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Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

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Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#531

Post by roenxi »

John23832 wrote: post #90

(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…

A question, perhaps, of babies, bathwater and relative velocity.

I'm not sure if anyone worth listening to is complaining about efforts to clean up racism in moderated communities. HN, for example, self polices that sort of thing quite effectively. "Racism bad" as a principle is one of the most solid points of consensus in the modern political sphere. We should keep moderating out racism.

But your post is going to different issues than the original one, which was talking about initiatives inside companies. I do not want to be in a position where I look at black colleagues and have formal evidence that they got hired/promoted/praised/ because of their skin colour, not their competence. That is setting up an environment where racists opinions will also be evidence-based and doing a disservice to literally everyone involved.

A company initiative supporting building up hiring pipelines is just good business practice. "A cheesy townhall once a month to discuss diversity hires" (from op) is a dangerous precedent for stirring up actual racism. There does need to be debate to decide where the line between these things is drawn, and why.

We were on a good thing with the aspiration of skin colour making no difference. It is a shame to see backsliding on that subject amongst many HR departments.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#532

Post by PuppyTailWags »

oh_sigh wrote: post #245
version_five wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoC > White folks I just want to mention that one of the worst aspects of all this is trying to sort people according to (here apparently a binary) label. There is not really such thing as either of these categories - it's stereotyping of the worst kind, and takes us back many generations

It gets even worse, where people are pushing for BIPoC instead of just people of color, indicating that black and indigenous are of primary import, and the rest of the non whites are relegated to "other people of color"

I always understood bipoc to be used primarily in places where either black people or indigenous people (usually both) had way more oppression than any other race. America is a good example of where bipoc makes way more sense, because they literally stole indigenous kids right out of their homes and built an economy on making a race of people into property. There's something to be said that there wasn't a case where all indian people who immigranted to america systematically had a generation of their children taken, shoved into a school where many of them were renamed, abused, starved, raped, experimented on, and eventually died there, never to see their families again.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#533

Post by Manuel_D »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #78
monero-xmr wrote: post #25

It boils down to a core philosophical difference - do you want to emphasize equal access to opportunity, or do you want to emphasize equal outcomes? Some would argue it isn't an either-or thing, and we can do both at once, but I argue mandated equality of outcomes is insidious and causes social strife. If you are a minority and get hired, and the company has an explicit policy of hiring N% of minorities, then you wil…

On the other hand, if you only emphasize equal access of opportunity you will never reach equal outcomes. White men have centuries of cultural expectations, family wealth, and other advantages, and minorities have none of those advantages, and may be only a few decades (if that) removed from illiterate, impoverished inequality. Give those groups equal opportunity and it's unsurprising when an inequality of outcomes i…

And yet Asian Americans and Jewish Americans significantly outperform those white men. And in the last several decades, women have outperformed men in university and in the 2010s in the workforce, too. This analysis does not hold up to close scrutiny.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#534

Post by [deleted] »

DrThunder wrote: post #453
Firmwarrior wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Hispanic man, I can say that I don't care about whether I earned my spot or lucked into it through my ancestry. Life isn't fair, and I'll gladly take whatever advantages I can scrounge up. The software interview process in particular is already so capricious that I feel absolutely no shame in tilting it in my favor in any way that I can.

You didn't "earn" anything if it was due to skin color and that's the point. I've gotten plenty of breaks in my life but I'm aware of what is earned and what isn't. It's one thing to be ok with the fact you got in but you need the awareness to understand the negatives of a system that gives you chances due to an innate characteristic you have no control over. The irony here is that if we all just accept the line of t…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#535

Post by anonymouskimmer »

Manuel_D wrote: post #443
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI can also be about looking past stereotypes. A couple of decades worth of research has shown racial bias against URMs in hiring exists. Breaking past it with a requirement to interview and consider URMs is a start, not the finish. https://hbr.org/2021/02/research-how-companies-committed-to-...

Alternatively, it could be ameliorated in a non-discriminatory way by anonymizing applications.

Sure. Which would require a specialized group of trained people at the company. This would involve such things as changing Alma Mater University to "completed degree". It would involve fudging things such as how long it took to graduate (which can be an indicator of familial status, in so far as people from poorer backgrounds are disproportionately likely to take longer to complete due to financial reasons).

Genuinely anonymizing an application is a difficult task without losing pertinent data.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#536

Post by exohell »

alphabettsy wrote: post #241
pnutjam wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another angle, are you certain this person was comfortable having a real conversation with you? PoC are very accustomed to bending with the wind and playing their cards close to their chest. I know it's only caused me grief to speak out.

[flagged]

Wow, so when a POC says something you don't agree with, you're rationalizing it by saying they can't possibly mean what they're saying. As a disabled POC immigrant who was born in a refugee camp, please believe me when I tell you: DEI is hot garbage, and it's full of people like you who refuse to take POC at their words.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#537

Post by malcolmgreaves »

spangry wrote: post #21

> If I were a white man with the same experience, I might not even be here? I can understand how DEI initiatives might undermine your self-esteem and I'm sorry you are made to feel this way, but take solace in the fact that you have a job. Imagine how the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color feels. That's who the real victim is here - the person who was racially discriminated against.…

YIKES

> Imagine how the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color feels. That's who the real victim is here - the person who was racially discriminated against.

White guys are not discriminated against in tech. This is such a racist take.

I bet you also think that reparations for slavery and Jim Crow -- literally, the government actually discriminating and harming people for their skin color -- would be bad because they somehow "hurt" white folks today.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#538

Post by ChickenNugger »

BurningFrog wrote: post #522
_wolfie_ wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yellow is not a color? I always assumed that Asians are included in PoC.

Side issue, but I grew up in Sweden thinking asians have yellow skin. After living and working with asians for decades in the Bay area, I have yet to meet a yellow one. To my eye, they're on the same white(pink)-brown-black spectrum as the rest of humanity.

Well yeah...

White people are pale to darkly tanned

Natives Americans are brown, not red

Black people are brown, not black, some not even very brown

Indian people are shades of brown too, and yet can be far darker than "black" people.

Japanese people are brown, not yellow

None of the colloquial color terms for races are accurate when you sit down and think about it.

The one time it might have been accurate is redheads are often pale enough to be white, so of course we call them gingers/redheads.

It's all a bit silly.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#539

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

excerionsforte wrote: post #360
HideousKojima wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always get confused when people say they need to have people who look like them in prominent roles in order to feel welcome in a hobby/career/whatever. I'm a fan of boxing, and my favorite boxer is a black Muslim. I do some hobby-level game dev on the side, and most of my favorite devs that I look up to are Japanese. Young black men seem to disproportionately love Dragon Ball Z, with an Asian-appearing main charact…

Dragon Ball Z was introduced into lower income neighborhoods via Cartoon Network among many other anime, so it was hard to miss. It was pretty hard to miss Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and etc. in elementary school especially with the merch kids brought to school. Marketing, re-runs and perceived coolness/epicness, I'd say drove the continued popularity of it. Once you hit high school and college though, Dragon Ball Z/Poke…

There's no country called 'Japan' in Final Fantasy VII, so I don't know why you're so confidently stating that. The closest analogue is Wutai, and Cloud's not from there.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#540

Post by anonymouskimmer »

willcipriano wrote: post #472
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an under credentialed, relative to the general population very smart white guy, I doubt the demand for any group exceeds the supply. It just might involve searching outside of the range of the lamppost. Gasp, horror, it might involve internal training as opposed to expecting people to hit all the marks for a position on their prior labor and education. It might involve hiring a lot more entry level positions than…

Let's say green people are 10% of the population to make the numbers easy and not call out anyone in particular. You have company A and they are killing it on their diversity goals, 20 percent of its employees are green people. Now you have company B, same size and industry as company A, they want to hire green people but their "share" of greens is already working at company A, perhaps they can pull greens from other…

> but ultimately someone is going to be left holding the "you don't hire enough green people" bag.

This would be a good argument if we ever get to that point. But we aren't even close, and plenty of smaller companies and startups don't have diversity goals at all. There's plenty of room for some big names to go 100% green without being a tithe of a tithe of the full working population. Or even a tithe of a tithe of the working population of greens.

Even Walmart is less than 1% of the total employed population in the US. Much more so for smaller companies such as Alphabet or Meta.

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