[sackofmugs]

I think it's not a useful exercise to come up with a better phrasing of the advice, as that's not really the point here. When you're in the moment reacting to peoples' questions and giving advice on the spot, you don't have time to wordcraft your speech like this. You'd still mess up once in a while.

Look at how often people tweak, clarify, and edit their comments even here on hacker news. So you'll probably just end up with "stifled" advice (using the terminology from the article), as you can see with all these suggestions in this thread.

[ALittleLight]

There's a difference between wordcrafting and giving obviously preposterous advice like "What would a white man do?"

If I was giving advice to someone who was too assertive and taking too much credit, I would never say "Think about what a black woman would do." Things like this are so transparently racist it shouldn't even need to be explained. You are simultaneously characterizing a race and gender of people and also telling someone else to act like a different race and gender.

The reason the advice was poorly received is because it is nonsense. The recipient of the advice asked the perfect question - "what does it mean to act like a white man?" The OP, when asked, also doesn't seem to know what it means. I'd say there is a lesson there - don't repeat something just because it was will received when you originally heard it. You may not understand it. It may be something of an emperor's new clothes situation where nobody can question the person who gave the original advice, but that doesn't make it good.

[retsibsi]

I'm not a fan of racialising everything either, but I don't think the intended meaning of that advice is really so obscure. It is something like 'white guys have been socialised to put themselves forward and take credit for things, whereas our society has probably squashed those tendencies in you; but in this setting you would benefit from being more like those white guys, i.e. more assertive and less self-effacing'. It's fair enough to be annoyed by the generalisations, the insistence on bringing race into everything, etc., but I don't think it takes much charity to see that the underlying point is well-intentioned and not obviously stupid.

[ALittleLight]

There is absolutely no reason to bring race into it. If you need to tell someone to be more assertive, then tell them to be more assertive and give examples of how and explain why. Don't bring up racist generalizations and hope they are interrupted the way you want them to be.

Saying that white men are confident and black women aren't is simultaneous bi-directional racism. You are generalizing white men and black women AND telling black women to act more white?

[retsibsi]

I'm not advocating the race-based approach, just pushing back against the idea that the advice was complete nonsense or hopelessly ambiguous. I can see why someone would say it with good intentions and a basically sensible message in mind. I agree that it was framed in a silly way and that race-based rhetoric and generalisations, even from the 'progressive' side, are usually a bad idea.