Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Doing that is just as bad as starting it in the first place.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because there is no bigotry in that statement, only an awkward observation of a superficial trait?

"You are much more smart because your skin is lighter than I expected," now that would be racism.

Or "I will be happier to work with you because you are lighter than expected."

Or "You must have gotten that job because you are lighter than expected."

The question is, why make the comment at all? There’s literally no reason to make that comment out loud.

If you’re making the comment, it’s because you’ve internalized a few stereotypes around skin color, and made an assumption based solely on those stereotypes. Stop yourself at the point where you’re making the assumption.

How do you imagine a generic person in your mind? Purple? Multicolored?

Probably each person has some mind-image that’s more common than others (probably guided by early childhood experiences, or mirror image of you), or even if you’re on average unbiased there’s still going to be some image you have in mind for each particular person, which is a perfectly legitimate reason to be surprised upon finally meeting that person.

Honestly the only reason this is controversial is because of “skin color” and the current political climate.

“Oh, I’m surprised, I imagine you having red hair.”

“How come you imagined me having red hair?”

“Don’t know, just because.”

> Honestly the only reason this is controversial is because of “skin color” and the current political climate.

Inherent in assuming a skin color is the implied association between, for example, intelligence and skin color.

"I'm surprised you're black," is not so far off from the acknowledged insult, "You're really $X for a woman."

WRT your example, anger issues are stereotypically associated with red hair, so there could be an implied "you have anger issues" that goes with that. "Oh, no reason," is also a very common deflection when being called out for poor assumptions or implied insults.

Some people (you, apparently) have these associations, others (e.g. me) don’t. It’s quite prejudiced to assume that everyone has them.

It's more likely that folks who claim to not have these associations simply haven't identified their unconscious biases yet.

There is always a reason associations between mental traits and physical features exist, even if you're not consciously aware of it.

EDIT: And to go a different direction, if someone truely doesn't make such associations... Now that they know some people do recognize those associations, just be polite and don't make such comments about people's appearance - be it skin color, hair color, height, weight, etc.

I’d prefer if other people were polite and didn’t accuse others of racism over innocent remarks.

Some people are not entirely neuronormal and have few filters.

True. But they should also then have coping mechanisms, which would ideally include apologizing if they offend someone.

There is a long history of white people assuming white people are more intelligent.

When you meet a software developer, saying they're unexpectedly dark strongly implies you didn't think someone of that ethnicity was capable of being a software developer.

It doesn't need to be spelled out -- the implication is very clear, and if an employee claims to be ignorant of this, they should at least be sent on the race awareness training.

The first time I meet a remote colleague I'm often surprised by their height, and a very common statement is "Wow I never realised you were this tall!"

I don't see the difference between that and realising someone is a different ethnicity than you expected.

Racism is (by definition) prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism. Being surprised because someone looks different than you imagined is nothing like that.

> I'm often surprised by their height

Because they're of an unusual height, I assume. You had an expectation that they were of average height.

You can look at the pictures of the person that received that comment. They don't have an unusual skin color, and the ethnicity matches their name (say, they don't have a Russian sounding name with really dark, almost black skin). It shouldn't be unexpected to see their skin color.

Another option is that the expectation didn't come from averages nor names, and it came from prejudice about how software engineers look like. So yes, it definitely can be interpreted as a racist remark.

Perhaps they had a bad camera.

My color of skin definitely depends on the camera I sit in front of. The best cameras are as good as a mirror, but lower quality cameras built in laptops are awful. Looking at greenish or greyish myself is a bit nauseating.

Clearly you're implying they should be playing basketball and have no business being in whatever career they're in

You're leaping to an incredibly negative assumption of the speaker's intent, and then onto a form of punishment for that person. I think the "assume good intent" approach is more appropriate in these kinds of situations where it's incredibly ambiguous.

"strongly implies", "the implication is very clear"

"Assume the worst" = This is precisely the kind of mind reading that leads to a paranoid, unhappy, eternally vigilant society.

> saying they're unexpectedly dark strongly implies you didn't think someone of that ethnicity was capable of being a software developer.

Everything is blue if you wear blue tinted glasses

I live in a city where I expect everyone to be expectedly dark, and anyone that come near to my white shade is very unexpectedly light

If I go to the pale end of the country, any darker skin would be unexpected, no matter the job title and no matter the IQ level

No unexpecting person should be liable for your projected meaning on surprising turn of events

Remarking on the colour of some ones skin is like saying you have very blond hair. Are we in denial of skin tone or something and that it's different from various regions of earth, come on.

I completely agree with what you say. And I wish I knew what you actually imply, but I am afraid that would be a complete nonsense.

It's not a remark, it's an expectation. Imagine if you had blond hair and someone said "Oh, I did not expect an engineer to be blond". It's like they are saying "the stereotypes say you shouldn't be smart". At best, it's rude.

> Imagine if you had blond hair and someone said "Oh, I did not expect an engineer to be blond"

That's because you explicitly added the "an engineer" part to make the insinuation clear.

Is any discussion about skin color racist? If I see a picture of someone and then see them in real-life where they look different, I'd comment if it was about the color of their hair. Is it not ok to comment if it's about the color of their skin instead?

As long as it has nothing to do with work performance or other character traits, I don't see racism here. Otherwise you'd need to ban any discussion about appearances at the work place.

Just avoid comments about peoples personal appearance all together. Maybe somebody doesn't want to be told they're short or dark or whatever. I was introduced to a guy via email and spoke to him on IRC for nearly a year before he came to the office, when he arrived he was wearing a dress and carrying a handbag - I decided to not comment on his appearance. Try it...

But then you're essentially defining racism as "anything that gets you in trouble."

It's perfectly reasonable to adjust coming anywhere close to discussing race as a strategy to avoid getting fired, but it's insane to redefine racism based on that.

We're doing that, and it results in a constantly expanding definition of racism, to where there are now "microaggressions."

Keep in mind, if you're white, you don't care: as you suggested, you just avoid talking about certain topics and carry on.

If you're a minority group, all these white people are, against their own apparent interests, agreeing that there's pervasive racism everywhere. The minority person has to live believing that all this is true.

We ought to have empathy and get this right so we don't contribute to a pervasive falsehood that makes people's lives seem worse than they really are. What's no big deal for us can be a ton of stress for others.

Context matters - and we don't know the context of the conversation.

If the commenter was being flippant or dismissive or generally uncaring in their conversation it could be taken as racist by someone sensitive to such things.

If the comment was delivered with zero malicious intent and was merely a throwaway observation then it's not racist and only someone looking for offense would take it that way.

Like I said, without background knowledge and context it's impossible to determine if it was a racist remark or not.

Playing the devil's advocate. If someone tells you 'tomorrow you'll meet your new colleague Lars from Sweden' consciously or not you'll form expectation about his skin color.

I had something like that some years ago. My sister has a friend called Christine, and my sister had mentioned her several times before I first met her.

Turned out that while Christine was born and raised here in Norway, she had two Thai parents.

There's not a large Thai population here, and Christine is not a name I associated with Thais, so I was quite surprised by it. Not in a positive or negative way, just plain old surprised.

I actually have one as well. At some point I was chatting a lot with a customer agent from one of our partner. To me their name sounded Russian so I assumed they were of Russian origin. Turns out they are from a Sub-saharan African country. Like you I was very surprised when I learnt it.

Given that name it IS statistically much more likely that he's white, so would there be anything malicious about that expectation?

True, but there's a difference between having an expectation and clumsily articulating it in a welcome meeting. On the balance of probability a new software developer is likely to be male and so you might be surprised that new dev with unisex name is female, but saying "oh, we weren't expecting a woman" when they walk in is obviously going to raise some very significant questions about your attitude

We make all kinds of assumptions every moment of every day. We don’t go yelling it out when those assumptions are wrong, because there’s no need to.

Where in that sentence is it implied that one race ( or skin color ) is superior to the other ?

Maybe that's my autism talking, idk, but I fail to see how one can find racism in that sentence.

It is not explicitly implied in the sentence, which can make it harder to parse for those of us on the spectrum, but no doubt hearing this kind of comment has an othering effect for most people. The fact that you’re not as “expected” can imply you’re not part of the right group.

Racism is the structural discrimination and exclusion of certain groups of people, and this is one of the ways in which it perpetuates. If every person who isn’t white is made to feel unwelcome (even if unintentionally), is that not de facto discrimination?

A lot of this stuff goes over my head, but it is there and it’s up to us to learn to recognise it when it has a detrimental effect on our friends and coworkers.

Racism is a prejudice based solely on one's race. There's nothing "structural" about it.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. What was that for that if not addressing structural oppression?

By the whole surrounding system that treated differently and badly people according to their skin color for ages? People who say a skin color comment is just like a hair color one are delusional. Obviously there are different levels of racism, but a comment like this is already racist because it's expliciting expectations based on people's origins.

What is racist about expecting a correlation between origin and ethnicity? Would it be racism to expect Mr Wang from Shanghai or Hanako from Kyoto to be ethnically Asian?

I've been called super white and super pale. Is that racism?

Now that I think about it, my (white) ancestors have been enslaved by people with darker skin color, and they never enslaved people with a darker skin color. Does that mean I can call black people racist if they point out my skin color?

Yes. The word "slave" literally comes from "slavs"

Yes of course, and not just Irish or Slavic people. But how is that relevant to the question?

White people have been enslaved at various points in history.

Pahaha. YES!! What a historically ignorant question.

Here's a picture of an Arab man and his white slave, for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery#/media/File:Mecc...

Lookup Arab slave trade, and slavery in Ottoman Empire.

Yes, it just happened slightly longer ago. Romans took slaves from and performed genocide on european populations who were generally lighter skinned and the cultural attitude considered them uncivilized animals. Later on, one set of my ancestors had a habit of enslaving another set of my ancestors, however writing was something fairly novel to both of them so it wasn’t well recorded.

Slavery in many kinds is everywhere in human history, there aren’t many ways to divide up humanity so that any group hasnt been both victim and perpetrator at some point.

You don't have to go as far back as the Romans. The Barbary Pirates (from north Africa) took something like a million slaves from Europe over the 300 years that they terrorised European coastlines, mainly raiding the Mediterranean but sometimes coming as far north as Britain and even Iceland.

More information: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Barba...

Note that Barbary slave raids weren't suppressed until the early 19th century, around the same time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended (emphasis on trade; slavery continued in the Americas for decades after the slave trade itself was ended). So slavery of white people was widespread for much of the time that whites were enslaving Africans. (And of course, Africans were enslaving each other for hundreds of years before Europeans showed up and continued to do it after Europeans stopped.)

The only thing more absurd than pretending slavery never happened is pretending that Europeans were the only people who ever practiced it.

No, because the new dogmatic definition of racism and sexism excludes the possibility of white people and men as a gender ever being discriminated against at.

Also known as “There’s no such thing as reverse racism!”, which as a premise to fight racism (different treatment based on skin-colour) starts off by dividing people into different skin-colours, so that they can be treated differently (and the equivalent mental exercise for sexism/gender).

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s being done seriously and gaining momentum.

Would the statement "your hair is much lighter than I expected" be racist? How about "your eye color is much lighter than expected"? Why is skin color different than any other superficial characteristic?

I'm extremely puzzled as to how you see that as racist, and even more puzzled at how you seem puzzled yourself.

It might be racism if one enjoys putting the gravest label imaginable on a situation. But if that is the worst the person experienced it is something that anyone should be prepared do deal with without invoking all sorts of institutions. I have experienced things like that occasionally because I am gay. The lightest shades of homophobia can be dealt with by just ignoring them. Just being ignored makes a decent person already think something along the lines of 'ow... maybe I should not have said that ...' and they will most likely just stop. The problem with the modern forms of equality thinking seems to be that we need to work very hard to eradicate even infinitesimal levels of racism or homophobia. This then deteriorates into a rather scary thought police that is much worse than the problem it allegedly attempted to solve. I am saying 'allegedly' because these people probably just enjoy bossing everybody around and found this issue as a means to do that rather than actually caring about he issue. The bigger problem is that when people in minorities start believing such things it makes them weaker and not stronger.

That's like someone being offended when someone gets called pasty or pale as hell.

This might be somewhat of a tangent, but I'm extremely pale. I don't tan, I burn, no matter how hard I try, and I stay milky white (or turn lobster red) no matter how long I stay in the sun.

I used to get teased for this constantly as a teenager. Every time the weather was nice, and especially if I was returning home from a holiday in a sunny destination, I knew I'd get the same idiotic comments about my failure to get a tan. I hated it, and I resented people who said this to me. Not because I'm insecure about the colour of my skin (really, I don't give a fuck about tanning) - just that it was so boring. The same stupid, boring, tedious jokes again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Give me a break.

This doesn't make me a victim of racism, and I can't think of any other disadvantages to my skin colour except perhaps an increased suncream budget. But I do find it offensive. You're not funny, and I've heard it a million times before.

Rant over.

(Edit: to be clear, I don't find it offensive if someone simply described me as "white" or "pale" - only when they make unoriginal jokes about it.)

Ditto, I have that fine pale, eastern european, 12 hours in front of a screen colour going. Honestly, the lobster jokes were quite funny for me as sometimes I would wear a matching red t-shirt without noticing just how lobster looking I was. I've had plenty of sun strokes too when I was younger and playing football in peak lunch heat. That's my level of pasty. My wife tans in minutes so I am jealous but so what.

I had plenty of eastern european cheap labour jokes from friends, I just played along depending on their skin colour or race. No one was upset and we all laughed at our unique differences.

Your right it is.

Any mention of skin tone is verboten!

We must not mention it no matter the context!

I mean, yes, judge people on the quality of their code, not the colour of their skin. It's opinions like these that make me think that clearly public shame isn't enough to get it into people's heads.

Just because you acknowledge something doesn't mean it's judgement

Where was the judgement?

If I recall correctly (from the other HN discussion) the person in question had vacationed some where tropical and the comment was about how much she had/hadn’t tanned.

I believe the person making the complaint actually raised the topic originally.

Because the parent commenter is ignorant, ignorance should be met with calmness and education instead of backlash.

In what way is it ignorant, should I be offended because some one remarks on my pasty white skin or the slight red tinge to my hair.

Please inform me because I didn't get the memo.

I dunno, having a bit of ginger myself has made me the target of jokes and ridicule. Being a bit of a nerd means my skin is far often pastier than others, and people comment on it. I have been called translucent and have asked if I have half a soul because my beard is ginger and my hair is brown. People say ignorant idiotic crap all the time. It's ignorance, judging people based on their appearance, and it's been happening to anyone not white for centuries.

Sure, but making everyone scared to have any sort of discourse with people for fear of offending each other will do nothing to improve racial integration.

I'm of Irish decent and it has had it's fair share of stigmatism throughout history yet most of us pretty pasty white.

I don't know about you, but I don't really wanna discourse with people who are so superficial as to ridicule my appearance. If you offend me, why the hell should I engage in civil discourse?