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by ngngngng 2162 days ago
> underrepresented minorities

To paraphrase Brene Brown, any conversation on privilege that excludes class is bullshit. The ability to be unlikable without it ruining your life (never mind using it to your advantage) is largely a privilege of class. No one in 2020 is immune to being "cancelled". But if you have money, it won't ruin your life.

3 comments

The list of "non-cognitive" soft skills in one of yesterday's posts contains a substantial number that could be described as "being likeable", and I supposed that made them parochially targeted at children who will need to have a middle-class job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211

As far as cancellation being a 2020 thing, Orwell observed in 1948 that: "As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which needs a thick skin and sometimes means cutting one's income in half for years on end."

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part50

Diogenes: eating lentils

Aristippus: You know, if you learned to be ingratiating to the king, you wouldn't have to continue eating lentils.

Diogenes: chewing If you learned to eat lentils, you wouldn't have to continue to ingratiate yourself to the king.

Ehhh, it's specifically the case that the fall from middle-class to poor is steeper for Black folk for what should be obvious reasons. Most of our middle class comes from our working class rather than inheriting the position [0]

[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/01...

Fair enough. I was thinking on it from a work perspective and did make an incorrect assumption that the vast majority of people in the meeting rooms were in similar classes