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Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#921

Post by dccoolgai »

ALittleLight wrote: post #817
insickness wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself. This is the only line in the blog post that can be construed as antisemitic rather than a criticism of Israel. It would not be antisemitic if he had stated the opinion: "Israel has an insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of itself." I used to be involved in the Palestine Liberation movement and…

"Why were you fired?" "I used the wrong word once in a deleted personal blog post from 14 years ago."

Wonder how many exit interviews he sat through, smugly grinning at someone who did something similar...

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#922

Post by el-salvador »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #796
nashashmi wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he must have established by the end the Jews he is referring to are those who support Israeli aggression. Not all Jews.

Replace the word "Jews" with "men" and gauge the reaction of those in the modern diversity movement. Either it's ok to say "not all ", or it isn't.

They wouldn't bat an eye.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#923

Post by acituan »

morelisp wrote: post #650
acituan wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> acknowledgement of race or racial difference Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position; that there is an essence to being a certain race that sets it apart from other races. Doesn't matter if that position casts the purported essence in a positive or negative light, it is bigotry in one way or the other.

> Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct , which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race. The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

> No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct, which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race.

That is still essentialism with extra steps. Social or not, your category hinges on purportedly durable and universal attributes, whether they arrived from within or without.

> The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

That's a strawman argument I haven't made. I am against conflating pragmatic categories with essentialist categories. There is a difference between using x as an ephemeral demographic category to address the material issues you allude to vs overplaying it to an x'ness as an essentialist identitarian concept.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#924

Post by el-salvador »

local_dev wrote: post #647
bozzcl wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, you could just delete your social media accounts regularly to minimize your trail.

I find the best solution is to simply never use a social media account attached to your real identity. Innocent comments taken out of context or a general changing of accepted speech can turn a decade old bit of text into damning evidence of bigotry, racism, or any other ism.

Or social media could implement automatic autodelete, like Snapchat but after a longer time.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#925

Post by nradov »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #896
nradov wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're inventing an arbitrary difference where none exists. Twitter is literally a microblogging platform. There is no legal or moral difference between a Tweet versus a post on a different blogging platform such as Medium.

The "micro" part does a lot of heavy lifting here. The difference is in effort made per post.

Why does the effort matter? Is there some specific threshold of time spent writing a post for us to take it seriously?

Some people spend hours writing a single tweet to get the message exactly right.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#926

Post by erik_seaberg »

bitwize wrote: post #644
JPKab wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are diverse as a side effect of hiring for competence. They aren't competent as a side effect of hiring with diversity as a goal. The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.

And you're not educated enough to understand that "meritocracy" is a myth that entrenches existing power and privilege structures, because the people who are good at something are the people with the resources and social capital it takes to get good at that thing.

Skills and experience were not distributed fairly, but they are still real and still necessary. The fix for missing education is more education, not trying to somehow do without it.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#927

Post by bjourne »

akarma wrote: post #914

Being reassigned as opposed to fired is quite the privilege. Everyone in the comments is viewing it as completely different than the Damore fiasco because this racist blog post was written in 2007, but are we forgetting that Antonio Martinez wrote Chaos Monkeys 5 years ago and was fired for it now? [1] What's the difference between: 1) Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naïve despite their cla…

You are misrepresenting Kamau Bobb's blog post by cherry-picking a single sentence from it. This is the first paragraph of his post:

> If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the long cycles of oppression that Jewish people have endured and the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired. This reconciliation would be particularly difficult now, in November, 79 years after Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. The anniversary of this dreadfully monumental day in my history would bring me pause. It would force me to reflect on the legacy of extraordinary human suffering. I might wonder how the vicious eruption of cruelty in the mid-twentieth century has influenced the shape of my identity as a Jewish person and our collective identity as Jewish people.

He is imagining a dichotomy; commitment to Israel and to humanist values. "If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented." This does not sound like anti-Semitism to me.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#928

Post by JPKab »

bitwize wrote: post #644
JPKab wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are diverse as a side effect of hiring for competence. They aren't competent as a side effect of hiring with diversity as a goal. The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.

And you're not educated enough to understand that "meritocracy" is a myth that entrenches existing power and privilege structures, because the people who are good at something are the people with the resources and social capital it takes to get good at that thing.

Ahhh, so if I disagree with you on a point, it's due to lack of education?

That's a hell of a worldview.

I grew up in an impoverished family, in a trailer park, in a mostly black county. I know far better than you do about "privilege structures", but since I happened to be white, none of the diversity initiatives care or help.

Poor white people are underrepresented in tech. But the white elites think poor whites are in trailer parks because they are stupid. It's their fault, right? That's what all of you say, I've heard it said everywhere. "Trailer trash" this and that, said casually without batting an eye. Never questioning if maybe, just maybe, the kids born there have opportunities equivalent to yours.

It's obvious nobody cares. If they did, they would talk about it, or try to do something. But there are no activist professors for them, so crickets.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#929

Post by greedo »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #440
michaelscott wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of getting people fired/removed/cancelled for remarks, yes absolutely. That may be a function of social media and the scale of communication in modern times, but either way the sensitivity of the vocal minority has definitely changed even in my relatively short life.

You say yes, but can you explain how it is different? As far as I can tell it's the same as it was a century ago. The only change is the subject matter. Do you think you'd keep your job after saying something anti-Christian in the 1950s? Look at what happened to Sinead O'Connor in the early 90s after she spoke out against child abuse in the Catholic church. Maybe the biggest difference is that now we write when we co…

Witness what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they protested the impending invasion of Iraq.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#930

Post by NoPicklez »

lgleason wrote: post #247

Live by the sword, die by the sword. That said, firing him, like they did with Damore would have been more consistent. Because everyone is under arbitration agreements that always benefit the company, vs the courts where you might have a shot at justice, they have no incentive to do that. As repugnant as his past anti-semitic rant was, people change and sometimes say and do stupid things. In a sane world this guy wou…

What frustrates me the most about this, is that we clearly have diversity teams to help encourage more diversity and inclusion AND to change the minds of people who may have been historically opposed or perhaps subconsciously discriminative.

So the entire idea that this person should be removed based on a blog post 14 years ago is absurd. Are they saying therefore that people who historically demonstrated limited views on diversity are incapable of changing and advocating for change? Then why have the position in the first place.

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