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

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611–620 of 898 posts

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

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system in place at my university was color blind. The top 5% of students were automatically accepted.

> Asking bc I went to a good school that had affirmative action. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34678203 Which was it? Was your school colour blind or did they practice affirmative action? They can’t both be true at the same time.

It is both. The top 5% of students from each high school doesn’t mean the top 5% overall. There was even a recent supreme court case over this. Something can be technically colorblind and still be affirmative action.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest here, a creator can make Apples be purple and slightly deformed and call it Banora Apples, but it's still an apple. Plenty of people who like DBZ or FF to debate with on how to classify said characters based on traits such as skeletal structure, influences from the creator, etc. These classifications, I don't think about much when playing games in general, not that much of a fanboy in trying to identi…

Japanese isn't a race it's a nationality and/or ethnicity, and neither Goku nor Cloud are from Japan nor do they share any real cultural traits with Japanese people. You've changed crux of your argument (or perhaps clarified what you inteded to argue) to now be what school age children do or do not think; though that isn't very compelling as neither you nor I are capable of reading minds. However the comment I did re…

Don't know how you can say that with a straight face. You got me laughing right now. [1] shows clear influence by Japanese culture. With Japanese language symbols in each creation, again, I can't see how your claim stands that there is no influence. I could never say that creations are not influenced in any way by the world we live in. Race/Nationality/Ethnicity tend to be used in an intertwined manner these days so I have to believe you are not being of good faith here. It's 2023, so you can read it as Pokemon and DBZ are of Japanese origin and leave out the fluff. If we really used the race term literally, it wouldn't be used at all to describe differences between people in the human race.

I've changed nothing. You misread it and I clarified it for you to come to an understanding. Race/Skin Color/Nationality, whatever it is you want to read it as with the negative connotations assigned, isn't something any young-in thinks about on a daily basis without it being pointed out in some way.

Anyway, I'm not interested in going on circles on this. I would know about said experience given my own culture and interactions. No one needs to reads minds to give anecdotes about their life experience and talk to other people in the same situation about their life experience and thoughts about things that happen(ed) to this day.

[1] https://scontent-hou1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/106206584_2...

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

#613

As a white european dude, who's ancestors never oppressed anyone, rather were oppressed by other white dudes through history. Can you ELI5 why the DEI exists and what problems does it solve, from but from a perspective of someone of my position? Not a troll-bait question, but I sincerely try to comprehend this as to me the mere term people of color is the uttermost racist label imaginable. Also, that presumes I'm fro…

In the US discrimination based on skin color is widespread and goes back to before the country's founding, and access to opportunities is very uneven based on wealth. The PoC term is a reflection of the general pattern of discrimination as practiced here. This situation both has strong inertia (easier to get access to opportunity if you have relatively wealthy parents and/or blend in with wealthier people who tend to…

Discrimination in the US is based on socioeconomic status just as much as race.

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

#614
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they meant dog. Which is a placeholder for _anything else_.

> they meant dog > which is a placeholder for ... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal. It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.

Definitely no hints to that in the cartoon at all. None... none at all... >.> .>

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but IRC wasn’t No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet. Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything…

IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.

Yes. It's a generalization.

... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard."

> Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist

I completely agree.

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

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard this and there were plenty of girls on IRC

Well if you've never heard that old joke, then clearly it can't ever have existed, right? Oh wait: > Welcome to the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are cops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546789 I picked this instance of course because it was said on HN, but it was a dead horse even in 2010.

by 2010 IRC was largely replaced by social media except for niche communities, sorry you were on there in the wrong decade

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

#617
post #604

(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 ab…

> That said, I think a lot of these people are upset by DEI precisely because it is resulting in more diversity.

You are exemplifying a fallacy known as asymmetric insight, whereby you assume to know more about someone else's "real" intentions than they do. While at some level we do have to have a mental model of other people's motivations, the temptation is strong to pathologize those we disagree with rather than take their ideas seriously.

So tell me, did you come to your conclusion based on sincere effort to actually understand the mindset of those opposed to DEI, or are you using it as an excuse to avoid thinking about their actual arguments?

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

#618

Interestingly enough, Pew Research ran a study[0] a few years back which found that the majority of whites, blacks, and Hispanics reject race-conscious hiring—even if it results in less diversity. I can only imagine what it would feel like to be a PoC in a company that has openly stated that their goal is to achieve a certain racial/ethnic composition regardless of standards. How would I not always have a sneaking su…

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.

[deleted]

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is power in victimhood now. If you can prove you're a victim or prove you're submitting to a certain group you've "victimized" then you are put at the top of the order. You become part of essentially a religious cult and given certain "powers" that you can bash the "sinners" over the head with. I think you're exactly right here, the largest proponents of this stuff tend to be white and left wing (mostly women).…

>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…

Clarification please - where do you find "power in victimhood" in Judaism 2000+ years ago?

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

#620
post #449

To be fair, as a pretty smart, white man in technology, my parents paid for half of my college to a prestigious engineering university and I've had friends and acquaintances (that I've built from my network) that have gotten me to where I am today. If it helps, you can think of DEI initiatives as making up for the lack of an existing network that many minorities have in the business world.

To be fair, you still had to graduate from said prestigious engineering university. And a degree doesn't net you a job. And a job doesn't net you a career.
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