> This is an HR responsibility.

No, HRs responsibility is to make sure that legal liability for unlawful discrimination does not get imposed on the company, consistent with other corporate goals.

Actually mitigating discrimination may sometimes be the mechanism for that. Helping management create a smokescreen around acts of discrimination and find pretexts to force out people likely to discredit that smokescreen are also sometimes ways HR does that.

Mistaking HR for your advocate rather than management’s is a dangerous mistake.

With what authority will HR eliminate discrimination?

At a minimum, they’d need to stop accepting employee referrals (how can they tell if the referrals biased?) and take over the technical interview process.

Also, what happens when an exec elsewhere in the company discriminates against someone? Will HR have the power to unilaterally fire the exec? The CEO? The chairman of the board? How would they even detect the discrimination?

Sadly, declaring that one division of a company will eliminate discrimination doesn’t work. You need the whole company to pull together, though realistically, that won’t work either.

Society as a whole has to decide to solve the problem. Looping around to the article, one of the political parties passed hundreds of bills to disenfranchise minority voters; arguing that minorities should have basic rights is (in the US, at least) politically controversial.

Charitably, I hope the goal is to force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work).

Invoke Godwin’s Law, and… Done.

Even within this framework, “only discuss these things with HR” is untenable. Say a coworker harasses you and HR tells you it’s the first time someone has reported them. How can you know whether to revoke that trust without “talking politics” with your coworkers?

What if we don't, for not only Basecamp but for most employers worldwide in any industry? This is a very common view.