This reads like lots of drama ensued internally (whether justified or not) and now a person writes about it creating more drama externally, or at least tries to.
It would have been interesting, to write about who and what topic was chosen as a replacement as well. I guess, I can understand not wanting to have to do much with people, who for not justifying reasons demote a speaker, whom one thinks highly of. It probably raises the question of what is more important to oneself. The project or the other people involved in it. Apparently the project was not important enough.
This blog post has a feel of creating more drama though. The person considers themselves important enough, that people may wonder why they left Rust. Well, normal people leave and when people ask, they answer. Possibly in detail, possibly a canned answer. If people really want to know, they can ask. Making it a public announcement has the drama feel to it.
I get this feeling often with rather publicly well known projects. Supposedly prominent people who are so kind to donate their time to the cause, but at a hickup leave the project and write a drama blog post or worse tweet or something. Seemingly making us think, that they are a great loss for the project. Well apparently their priorities were different. More about the people or prestige of working on the project than the actual project, which they might even be harming with their drama blog post.
And then that section:
> I also felt the weight of the context of the decision. JeanHeyd isn't just a recent grant recipient of the Rust Foundation. JeanHeyd has important history with the Rust project.
> It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
> When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
> Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
No, no, no. Firstly, no explanation, what JeanHeyd actually did for Rust. Nagging about lack of diversity OK, but did they make suggestions for people to invite? Or was it just complaining? I would not call it "important history" then. Complaining about diversity or the lack of is easy. Did they do anything themselves to change it? And why the racism? What inherent qualities does JeanHeyd ascribe to "black" people? And what significant contributions did JeanHeyd make?
I am for diversity, but it needs to be based on actual merit and not just that stupid "Oh we got no blacky, lets invite one, then we are good!". Make it a reasonable choice! Look for the talent and invite it, not because of some skin color ideas. Make sure you do not fall into bias avoiding other ethnicities because of who they are. But also make sure not to overlook greater merit, because you haven't ticked a bock on your skin color check list yet. If a "black" person is the best fit, choose them. If not, then choose someone else. Don't friggin base it on color. If you base these things merely on color of the skin, you are opening the doors for the unpleasant crowd, who will argue, that a person did not get into their position by merit, but by skin color. You don't want such crowd, so don't attract them with such argumentation.
> As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.
And the value in that is? Just to be aligned with ideology? Or some racism behind it?
As a viewer I want a good keynote. I don't care what the color of that person is. Why do you make it a color question? What does it have to do with color? This kind of argumentation makes me think, that they are actually more racist than others. It is all so forced, it is no longer authentic. Let it be done in authentic ways. And again, don't argue on the basis of skin color, otherwise you are just as racist as the guy who rejects a person on the basis of skin color.
In some situations one can argue on the basis of additional diverse cultural background being brought into a situation, group, company, etc. It needs to have something to do with the subject at hand though. Say for example a teacher in a primary school. There it could make a difference to have a person with different cultural background, to teach the children more things and make them aware of different culture. It is an argumentation one can follow. But just arguing: "We don't have 10 'black' people at our conference yet." is very weak and ethically slippery terrain.