I thought you were being over the top about the racism but then I saw the slides in the article: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2462e526543008...
My first reaction is that the language of "us" vs "them", victims vs oppressors, reeks of hatred. Hatred undermines productive conversation, which undermines any attempt at building a good culture.
I would have to listen to the whole presentation before I render final judgement.
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
[1] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82
[2] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages...
>Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding: > ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Coded language for sanctioned discrimination.
Related reading:
Tact Filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
Ozark English: http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html
When Nerds Collide: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
I'm just glad I dumped Github. I'm pretty sure they'd find my white female friends [some of whom needed to transition] being discriminated against as okay based on those slides.
You shouldn't be generalizing on race if you want me to believe that.
Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit.
But on the other,
1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people.
2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example.
3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than
white people, relative to their percentage in the country.
That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country.
It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior leadership?
"And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]"."
You're missing the ending part of that statement, which is "to lead". That makes it very different. No one said white people can't be involved, as long as they are not taking up all the space.
How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry).
I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism.
edit: typo
When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized.
IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness.
With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
The US is 77.7% of the US population. I hardly think that a 2% imbalance is an issue to create divisiveness over. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...
I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you.
2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know.
The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.
I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
I don't see how you can guarantee that. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand what you're saying. But this is a one-line bullet point in a slideshow, I'd like to see some more context before I grab my pitchfork.
We've invented tools to deal with this: language and literature. Almost everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, even if for many it is only occasional and minor, and that's enough to give a good writer an opening to get inside the reader's head and use that to build upon and paint a vivid picture of the more frequent or major discrimination the writer has dealt with.
This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias.
The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.
I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing.
there are people complaining about the very notion that
there might be something wrong with how hiring and
promotion happens in technology.
Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.
It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.
But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
Why is it OK to make these kinds of generalizations?
If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways.
You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations?
This is the future you chose.
EDIT:
Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?"
The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs.
We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences.
EDIT2:
Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects.
The logic and principle is exactly the same.
I don't understand it completely, but here is a related wikipedia article.
Furthermore, I don't understand the racist attitude that somehow white or male people are somehow less qualified to lead a diversity program. Interpersonal skills, knowledge of the myriad diversity initiatives and approaches tried elsewhere and how effective they have been, knowledge of hiring practices, knowledge of recruiting practices, knowledge of retention practices, knowledge of the law surrounding hiring, recruiting and retention practices, professional network, etc. are all the type of things that should be relevant when choosing the most qualified candidates for such a position. Discounting all these and elevating someone's race and gender to utmost importance is blatantly racist policy/attitude.
An equally absurd corollary to "those that have experienced discrimination have unique insight into preventing discrimination" is "those that have experienced privilege have unique insight into privilege and how to dismantle it".
Just because you're on one side or the other doesn't make you more qualified by experience. We need people with understanding of both sides of the coin. In other words, we need diversity with respect to experiencing privilege and discrimination to understand what is happening and how to address it. When you don't have people on the other side of the coin, racist attitudes like the ones reflected in that slide proliferate.
Being white doesn't disqualify you from having experience being discriminated either. There are gay, lesbian and transgender white men, women and other gender identities. Head over to The Advocate and read some essays/blog posts from gay white males.
Furthermore, discriminating white people and men from this sphere of work (or any other) gives them some similar experiences and insight into discrimination.
What this thread shows is the sentiment that, if you claim diversity is important, leaving out a group specifically to increase diversity (as opposed to, say, merely reducing their proportion in the cohort) is in fact not being intellectually consistent or honest.
Don't fall into the flippant "Oh ho ho if white's aren't involved I guess it can't ever be legit" sarcastic dismissal. That's neither fair nor accurate.
They have enterprise services, or can be self-hosted.
I know the slide needs more context, but even so, it is a very disturbing statement to make.
Something is amiss and lots of explanations are needed.
PS: now I am more than happy with my choice of keeping my repos on Bitbucket.