Really? No offense Dang but don't you think that is patently ridiculous if a mere mention of skin color for a relatively benign story invites trolling and racism?
Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN? This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.
Of course it's ridiculous. The empirical question is what minimizes flamewars. If you don't think that matters, I disagree. It's the difference between this site functioning vs. being nasty, stupid, and not long for this world.
Then this goes back to some of the earlier discussions I've had with you in that there's clearly a deeper issue at hand with the community if the mention of race in a benign story incites flamewars.
Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites. Because to me, that signifies a certain, non-small proportion of the userbase here is unable to handle topics involving race, and that section of the userbase is so virulent that even stories which do not proselytize are wrapped up into the flame war.
And to preempt the argument I already see forming: Yes, social media sites and HN are a reflection of society. But your duty as someone maintaining the site is to control what parts and in what ways it reflects society. It is an excuse. Not an argument. And I find erasing race from discussions because it might inflame racists to be particularly egregious. I can understand doing so if the poster did so in a way as to misrepresent the article, but this was not the case.
"Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites."
This is so evidently false that I'm inclined to think it's even contrary to what you suggest; "other sites" is far too ambiguous.
I believe you're completely wrong about this not being the case on other sites. If you can find even one site that can fairly be compared to HN which is not at least as bad on divisive social issues, I'll be surprised. If I recall correctly, the last time you brought this up you said you were comparing HN to private, controlled forums. That's not a legitimate comparison. I'd bet that those private, controlled forums are far smaller as well. Any such community is going to have a completely different dynamic by virtue of size and structure alone. It's not because the moderators are more enlightened there or less enlightened here. That may well be the case but I guarantee you it's not the high-order bit.
Your argument about this feels to me a bit like backseat driving. All of HN's problems in these areas are endemic to the category it belongs to: a large, public, optionally anonymous, completely open internet forum. Find one of those we can learn to do better from, and I'll be delighted to.
Of course then this becomes an argument about scale, doesn't it? Twitter and Facebook both suffer from problems of racists and issues relating thereof, but do you really, really want HN to be compared to those sites? Do you view HN as having the same issues adapting to scale and being unable to control their userbase? Do you believe Facebook and Twitter to be above criticism because they have little to no other sites they can be compared to?
The sites I'm referring to are more or less microcosms. Larger subreddits, or sites like Tildes, SomethingAwful etc. These sites don't have the traffic of HN, but they deal with similar issues at their own scale. Larger sites can and absolutely should apply ideas learned at smaller scales and try to scale them upwards.
edit: Regardless of my thoughts on the site, I'll stop arguing about it and let things hopefully get back on topic.
The fact that the race of the beekeepers is only mentioned in the title and never in the actual article makes it fairly clear that their race is not relevant to the story.
I wholly agree with you in sentiment that context matters, but how the hell is that article equivalent to the one here lol, I have to ask
Your article has to do with white farmers specifically targeted by the black government of Zimbabwe, literal racism, so the race of the farmers is actually relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'equivalent', it's not something I said. I'm also not sure you've interpreted the contexts very accurately but if you happen to be unfamiliar with them, you can easily google up brief histories of Detroit and Zimbabwe and the central role race has played in both.
I agree that it depends on the circumstance. Particularly, it feels more like patronizing if we highlight an accomplishment for a particular reason that the party in question finds embarrassing. Maybe Johnny doesn't want to be applauded for doing his homework. But if he doesn't mind, then there is no harm to Johnny.
But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes us defensive.
And the NBA is 78% black. Should articles about white NBA players (doing something totally unrelated to their whiteness) start with lines like "White NBA players start charity for kids with cancer"?
Or maybe their race has nothing to do with their actions, and therefore should not be included?
It would be notable if white NBA players don't normally do charity. Race isn't the lede, but it's a component that may make the story unique.
To take the basketball analogy further, "white basketball player makes slam dunk" would be a bad story, because yeah, we know white basketball players can dunk. But "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader" would be news-worthy, because it's unusual. What makes a story interesting or unique won't always be dramatic, but it may still be important to highlight.
I don't we should emphasize race in that way, when it's only relevant because "your race is less common in doing this thing". I don't want to see a headline like "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader". The race isn't important in that way.
That kind of thinking is what led to the self-fulfilling prophecy of slavery and racism against black people in the Americas in the first place -- the idea that they are less capable and it would therefore be surprising if they achieved something that the white man finds commonplace.
But these are different concepts. The bias of racism is one of erroneously assuming a person's capability based on something which has nothing to do with their actual capability. On the other hand, "emphasizing race" in a story can be used to point out the opposite of the above bias, in order to counter it.
If you've grown up all your life hearing the first bias, you may believe it. And then suddenly you see a story that refutes that bias, and you realize that actually, maybe the bias was wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be weird that this certain kind of person can do this certain kind of thing. It can take a lot of examples over a long period of time, but it works.
Countering the bias requires examples, and you have to actually publish those examples. If you never have stories that counter the bias, people literally just keep believing the bias. If in the 18th century nobody had ever put out stories about freedmen starting businesses, nobody would have believed that a freedman was capable of doing business. They needed those stories published just to change how people thought. That's the purpose of "black man becomes beekeeper" stories - to change perceptions, a little bit at a time.
That kind of story is useless if it's about something that everybody already knows and believes, but it's incredibly valuable if it fights a bias. This is the reason you don't see "white man becomes beekeeper" stories - we already know white people can be beekeepers. We don't all know the opposite. (If this sounds dumb, yes, I agree... but that's literally the kind of bias many people have, and this is how to counter it)
This is a really important question and needs addressing. Unless I missed something, it appears the title was changed solely to remove the fact that the beekeepers were black, which is the entire point of the column. If true, this is... well, embarrassingly racist.
Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN? This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.