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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

#681

Post by ModernMech »

koonsolo wrote: post #58

We shouldn't care about the skin color of people. And when I was young, I thought we would evolve into a world were skin color wouldn't matter. But now it seems some people 'accepted' that skin color matters, and so we have to positively discriminate skin colors that get discriminated against. Their belief is that there will always be racism against colored people, and somehow it needs to be offsetted. If find this v…

The problem is that as we started to transition to a world that didn’t discriminate against racial groups based on skin color, the people who wanted to discriminate against those groups changed tactics. They discriminated using other signals strongly correlated with race, largely with the same effect. The coup de grace was then declaring racial discrimination “over”, all the while maintaining the same racially discriminated power structures.

Now we live in a world where racial groups can be targeted with surgical precision using such signals. The racists aren’t using the N word out loud anymore, but the racial animus is still there. The promise of a colorblind world was naive, and it won’t work.

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

#682

Post by bigfoot675 »

drstewart wrote: post #287
grogenaut wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the n-bomb, gay and b*tch and other words as a universal slur and negative adjective were everywhere on irc. Casual rape references were constant, it was about as bad as Xbox voice chat. I have trouble going back and reading much of bash.org's top 100 due to the things you're claiming didn't exist. http://bash.org/?99060 http://bash.org/?5775 http://bash.org/?23601 Just because you didn't mean it or it didn't bot…

Wow, solid resource: http://bash.org/?121764 > why do you crackers steal everything from us? http://bash.org/?51331 >(@virt) cracker barrel is the most hilarious name for a place where a bunch of white people go http://bash.org/?86009 > It's sad when white people try to talk like black inner city people. It's doubly sad when those white people are European. :P Incredibly virulent anti-whiteness. Thank you for posting…

You're just proving their point -- these types of communities follow "Internet chat" trends which includes toxicity to literally everyone. Minorities are affected most by this dynamic. By moving the discussions "above ground", we force the discussions to use professional etiquette, and move the conversation closer to where it can have actual impact

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

#683

Post by alphabettsy »

pnutjam wrote: post #546
taude wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not claiming to be good. But I will say most my white friends don't actually engage with this conversations, nor do they even have friends of color, so....whatever. EDIT: BTW, I was only offering opinion to support what the OP was feeling and saying.

I was not intending to denigrate you, just opening up another possibility that could be overlooked. People in tech say question your assumptions, right?

The prevailing HN demographic doesn’t want their assumptions on diversity and race questioned.

The opinions and views of minorities are only acceptable and elevated on HN when they support the existing views that maintain the status quo or revert to some inaccurate remembrance of a better past.

Compare the comments and upvotes of this post to any of those discussing experiences with racism or lack of diversity.

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

#684

Post by JLCarveth »

mostly_lurks wrote: post #306
dbrueck wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might want to reflect for a minute on why you thought "but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone?" was an appropriate response to a black person talking about their experience of racism. I recognize you believed yourself to be mitigating the effect of your statement by prefacing it with "Not disputing your bad experiences," but I think you'll find that the net effe…

And you're here dismissing their experience because they're not black. See the issue?

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

#685

Post by qdog »

lliamander wrote: post #617
qdog wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I certainly haven't conducted a scientific study, this isn't my field.

I am, however, a white male who checks most of the 'tech dude' boxes, and I don't usually have to guess what people are thinking about this. I just have to be around at the right time for people to make their opinions known. So my evidence is anecdotal, but no, I don't have to wonder if people have racial bias, they will tell you if you let them. I have also observed a manager who's religion made women subservient, and no woman he ever managed was promoted. Bias or just probability? One of those women is now a very successful director of engineering. (She left his team and was promoted elsewhere)

While I can't speak to all DEI programs, the intent at most places I've been is to interview a wider range of people. That might show slight favor to interviewing, but the bar for hiring does not change. This is not just a problem in tech, the relatively recent NFL head coach issue of teams deciding to hire a coach and then interviewing a black coach after that "for compliance" with no intent of actually considering them is a huge problem.

If you work at a place that truly only hires people to check a box and doesn't care about that person's success or the impact around them, sure, move on.

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

#686

Post by fknorangesite »

surement wrote: post #616
fknorangesite wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course it was, but that's not what we're talking about. The link I chose was just the arbitrary one I picked from the google results.

Personally I remember hearing that joke in the 90s. If you want a different example, here's a variant from 2001: http://www.bash.org/?2832

Note that this one ends with "but some of the men are really women"; it's already old and well-known enough in '01 that people are modifying it for meta-humor.

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

#687

Post by Firmwarrior »

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…

Man, it's really weird to find myself on the SJW side of this argument for once. I'm usually the token brown guy in Libertarian circles.

Despite what you might've read on Tumblr or Fox News, I'm not planning to oppress anyone or commit white genocide.

When I'm doing interviews or looking at resumes, I'll give an extra moment of consideration to anyone born in the USA who seems to have pulled him/herself up by their bootstraps. I personally think that's enough DEI from me, and I don't think it's something you should be too incensed about.

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

#689

Post by goatlover »

Animats wrote: post #667
rirze wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing minorities lack is a proper value system. There are multiple immigrant groups that start from nothing and achieve upper middle-class status in a generation's time. Once we realize, as a society, that what minorities really need is internal support to reform their cultural systems, only then will minorities will empower themselves to do better.

There are multiple immigrant groups that start from nothing and achieve upper middle-class status in a generation's time. Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans... In Martin Luther King's day, the line was that all that was needed was equality of opportunity.

Malcom X also said this and pointed to immigrants As examples to immulate.

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

#690

Post by anonymouskimmer »

gfodor wrote: post #680
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrational bias will always exist, but it will always be a bunch of shifting goalposts. Once DEI systematizes enough it can be incorporated into whatever HR eventually turns in to, instead of being a separate division.

Purely irrational bias isn’t really the issue since most people of sound mind can be dissuaded from purely irrational acts. The issue is stereotyping of individuals based upon statistical or anecdotal patterns by people imagined to be a member of the same class combined with the usual human natures of otherization and tribalism. This isn’t purely irrational, since stereotypes can provide predictive power beyond pure…

I didn't use "purely", "entirely", or other otherwise modify "irrational", because I didn't want to be too verbose, but yes, any stereotyping has some degree of irrational underpinnings. Figuring out and teaching people what is irrational (or at least irrelevant) bias and what isn't irrational bias are the difficult parts.

> "Ironically, programs seeking to reduce discrimination which characterize the former phenomenon as entirely irrational is what helps perpetuate the latter, because it undermines any sense that there is a good faith engagement going on."

From what I recall I don't believe these programs generally characterize implicit bias as entirely irrational. I see them characterize it as problematic. So I don't see how the "undermine good faith engagement" follows from this.

On a total tangent I think the main problem with counteracting people's biases is that it can lead to people totally discounting their gut reactions. Which has lead to people getting murdered, raped, etcetera, by bad people.

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