Edit: I concur with parent comment.

As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area.

You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)

This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.

A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.

> don't face trials and tribulation.

Nobody has made this claim.

In what sense?

This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?"

I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns.

I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.

Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.

Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.

Pool metaphor: It's not enough for lifeguards not to see race when the majority kids bully minority kids as groups. It inevitably leads to the lifeguards seeing the minority kids as the source of the problem, since they're always in the middle of any fight, and when they're gone the fights are fewer.

https://youtu.be/30ui1x-eKIw

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-...

Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.

It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.

This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations.

Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.

People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot.

The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.

Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.