There was a huge thread yesterday on HN about this topic with many comments much longer than tweets. It is certainly a topic that can be discussed at length on HN. People were voted down and up, but no one was cancelled; we're all still here.

I'm not aware of any moderator preference against talking about this subject. Again: huge thread on it yesterday that persisted on the front page all day.

However, I don't think every single off-hand mention of race or gender needs to devolve into a subthread of 50 multi-paragraph comments. So I appreciate your decision to avoid it in this instance.