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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

#641

Post by [deleted] »

wyager wrote: post #596
TimTheTinker wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - DEI is about upholding the prevailing form of political correctness so as not to get publicly shamed. Federal law still bans racial discrimination in hiring, so lawsuits are less of a concern than looking bad in the public eye. The irony is that DEI as a worldview promotes and condones racial discrimination in many forms -- that is, treating people differently because of the color of their skin, not the…

I'm not disagreeing with you at an object level, but at a meta level you're at least 30-40 years behind what's going on with title VII legal strategy, and your grade school understanding of MLK is not helping things. I would suggest looking more into what he was actually about, rather than taking at face value a few words from his most popular speech.

[deleted]

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

#642

Post by John23832 »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #231
shadowgovt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog." ... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.

>> except they didn't mean dog The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking. See the original image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.... 'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.

Dog was used a a euphemism for undesirable. In the more specific case of the image, black. Look at the color of the dogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

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

#643

Post by dbrueck »

projectazorian wrote: post #564
dbrueck wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You no doubt have any number of other things you could be doing, but you’re in here. Might be worth thinking about why that is. Obviously this applies to you as well. Maybe you've taken what I wrote as some sort of disagreement or getting defensive or... something? And then from there concluding that I shouldn't be allowed to participate? I'm not sure, but this is a discussion site and I'm participating in the disc…

> Obviously this applies to you as well. Maybe you've taken what I wrote as some sort of disagreement or getting defensive or... something? And then from there concluding that I shouldn't be allowed to participate? You're allowed to participate, but I trust you can understand that in many situations there is a difference between what discourse is permitted in a space, and what discourse others might see as appropriat…

"Authoritarian mindset" indeed!

Anyway, you seem to have misunderstood by initial and subsequent comments, so other than rereading them in good faith until you believe me when I say that I was neither disagreeing with the comment, nor trying to undermine his experience, nor defending bad stuff online, I don't think we can make any progress, so I'm moving on to other things. Have a great day!

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

#644

Post by throwaway894345 »

dbrueck wrote: post #243
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…

Not disputing your bad experiences, but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone? :) Speaking of 2 things being true at once, what's amazing about BBSs/USENET/IRC/etc. especially in the early years was that they had: - online discussions where a lot of things just didn't matter. Race, gender, etc. just didn't matter. You got judged on the merit of your ideas, not what you looked…

This was what I was thinking. There were lots of jerks on those forums[^1], but I didn't see many racists. Frankly, I don't know how anyone would be able to ascertain others' races in the first place.

[^1]: as far as I can tell, no one was welcome to ask questions unless they could first prove that they were smarter than everyone else about computing, in which case you wouldn't actually need to ask questions in that forum in the first place

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

#645

Post by not_a_pet_rock »

spacephysics wrote: post #57

I think these initiatives had great intentions, as the saying goes, “road to hell is paved with good intentions” We shouldn’t be “color blind”, but at the same time shouldn’t raise (or especially demote) anyone for their skin color These initiatives are antithetical to what MLK preached, to much of the civil rights movement And just like the scrum cult, once these systems are implemented, they understandably have mot…

> but at the same time shouldn’t raise (or especially demote) anyone for their skin color

thats literally what colorblindness is all about, recognizing people for their actions not their skin color.

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

#647

Post by samhuk »

maldev wrote: post #621
samhuk wrote: post #601

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…

The curse of low expectations is real. I recently moved out of Baltimore because of the long term implications of DEI in education. There's schools where a gpa of 0.13 puts you in the top half of your class ( https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/calls-to-shu... ). You also have 77 % of seniors being illiterate ( https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/77-of-students-at-... ). I also dated a teacher for a…

It's a pretty sad fact of life that sometimes you hurt the most by offering what you think is help.

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

#648

Post by adolph »

tarotuser wrote: post #196
adolph wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the while the C-levels are 'white male sausagefest' Aren’t those the wurst? It’s like they could at least include vegetables, like aubergine or something.

+1 for the funny joke! But as a story of "DEI" in real practice vs a company who fakes it: I worked as a system engineer for a gov contractor SaaS company with 4 C-levels. 2 were men, and 2 were women. The CEO was a second generation Italian. The CFO was a guy. The 2 women were in charge of the core part of the business: development lifecycle (design, dev, QA), and customer experience (helpdesk, consultants, sysads).…

It is gratifying you enjoyed the humor. At the time I thought I was following your redundant usage of "male" and "sausagefest," the latter referring in metaphor to genital particulars. But maybe it isn't redundant in that the practice of SOGI informs that gender identity is different from sex assigned at birth. Thus perhaps you were attempting to say that the all members of the group had a gender identity that matched their sex assigned at birth? It is beyond my comprehension of what constitutes workplace communication to communicate such matters.

I'm sorry to hear your federally regulated employer headed by an Italian, a guy and two scary sharp women who were ladies was bought out and sold to a terrible company.

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

#649

Post by goatlover »

domain8543 wrote: post #434
goatlover wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lebron plays in a league that's majority black in the footsteps of Michael Jordan, who was the most famous athlete on the planet and on the way to being a billionaire and owner. Lebron was anointed Jordan's heir while still in high school, and he got drafted straight into the NBA with the #1 overall pick. He's had numerous huge endorsements over his career. Exactly how did he struggle as a basketball player? White Me…

I said his struggles as a black man. As in being raised in poverty in the midwest (not a lot of opportunity for people of his background) and having no real shot at success in America other than selling his body.

Selling his body? Is that what millionaire athletes are doing? Or just the black ones? You mean Lebron didn’t want to play basketball but had no other choice? Unlike us office workers who grew up dreaming of being professional athlete, but weren’t good enough at sports?

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

#650

Post by mixmastamyk »

busterarm wrote: post #266
moomoo11 wrote: post #176

I wish we would transcend to a point where we look up to people based on their achievements and separate their race from it. I’m Asian btw. I can relate to Lebron just as much as I can relate to Neil Armstrong or Satya or Matz or Woz or Marie Curie because they are all excellent at what they did/do. I want to be excellent like them. Because we all are humans.

It's interesting to me seeing all asians and pacific islanders lumped together and excluded from most DEI efforts because HR departments think there's too many of you already and that you're too white-adjacent. Seems like blatant racism to me.

Also doesn't ever mention ageism, even in lip-service or passing.
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