| HN Mirror

The other reply to this post has it right. Your argument against identity politics appears to be to engage in identity politics, and that was the reason for my snarky comment. But I'll bite and make a serious reply, I'd like to think HN is better than a place to shitpost (and that's on me).

I have no reason to doubt any of what you said, and in all seriousness, I am happy that you have come from a poor background and made a good life for yourself without the so-called required college degree. My point is that if all those things were true about you and you were also black for example, you'd probably have been at a relative disadvantage to your white self in this country.

That in no way takes away from your success in life, or implies you didn't work hard to get there. I grew up in a family without much money, but one that valued education and hard work. I have worked, and worked hard my entire life, and things have by and large worked out very well for me. In my younger days I did plenty of stupid things that might very well have gotten me shot were my skin tone darker. I have black family members who have been handcuffed and thrown down on the driveway of their house that they own because it was late at night they "looked suspicious". Would I have gotten to where I am today if I were black? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the macro-level odds are I'd be worse off if I weren't white.

My view is that if we want to change things for the better - whether in politics or business or personal life - it's better to be honest about the nature and degree of the problems than to try and pretend they don't exist. My great-grandparents owned businesses and my black friend's great-grandparents were owned by other people. My parents could do whatever they wanted and my black friend's parents had to go to separate schools and use separate drinking fountains. None of this is your fault nor mine, and I'm not going to feel bad about myself because of what my ancestors did. But I am willing to consider that actual history should inform our approach to improving things going forward. Maybe consider it a blameless postmortem for society https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

If you want to reduce that to "identity politics" and write it off in a with-us-or-against-us calculation, that's certainly your right. It is still a free country after all. For the record, I've been an unaffiliated voter my entire life, and I believe the surest sign that the democratic party is terrible at what they do is that Donald Trump has been considered a serious presidential candidate three times now. The two party system has done an amazing job of splitting people who may otherwise agree on 95% of issues over relatively trivial issues. But truly, you really are with us or against us, and there is no other way unless we can get rid of the two party system. So for me I am against the sycophancy and nepotism and kleptocracy and hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the republican party, and if that means I have to deal with some ill-advised identity politics from the democrats, then the reality at a national level is that I have to hold my nose and deal. What I'm not going to do is vote against the interests of myself and my family (and, I believe, my country) because someone is trying to make me feel bad about my ancestors.