Your complaint has virtually nothing to do with the article, which is about a widespread and serious problem in academia. It's not about wokeism; it's about labs in which PIs berate and grind down postdocs and employees. You won't find many academic STEM professionals that don't have horror stories, and there are whisper networks about which PIs to avoid.
The topic of "whiteness" comes up in a small section of the article that discusses the fact that there has been far less reporting of the phenomenon than would be expected from how "open" this secret is. You can agree or disagree with whether whiteness or maleness has much to do with it, but you can't reasonably disagree with the broader point of that section of the article: academic STEM research is way worse than you'd expect looking at it as an outsider.
This is a particularly egregious instance, because this article discusses a phenomenon that should be especially interesting to HN (overwhelmingly widespread abuse in academic science labs), and yet here we are bickering over whether the article used the word "whiteness" appropriately in one paragraph.
I have a strong understanding of the guidelines of this site, and I do see how you might want to invoke them for this thread, but considering the subjective nature of this topic, I am comfortable that my comment remains acceptable. These sorts of statements absolutely impact my perception of the strengths and applicability of the (strongest possible) interpretation of the linked blog post.
Also, I would say that you're comments in this subthread do not assume the strongest possible interpretation of the commenters point. You're coming across as actively hostile, frankly.
So if an article casually threw in some disparaging remarks about Blacks, Asians, or Jews (or, as was the case here, implied the entire problem the article was talking about was disproportionately their fault), they'd be expect to let the accusations stand unchallenged, because they should only address more interesting parts of the article?
If you continue by :" Note that all presidents abuse their power and the issue is more about the unearned powers presidents have than being Jewish or from the Ivy league" i would find it weird but Ok, wouldn't you?
Taking a piece from a single paragraph, ignoring not only the context, but also the following sentence because it weakens your argument, how would you call that? Do you think it's fair? Do you just like storytelling so much you also lie to yourself?
> Do you just like storytelling so much you also lie to yourself?
Please don't cross into personal swipes, regardless of how another commenter is or you feel they are. That only makes everything worse. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
To be clear: are you suggesting the article is demonizing a specific demographic?
The article says:
> Note that bullying appears to be related to power differentials more than to gender, meaning that the reason why perpetrators are overwhelmingly male is because men disproportionally occupy powerful academic positions.
This seems to be about as demonizing of a demographic as saying “with great power comes great responsibility.” Tenured professors may not have mutant superpowers, but they do have tenured superpowers, and some of them abuse these superpowers. In my personal experience, there is no evidence to suggest that the perpetrators are especially correlated with any particular demographic other than being people who are able to do the specific problematic things they do. The perpetrators who abuse those they advise [0] are people who advise other people. There is no shortage of examples of cis, straight, white, able, male, etc people in academia harassing others who are every bit as cis, straight, etc as they are. There are, of course, also examples of males with power harassing females with less power and many other combinations.
And there are many, many examples of people harassing other people in ways that were seen as normal and even expected in an earlier era. Some of the perpetrators here genuinely do not realize that they’re doing anything wrong, and some of the victims may also not feel that they are being wronged. There are huge gray areas here! One thing that society could do a lot better is to realize that many of these perpetrators are not bad people, that they should not be vilified or canceled, but that they should learn to do better in the future.
So, while I’m sure there is a whole host of problematic and maybe even “woke” literature that is over-the-top on demonizing a demographic, I don’t think this article is it.
[0] “Advise” here is a term of art. There are academic advisors and research advisors who have very specific powers over those they advise that, in general, are only vaguely related to the common meaning of giving advice.
The topic of "whiteness" comes up in a small section of the article that discusses the fact that there has been far less reporting of the phenomenon than would be expected from how "open" this secret is. You can agree or disagree with whether whiteness or maleness has much to do with it, but you can't reasonably disagree with the broader point of that section of the article: academic STEM research is way worse than you'd expect looking at it as an outsider.