As a person of color, I would be very happy if it became policy to never use the phrase “white privilege” inside a workplace.
First of all it is making a blanket statement about an entire group of people. Saying <race> <attribute> is problematic as a principle.
Second, this too close for comfort to “white supremacy” for me. Both phrases describe white people as having a superiority to other races through the virtue of their whiteness.
Third, the phrase alienates people and makes them defensive. Most people can agree that having an environment where everyone can achieve their best is important. However, when you use words that cast people and their families as the villains and imply that they are not as deserving of what they earned as other people, then you turn them into your enemies.
I understand the phrase is trying to emphasize the historic and ongoing injustices against people of color. However, I think Trevor Noah’s phrase “black tax” is much more useful. This puts the focus on removing barriers and disadvantages, rather than on trying to remove someone’s “privilege”.
According to Facebook, in 2018 46.6% of their US staff identified as white and 41.4% identified as Asian (50.3% percent of US technical staff identify as Asian vs 42.7% who identify as white.)
With only 1 woman on facebook's board of 9, men are considerably over-represented. But white people are not.
The board has 5 non-hispanic white people, 3 jewish, and 1 black. US demographics for those groups are 60%, 1.77%, and 12.6%.
This means white people are 92% represented, black 88%, and jewish 1880%.
> I want to spend my time at a place willing to push further on diversity and inclusion. One where it's not OK to write on Workplace that white privilege doesn't exist. One where if I call out that our board has too many white men, I don't get harassed by other employees on Blind with transphobic messages saying I should be fired.
workplace harassment is certainly related to one's job...
I mean it sucks that the world has racists, bigots, homophobes and all tons of other sorts of rubbish people. But you can’t really fault a company for the fact that they manage to get hired as long as they are dealt with when they are actually discovered.
Where they supposed to ban every employee from making any kind of anonymous comments online after this case?
The point is that it provides: hard data about the whispering campaign going on behind your back, the conversations from which you are excluded.
that the harassment does actually exist, and is not a mere allegation by you being paranoid.
that other people can go verify the hostile attitudes and expressions for themselves.
provides real, externally verifiable evidence of problems at facebook, not coming merely from the famous "disgruntled ex-employee"
Stop trying to minimize serious issues (and if you do want to minimize them, at least make sound points that are better than trivial sophistry, a half step up from complaining about typos).
Was she required to use this app for her job?
A useful analogy would be that one bar near your work that lots of your coworkers go to often, and end up talking about issues at work. That bar isn't officially affiliated with the company, and you don't have to ever go to said bar to nevertheless be affected by what transpires there. Except Blind has more to do with the workplace than said bar because a lot of people post to Blind from work.
There are structural problems that inhibit participation from underrepresented groups. The objective is to level the playing field so everyone has a fair chance at success.
disclaimer: i am a black engineer who is tired of wasting time arguing with people who harbor views such as yours.
If I'm going to set up a medical team, I don't want the best and most lauded 4 surgeons in the world, I want only 1 of those so I can also have the best anesthesist (sp?), the best physio, the best psychologist... you get the idea. (Edit not you in particular, of course... I mean everyone)
"Culture fit" has become an accepted "soft" value for which a technically superior candidate may be passed over; why this resistance to diversity as a soft value too? New points of view, new mental patterns, new sources of inspiration... that is better than the same pov repeated 4 times. Why does it need to be explained over and over? (we know why, whether we like it or not) It doesn't mean diversity takes precedence over other soft or hard skills and valuable aspects of a candidate, it just means it takes is place among them.
It's at the preschool, primary school and university level.
Why are we somehow pretending 100% of responsibility rests on the employer?
why does it matter so much that other people look just like you? why cant you look past other peoples skin color?
but nobody will admit it
That said, according to the article's statistics diversity is continually increasing at Facebook.
Oh wow, a woman headed react? That's cool.
Oh wait, a trans-woman... so that's socio-cultural diversity though not biological diversity - still born a white male.
Unless transgenderism isn't a choice but part of somebody's biological nature, then it is biological diversity, right?
erm, is being biologically predisposed to not liking chocolate also biological diversity? Wow, how much biological diversity goes unnoticed by diversity advocates? Maybe fb is biologically diverse after all!?
Isn't it cool we're all unique individuals with unique interests, although fb has mostly people who all share an interest in tech. True diversity would be to get people not interested in tech at fb.
You wouldn't see a candidate's face, name, hear their real voice, know their educational background, what economic class they're from.
You would conduct interviews over chat and voice (maybe use voice morphing software), which seems entirely plausible these days.
If anything, it would probably improve the hiring of qualified people. Interviewers can penalize candidates for all kinds of irrelevant things, not just sex and gender.
This would largely eliminate the very toxic problem of "diversity hires" that serve to perpetuate stereotypes. It would truly level the playing field.
React as we think of it today simply would not exist without Sophie. The entire front-end ecosystem would be drastically worse.
It’s really sad to hear she won’t be leading the react team anymore, and worse to hear how some employees of Facebook treated her.
She’s hands down the best engineer I’ve ever worked with, and also a wonderfully kind and caring person.
Her leaving Facebook is a loss for the entire tech community. I hope her next endeavours treat her with the respect she deserves.
