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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone hires a person based on their color, that's wrong regardless of who's doing it. Let's say a company is set to hire 1,000 employees. For the first 900 hires, they intentionally exclude white people. Should they, then, make up for this intentional exclusion by then prioritizing white people in their hiring? Or should they correct the problem by giving those who were intentionally excluded priority? In othe…

Can you get rid of unnecessary discrimination by continuing to discriminate, no. Punishing people today who had no input into situations in the past, only because of a characteristic they have that they can not alter ... that's just breeding more resentment. A teenager of my acquaintance was accepted last minute to an educational opportunity, it was well over-subscribed. When they got there they found there were actu…

> How is that fair for those students who missed out?

That's exactly the question: When people miss out due to intentional discrimination, it's not fair.

Should anything be done about that? Of course!

I fail to see how this is controversial, except that people don't want resources to go to those who were discriminated against.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#322
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post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even in diverse workplaces, there are a whole lot of islands of one ethnicity or another-- including very, very white groups. More than you would get by chance. This means a whole lot of racist personnel decisions are being made in all directions, and in a diverse workplace they kind of net-out OK? In any case, ignoring one awful problem because there are others that may be of higher magnitude (or may not...)…

"This means a whole lot of racist personnel decisions are being made in all directions" - not necessarily actually. Unless you count team / company choice by a prospective employee as racist. People often self-sort into cultural bubbles they feel most comfortable in.

> People often self-sort into cultural bubbles they feel most comfortable in.

If I sort myself into an all-white cultural bubble, and then later hire all the people from my network into the groups I run, etc-- I end up making de-facto racist hiring decisions. So even the situation you describe does eventually trend towards racism.

And, in any case, I think back to one of my early experiences in industry. We had groups that were 95% one ethnicity. I am pretty sure based on organizational culture that I would not have been successful in one of the non-white ones, and I'm not sure that people from those groups would have been successful transplanted into in the majority white groups. I think in practice the organization was really bad from a DEI standpoint, but on paper probably looked really, really good.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, certainly gather information and follow due process, but once it's clear what occurred, there is no question that a person who refuses to work with coworkers based on lower caste does not belong in any workplace with lower caste workers. And anyone who resists that principle is a co-conspirator in caste-based oppression and should leave as well.

Why can’t they work together, but force to not discriminate?

Working relationships are complex and require a lot of trust. You can't just wave a magic wand over two people and say "discrimination be gone". The bigot can and will always find ways to harm the victim without accountability.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

There seems to be a sad irony of discrimination in this.

I agree, it is sad and HN has a tradition of not condoning this kind of comment, :shrug:. I tried to call it out, too.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#325
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great example of the kind of hyper-reactivity that makes conversation on most of the internet absolutely impossible. The parent said they didn't see this in the article, don't imagine they'd gain from it, and asked for more info about it - all totally reasonable thoughts and expressed without negativity. And yet you responded with snide superiority, as though your dialogue with this person was already an ar…

100%. I found the books “how to have impossible conversations” and “crucial conversations” helpful for me, but in a nutshell they’re basically “say things in a way that protect the other side’s ego”

Related, the difference between a "nerd" and "normal person" tact filter: https://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#326

This is a good step forward but wait until Apple realizes that Indians discriminate on many other factors including but not limited to skin color, state of origin, region of origin (North vs South vs NorthEast), mother tongue, religion (Hindu vs Muslim), Political beliefs (Left vs Right).

Political belief should not be a protected class. It's an opinion- everything else you listed, you're born with/can't change that classification (don't want to get into the weirdness of the religion part, but nearly all religious preference can be predicted by geography).

Why should only things you can't change be protected?

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#328
”Recently, talking about the incident to the New Yorker, Tanuja said, "A number of e-mails got sent to my VP, to the head of HR, to our chief diversity officer, to our CEO directly, claiming that the talk was creating a hostile workplace, that people felt unsafe, that the speaker was not qualified to speak on the topic and several other allegations." She also claimed that in tech companies, including Google, discrimination based on caste was rife and that tech company needed to talk about it.”

Congratulations America. Now the ”felt unsafe”, ”hostile environment” etc. woke newspeak is used to protect the asses of the people who want to discriminate while victims get smoked out by these useless clowns that are called ”diversity officers”.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#329

How hard is it to fake being of a higher caste like Brahmin or Kshatriya? Since it’s not skin color but your heritage, can’t you falsify this information? Especially if you claim to be from some rural or remote location? Just how involved would someone try to investigate your background?

It’s about as hard as someone from Alabama trying to pass as someone that grew up in New York. It’s not super hard but people will probably eventually find out.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#330
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post #189

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively. HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes tha…

I don’t think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
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