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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

#871

Post by tacitusarc »

John23832 wrote: post #589
cmh89 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd. What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2014/febr... It's also the case that DEI groups want…

> What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was. The paper bag test doesn't make paper bags racist. It's a shade test. > It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'. I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.

I appreciate your response. I think I have been so repeatedly told that the ridiculous elements of DEI (and anti-racism) are the core of those two… movements? by their (ostensible) advocates that I now strongly associate them with silliness, though maybe it is in fact a case of Nazis and the swastika.

> I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.

I sat in a meeting where two young, white colleagues informed another colleague that the term was racist and we should come up with a different one. I tried to push back gently, but I am a white man and as such have no standing in the DEI hierarchy. So it was decided in this meeting full of white people that we would no longer use the term as it might cause offense to someone, maybe. And the two young engineers were satisfied they had made the world a slightly better place. I found it disturbing but don’t know what to do.

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

#872

Post by DrThunder »

ejstronge wrote: post #845
DrThunder wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dr. King's canon of work based on your memory of a very meme-ified quote" It's part of his most famous speech which follows the same line of thinking throughout... nice try with the gaslighting though. "One of the best pitchers in baseball history never had a chance to play in his prime. Why? Because of an accident of his genetics." Absolutely not, he missed out on playing because people back then decided to base hi…

> It's part of his most famous speech which follows the same line of thinking throughout... nice try with the gaslighting though. You're still side-stepping my line of questioning. This is like reading a module name and assuming you understand the code. > Absolutely not, he missed out on playing because people back then decided to base hiring off of skin color (white skin) instead of basing it off of merit (pitching…

You cannot claim past bias on skin color and argue for future bias on skin color. That is what you're doing and it's cognitive dissonance. You need to break down your arguments to their base, instead you're just putting a cognitive block in place to stop yourself from doing that.

Are you trying to deny his skin color kept him from pitching? By your own admission this pitcher was good and was only stopped due to his skin color. Therefore, the fix is to look at the skills he had as pitcher and drop the irrelevant skin color requirement, correct? And yet you're here trying to promote switched bias where we look at skin color FIRST instead of merit. That is the base of your argument whether you want to admit it or not.

You can falsely claim MLK didn't want a society based on merit and wanted skin color to count for everything, I don't really care, it's not all that relevant to my point. Arguing that some people might have an underlying bias for skin color also isn't really relevant. We do not, as a society, just stop trying to move forward because a few outliers might impede 100% progress.

I DO want a society based on merit because the alternative is a complete collapse of what we have. A society based of diversity of skin color (which is a really superficial useless diversity) above merit based skills is a dead society.

"I wish you luck learning anything that doesn't match your opinions."

Are you looking for someone to just be submissive to what you're claiming and not challenge you? Are you sure I'm the one that needs "luck" here?

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

#873

Post by kodah »

mikrotikker wrote: post #863
LordDragonfang wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you link me to the source that describes intersectionality in a way even remotely approximating that? Or where this "victim hierarchy" is detailed? I'd love to calculate my victim score™.

https://medium.com/@burntoakboy/the-hierarchy-of-victimhood-... .

AOC isnt exactly a shining light of intersectionalism. In fact, she kind of prides herself in tribalism. Consider this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/aoc/status/1103163478024601601 Rather than trying to share ground with others she's being reminded that she regularly drowns out other people's voices. She went on to do exactly that after this.

If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not all people who use intersectionalist words actually have the values, then I'd respond with, "duh".

Intersectionality isn't about telling one person's story or exemplifying one person's pain. It's about showing that these things are interconnected and effect people differently, and ways in which you probably wouldn't expect. It does the absolute opposite of a hierarchy.

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

#874

Post by poorbutdebtfree »

DIE and "representation matters" makes no sense to Indian-Americans. They are the highest earning people in America and were nothing but "thank you come again" jokes in Hollywood and MSM in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s (Harold & Kumar).

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

#875

Post by mikrotikker »

ModernMech wrote: post #870
mikrotikker wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://medium.com/@burntoakboy/the-hierarchy-of-victimhood-... .

What’s missing here is a notion of intersectionality, which explicitly is about how people are not just a singular identity, but an “intersection” of many - some of which may confer privilege, some of which may be discriminated against. Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about…

You missed the forest for the trees, friend.

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

#876

Post by mikrotikker »

kodah wrote: post #873
mikrotikker wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://medium.com/@burntoakboy/the-hierarchy-of-victimhood-... .

AOC isnt exactly a shining light of intersectionalism. In fact, she kind of prides herself in tribalism. Consider this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/aoc/status/1103163478024601601 Rather than trying to share ground with others she's being reminded that she regularly drowns out other people's voices. She went on to do exactly that after this. If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not al…

Well thats just it. If you're a Muslim female your score is higher than a Muslim male. If you're a gay trans disabled Muslim you're higher than the Muslim woman. Thats how you figure out your victim score(tm).

(I could care less about AOC. She was like 1% of content of the article I posted.)

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

#877

Post by boppo1 »

mostly_lurks wrote: post #754
boppo1 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might want to reflect for a minute that you are playing the exact DEI game that the OP is complaining about. You are dismissing your parent post's argument without addressing content of the argument. Essentially, your post boils down to "Don't argue with Black people. "Lived Experience" trumps all rhetoric and discussion. In the future, please keep your thoughts and concerns to yourself." You are fosterin…

I was not engaging with the argument made by the post I replied to because the poster's argument is completely beside the point. When someone says "I experienced racism because I'm black," the appropriate response is not "Well, actually, lots of people who aren't black experienced that terrible thing." So what if lots of non-black people experienced that terrible thing? That's not what we're talking about here. Your…

Are you Black?

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

#878

Post by ModernMech »

mikrotikker wrote: post #875
ModernMech wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s missing here is a notion of intersectionality, which explicitly is about how people are not just a singular identity, but an “intersection” of many - some of which may confer privilege, some of which may be discriminated against. Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about…

You missed the forest for the trees, friend.

There’s not much of a forest there, as far as I can tell. Unless you want to actually make a point?

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

#879

Post by cbeach »

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…

You said that people in affected communities need to have role models in the industry with the same skin colour.

Firstly, young people aren’t stupid. They will be acutely aware if those role models were created in a tokenistic way. Young people know when older people try to distort the real world in order to manipulate them (whether or not it’s with good intentions).

Secondly, what makes you so sure that young people are so bigoted/sensitive that they would negatively judge an industry that was largely made up of people of skin colours other than their own? I think young people these days seem confident and tolerant of others regardless of their skin colour.

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

#880

Post by tablespoon »

not_a_pet_rock wrote: post #631
tablespoon wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist. I think that's a inaccurate and misleading description. I think the correct term is "colorism" not "racism," and it sounds like those distinctions were more significant wi…

colorism is just racism.

It's an embarrassment to HN that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683200 got flagged to death. IIRC, the author of that comment is from Bangladesh and is a position to actually know something about colorism.
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