". If someone is being obtuse in this conversion, I'm going to go with the people that insist that no segment of society thinks that it isn't okay to be white while simultaneously denigrating the people who say "it's okay to be white".
What on Earth do people hope to achieve by condemning the people who say "it's okay to be White"? I get that a segment of the population interprets statements about a specific group as implying that the statement doesn't apply to other groups (e.g. people saying "Black Live Matter" is racist because it implies that only Black lives matter), but it should be plainly obvious to see why objecting to the phrase "it's okay to be white" is not a good idea. Apparently this is the work of 4chan as a means of duping people into making anti-white statements. If so, then the trolls have had a resounding success: they even managed to dupe a significant portion of HN commenters.
Then why are we taking offense to the phrase? Worse yet, why are we taking offense to the phrase despite knowing that the alt-right wants us to take offense to the phrase because most onlookers will see it as anti-white (which is a reasonable conclusion, for the overwhelming majority of people that don't follow internet culture).
These things being true does not imply they are relevant. "It's ok to be non-white" is true and poignant social commentary, and thus I value it for the latter. The truth in it is necessary, but not sufficient. "It's ok to be white" is a fact, but it is simply a fact. It is nothing more than a fact.
>why are we taking offense to the phrase despite knowing that the alt-right wants us to take offense
I'm not taking offense to the phrase, I'm taking offense to the willingness of someone to say it where it is unwarranted. The phrase is not offensive. The willingness and desire to offend is. Exercising that willingness by employing an otherwise true statement is both offensive and cowardly.
In any case, I do not make decisions based on the whims of the Alt-right. What they want and what I want are not going to be intentionally correlated or anti-correlated.
If I said "it's ok to be gay" and someone RESPONDED with "it's ok to be straight", I would have little reason to believe they weren't explicitly trying to disagree with me. (As nothing I said would imply otherwise, and it goes without saying.) If they wanted to agree or elaborate, there are far better things to respond with, and it would unfair to allow them the presumption of exclusion but deny me the same assumption.
Usually in a conversation, we're not screaming slogans into a void and trying to analyze their validity while ignoring anything meaningful that happens in the world.
This is the exact same argument, almost word-for-word as saying that the phrase "Black Lives Matter" disparages non-Black lives by supposedly implying that they "don't" Matter. And it's clearly wrong, in both cases. Contrary to popular misconception, Exceptio probat regulam de rebus non exceptis is not a generally-applicable principle of English semantics.
"Black Lives Matter" is a slogan. It means "Black lives also matter." If someone wanted to respond to that by saying "White Lives Matter", they would be egregiously missing the point, no? Creating conflict from something that they presumably don't disagree with? And why would anybody do that?
And it's evidently working. Taking offense to the phrase "it's okay to be White" is falling straight into the trolls' hands. If we want to stop the machinations of said trolls then we should stop taking offense to the statement, since taking offense to the statement "it's okay to be X" necessarily implies that it's not okay to be X.
If Microsoft was aware of the phrase's history then their behavior is even more counterproductive; they knowingly walked into this trap.