"""
I was near surrounded by these people, for the first time in my life, at a sort of ethnic-pride gathering which I was attending for reasons not relevant to this essay. And found myself experiencing disgust. Not anger, not hatred, but a visceral feeling of revulsion similar to being exposed to sewage or rotten food.
Something in my hindbrain was pushing me hard in a direction perhaps best verbalized as “these people are greasy, filthy monkeys and I despise them and I loathe them”.
"""
"""
Scrupulous honesty requires me to report here that there is a small subset of blacks to which I do have a twitchy hindbrain reaction something like “Animal; unsafe; avoid.” But I’ve noticed that blacks outside this subset have that reaction too. so I’m probably not reacting to “race” in this respect. It may be related that I perceive a lot more variety among blacks than I do among minority X.
"""
"""One was: their skin color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion; my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies.
"""
There should be a prize for taking things out of context. You'd win it.
Here's some more relevant quotes from that citation, to show how you twisted it:
> For the first time in the fifty-five years of my life I found out what it was like to feel racist, from the inside.
> I was able to notice that, when paying attention with the top of my brain, I could not notice any rational reason for me to even dislike these people, let alone feel disgusted and revolted by them. I began to analyze my revulsion as though it were a specimen on a laboratory slide
> The most important point is that black people in particular have never made me feel repelled in the way minority X does. I’ve had black girlfriends and might not implausibly have ended up married to one of them,
> my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies. My forebrain, meanwhile, was all like “What is up with you, hindbrain?” Apparently my human-recognition template needed some updating.
> The pressure on me eased a bit when I realized that what I was experiencing was a really severe case of Uncanny Valley reaction, and that more exposure to minority X might well stretch my template to the point where they didn’t seem so creepily repulsive any more.
So basically, you took him out of context, and selected choice quotes from your citation in order to make ESR look as bad as possible. You're an excellent propagandist. I'll be adding your nickname to the list of known trolls on HN. thanks.
2) You're not exactly coming out of this looking like a saint, you know.