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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

#601

Post by samhuk »

The concern I have with DEI is that it's the manipulation of the natural function of a market - the jobs market. Just like others in this space such as quantitative easing, printing money, and "stimmy cheques", this often comes with positive and negative effects.

Personally, I have a few thouhts:

* If we didn't have DEI (which in practice is really just the new AA (Affirmative Action)), would hetero-ethnic areas like Europe and US ever have balance in the workforce? Would society naturally trend towards ethnic balance in the workplace without DEI, or would we end up with a Gattaca? Is DEI necessary in that sense? Without DEI-like influences, would we just be stuck with a black valet and a white CEO?

* Psychologists have known for decades about "the tyranny of low expectations" - the tendency for lower expectations to lead to lower performance in humans. I wonder if long-term DEI will lead to performance imbalances as those who are favored by DEI become reliant on it. It's a scary thought to imagine in the long term.

* Personally, I think a small amount of temporary DEI exposure is required to offset the human's natural tendency to be hostile towards those of a different ethnicity. I think that if DEI exposure is either acute (a lot in a small time frame) or chronic (little bit over a long time frame), it is likely to lead to systemic negative consequences, such as performative imbalance and/or aggression/hatred between those favored and unfavored by DEI.

It's a really complex situation!

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

#602

Post by kodah »

DrThunder wrote: post #590
LordDragonfang wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is power in victimhood now Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "persecution" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural l…

I'm confused... are you endorsing acting this way or against it? Kinda seems like you're justifying the current action of "woke" people by discussing past injustices? Isn't the whole idea of the "woke" DEI initiative to fix injustices in our society?

I think they're just saying this occurrence isn't unique and it doesn't look like they approve of it. Many of us identify with our own struggles in deep ways. If you create an opportunity for people to organize around those struggles then people will, because as was said, there is power there. That power is in representation. The problem is generally in the silo'ing of representation. This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address.

We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution that devolved in the ~200 years since it's founding to go on to oppress others. We can and should do better.

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

#603

Post by MacsHeadroom »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #356
drstewart wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low ranking based on what? Are you telling people what feelings they should have towards slurs directed towards them? The "top quotes" don't bother me at all, for example.

Low ranking based on the number of votes they got. That's the green (or red) number in parentheses between the plus and minus signs. The top 100 quotes range from 9,000 to 41,000. If I refresh random a few times, the most common number of votes seems to be in the mid-100s, which is exactly where these fall. So the fact that - you had to search to find a couple low ranking quotes that might be insulting to white peopl…

Votes have no relation to how much any quote exemplifies IRC culture.

Bash.org is not IRC or IRC culture, despite being built on IRC logs.

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

#604

Post by qdog »

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…

Yeah, I dunno if these people hung out on the Care Bears irc channel or what, but every 'open' forum and most of the closed ones had tons of racism/sexism/whateverism. Just look at twitter nowadays to see how awful some posters can be.

I've worked with a very small handful of black people over my career, several indians, a fair number of asians and a few hispanics.

The demographics in my experience were all pretty abyssmal, without some sort of policy in place, the actual bias that ends up hiring only other white males was never going to end. I would say it's probably still strong, as a recent place I worked was incredibly white and male.

My understanding is that hiring becomes much more fair if you are able to remove all racial/sexual details from a hiring process (at least, if resumes are shown without those details you get expected results, but with those details a bias appears).

That said, I think a lot of these people are upset by DEI precisely because it is resulting in more diversity. If you are biased against the people who DEI helps get hired, you are obviously going to think they are poor hires, because you always thought "those people" tend to be poor hires. Assuming OP is actually a black man, I think he needs to realize that many, if not most, people who make assumptions about him based on DEI or the like, are always looking for an excuse for their own biases.

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

#605

Post by ejstronge »

_trackno5 wrote: post #591
ejstronge wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused - why do you say that Brazil is not part of Latin America? Is it because Brazil speaks Portugese (a descendant of Latin) instead of Spanish (another descendant of Latin)? I heard a very humorous and apt anecdote that there are no black people in Africa - maybe the same phenomenon is happening here, where the identity you have in Brazil (just a Brazilian) is different from the identity you are as…

I'm not saying Brazil is not part of Latin America. What I am saying is I don't call myself a latino. Nobody in South America or Central America calls themselves latinos. That's a US made up term. We all call ourselves by our nationalities. The anecdote on Africa is probably correct though.

Yes - we are saying the same thing. Your identity from your home may differ from the identity with which you are perceived in a different nation.

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

#606

Post by Eumenes »

Big tech companies openly discriminate in the hiring process towards non favored groups, this is a fact. People involved in the hiring committees at these companies know and this has downstream effects. DIE is perpetuating harmful stereotypes no doubt.

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

#608

Post by lliamander »

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…

It's certainly not obvious to me, as someone who never ventured on IRC, that IRC culture would have a serious impact on minority representation. Most people (minority or not) were never on IRC to begin with, so I doubt that would explain (for instance) the under-representation of minorities in Computer Science programs.

I mean, you say that IRC was virulently anti-gay, and yet gay and trans people are over-represented in tech.

Even if we accept that IRC culture drove minorities away from tech, that doesn't justify common corporate DEI policies such as affirmative action, unconscious bias training, etc. Those are just bad, counter-productive polices.

> EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.

You are generalizing from you own experience, expect others to do the same. And, to be fair, they probably aren't saying that your experience didn't happen, but that it either wasn't representative, or that you are misinterpreting some of it.

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

#609

Post by hondo77 »

I recently worked for a government organization. DEIA (accessibility) was omnipresent. That's not a bad thing, for the reasons others have pointed out. Lots of recruiting in non-traditional places, for instance. However, there was no need to trot out, as you called them, "diversity hires" because when they would announce the new hires, they would just be diverse. I'm trying to imagine your scenario and cringe.

Have you thought of raising your concerns with HR or even townhall feedback, if your company has such a thing (one of mine did and they actually acted on some of my suggestions)? The actions sound well-intentioned but clueless so they just may need to be clued in.

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

#610

Post by ChickenNugger »

shadowgovt wrote: post #123

> "Why should I feel proud of my accomplishments, when the accomplishments were spoon-fed to me by the company because of my skin color?" Because they're still your accomplishments. White people hardly ever ask if they should be proud of their accomplishments when they live in a society that assumes they should and will succeed. > "If I were a white man with the same experience, I might not even be here?" If you were…

> black men are still extremely under-represented in tech.

Are they? Should be about 6% as black people are 12.1% of Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...) and this source: https://www.zippia.com/advice/diversity-in-high-tech-statist... says black Americans (doesn't separate genders) are 7% of tech, and if 73.3% of which are men (same source) means 5.1% are black men, which is damn close 6%. Less than 1% off isn't "extremely under-represented".

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