I feel like we were doing fairly well moving towards a single 'human tribe' for the first part of my life, and that 'Racist' was such a powerful label because it was tantamount to putting the human tribe secondary to some sub-group.

I'm not sure how or why, but it feels as though a large swathe of the intellectual class betrayed the project by changing the definition of racism from something an individual did, and could thereby be considered a traitor to the 'human' tribe, to something one could be guilty of merely by benefiting from when someone else betrayed the human tribe. If one person is a racist, everyone he favours is also guilty of racism under the new definition. No tribe could hold together under such conditions.

Well-said. That's why I believe it will lead to a backlash if left unchecked. History suggests that forcing people to suddenly view themselves in stark racial terms is a recipe for disaster.

> to something one could be guilty of merely by benefiting from when someone else betrayed the human tribe.

You may not be aware but this is a common alt-right strawman argument opposed to Black Lives Matter. The idea that all white people are vulnerable of being accused of racism simply because of their privilege. It's incorrect, and a strawman of the actual position, which is that silence aids the status quo.

"There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

""First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;"

> You may not be aware but this is a common alt-right strawman argument opposed to Black Lives Matter.

Just argue the point. This kind of insidious smear-by-association is what I despise so much about the current state of public discourse.

I also despise the current state of public discourse for the very reason that stating that at the beginning of their post is necessary.

It's impossible for us to know if the poster of the original point is posting in good faith or not (such is the nature of the internet). By noting that it is a common alt-right strawman, and engaging with it anyway, it can help readers understand the meta of discourse that leads many other people to decide _NOT_ to engage with the argument.

The core problem with the discourse that is frustrating us is that people leverage these viewpoints not to generate discussion and mutual learning, but to try and terminate discussion in order to win people over to their side.

The way that the original point terminates discussion is tricky. Feeling "guilty by association" is a perfectly valid feeling. But the implication is, "things that make me feel guilty are not correct", and that can easily terminate a discussion because we have to untangle that first.

Continuing to post in support of the thing that makes someone feel bad is seen as callous, which is why I believe the replier speaking up for BLM is being downvoted. They are ignoring the OPs feelings, which _may_ be valid and real, but it can just as easily be an attempt to redirect the discussion.

Ultimately, feelings of guilt is not something that can really be processed over posts on social media, which is why I wish that the greater HN community would engage less in upvoting "peoples tactics made me feel bad" and more in productive discussion of how to do better than the status quo when it came to racial justice and other social topics.

I really didn't mean for my feelings to be germane in the point I raised. The point I was trying to make - which I feel is being deliberately ignored - is that seeing my fellow humans as 'negros' weakens the project of making a 'human' tribe which doesn't care about race.

I'm not surprised the alt-right raises the same point, but I'd guess it's only raised to point out the hypocrisy. The alt-right is perfectly fine with the 'human' tribe fracturing along racial lines. So, as far as I can tell, is the radical left, the only disagreement I see between the two is how the racial tribes should settle their differences.

So I don't see how it should matter that alt-right people, who are perfectly happy to see more racial division, would make the same criticism I would. Either you have a ready answer or you don't. Suppose 51% of people who make the same argument as me hide a desire for more racial division behind accusations that insisting on 'racial awareness' deepens racial divisions. What does it matter whether I'm one of the 49% who are making that argument in good faith? Do you want more racial division or do you want more human unity? And if you want more human unity, how could my keeping your race constantly in mind do anything but delay your getting what you want?

> Do you want more racial division or do you want more human unity? And if you want more human unity, how could my keeping your race constantly in mind do anything but delay your getting what you want?

Why not both? Human unity doesn't have to mean homogeneity.

The ask isn't to "keep race constantly in mind" but rather "keep the mind actively hunting for its own unconscious biases."

> What does it matter whether I'm one of the 49% who are making that argument in good faith?

Because my time and energy is scarce, and so are other peoples. Why should I oblige someone who is arguing in bad faith the time and energy to deconstruct their argument and build it back up to the level of discourse required to talk about these issues, when they will just continually drain me of whatever reserves I have. That's the point of a bad faith argument; to mask as a legit one in order to drain the opposition.

> Do you want more racial division or do you want more human unity?

I don't think that's even the topic of question. Racial division or unity is not at stake; it's justice and equality. Framing it to be about "unity" is an approach that experience has shown people who have paid attention to racial equality & justice over the last 30 years as _not_ working.

> how could my keeping your race constantly in mind do anything but delay your getting what you want?

Keeping in mind a person's experience as you interact with them is paramount for empathy. For a large portion of people in America, their race is inexorably tied to their experience. You're not being asked to think, "Oh this person is Black, I need to act like X & Y & not Z because the SJW police told me to." You're being asked to think, "Oh this person is Black, I need to understand their experience so I know how to act around them so that they feel safe."

Some people find it helpful to boil these down to rules of thumb, but these are simply tools to help people who are new to empathizing with the experiences of POC to not fuck up as much. Take them at your leisure based on your perceived level of understanding.

Lastly, I'll leave you with a few questions to ponder & research if you feel like it's valuable:

How does a society repair the subtle mechanisms within it that perpetuate racial injustice and inequality?

How does a society acknowledge and celebrate cultures that are different from the majority (as in, without erasing them or forcing them to adopt white culture)?

How does a society enact justice for the communities who have been terrorized and brutalized due to racism perpetrated through people, policy, and the power structure in all areas of the country?

To me, "ignoring race" does not come close to getting to the root of these questions. It is extremely palatable because it requires no work on my part, but experience shows it does not actually bear fruit.

I try to be as generous and good faith as I can, but I'm not the best at it. I tend to point out talking points when I see them because I waste a lot of time arguing on the internet, and so I time and time again will watch a talking head say some red herring or strawman, watch it propagate through Twitter and Reddit, and eventually end up here almost completely unchanged.

It seems important to point these things out when I see them. I want to challenge why someone believes what they believe or is saying what they say. Is "black lives matter means white lives don't matter" what you really believe, or is it something you heard and sounded true to you and thus became embedded in your worldview before you had a chance to really consider the implications there?

Sometimes it feels like public figures, verified Twitter accounts, and massively upvoted comments on Reddit are putting weapons onto a rack in the colliseum of "internet debate," and half the time I'm just finding myself face to face with the exact same sword fifty other people have swung at me... So I just jab back with the exact same spear I've used fifty times before. At that point it doesn't even matter who's wielding the weapon, just that the weapons are endlessly crossing eachother.

Disengagement is a right, just as is engagement. Silence does not necessarily imply disagreement, but can serve to damp overshooting reactions.

Order is not orthogonal to justice.

Disagreement with methods should be fine, so long as a useful alternate path to the goal is offered.

Here is an interesting observation. If we take a look at how different nations are distributed across big cities, we can see that many neighborhoods are race specific. A lot of cities have chinese, jewish, russian, mexican, etc. neighborhoods, meaning that people _naturally_ want to live with _similar_ people. What's more important, it happens organically. It's not like some organization or government forces people to move there. There are no incentives, no financial benefits. Nothing. People are free to live anywhere they want, but they still create those communities and prefer to live among their own kind. From this specific observation, it seems like racism is more like a biological thing, the product of evolution.

This couldn't be further from the truth and disregards the history of how these areas started. For example, San Francisco's Chinatown:

"This, combined with a number of racist and restrictive laws limiting where Chinese were allowed to live within the city, led to the growth of Chinatown, which today comprises 24 square blocks." https://timeline.com/in-pictures-the-making-of-san-francisco...

This video talks about how African-Americans were driven to certain communities by realtors and discriminated against from living in other, more desirable areas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RHppw20Zm8

> _naturally_ want to live with _similar_ people

You are forgetting that those kinds of neighborhoods have developed in part because other people have taken mild-to-extreme steps to prevent "those" people from living with them.

Known steps in the US include at the very least: - rules preventing "those" people from living in some places - mild-to-extreme actions against "those" people when they move in - people leaving when too many of "those" people move in

I.e., "People are free to live anywhere they want" is completely wrong, even in living memory.

So all of these groups choose to live in separate neighborhoods, because they all are racist to each other?

Not because they want to be around people that are similar to themselves?

And the fact that the same pattern shows up basically everywhere. In Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and to some extent South America, does not change your perception?

> So all of these groups choose to live in separate neighborhoods, because they all are racist to each other?

No, because the empowered class artificially created ghettos, and either forced racial separation directly or indirectly by removing access to societal resources, forcing communities to form to compensate. Of course Cuban refugees will form Spanish speaking communities in a hostile Florida - everything is in English (which they're still learning), many local whites don't want them there and sometimes make that very apparent, and the community is already filled with people with the same background that "made it work," so can offer useful advice and resources.

This doesn't change anything about diversity bringing power, when one can overcome societal biases and racism.

Pray, tell. Why would these repressed Cubans not live together with hispanics, in hispanic ghettos. Speaking the same language and all.

After all, that would make them a stronger force, and definitely give them more diversity.

They... Do...? That's why an empowerment movement might focus on Latinx in general, and as you go more local you might find some of the same people at the state Latinx rally as you do at a city's Cuban American resource exchange group or whatever.

The point is that self-sorting doesn't by definition mean that humans are inherently racist or that it's natural/ethical to oppress minority populations, which I take as one of the many bad taste implications from this thread.

I don't see anybody except you conflate natural and ethical.

So the cubans now live side by side with mexicans? And both they and mexicans/south americans self-identify as hispanics/latinx and not cubans, mexicans or something else?

And having a Cuban American cultural exchange is just an oddity of history? And is now more the latinx american cultural exchange?

The thread is being lost - what exactly is the point you're trying to make?

That self-selection for living and organizing with kindred is something that also happens in the absence of extreme power disparity.

You've failed to provide evidence. All the examples we're discussing involve extreme power disparity.

That also doesn't necessarily mean that diversity = bad. It's easier to stay at home and watch Netflix than it is to travel to a foreign country and experience their culture, yet every time I do the latter, no matter how uncomfortable the trip can make me at times, I always come back grateful I did the trip, and imo a far better person.

Is there something about European or Asian or American history that would make it reasonable to assume that racism was not factor shaping societies?

Europe had pogroms before it had WWII. United States were racially legally segregated long after WWII. The Asian history does not lack racism either.

Why did you not mention African history?

In this respect, it's certainly not less "racist" than any other continent's history.

If you by racism means tribal or national sentiment to live together with others from the same tribe or nation. Then yes, what you call "racism" shaped it everywhere. I would hesitate to call it racism however, as it seems to be a universal human trait.

No, by racism I meant specifically racial issues, not just etnical ones and not just national ones.

In United States, it would be cleansing of land from natives and rhetoric around it. It would be rhetoric of slavery and later Jim crow and so on. In Europe it would be very eacial ideology of Nazi and previously pogroms and relationships against Jews. In Africa, I am pretty sure colonial history applies. In Asia, check out Rwanda for genocide or Japan for general racism.

I missed Africa, because I never really read much about any part of their history, unlike Europe, United States and Rwanda. Not sure why that would be issue.

> People are free to live anywhere they want, but they still create those communities and prefer to live among their own kind

I disagree

In some some cities in California, a former mexican territory, there were property deeds that explicitly forbade selling to mexicans

Where do you think mexicans ended up living?

Then someone can come along and point and say look every race prefers to live among their own kind

Quite a few of Jewish neighborhoods developed because they were not allowed to live elsewhere.

With regards to Eastern European people living close to each other was when mutual help due to shared struggle was needed. It however spreads out as people get integrated, in the second generation latest.

The black/white racial segregation did not happened by random either. At minimum, there was economic motivation to keep street whites only. (Keeping it black only was not as economically advantageous, there is asymmetry there.)

I think making this clustering about race is too simplistic. Its about language, religion, food, values, culture.

People like to be in familiar environments. Especially after moving to another country. Because of that its natural to end up with clusters of people sharing something in common even when there was no outside pressure.

I’m now lived in three countries for a longer period of time and its interesting to feel this connection with people from back home even though you never met them before.

I genuinely enjoy travelling and working in other countries and meeting new people. I also fully understand that sometimes it's just plain nice to be able to have a full conversation in English, not have to continuously explain cultural context, and enjoy my lunchtime cheeseburger while talking with another American. There's room for both experiences.

You are right. Some of the sibling replies argue the contrary by using a sleight of hand; stating the desire to associate from only one of the two parties.

Take for example the relationship between a man and woman.

If both want to live with each other, everything is fine.

What if the man wants to associate with the woman, but she doesn't? Do we force her to accept the man? Does he have a right to access her?

Obviously that's silly. We all know that the relationship is only valid if BOTH parties consent.

And yet in regards to neighborhoods the sibling replies act as if only the man's opinion mattered. "That Jew wanted to come in but was refused! People were not free to associate!" They ignore that refusing someone is also part of the freedom of association.

The desire to prevent a Jewish person from being your neighbor is unethical and Bad. Such a "freedom" should not be encoded into law (as what happened in San Francisco with Chinese populations), or allowed to encode implicitly into societal norms.

People shouldn't be imprisoned or killed for being racist - but they should be scorned, shamed, and cause disgust when their viewpoints are aired.

> They ignore that refusing someone is also part of the freedom of association.

And this is undesirable with no restrictions which is why societies constrain the freedom of association, in particular, in the US, via various "Civil Rights" acts.

I don't see these two ideas as mutually exclusive. While putting aside our tribal nature seems unlikely, it seems realistic to think we could do something that would let most people stop considering race when deciding which "tribe" someone may belong to. You see this difference as well, which is why you based your example of reasonable tribal behavior on someone's actions/experiences rather than their skin color. It make sense to have tribal affiliations with other people that speak the same language as you do, it doesn't make sense to exclude someone from your tribe just because their skin is a different color.

So, off the top of my head two other kinds of in-group identity that have worked in the past are nationalism and religion.

It seems those ideas aren’t so in favor right now, so how do we construct a sense of belonging that is truly positive?

I think something that takes a global effort, like space exploration or switching over to renewable energy, would get everyone working towards a common goal.

Humanism sounds pretty good to me...

In the United States, there were periods of time where Irish and Italian people were discriminated against. Yet today, the idea that an Irish people is part of the out-group and wouldn't fit in a workplace is completely out-dated.

The Rwandan genocide was Hutus killing Tutsis, yet the distinction between the two was very arbitrary and in a lot of cases boiled down to "the Belgians liked your ancestors more so declared you to be Tutsis".

Nazi Germany was allied with Japan despite all their racial purity rhetoric and some Jews were designated as "honorary Aryans". White supremacists today will gladly talk about the portion of white people who are "race traitors" and deserve to die.

Humans might have a natural tendency to favor those in their "own group", but exactly what that means is completely arbitrary.

Emacs or vi?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu

> The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".

TIL that's where the word for byte ordering came from.

Ironic that the great unifying software is called 'evil.'

Correct.

So let's work towards squashing racism every time it crops up. We had a Catholic president, remember when that was a huge deal? Now nobody would bat an eye. Let's continue this for women, POC, LGBT, and so on.

It's an ongoing battle.

I don't know if this is an ungenerous reading of what you are saying or not but that sounded vaguely like racism is a fact of life and we should just deal with it.

Am I misreading you on that? If not, what kind of approaches do you think would be more appropriate?

I think he's saying that discrimination in many forms is often - but not always - a side effect of evolutionary tribal tendencies and that if we don't take that into account when trying to reduce discrimination our efforts won't be successful.

To me that sounds like realistic, if also extremely depressing, point. I'm optimistic though. We've been successfully living in larger and larger cultures throughout history and have overcome this difficulty many times.

I want to be clear, I wasn't debating there was some truth to the idea that racism is that thing that you can tie to an evolutionary biological level around a fear of outsiders.

But I guess it is the second part that you touched on here as well. When you say take that into account.. how specifically?

Like when someone performs a racist act, how should we respond in a modern society?

It's a tough question and I don't know the answer. I think the current trend of aggressively calling out micro-agressions is counter productive. In cases where there was no negative intent, it's easy to alienate the person who made the faux pas by implying or outright telling them they are racist. That makes them less likely to change behaviour in future. We need to take intent into account and response with education over policing when possible.

"Taking that into account" IMHO means acknowledging that concept of tribalism when making long-term policy, when looking at what specific problems you want to solve with what means.

One part of anti-racism is establishing principles that allow "tribes" to coexist and treat members of other tribe fairly. That's all the anti-discrimination rules, requiring commerce and employment to happen on fair principles for outsiders as well; that's all the control of violence, hate speech, threats of violence.

The other part (or is it a different direction?) is to try to form a single tribe - unification, assimilation, rallying together against an external threat, general acceptance etc. "Building a nation" if you will, reducing differences and establishing national unity, though often at the cost of some international tribalism.

If we look at the specific situations described in the original article, it seems to me that there in most of them there are no "racist acts" (violations of the first part) involved, this story (unlike many others) does not involve the "other tribe" acting horribly against the members of "his tribe" - the article focuses mainly on the fact that mr. Diallo is not treated as a "member of this tribe", and provides many illustrative examples of natural emotional pain and alienation caused by being treated as an outsider, even if outsiders are treated fairly.

And that's conceptually very different. It's reasonable to mandate fair treatment for everyone. But it's not reasonable to mandate every tribe or subtribe to accept someone (especially because usually "the tribe" is not organized enough, it's effectively a sum of individual decisions) - freedom of association is a quite fundamental thing, it's completely reasonable for someone to (for example) treat only their extended family as "their tribe"; or for someone to treat only members of their particular religion as "their tribe", shunning those familymembers who are not. It's a free individual choice. It's worth noting that if you look at any list of prohibited discrimination types, then there's a "tribe" in almost all cases. People can and will treat someone else as "not my tribe" for all kinds of reasons - political beliefs, sports team preferences, having not seen (or not liking) a particular TV show, etc, and that is their right. You can't mandate being friends with someone; it's permissible to treat Bob as an outsider just because Bob is kind of an asshole, and it's permissible to treat Bob as an outsider just because you are kind of an asshole and hate him for no good reason.

You can implement various policies to try and slowly erode factional/"tribal" differences. But you can't eliminate the tribes or determine their membership. If (for example) Montagues and Capulets hate each other, you can't mandate them to stop that hate. If someone from the Montague "tribe" wants to marry a Capulet, then you can (and should) have policies so that they can marry despite the wishes of the tribe (if they're adults, unlike Romeo&Juliet), however, if the "tribe" wants to expel them because of that and treat them forever as outsiders, that's their right which can not (and should not) be prevented.

> Like when someone performs a racist act, how should we respond in a modern society?

You'd first have to define what a racist act is and who gets to decide that it is so.

We have a working system for these matters - legislative and judicial branches of government.

I feel like you're trying to look at this from a very abstract place where it is impossible to come to some all encompassing grand unifying theory and it feels like without that we shouldn't act until we have an answer to that question.

I'm asking a question that says in spite of not having a perfect answer when you are in a situation and you watch a friend do a racist act, what response if any do you think is appropriate? What if it's not a single act that might be considered racist but a whole string of them?

Do you think there is any kind of moral or social obligation to do anything or is ignoring it ok?

I personally haven't witnessed a single racist act in the 20+ years that I've lived in Toronto, a very diverse, multi-cultural city.

Which leads me to believe that my definition of a racist act, is different from yours.

Please provide your definition.

So you are saying something that has existed throughout all periods of time, in every society isn't a fact of life?

Also, speaking about racism particularly is something that makes very little sense historically. Racism has largely not been a problem because most societies weren't (and still aren't) multi-racial. The biggest issue has been religion and, more recently, class.

Both of these distinctions are arbitrary and should highlight that discrimination, not racism, is the problem and that is a fact of life. You will get discriminated against if you are disabled, if you have a Southern accent, if you are too short, if you are too tall, if you are too fat, if you aren't fat enough, etc. On and on forever. This is constant, it is human nature.

Btw, it is also worth saying that we largely have approaches that are effective. The only thing that history is really clear about is that constantly going over the past, seeking revenge/retribution, etc. doesn't work (many countries have gone down this route with power-sharing agreements due to religious/tribal conflict, it doesn't work). Equality means equality for all. Everyone is different. We all have to live with that. When you start from the basis that some people have an advantage/disadvantage because of their identity, the only way that ends is segregation and power-sharing agreements (usually after some period of terrorism/internal civil conflict). Everyone benefits from fairness, it isn't a race/religious/class issue.

I think you have a point, but I think your point is about out-group exclusion more than in-group affiliation. Otherwise we'd just affiliate with "humankind."

Your feeling of obligation to learn French, I think, is about not wanting to be seen as an outsider, not wanting to be judged for your poor command of the language, etc., more than the positive aspect of fitting in. They're two sides of the same coin, yes, but it determines a bit where you end. You don't have to be immersed in French culture to avoid funny looks at stores, but you do have to be able to order food without people noticing anything strange. And you're not affiliating with the expats because you inherently want to define yourself as one, but because they won't judge you.

And so I think responding to the truth of human desire for affiliation by saying "Everyone needs an out-group" is bound to end poorly. Historically, the expansion of certain in-groups (e.g., "white" in the US encompassing the Irish, Italians, and for the most part light-skinned Jews, Arabs, etc.) has been tied to more firmly defining an out-group or responding to the presence of a new out-group.

I think we need to figure out how to make people comfortable with not having an out-group.

(And, to the article itself, we very much need people to make a conscious effort to get over their desires for in-groups or distaste for out-groups when making hiring or investment decisions.)

In Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle a karass describes the sort of tribe people are looking for. Unfortunately melanin content is not a karass, but instead a granfalloon.

"La francophonie" is another granfalloon. But you have hit upon an easy way to distinguish immigrants from expats: immigrants hang out with people who have similar interests, while expats hang out with each other.

>granfalloon

Or in current parlance, 'community'. An assigned identity based on shared property across the set.

I feel the same way. I had a coworker who believed that racism was a personal choice, like stealing, and that you could eliminate it by creating harsher laws to punish people who did or said anything racist.

Can you explain how racism isn't a personal choice?

People are tribal about anything they identify with, whether it's their race, local sports team, country of birth, etc. It's not okay to be racist, but it's also not something you can legislate away. You may as well try to outlaw getting angry at people, it'll be just as effective.

This doesn't make any sense to me considering an uncontrolled outburst of anger is the exact kind of thing that gets people punished by law.

Anger isn't what's being punished, choosing to act on it is. I've met people who think that racism is an act that people choose, instead of a natural feeling that you shouldn't act on. Tribalism, whatever it's about, isn't going to go away any time soon, so I think trying to make people feel like they're part of the same tribe is a better solution than trying to legislate away millennia of human nature.

I don't think anti-racist legislation (what even is that? Do you mean maybe civil rights acts type things?) Is trying to legislate away human nature. Near perfect empathy is also in human nature. After all, why are we capable of desiring to end racism? It's about choosing the ethical and good parts of our nature, promoting that, and making Hate the less desirable choice.

Anger is a choice, at least to a limited extent. Managing ones emotions is a skill that can be honed with practice, if you're willing to make the effort.

I don't say this to nitpick your point. I just think it's worth saying since some people may not realize they have a choice.

It's not a choice at all. You don't choose to feel angry, but you can choose how you respond to it (often with great difficulty).

Similarly, I have never seen evidence to suggest that the strong desire to associate with people like you (on one of many dimensions) can be eliminated. You do, however, get to decide how to act on that desire - likely to perpetually imperfect results as is the case with anger. I've let anger get the best of me before, and I'm sure I've judged people based on stereotypes despite my best intentions not to.

Do the things that angered you when you were five years old still anger you now? Hopefully not. It’s not just because you’ve grown up. It’s because you think differently than you did when you were five. You’ve also learned that in many contexts anger isn’t worth it. So you’ve stopped being angry about it.

People like to imagine it’s the stimulus that makes us angry. “Of course I’m angry! That guy cut me off! He made me angry!” That guy has no access to your internal state except the access you give him. He performed an action. It’s obviously not the action that made someone angry or we’d all get angry when that happens. Yet we don’t. For those who get angry it’s their thoughts about the action that “made them angry.” We make these choices frequently over time (often on autopilot or subconsciously) and seldom attempt to choose otherwise. So it feels innate, like something out of our control that just happens. That might be true of a child and there are certainly some innate biases from evolution, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of our hands.

None of this is to say it’s easy to change those thoughts nor that it can be done on a whim. It’s also not to say that anger isn’t understandable in many contexts or to unempathetically wash our hands of others feelings. It’s also not to excuse unacceptable behaviors in others.

It is to say that, yes, how we feel is very much our choice.

Calling out normal people for terrible choices they make is just bragging your own ethics seen from your own standpoint

It was not my intention to call out anybody (I don't think the person I responded to was angry, so there was no call-out here.) Anger is something I used to have a lot of trouble with. At one point, somebody took me aside and explained that anger is something I can control, if I have the will to do so. That's a favor I try to pay forward.

Managing one's emotions is a choice, experiencing them in the first place is not.

To a point. Eventually your own management gets to the point where a certain emotion doesn't get experienced at all.

Personal experience. I used to fly into a red hot rage on the road. Now someone cuts me off and I feel absolutely nothing at all about it. My management made my anger a choice.

Managed vs unmanaged anger can be the difference between a rationality clouding typhoon vs the faint smell of rain on the horizon. The deleterious effects of anger are avoidable, usually anyway, with some effort.

The proposal would punish racist actions, not racist thoughts. You're free to like the Yankees more than the Mets, but you can't start giving out promotions to all your Yankee loving co-workers and none of your Mets loving coworkers for that reason.

There may not be laws[1] about getting angry, but there are laws about assault, let alone battery.

[1] here referring to legal code, not social code.

France might be a bad example.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/19/17590302/t...

This is totally irrelevant to the article.

The article is about assumptions people make about a black programmer because he's a programmer and because he's black, and about how disappointingly rare black programmers are.

Why are we not having a discussion about THAT?

Sorry that's ridiculous, if your in group affiliation excludes others its a huge problem with your group. Equating it to a language is also awful being exclusive on the grounds of sexuality, race and gender is a deliberate choice that people make. If your culture is lacking in diversity seek it out you'll never know what problems you can solve by adding to your view point.