Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Comments
firefoxd
lolinder
Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing.
So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
seadan83
I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief?
According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place.
I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...
rayiner
America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
xrd
Your comment about white people that didn't have anyone to do with slavery doesn't seem entirely correct. I'm one of those people (great grandparents were German or Scottish immigrants). But my mom's house is in a neighborhood where black people were explicitly prohibited from buying houses (it was on the deed at the time). And, loans from the government were red lined. Isn't that government collusion that benefitted only me and harmed black people? It didn't help Latinos or Japanese immigrants in the twenties. I'm not sure if that counts as having nothing to do with slavery. That impact seems directly correlated to slavery, although the dragnet could have impacted recent African immigrants in the 1920s.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
rayiner
Say you inherit your mom’s house which is worth more as a result of historical redlining, and your wife inherit’s her mom’s house and it’s worth less. So there is some persistent economic disparity as a result of past actions. But both houses probably are worth more than my wife’s grandmother’s house, which is a modular house in rural Oregon. And my dad’s family house is a tin roof building in a third world village that didn’t have electricity last time I was there in the late 1980s.
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
yndoendo
Economic value of a house is just a single factor between the two. Redlining has a host of other issues that are often unspoken about or ignored. That rural house in Oregon most likely is in a better environment. Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted. Because of lack regulation or companies just paying low cost fines and making criminal acts just part of business their model. This increase the cost of insurance and medical expenses for those that live in redline districts.
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
[0] https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highli...
xyzzyz
> Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted.
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
foxglacier
There's a clear reason for these ideas being popular but it's something you have to work out yourself because everyone who writes about it is too deeply politically motivated to address it objectively.
rayiner
As to teaching history, the question is how you do it. Growing up in Virginia, I learned about slavery as a cautionary tale: we treated people in the past differently, and that was bad, and we strive to treat everyone the same now. That’s good history.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
xrd
Darn it, rayiner. I should know better than to debate you. I always learn a lot.
harvey9
Everyone learning stuff is what's supposed to happen in a debate.
kybernetikos
You can see the difference between one immediate family and another in the DNA. DNA differences range from distinctions between individuals to distinctions between species. How do you decide where it makes sense to draw a middle line and say "ethnic group"?
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
rayiner
You can easily distinguish Pakistanis and Bangladeshis by DNA: https://www.brownpundits.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Rplo.... Bangladeshis are an extremely tightly clustered group.
lazide
Have you spent time in other countries?
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
stratocumulus0
> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
rayiner
Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
klooney
The point of all the tiny European states is that they're blood and soil ethnostates. A lot of people got killed to establish that point.
dotancohen
As a non-European I'd like to read more. What exactly should I be googling to get the real history and not the clean history that is commonly told?
esafak
Read about the French Revolution and the origin of the nation state.
rnabsv
So, Germany previously had Prussia, Bavaria and the rest. They were separate kingdoms, but all ethnically German.
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
dotancohen
Thank you. I wouldn't exactly call France a tiny state. Are there any others that I should specifically be looking at? The Europeans pride themselves as being quote unquote civilized people, did they not have uniform ethnicities within their borders before the founding of their states? If not, then what did define those borders?
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
esafak
Killing is not the only way to ethnically homogenize a population. Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.
dotancohen
> Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.
lazide
Pretty much still does against the Kurds
lazide
Have you not heard of the Crusades? Or the Inquisition?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Inquisition]
It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.
lazide
What history of WW1 and WW2 did you read that seemed ‘clean’?
hjgjhyuhy
In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north.
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
nordic-ethnos
That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now.
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise...
https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
JumpCrisscross
> Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”
Literally the Vikings [1].
> in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn
Yes [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
nshfgav
Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white.
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
steveBK123
> Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900.
Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
rayiner
It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
steveBK123
Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
lazide
When everything is a choice, the choices you make are what you are, correct?
fhsTabv
Space and wages of course. In Germany you are a bank slave for your entire live if you want to buy a house. Meanwhile rich people from all over the world buy up prime real estate.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
steveBK123
I use ethnostate more as a statement of fact than as derogatory. Often though I do it to needle lefty euros who like to tell Americans how much more racist we we are than them.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
ekianjo
> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white,
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
portaouflop
The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do. If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
AYBABTME
You know it's the same everywhere? It's hopeless to wish for all of humanity to change their common intuitions and independently reproduced heuristics.
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
gottorf
There's a white Korean member of the National Assembly[0], whose existence I find fascinating. I have no doubt that he would also get spoken to in English on the streets, if the speaker does not know who he is. And even more funnily, supposedly his Korean has a thick Jeolla accent!
lazide
Also, born and grew up in Korea to missionaries, only to be deported to the US by the Japanese when they took over Korea. Then moved back later in life.
Talk about an unusual life!
portaouflop
You are correct of course.
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position. Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
gottorf
> I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position
The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.
> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country
Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?
As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.
We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.
rayiner
Nobody owes you anything.
portaouflop
And?
thunky
> The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German
If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
portaouflop
Even if that number would hold up - Why? It’s still more dignified for all involved. Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.
lazide
Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German.
Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
portaouflop
Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.
It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
nec4b
>> Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
portaouflop
I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
The party is internally divided but a strong portion of it openly endorses facist “heroes” - for example calling the SS “all good people”. They try to hide it and purge their extremist members but it’s not working. Höcke and Gauland are very obviously racists as are many other less prominent members of the party.
>"Germany for the Germans". >referring to Germans of Turkish origin as "fatherless vermin" and "camel drivers", who should go back to their "mud huts" and "multiple wives".
Yea those are definitely not racist or facist statements /s
Edit: even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
nec4b
>> I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
Maybe what you think you know is wrong?
>> even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
Maybe because they don't consider AFD as far right enough?
AdrianB1
Because probability and logic says it is the best way.
boringg
It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.
portaouflop
It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.
lazide
People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.
steveBK123
Indeed humans are unfortunately tribal creatures.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
visarga
> The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
xrd
Yes, I've lived in Brazil for almost a year, and lived in Japan for two years, and was more or less fluent in both the languages of those countries. I've traveled to almost every country in Europe and South America.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
lazide
Because how do you propose doing reparations without causing the exact problem I’m describing?
After all, there are practical problems of who is eligible, how long, and who gets to decide that.
Not only that, but at that point there is now strong financial incentives to be in specific groups. At least while the money flows.
Not everyone can be eligible, or it loses all meaning. Someone has to pay, or it can’t be funded.
Someone has to be officially the victim, and officially the offender, or such a program can’t actually exist. Etc.
These aren’t modern problems either, and this isn’t ‘modern’ racism, whatever that is. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz]
xrd
Ah, I see your point now. I agree there isn't a way to do this easily. And I see what you are saying about the impact of separating into groups to achieve the goal of reparations.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
lazide
But as you note, you used race to discriminate, and someone who otherwise would have been qualified who wasn’t black (apparently), lost not due to some skill gap or the like, but apparently purely due to the color of their skin. At least that is how I read it.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
Frankly, they often do.
hdctambien
If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
lazide
Those situations you are describing are discrimination. At least by the meaning of ‘a choice based off criteria’. The vast majority of them are legally just fine, but as you note produce a specific, rather predictable outcome yes?
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
visarga
> for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population
But there are also personal preferences, and some groups have different average preferences than other groups. Look at rich countries, women often prefer non-STEM jobs if they have the choice, while poor countries can have more equality because women will pursue traditionally male jobs lacking other good options.
lazide
That argument has historically not been accepted by the DOL in the US. We’ll see what happens now.
visarga
> Because how do you propose doing reparations without causing the exact problem I’m describing?
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
portaouflop
Humans are tribal. As much as I wish it weren’t the case often, I don’t think just pretending we’re all one big family will work.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
whatshisface
The answer is to stop paying lip service to the idea that an ethnicity is like a big family - an idea almost nobody in the US believes, so this will not be that hard - and start saying what we all know to be true: that we're all individuals whose behavior and loyalties are determined by our character and values, not the circumstances of our birth, our skin tones, or which side of a pointless conflict our ancestors fled here to escape.
lazide
In most cases, it’s not so much that they’re a family, but rather a group of folks with somewhat aligned interests that can fight together for those interests.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
whatshisface
Ethnic groups don't actually have collective interests. Individuals have specific examples of universal interests. Sometimes individuals are lead to believe that they have collective interests, but that's usually because they're being made to do something against all of their individual interests. Let me offer a few examples.
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
lazide
I’m not sure that you’re saying what you think you’re saying, if you look at your examples a little more closely.
If you were an Irish immigrant in NYC in the 30’s, would you still say that about an Irish community group?
How about a Latino workers group in 70’s Los Angeles?
Or for that matter a ‘black community’ group in 70’s Los Angeles too.
whatshisface
Irish New Yorkers in 1933 didn't want Irish rights, Irish houses and Irish jobs, they wanted rights, houses and jobs. That's what I mean by individual examples of universal interests. Nobody went around saying, "I'll only work for an Irishman," or "I'll only live in a building built by an Irish mason."
LA has always had a lot of gang warfare, which divides itself along ethnic lines because that's the underbelly of human nature. Gang warfare is a great example of everybody doing things that are very bad for themselves and others because of a perceived division with little basis in fact. If there's enough gang warfare I guess you could see racially segregated unions, like in the deep south, but that is again against worker's interests just like how segregated churches oppose God.
It is very difficult to find even a selfish motive for segregation unless you are an actual slaveowner or apartheid government official.
lazide
Irish New Yorkers were being heavily discriminated against, to the point that worrying about rights, houses, and jobs was a particularly serious and somewhat unique problem for Irish folks (individuals!) there at that time. It’s not like someone fresh off the boat is going to be able to pass as anything else.
There were also prevalent crime issues and ethnic gangs at the time. And many people (Irish in particular) DID go around saying those things you assert no one ever said.
For people who ‘looked Irish’ it was absolutely in their interest to align with these groups to some extent, or they’d be discriminated against and not have useful power to fight against it, and not have a group of people aligned with them that would provide housing, jobs, etc. to them.
In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason the Irish stopped being discriminated against so heavily is because of the political machines and gangs that punished groups for discriminating against them this way.
Same with the Catholics, actually.
So what are you actually talking about?
whatshisface
I can see that we have different interpretations of what acts were central to the progress of civil rights, and which were ancillary or even effects.
I don't think, for example, the "mafia" was a major contributor to equal rights for Italian immigrants. One obvious piece of evidence is that today, the mafia has been weakened thanks to the efforts of the police, but Italians haven't become persecuted as a result.
Membership in the Italian Mafia has turned out to be bad on net for the good of the people the families claim to represent. I think some people can get rich doing it but it is not a beneficial or admirable lifestyle.
If you want another example, where were all the Jewish gangs? I'm not aware of a single one. Some famous gangsters were Jewish (at least if you count the movies, I don't know about real life), and I don't think the cause of equal rights has suffered as a result. You have to read this with a smile even though the topic is very serious because the ideas involved would be at home on Saturday Night Live.
One final example is what could be the most hated organizations in America: the white nationalist gangs that only exist in prison. They are all in jail, and equal rights for people of European descent hasn't suffered at all. I'm surprised I ever participated in a conversation where I had a reason to write this, but white nationalists have no positive goals, not even for anybody.
The advancement of the universal recognition of equal rights for all is a much better explanation because unlike the rise of gangs, it hasn't been reversed.
portaouflop
There were a ton of Jewish gangs in New York: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_organized_cr...
Also your example of white nazi gangs in prison: they exist for the same reason- people need to band together to survive
whatshisface
Well, at least I admitted I didn't know. :-)
As to your second point, not all Nash equilibria are beneficial. Gang formation is a lot like a Keynesian beauty contest in that appealing to the basest parts of our nature is the safest bet, and I think we can agree that this has nothing to do with anything good.
People do not need to "band together to survive" in that sense. Those gangs were mainly shaking down businesses in their own neighborhoods anyway, and everybody is a lot better off now that they're history.
lazide
So now you’re trying to say we should just go back to 1930’s New York (and prisons!) and tell them they should just stop forming those ethnic gangs because clearly they don’t actually need to do that, and they’d be better off without them?
Hey, you’re welcome to if you want. Time travel may be hard, but I’m sure someone would let you into your local Folsom equivalent if you asked.
lazide
That is a rather weird shifting of the goal posts, and completely ignores that there is such a thing as collective interests if a collective is being specifically targeted, or has special interests correct?
Which is what you seemed to be rejecting?
whatshisface
Yes, collectives don't have special interests. Individuals have specific instances of universal interests, like security or freedom. "Black people" doesn't have a separate existence from a black person. By guarding the principle of equality before the law, you are not getting involved in anybody's business but yours.
It isn't right to view something like equality before the law as a matter of somebody else's self-interest, or to justify a ruthless pursuit of self-interest by recasting it as service of an imagined collective interest.
lazide
I honestly don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Does it have a practical point?
If a bunch of, say Catholics, get together to make a community group and lobby for something they want - how is that not that groups ‘special interests’ in every practical way?
whatshisface
In 100% of cases, that group will either be lobbying for a universal value in a less effective way than if they were defined by the cause, or advocating for the interests of a few of the members of the larger group against the interests or views of other members.
Anyone who doesn't find that self-evident, I challenge to think of a single political opinion that is universal to members of any religious sect or ethnicity that is not universal to all human beings.
lazide
The right for Sikh’s to wear religious weapons in places where weapons are normally forbidden.
Dispensation for Orthodox Jews to observe Shabbat even when they would otherwise be compelled to break it due to civil duties.
The right for Muslims to take specific breaks for prayer when required, and have a place for such prayer.
And I can go on.
Or are you going to move the goal posts again?
whatshisface
Those are all the same right, the right to practice your religion without being expelled from normal society. Nobody has different rights from anybody else, we just exercise them in different ways.
lazide
Literally these are different rights for different groups of people. Based on the dictionary and legal definitions of ‘right’. I’m again not sure what you think you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem to agree with reality.
erikerikson
Some minor edits:
> Humans are tribal. [...], I don’t think just pretending we’re all one [tribe] will work. [...] I hope we can build [a] common [tribe].
KPGv2
> America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
<< White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
fsloth
"DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity)"
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
visarga
> What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
Interviewing for orchestras behind a screen, so the judges can't see the age/gender/race. That's a good way to go about equality.
eadmund
> White people aren't being punished.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
greentxt
The word "justice" being the keyword (now, for some people) for DEI indicates it is precisely about punishment. At least to those who frame it in terms of "justice". I see that word and I know it is a buzzword for angry people. In the 90s when I was first persuaded as to the necessities of policies that instantiate reverse racial discrimination (i.e. affirmative action) talk was more about equality and unity, and increasing efficiency of the system. Blacks were (still are) not utilized to their full potential, so aa offered a common good inthe form of a more productive, better functioning society. I don't encounter those arguments as much niw as arguments about "justice" or the impossible to define "equity" (not the same as the phrase "equality of outcome" which was a very concrete and useful construct for thinking about racism). Historical context is everything.
hdctambien
What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
logifail
I don't wish to throw any fuel onto the fire, but people appear to have very different experiences of DEI.
lazide
affirmative action as implemented requires percentage targets (based on statistical models of the overall population) based on race/gender/etc.
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
jazzyjackson
This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing. We are all harmed when we are amongst racist assholes refusing to coexist with others based on skin color.
KPGv2
> This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing
Did you sleepwalk through literally every American history class you had growing up?
It boggles the mind that you can write "discrimination against people doesn't help the people who aren't discriminated against."
That is the point of discrimination: to benefit those who aren't discriminated against. That's why it was created, that's why it persists, and that's why people who benefit from the discrimination oppose its cessation. Look elsewhere in this discussion: the people who historically benefit from that oppression are saying its abatement is oppression directed back at themselves.
greentxt
His point was that racism harms all. Calm down: benefit of the doubt goes a long way on hot topics like this.
runarberg
The beneficiaries of discrimination are usually split among class lines. So you have economically poor white folks who are indeed harmed by racial discrimination—though not nearly as harmed as the discriminated groups them selves—and rich white folks who are the only ones making money off of it.
The harm is often second factor such as the abundance of cheap (or free) labor yields less bargaining power and you end up working for less than you otherwise would have (but also the psychological harm of living in an unfair society). But next to the harm caused to those who are indeed discriminated against, the harm is rather minute.
Levitz
>You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
jiscariot
My issue is the metrics constantly parroted to show inequality wouldn't (shouldn't) stand muster to an Econ 101 student.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
wyclif
How about the English? I'm a second-generation 'white' American citizen. My grandfather was a Canadian citizen from London, Ontario who migrated to the USA in the mid 1920s as a boy. The English, largely due to the influence of Wilberforce, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which outlawed slavery in the British Empire and predated the American Civil War.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
youngtaff
The Tusla Race Massacre took place in 1921!
anon373839
> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
UncleMeat
MLK's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering.
MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.
nine_k
MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian.
The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal.
So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world.
Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor.
Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
UncleMeat
MLK believed in equal worth. But he did not believe that the mechanism to achieve this in public was systems-level colorblindness.
I also think that Christians specifically should be comfortable with the concept of generational sin and personal sacrifice for social justice rather than a vigorous defense that one's achievement's are solely their own and must be hoarded at all costs.
naasking
> I also think that Christians specifically should be comfortable with the concept of generational sin and personal sacrifice for social justice rather than a vigorous defense that one's achievement's are solely their own and must be hoarded at all costs.
This is a false choice. They are not the only two options.
goatlover
Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
treyd
This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
marcusverus
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place".
jonathanlb
I think the voters already informed her about that. The campaign was shut down a few months ago.
Cthulhu_
> "we all wind up at the same place"
Yes? You're presenting this as some kind of gotcha but isn't that what the ultimate goal is?
I mean there's multiple ways to go about it; one that a lot of people object to is e.g. giving people jobs they're not qualified for. But another that I myself benefited from was a government that paid for everyone's education from elementary to university level, allowing me to go from a blue collar lower class to a comfortable middle class income level.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Good for you for being able to use the system to you advantage. Parent has a point though. DEI goals kept moving and changing along with the language in ridiculous direction. Question of the expected future state is very much relevant here. Note that we may disagree on what is acceptable future state.
xrd
I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
water9
Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
intended
Without context nothing is offensive.
I have no problems with Tan suits for example.
Good people don’t tell you to hate, sure?
They do tell you to take care of yourself and to protect yourself. That some people are evil and should be stopped.
Bad people sound like good people and use different words to achieve the same goals.
ouEight12
>That some people are evil and should be stopped.
That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it?
the only difference is in who the far left vs far right each believe "should be stopped".
amanaplanacanal
Are you saying Make America Great Again means a return to the 1870s?
etchalon
You're implying Black Americans should be thankful to return to an era where they were slightly wealthier, but had fewer rights, fewer protections and enormous, normalization, socially acceptable discrimination.
swatcoder
The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
PaulDavisThe1st
Which more severe or intense or extensive or impactful historical inequalities are you thinking of?
liontwist
If you meet a Chinese person can you tell if they are from a minority group that was enslaved in Vietnam as recently as the 70s, or an upper class Han family?
What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.
And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.
All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.
Levitz
Being poor.
A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
swatcoder
You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point!
But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today.
Who might see more impact from more opportunity though:
* the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression
* the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business
They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace.
Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
Radim
The one that gave us the very word "slave"?
To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.
mjevans
Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome?
As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track.
Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past.
I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
PaulDavisThe1st
> Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary.
Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
gg82
They mostly do it by measuring the family bank accounts!
User23
Measuring potential isn’t particularly difficult. Everyone from the NFL to the US military does an adequate job of it.
Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s literally good enough for government work.
jimnotgym
Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test.
For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star.
I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test.
So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
User23
In our present society, gaming the test is part of the test.
Whether it's learning the social mores of the institution you're trying to join, or grinding test prep, or whatever else.
Is that ideal? Probably not, but like I said nothing's perfect.
macintux
How do you game the color of your skin? How long does it take to game your accent in a second or third language?
User23
Nepotism, obviously.
RestlessMind
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place. In absence of a clear definition, people just fill in whatever they want.
KPGv2
> That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place
Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends.
One might consider [this seminal paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.e...) on the concept of social equity, and then google "equity" to see how institutions are using the term.
Most of them, you can see a connection between the ideas expressed in that paper and the definitions the modern institutions purport to believe in.
RestlessMind
> Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means
I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English.
"Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience.
Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
water9
It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident.
It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out.
You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
Sabinus
>historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race
Highly correlated with one race for a particular moment in history. New immigrants from Africa don't share the same disadvantage.
Is targeting a divisive proxy for disadvantage worth targeting when you can just target poverty itself?
lazide
Ah, the problem for many people is they see being poor as the worst sin of all.
rayiner
Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
KPGv2
> Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation.
We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
fzeroracer
> Are we perpetuating them?
Yes.
> Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies.
Now what would you call this exactly?
rayiner
What factors were controlled for that led you to the conclusion that is racism? E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia. What about non-marijuana criminal records? A person is more likely to be charged with marijuana possession if they have other crimes on their record. What about age? The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44. People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Race-related factoids in ACLU reports should be viewed with skepticism. It’s made-for-litigation advocacy, not science. People of different races differ on many other dimensions and it’s easy to cherry pick results for advocacy reasons.
For example, I was interested in this notion of a “bamboo ceiling”—the idea that Asians are underrepresented in management or as corporate directors. Turns out that effect disappears when you account for age (the median Asian is 36), language proficiency (most Asian Americans are foreign born, and only 57% of those are proficient in english).
fzeroracer
> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.
Why do you think that is?
> The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
> People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
You said:
>I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
And I'm telling you, directly and upfront, why it matters. You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor. You have chosen to try and shift away from the argument when I brought up why it matters. The persistent effects of past bad acts is why it matters where you were born and of what skin color.
ponow
No, it's equal outcones, or worse, turn the tables. Racist hiring aka affirmative action illustrates this.
skellington
The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting.
I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms.
There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole.
(Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.)
But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
naasking
> It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
philipwhiuk
How do you measure that other than equality of outcomes?
PaulDavisThe1st
You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society.
You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective).
If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
raffraffraff
Let's say you have a company in Warsaw full of lovely people who want what's best for the company. They have an opening for an infrastructure engineer and need somebody with particular skills, but are willing to interview candidates who don't have those skills but show aptitude , interest and a willingness to learn. They throw the doors open wide and interview everybody who applies. They only get white males applying for the job.
If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.
The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.
Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.
PaulDavisThe1st
Well the first thing to do would to acknowledge that the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.
The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.
The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.
raffraffraff
> The second thing to do would be to ask why only white males are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that.
But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?
This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.
PaulDavisThe1st
I said in my opening line:
> ... the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
raffraffraff
Sorry, gotcha. I read and responded while on the move, hence the stupid.
tjpnz
You don't have to practice American-style DEI. Removing blockers for women and people from working class backgrounds is IME far more productive.
skellington
Yes, you do everything except measure merit.
Equal outcomes for everybody.
This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
defrost
> This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
\1 Is this a real problem in actual fire deployments or simply a made up bit of Fox News DEI outrage?
\2 Here in the Western Australian rural bush fire service 100lb women and people in wheelchairs are valuable members that operate GIS terminals, coordinate aircraft, work as administrators and bookkeepers, etc.
Animats
This is the actual test to get into firefighter training in California.[1] This is just to get into training. Graduating is tougher.
Eight test events in 10 minutes 20 seconds. All events must be passed. No breaks. Candidates wear 50 pounds of weight through the whole test. Plus an additional 25 pounds for the stair climb. The events are all firefighting-related.
Here's a woman firefighter passing this test.[2] With two minutes to spare.
LA City Fire is about 3% female.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh3EoE1yJnQ
PaulDavisThe1st
Nothing in what I described called for "do everything except measure merit". And I specifically disclaimed attempting equal outcomes.
I'm a firefighter in NM. Your comments about firefighters are pathetic and ignorant.
Manuel_D
Send applications that are identical save for identifying characteristics (e.g. names, ethnic extracurriculars) and observe of there are disparities in call back rates. Or anonymize applications and observe if the rates change.
Equality of outcome is absolutely not a measure that ensures nondiscrimination. An extreme example, but imagine if we instituted a policy mandating equal outcomes in murder convictions with respect to gender. Would that make the justice system fairer?
xocnad
Since you are qualifying what type of societal engineers you don't trust are there ones that you do?
wsintra2022
Hip hop artists from the 90s I thought for a while. Nowadays not sure anymore. Folk artists from any decade are usually my more trusted societal engineers, going all the way back to maybe even before Jesus.
kmeisthax
Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group.
In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics.
My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media".
To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it.
[0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
ConspiracyFact
> Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity.
Only if you assume that group-level differences can’t exist.
galaxyLogic
But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity.
Or are you thinking they caused by genetics?
gottorf
> But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity.
There's no evidence that this is true. Even if you take the extreme position (against which there is plenty of data) that different ethnic groups are more or less identically "genetically" capable at a group level, both in terms of the average member as well as the outliers, the fact that different groups have different cultural values and practices mean that those differences play out in considerable differences in results. And those differences get even more exaggerated at the outlying levels.
For example, the US population is roughly 14% black and 6% Asian, but among NFL players, it's 58% black and a 0.1% Asian. Even if you assume no group-level differences in inborn ability and potential, the fact that football is a much bigger part of black American culture than it is Asian American culture would mean that after generations of such cultural differences, you will end up with such a skewed distribution.
In real life, of course, there are group-level differences at the genetic level, which compound into culture and over time result in wildly different outcomes for members of those groups. Over nine-tenths of the world's top sprinters are of West African descent; same for the marathon and people of East African descent. You might easily imagine that a group of people composed of those who naturally run fast will develop cultural customs that involve running, which further develops the talent pool in that group.
Apply that over generations, and it results in such a big difference between groups that a naive observer concludes that external causes (i.e. racism) is the most reasonable explanation, coming from the faulty assumption that group-level differences do not exist outside of such external causes.
In fact, I would go a step further a claim that it's virtually impossible to take a subgroup of a broader population that precisely reflects the composition of the latter, along any lines.
ConspiracyFact
I think that the most likely explanation is that both environment and genetics are factors. In order to view inequality of outcome as proof of inequality of opportunity, you have to believe that group differences are due entirely to environmental conditions. That's a rather extreme position to take.
andriesm
Of course genetics play a role - some people can get by on long term sleep of 4-5 hours a night, while most people need more. Some people have fantastic health from genetics (and then work hard to maintain it), while others are born with a slew of minor ailments that make them less productive. Not to speak of inteligence or natural talents, height etc.
gopher_space
Unfortunately your alternative is a society engineered from the top down to be deliberately unfair.
Dalewyn
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life."
-Jean-Luc Picard
Additionally, the Declaration of Independence states our fundamental philosophy as a nation that all men are created equal. We all start from the same line, but where life takes us and what we make of it is completely up to life and us the individual.
galaxyLogic
Note it says "all men". Not "all men and women". Big difference
skellington
It is commonly understood that 'men' in that context and in the context of the time is a reference to 'mankind' or 'the race of men' which means the human race, not males specifically.
StackRanker3000
So why weren’t women allowed to vote when those words were written?
Levitz
It's not as if every man was able to vote back then either. Property owners, of age, white.
The story of universal suffrage isn't that clear cut.
StackRanker3000
So did the Founding Fathers actually believe that all human beings were created equal?
Levitz
If I was to say, yes. This is an opinion from someone that isn't even from the US, mind you, but given what I know about the constitution I do think it was the case.
To this day, we generally don't allow people to vote in an election if they aren't a citizen yet I reckon we don't consider non-citizens lesser human beings. The idea of allowing only those with property to vote (because they have stake in the country) or to only allow men (they will be fighting the wars) are outdated, but they aren't nonsensical.
gopher_space
I think like half of them did. The compromise over slavery cursed our nation.
4ndrewl
Literally (and I mean that) no difference when it was written. Language changed.
Dalewyn
>Language changed.
I argue that it hasn't; we say "man" both by itself and as part of another word (eg: manpower) in many contexts where gender is literally irrelevant.
What has changed is the likelihood of certain individuals engaging in sexism in the name of equality.
Dalewyn
To copy myself from another sibling comment:
Man as in mankind. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
>1a(1): an individual human
>b: the human race : HUMANKIND
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
Cthulhu_
Linguistic pedantry with strong sexist overtones said in bad faith. Come on.
spiritplumber
Equity is more like... wheelchair ramps. Or chirpers at traffic lights for blind folks. Or subtitles.
spaceguillotine
MLK was a communist who was killed for his views by the US Government.
He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into.
Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
thefounder
>> Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
maeil
This only ever happens when protesting those with fairly little power, very lower middle management, and those in actual power don't care.
It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else.
Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently.
Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
roenxi
You seem to be talking about protests. Protests will rarely succeed because protesting is something of an already-lost-the-battle tactic. If the protesters had any effective options they'd be doing that instead of protesting. Protesting is for people who don't have the numbers/power to force change, don't have a persuasive argument to get what they want through formal channels and can't think of a better strategy than basically shouting complaints into the wind. Sometimes they can achieve success regardless, but generally protests don't work. There might be protests because people like outdoor activity, but they are a sideshow or charitably an opportunity to meet people. Effective non-violent tactics don't involve on protesters.
For something interesting consider the topical Roe v. Wade decision, both in its establishment and removal. That involved some significant questions of rights and was settled without violence. Protesting, on either side of the issue, was largely ineffective compared to small groups of organised people working to align the legal system over long periods of time.
thefounder
It won’t happen overnight. It’s not like violence beings best results that fast. What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? Or the Islamic state? Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
ben_w
> What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ?
He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...
And the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan.
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
The parent's comment is fascinating isn't it? One of Bin Laden's stated goals was to get US engaged and bled out through protracted and costly war, which he actually managed to achieve..
I mean this is not ancient history and lot of it at this point is public record.
maeil
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
How had it been going up until that point? Very poorly too. The idea that peaceful protests by Palestinians would've changed that would be so awfully naive that I've never even encountered that argument.
Draiken
It won't happen.
It's too easy to forget that even our beloved weekends were only achieved after bloodshed.
The people in power successfully managed to sell us the belief that we can achieve change by sitting on our asses and yelling really loud. If we spend 5 minutes thinking about the current power structures, it's clear that no amount of peaceful protesting will ever achieve any meaningful change.
The only real power we have is to withhold our labor on strikes, and somehow even those need permission (!) to run.
compiler-guy
Although the women’s suffrage movement in the United States did have some violence in the extremes, proposal, advocacy, and ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the US Cobstitution (which granted women the right to vote in the US) was not driven by violence in anything but the most remote margins.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
ArnoVW
Mind you, feminists had a woman, often several, in every household.
My guess is that if race was determined at birth by chance (instead of genetics) we would have the same racial distribution on a societal level but race issues would move faster.
jazzyjackson
King was a Christian, he considered communism atheistic.
jsnell
> the first time having two black senators is now
This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
KPGv2
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
That's a 50% increase.
deanishe
> According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
Over2Chars
According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject.
So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...?
lolinder
> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade.
I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.
I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
torginus
>FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
paulryanrogers
Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
paulryanrogers
^mitigated, not motivated
chii
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
KPGv2
> why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
chii
> a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
gottorf
> do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
Marazan
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
Aunche
It depends on how this percentage was raised. If they actually increased the black and brown talent pool by 50%, that would be an unequivocal success. What I suspect actually happens is that recruiters are incentivized to improve DEI metrics, so they simply hand out more interviews to underrepresented candidates. The end result is that higher tier companies simply poach these candidates from lower tier companies.
o0-0o
So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
kridsdale1
Apparently Indians don’t count as Brown.
aprilthird2021
In DEI parlance, black and brown refers to African-Americans and Latinos, although, curiously they also do accept African H1B visa holders in this group, despite them typically having high education, wealth from home, etc.
KPGv2
> curiously they
Who is the "they" here. Whenever I see a pronoun (especially "they" it's always "they") with no referent, I ask this question.
defrost
In standard English "they" clearly refers to those that use DEI parlance.
KPGv2
When I have read writings on DEI, they usually talk about "African-Americans," a term historically used to refer to the descendants of slavery. Which writings by DEI professionals and experts have you read that say African H1B visa holders should be included in DEI initiatives?
defrost
> Which writings by DEI professionals and experts have you read ...
None. I'm a third party HN commentator that dropped in to address the incorrect assertion that the sentence in question contained a "they" with no referent.
I have six decades of reading, writing, and speaking Commonwealth English and four or so with American English and felt the user who asked could use the grammar assist.
aprilthird2021
But they are included. Because the companies talk about demographics and include "black" as one of those. A group which mixes African-Americans and African immigrants together
Drew_
Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
kridsdale1
Which population? FB hires from everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
Dylan16807
To start with, you can sort the employee records into a visa pile and a not-visa pile.
ponow
If you have to force something, it is. And it's being forced. If we made more white play in the NBA it might seem clearer.
Dalewyn
You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
Dylan16807
Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
Dalewyn
You are explicitly considering a man's race for something that is irrelevant to that consideration, in this case to answer whether to hire/admit them.
You must consider a man's race if this concerns something relevant to that consideration such as their medical history. This is not one of them; there are actually very few instances where asking a man's race is necessary.
Dylan16807
The person above was just saying that having a closer balance of hires to the greater population was a good thing. They didn't talk about how companies got there. We shouldn't just assume they got there by using race while deciding whether to hire or not. Maybe they did something else, or maybe they found some existing racism in hiring decisions and removed it.
Dalewyn
The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis. The only way to force that composition to mirror social composition is to do so explicitly and strictly on racial basis.
A lot of factors go into proper hiring and terminations, most significantly the merits of the individual concerned. Such factors will lead to an employee racial composition that might not mirror that of social composition.
Certain hiring practices like favoring women for flight attendants and black men for basketball teams should be terminated with extreme prejudice, but to force employee racial composition and specifically that one way or any other is racism.
Dylan16807
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis.
I put an example of another way in my last post. If you're creative, you can think of more.
Another one is seeking out people and inviting them to apply, at which point they enter the normal unbiased hiring process.
KPGv2
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis
That's ludicrous. If I hire only from Harvard, but then I start hiring from state schools as well, the employee racial composition is highly likely to change.
Dalewyn
But is the goal to hire from certain schools or to hire certain races?
The axiom presented is that the employee composition must mirror the surrounding social composition, ergo you are hiring for racial reasons because you must set quotas and then hire based upon satisfying (and not exceeding) those quotas.
As an example, if the social composition is composed of 40% Earthlings, 30% Martians, 20% Venusians, and 10% Mercurians and your workforce consists of 10 men: You cannot ever hire more than 4 Earthlings or 3 Martians or 2 Venusians or 1 Mercurian and must refuse or terminate any excess. If you cannot hire even 1 Mercurian at all you arguably can't hire anyone.
That's racist.
Dylan16807
Using quotas like that would be racist.
But the idea of quotas is something you pulled out of nowhere. It was not part of the conversation until you showed up.
It's a strawman.
Also the post up above was talking about statistics with error bars a thousand people wide. The idea of having a demographic match with 10 employees is... also a strawman.
Dalewyn
I agree life is seldom as simple as the examples, the small numbers are just for sake of brevity.
In any case, none of that takes away from the crux of this conversation that programmes like mirroring surrounding demographics and others are discriminatory and have no place in free and civilized societies today.
Dylan16807
It's a good idea to measure the imbalance, and sometimes it's a good idea to try to do something to work against it. It requires a lot of care, but it's not inherently wrong. When there are a bunch of bad actors, everyone else trying to be completely neutral leaves things quite unbalanced.
ruined
the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
JohnMakin
You only need to go back 3 generations in my family to find someone born a slave. And I am not even middle aged. People don’t understand that hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations, it carries over in really strange and insidious ways.
Aeolun
> hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations
This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow.
That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
PaulDavisThe1st
> If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago,
Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics.
Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
davidgay
> Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
I feel that's overstating it a bit. But my mother (English) was definitely brought up in a context that had not forgotten about Napoleon - Napoleon was viewed/presented as comparable to Hitler.
scott_w
Not really: the descendants of the Norman conquest remain some of the wealthiest landowners in England.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-h...
vladgur
Exactly. The history is filled with injustices directed by everyone at everyone if we go back generations.
Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Injustices perpetrated generations ago belong in history books. We cant forget about them but Im not going to be held responsible for them.
395112342
Older injustice still has ramifications today.
Take redlining for instance. That happened a long time ago. Redlining systematically and intentionally deprived non-white families of home ownership, while helping white families to own homes. But wealth begets wealth, so owning a home lets someone borrow money against it to start a business. When these people die, their children will inherit their wealth. As a result, the (grand)children of a family are still denied opportunities that they would've gotten, if not for redlining.
The creator of VeggieTales has a great video on this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY
P.S. Yes, a family who was able to get a home loan (redlining didn't affect them) might have squandered this wealth gambling, or maybe they didn't pass it onto their children, so some people unaffected by redlining may still end up in a similar place. Similarly, some families that were affected by redlining have still managed to accumulate wealth in spite of redlining. My claim is that the family that squandered their money still got the chance to squander was was given to them, and the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity.
gottorf
> the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity
Right, but the median debate isn't about whether there was in fact past injustice done via discrimination on racial lines. The median person agrees. The debate is whether present discrimination on racial lines is required to "correct" that past injustice, and whether that would be a form of present justice. There's very little agreement on that.
395112342
I can't help but notice (believe me, I'm trying not to notice!) that this comment is getting some downvotes. I'd love it if a downvoter could let me know why they're downvoting, and how I can improve!
Omatic810
I can't speak personally to why peeps are downvoting, just wanted to say I appreciate the comment - you explained the position well.
JohnMakin
> Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Yes! welcome to black lives matter. But, that seems to have been labeled a terrorist group for some reason.
ipaddr
I haven't heard that but in general tactics and threats could get your labelled terrorist? You may feel you have a just cause but it doesn't mean your goal justifies your actions.
Aeolun
> You may feel you have a just cause but it doesn't mean your goal justifies your actions.
Only ever said by someone that’s part of the establishment.
dijit
by definition, if you want to destroy the established methods for change or circumvent them then yes, that is treason (or; terrorism) especially via threat or force.
Real change that will jot be classified that way has to happen by engaging with the process for change- though I definitely recognise that its a lot slower and more difficult.
So too is it more difficult to save up money instead of robbing a bank, but it doesn't mean you’re morally justified to rob a bank to give to charity vs working and giving a percentage of a paycheck.
vladgur
Black Lives Matter as an organization has lost any respect from me on October 8, 2023 when they celebrated the October 7th attack killing over a thousand Israelis on their X account [0]
Please use a different example
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/blm-chicago-under-fire-for-pro...
svara
> This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago
That's politics. Many Europeans are certainly still hurting from the trauma the wars caused. That includes later born generations.
Culturally, the two world wars have had a great impact, but that's another story.
My main point is that individually experienced trauma does transmit over generations, while great national narrative can change relatively quickly.
spopejoy
Insofar as Europe has "forgotten" about the Nazis, you might want to check out how Israel legged into this in the early 60s, basically getting Germany to back any of their militaristic objectives in return for full diplomatic engagement with all the symbolic power that implied.
Every government wants to "forget". France maintained a viewpoint that Vichy was a "few bad apples" until the evidence of deporting Jews until their death was undeniable.
KPGv2
> If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago
Germany paid massive amounts of reparations for the sins of the Nazis, and on top of that, Nazi leadership was executed.
It's simply ignorant to think a citation to post-war Germany is a winning argument for you.
JohnMakin
>sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
Germany probably shouldn’t forget the genocide of millions of people from a variety of groups, just as the united states should not forget the systematic enslavement and repression of millions of people, who are also americans and their descendants are alive and numerous today. It doesn’t really make sense to me why people should forget that, and it cannot be forgotten by the people still living with the consequences of it today - but I’m not really willing to be baited into this type of discussion on a platform like this, so I’ll just say your fundamental premises in your post sound flawed if not extremely troubling in what you seem to be implying. It sounds completely unreasonable to say for instance, indigenous groups should forget they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
andsoitis
> they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
And if were to say "...but those colonizers are no longer alive, and neither are their children.", is that not also a fact?
Or is my wording a political statement but yours is not?
I don't know that we can be so uneven in our evaluation.
Aeolun
I think you are intentionally misreading this. My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take. Sins of the father and all that.
Doesn’t mean we should forget them. But getting angry at someone now because of something that his great grandfather did to your great grandfather is a great way for these grudges to never die.
KPGv2
> My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take
No one is holding people responsible for actions they didn't take. YOu're just mis-perceiving assistance given to historically oppressed people as a personal slight against yourself.
Helping a black person is not punishing a white person, and you're showing your own ass when you suggest it is.
DecoySalamander
Taking resources - tax dollars and opportunities usually granted on the basis of merit - from white person and redistributing them to black person on the basis of race absolutely does punish the white person. Talk of "historical oppression" is just a polemic to distract from this racist favoritism.
kmeisthax
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but "getting more reparations out of Germany" is a constant refrain of Polish politics regardless of what wing, faction, or party is leading it.
The thing about oppression is that it causes both long-lasting and recurring trauma. The people targeted will be hurt for a long time, and they will be the target of follow-up attacks because other bullies know they can get away with it.
In the specific case of Nazi Germany, exterminating the Jews was not an original idea of Hitler. Hitler's only original idea was taking shittons of methamphetamine. Martin Luther had done the legwork of radicalizing Germany into hating Jews; once Germany had become a functionally unified nation-state the Holocaust was a forgone conclusion. This is the core belief of Zionism[0]: that the only way to stop Jews from becoming victims is for those Jews to form their own nation-state that can commit its own atrocities.
BTW, this is the same logic the Japanese had in their head when they started invading and destroying the rest of East Asia, around the same time as Hitler. They wanted to be respected in the way that the Christian Bible would describe as "having the fear of God". The fact that this led to the horrific rape of China and Korea[1] would suggest that these victim narratives are morally self-defeating without some framework of reciprocal[2] tolerance and human rights to distinguish between justified self-defense and unjustified oppression.
But America at least sort of has that, so we can make that distinction. In fact, that's part of what makes American race relations so weirdly straightforward. In the "old world" you have complicated webs of peoples angry at each other for shit that happened anywhere from ten to ten thousand years ago. But in America, there's just one very deep wound that never seems to heal.
When does America "forget" slavery? Well, ideally, we don't 'forget', but we do 'forgive'. Practically, however, we can't. Every time a cop thinks it'd be a good idea to treat a criminal suspect like a demon in DOOM Eternal, and it hits social media, we get a huge reminder of "oh, there's still people in this country who think it's OK to do this to black people".
[0] I'm a Mormon[3], so I'm morally obligated to point out that we fell into this rhetorical trap, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
[1] And yes, they still complain about it, too. It doesn't help that Japan's ruling LDP was run by a war crimes denialist for a decade and change.
[2] As in, "tolerate all except the intolerant." See also: the GNU General Public License.
[3] I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mormonism, is in fact, LDS/Mormonism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, LDS plus Mormonism. Mormonism is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning LDS system made useful by the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, the Old & New Testaments, and the Pearl of Great Price comprising a full testament as defined by Jesus.
dkga
Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
wahnfrieden
Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years
2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA
50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
gizmo686
The 13th amendment allows for slavery as a punishment for crimes. It does not require that everyone in prison be a slave.
wahnfrieden
Ok?
PaulDavisThe1st
Are you actually claiming that everyone in a US prison is a slave?
BriggyDwiggs42
The constitution allows that they be used for slave labor, and many are.
PaulDavisThe1st
But are they slaves by virtue of being in prison?
BriggyDwiggs42
You’re saying that only those forced to do labor would be slaves? Slaves aren’t made free by a lack of tasks. What’s your point?
ponow
Don't commit the crime if you can't handle it. It's a punishment.
lesuorac
I think you mean, don't be poor.
It's not like people in prison are actually all guilty of their convicted crime.
You'll see this double-standard a lot for minor offenses as well. How many times has MKHB been caught excessively speeding (including 90? in a school zone) and still have a license.
BriggyDwiggs42
We forbid cruel and unusual punishment. If we lived by the morality you just articulated, we wouldn’t do so. I think slavery is cruel and unusual, I think that’s clear.
khimaros
could you say more about this or provide resources for learning more?
thatcat
plenty of forms of slavery still exist, perhaps we should focus on that
sethammons
The grandson of the 10th US president is alive and well. That president was alive when George Washington was. This is a young country.
lazide
The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks.
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
xwolfi
But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people.
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
throwway120385
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. It would be like trying to get more white-looking people in positions, when what you really want is to integrate the Irish or the Italians into more prominent positions in your culture. We don't even think about that anymore because our definition of white has expanded to include those people. But for a while they were on the outside trying to get in while the newly freed slaves weren't even at the door yet.
xwolfi
But being white is really random: how is it my problem that the weather is shit in Normandy and all my ancestors are pale ? I arrive in the US, people would tell me I'm privileged somehow, when all I do is work hard and do my best to contribute to companies. And the same goes to more sunny weather-born people.
If we talked less about skin color, and a bit more about the actual nature of people (I can accept positive discrimination towards former slave families, they deserve compensation), maybe we'd accept those DEI policies more ?
It's a complex debate everywhere anyway, we have the same in France with our own colonial crosses to bear, and like what to do with a Tunisian freshly arrived vs a descendent of a Tunisian family who's been French for 3 generations.
yantramanav
Disenfranchising Indians must be the new racist trend here. Please try to have some empathy.
Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc.
They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well.
Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
pfannkuchen
Coolies have nothing to do with America though.
If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though.
I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
lmz
How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
xwolfi
I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country.
Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Interesting.
I personally think that it is not helpful to subscribe to 'sins of the father belong to the son' view of the world. Apart from everything else, it rewards near-constant cries of perceived injustices that drown any point you may have had about descendants of slaves.
bubblethink
You're thinking in terms of group guilt and inter generational guilt, which frankly doesn't make sense. There is no rational basis to trace ancestry of people to find who descended from slaves or slave owners. It's non sensical. In a fair hiring environment, no one deserves any special preference. If you want to help economically poor groups, the time to intervene is much earlier in their childhood by providing them better education, communities, infrastructure etc. So tipping the scales by investing more in certain communities is alright, tipping them at the job interview isn't.
visarga
When we think about society we love equality, but when we have to choose our heart surgeon we only want merit. Helping some group get by easier through school and hiring only puts a question mark to their real merits. It's also demeaning for them to be admitted with lower standards.
manishsharan
I am not sure where you are getting the idea that people of Indian origin are asking for or getting any special consideration compared to Turkish or a Portuguese or any other ethnic groups.
vrc
There are more brown people than Indians… Usually these initiatives push for underrepresented brown people, ie Hispanic/Latino Americans.
Most diversity programs actively harm Indians as over represented, as they fall under the broad “Asian” category (see Harvard).
But I guess Indians are easy pickings these days.
ganoushoreilly
This is an interesting response that points out ambiguity in it all. Depending on what you're reading / what statistic is being derived, often times you see Hispanic / Latino included as white and not brown.
esafak
In the US I always see Hispanic/Latino as its own category.
throwaway7783
It should not make sense, but as long as discrimination is based on skin color, you will see efforts to address it also be based on skin color.
The only thing I advocate for is on economic basis. Nothing else should matter.
If one is "poor" (for a socially acceptable definition of poor), we as a society must help them.
Skin color, historical persecution, country of origin,gender, sexual orientation or any of the thousand things that can be "different" , shouldn't matter.
xwolfi
I agree, but I think the constant division of people across vague color lines make people counter react in unproductive ways. Like (random example) talking about Obama as a black person hides so much nuances about who he truly is (and who his ancestors are) that it gives his opponents the impression that s all he is and his defenders not much else to defend him with.
I just find the american casual racism, both sides of the political spectrum, very ... american :D
In France we sort of pretend to ignore there s skin color. I d never describe someone as black, or no more than I d describe someone as blonde and I would almost never use a French word to describe it. It makes me nervous to reduce someone to this random attribute, when maybe his family came from Mali, or Martinique or the US and that's so much more interesting than the effect of the sun on his skin.
throwaway7783
Yes, it is not optimal. Like I said, I don't subscribe how its handled either.
I am not an American, and I'm brown. I don't take issue if someone says I'm brown because I am brown! Maybe I cannot empathize with other races who've been extremely discriminated because of their skin color, but as you said, it is an attribute describing me, among hundred others. I also agree, color of skin by itself is not interesting at all, just like being blonde is not interesting at all - but may play into personal preferences, again, just like any of the hundreds of physical, personality attributes.
Tainnor
I'm in Germany and I'm also puzzled by how Americans view race. To me, black, white, etc. are just phenotypes, no more important than e.g. being blonde (of course, I realise that some people discriminate based on skin colour). The idea that these skin-colour labels constitute separate "identities" is a bit weird to me.
And yes, of course many African-Americans have certain cultural traits, some heritage etc. that sets them apart, but I would describe that as "African-American" and not "black" because I don't think that a Nigerian or a Sri Lankan would share those traits.
When Donald Trump insisted that Kamala Harris wasn't really black that just made no sense to me.
ponow
Brevity informs diction.
Tainnor
Your comment is too brief for me to figure out what you mean by it.
diogocp
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds.
Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
throwaway48476
>And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
jdietrich
Ask anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union about that one. The vast majority of people could see through the propaganda - even supposed party loyalists - but they understood the consequences of failing to toe the line. There wasn't a sudden moment of collective enlightenment that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, just a gradual breaking of a taboo. Imposition of an ideology through coercion is remarkably durable, right until it isn't.
wombatpm
And if you were in a large corporate environment, you could see through the bullshit as well. It is just a CLM (career limiting move) to call it out, so everyone gives it lip service.
davidgay
You're moving the goal posts to try and tar your opponents with the "communist" brush. The Soviet definition of "silencing dissent" was far more extreme and violent (prison, death) than what the grandparent's comment is referring to.
UncleMeat
> And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.
paulryanrogers
> ...as progressives are wont to do these days.
Progressives I know are pretty tolerant. It's the conservatives that seem obsessed with free-speech-for-me-and-not-for-thee. Xitter is the loudest example.
lolinder
Both the progressives I know and the conservatives I know are pretty tolerant of dissenting speech in that they disagree with it but don't advocate for it to be silenced.
But at the same time, both the progressives and the conservatives who are active on political social media (take your pick of platform) are very likely to actively attempt to silence the opposition and punish them for speaking.
It's less a political divide and more that most people are still tolerant of dissenting speech, so the people you know in person will tend to be tolerant. There's a loud minority that's vocal on the internet on both sides that advocates for silencing others.
paulryanrogers
If it's mostly only online then why did left leaning papers self censor, on the orders of their rich owners?
Which side is often going to court (and losing) to dispute facts (like election integrity or sexual assault allegations)?
ConspiracyFact
The sense I get is that those on the far right are worse than those on the far left, but those on the moderate left are much worse than those on the moderate right, to the point of being nearly insufferable.
reaperducer
silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do
The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.
Get back to me when it's the Democrats.
skellington
That's almost certainly a lie...but weird things happen.
I keep hearing about Republican book bans, but I've only heard they don't want certain books to be available to children in schools, not that they should be banned in general. Compare this with liberals who got some Dr. Seuss and other books cancelled and removed from Amazon etc.
It's seems like both sides attempt to decrease accessibility to literature that they find objectional, but neither has achieved an actual ban.
hobs
>In February 2021 some religious communities in the United States have started holding book burning ceremonies to garner attention and publicly denounce heretical beliefs. In Tennessee pastor Greg Locke has held sermons over the incineration of books like Harry Potter and Twilight.[86] This trend of calling for the burning of books one's ideology conflicts with has continued into the political sphere. Two members of a Virginia school board Rabih Abuismail, and Kirk Twigg, have condoned the burning of recently banned books to keep their ideas out of the minds of the public.[87][88] In September 2023, Missouri State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel showed off a flamethrower at a campaign event and vowed to burn "woke pornographic books [...] on the front lawn of the governor's mansion" if elected.[89]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I guess if you think this is fine then that's what you think.
goatlover
Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.
esafak
The goal is not to persuade them but to sideline them; to prevent them to propagating their viewpoint.
steveBK123
Largely agreed DEI was a bit of a workplace recruiting marketing/signaling exercise than something that changed demographics at work.
I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts.
In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before.
In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration.
Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s..
I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
makeitdouble
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds.
I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power.
Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart.
> It's a slow, painful process
The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time.
Power matters.
lolinder
> Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
Yes. Probably multiple lifetimes. This is why I say that real change takes generations.
You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Wield that power too forcefully, and you'll get pushback, and unsavory politicians will ride that pushback to power. When that happens, as you observe, a lot of what was previously accomplished is undone.
I believe that democracy is the greatest good progressivism has ever accomplished. I'm not willing to sacrifice democracy in order to speed up the rate of change, even if it means that people suffer in the short term. And because I believe in democracy, I cannot support the heavy-handed use of power to try to force people to change. Not for their sakes, but because it simply doesn't work. As long as those people have the vote, they will resent you for your use of power and be able to strip it from you. That's the lesson of 2024.
That's not to say we can't do anything while in power, but it must be done with an eye towards the next century, not just the next election cycle.
> The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger.
The trap is accidentally triggering a reactionary movement by moving too hard too fast. Reactionaries aren't called that by accident—they react. It is within the power of progressives to avoid triggering them by staying within (whilst steadily changing) the national Overton window.
makeitdouble
> You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Voter suppression has repeatedly happened and has been mostly scuff free [0]. Working diligently through generation also means building the means to protect the advancement you achieve, and not just by having them in the rules, but to be able to enforce these rules.
My mental image of this is Tulsa: when you steadily but firmly create a vibrant place for your community for decades, to have it burn in flames within a day, with no significant reparation, no significant support, and just a footnote in some textbooks.
When I say "power" I don't mean in some limited framing, I mean anything that can actually leverage your position in a realistic way. Capital, cultural influence, military or political power come to mind, but whatever form it takes, I think a group needs to be able to stand its ground if it chalenges the status quo, whatever time frame it chooses to do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
lazide
The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences.
All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies.
And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions).
That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty.
For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action.
So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence.
Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place.
Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power.
Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever.
Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction.
Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked.
Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.
makeitdouble
Yes.
This swinging pendulum is really the tough part, and the nazi trend coming back in force after a black president was there for 8 years is the most symbolic image of it.
In the current situation though, the money doesn't seem to be swinging around, so I wonder how far it could even swing back. That's part of what I mean by "power", the current changes we're witnessing are huge shifts of money in one specific camp, and I don't imagine heads rolling either, so outside of a completely unforseen even wildly resetting the scene, it looks kinda toast to me.
lazide
Not sure what you mean by money not swinging around?
The largest tech companies in the world (which directly or indirectly control all modern media, and are > $4trln in market cap), just publicly ‘bent the knee’ to someone they quite publicly fought for almost a decade now - and which of all market segments, they were the most consistently against.
In many cases for personal identity reasons (Tim Cook being gay, for instance), but also because these companies are based in areas which are typically Liberal - west coast urban areas.
Most other market segment companies were never strongly Liberal in the same way.
And if you think Tech DEI programs may have been performative, I can assure you that initiatives in Construction, Heavy Industry, Finance, Transportation, etc. had far less actual backing. They just rarely got the press, because Tech == $$$ and visibility, and also Tech == historically incredibly naive when it comes to politics and power.
In my experience, at least FAANG Tech DEI programs actually weren’t performative - they really did work very, very hard to meet their goals, which actively made huge problems later in the cycle because there just weren’t enough candidates.
makeitdouble
> publicly ‘bent the knee’ to someone they quite publicly fought for almost a decade now
Major US tech companies all edged their bets and tend to push some amount of money in both camps at all times. I don't remember top companies fighting Trump when he was president, the only ones showing the middle finger where the small enough to do that.
Newspaper generally have a different slant, but that's not where the money is for a long time now.
> In many cases for personal identity reasons (Tim Cook being gay, for instance)
He was the very interface to Trump to let Apple keep sane relations with China. He's the very representation of the guy who left his personal ideals at home to prioritize the company's future. And that's of course his role as a CEO.
lazide
There was Twitter and Facebook deplatforming him. Facebook ‘fact checking’ all his favorite ‘facts’. Google adding fact check popups around the prior election. Etc. etc.
This was all before the most recent election, before Musk bought Twitter, etc. also stuff like [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/don...], [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/27/trump-google...], etc. etc.
Personally, I never heard so much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Trump won the first time (knowing a number of Google leadership folks).
There is going to be a lot of noise.
brutal_chaos_
If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight.
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
lolinder
It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.
brutal_chaos_
Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.
geoelectric
There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation.
Things improve on their own over time too.
brutal_chaos_
This is true. I know the change wasn't just DEI, but I thought it might have been the biggest push. And yeah, after it's gone we will see how much it helped (or not), or other influences will muddy the data and we'll never really know (unless it's a really big trend). shrug
snovv_crash
Honestly I think a lot more of it has to do with the perceived status of engineers in society - particularly teenage girls are hyper aware of social status.
15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
makeitdouble
I wanted a wider view of the trend, and it looks to me like after the covid dip the US is still not back at the 2000s level of participation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026
In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?
Simon_O_Rourke
> ...was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant.
Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
aprilthird2021
This is true, and unfortunately you can't say this to any colleagues at any of these companies without jeopardizing your future. Even still as the DEI programs are dying, the DEI social norms are still strong in most corporations
thewanderer1983
>so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
dukeofdoom
I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.
torginus
I've always found these loud DEI programs incredibly uncanny - every career website loudly how important diversity and inclusiveness is for them, but in flowery language, as implying they'd actually discriminate against non-diverse hires would be illegal in most places. Which begs the question of the point of these programs, considering of why they were needed this outwards messaging against discrimination, considering it was illegal in the first place.
I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places.
A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.
zmgsabst
There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism.
We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.
2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
ConspiracyFact
This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.
unclebucknasty
I think your analysis is missing some nuance.
There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle.
So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues.
Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
lolinder
The methods chosen to push this and other recent changes assumed that those advocating change would stay in power, if not in government at least in the culture. They assumed that they could keep up the pressure to act in a particular way in spite of the fact that those so pressured didn't really believe in any of it. That was a critical and fatal flaw. You can't plan change on the assumption that you'll be able to apply pressure indefinitely.
You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won.
Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
unclebucknasty
There's too much history arguing against what you're suggesting here.
And, your claim argues against itself. The problem is that minds can be changed in either direction, and the people who "didn't believe in any of it" had been precondtioned to reach that position of non-support before DEI was even a thing.
Likewise, Trump was able to manipulate people based on age-old tactics or, as you put it, he "untapped" existing resistance. So how, exactly, do progressives convince these same people?
You're suggesting they do so by not moving too fast? That they wait for the "culture to be ready for change"?
If we waited for the culture to be ready, then schools in the South would still be segregated. Instead, they were integrated under the protection of men holding rifles.
Of course the status quo doesn't change without pressure. That's why it's the status quo. There is no amount of progressive pace calibration that would have addressed this. If there was, then 400 years should have been enough time.
Again, the problem is not with progressive pacing. The problem is on the other side.
MichaelZuo
Who says ‘ 400 years should have been enough time’?
Why not 4000 years or 40000 years?
Or never? There are simply no preordained guarantees.
bko
A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions.
Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100 companies
Hispanic individuals accounted for 40% of new hires, followed by Black (23%) and Asian (22%) workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
miles
> Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
75.3% White alone
13.7% Black alone
1.3% American Indian and Alaska Native alone
6.4% Asian alone
0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
3.1% Two or More Races
19.5% Hispanic or Latino
58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino
foota
I don't want to make too many assumptions here because it's a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that all of the best white people were already hired, while many POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for ways to hire new people without having to pay them more would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if you're just trying to find workers.
Manuel_D
> you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
In my experience, DEI programs do the opposite. I've seen manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse and hiring them would put them below their diversity target. If 20% of the workforce is women and your bonus is contingent on reaching 30%, you could recruit at Grace Hopper and try to hire more women. But if that doesn't get you to your quota, you need to hire fewer men to push up the proportion of women.
goldenManatee
What kind of role did you occupy that you saw "manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse"? Have you considered it may all just be the appearance you are interpreting in your head, but it doesn't map out to reality?
Manuel_D
Nothing about this was ambiguous. The company instituted "outcome based goals" specifying 33% women in engineering. We had hires that passed with flying colors, but were told that proceeding with an offer would put out org below 33%. We'd have to wait until we hired a woman, or just not give an offer.
dijit
There are better ways of asking this.
The incredulousness is valid, but the way you’ve posed this question is so inherently biased it reads as tone deaf, as if the parent couldn’t possibly have witnessed this.
Reality is a lot stranger than you might expect, if you can believe people can hold out for a junior engineer with 5+ years experience and a $50k salary: you can believe this.
nearbuy
I suspect the conditions were the opposite at the time: competition for good non-white employees was fierce after BLM, making them harder to find. If I'm understanding the Bloomberg numbers correctly, a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
stevage
I had an interesting experience asking a startup I worked at why they had no female engineers. The answer was they couldn't afford them. They were in such demand that they commanded a significant premium over male engineers at the same level.
MacsHeadroom
This is real. Female engineers are overrepresented in big tech something like 3-4x the graduation rate. There just aren't any left over for startups that can't afford FAANG rates.
LPisGood
Is there any data out there that reflects this? That’s really interesting
Cumpiler69
> Female engineers are overrepresented in big tech something like 3-4x the graduation rate.
Why is that? Virtue signaling? Discrimination on males?
LPisGood
Could be a combination of technical skill gap, better networking, better interviewing. Jumping straight to virtue signaling or discrimination seems strange.
Cumpiler69
Why would those quality traits be specific to females in engineering? Engineering as a whole is a skill fungible regardless of gender so if a gender is hired by big-tech at 3-4x their graduation rates compared to the other gender, then there must be something at play.
Think about it like this, if you'd use the same argument you gave me if the roles were reversed with men being 3-4x overrepresented in a well paying white collar career, everyone would cry sexism and discrimination and action being taken to "fix" that. So why isn't it when the genders are reversed?
LPisGood
> So why isn't it when the genders are reversed?
Men occupy a position of institutional and societal power that makes such a comparison unhelpful, at best.
an_guy
Has the same energy as "President is black therefore talks about racism against blacks is unhelpful"
Cumpiler69
>Men occupy a position of institutional and societal power that makes such a comparison unhelpful, at best.
That doesn't justify discrimination. You're using the same argument Nazis used to genocide Jews: "they're overrepresented in positions of wealth and power so it's ok to discriminate and kill them all because it's obviously their fault for your problems".
You average man has no benefits in common with the top 1% of wealthy and powerful men who write the rules. The top 1% of Americans have more in common with the top 1% of Russians or Chinese then they do with your average Walmart American male.
Why punish men todays for the original sin? This only leads to extremism as backlash.
LPisGood
I’m not justifying discrimination. I’m justifying the comparison being bad, which it is.
skeeter2020
That's absolute nonsense. We know it's almost completely a supply problem not a demand one.
llm_trw
And price is determined by both supply and demand.
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
mjevans
It can be both.
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
ponow
None of that is combatting sexism, but reality.
mjevans
Sexism is '(sex) Can't do x'. That's combated by successful examples being common.
Bias of applicants is solved by making the job worth for all to do, not just from the positives but by removing the negatives.
az226
Before 2020, it was around 7-10x, so it doesn’t surprise me it went up after.
SV_BubbleTime
> a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
I’m so old fashioned thinking your immutable characteristics shouldn’t be considered for employment.
whimsicalism
this is an incredibly misleading statistic skewed by the fact that almost all retiring corporate workers are white so lots of white jobs were “lost”
droptablemain
We are already in the backlash.
grahamj
When the playing field is tilted you have to put a thumb on the other side to balance it out. This might annoy the ones who were tilting it in the first place.
programjames
How are the people without the jobs doing the tilting?
grahamj
They aren't, but it's unfair from them to benefit from the tilt.
programjames
Who is benefiting from the tilt? Are they the same people getting thumbed in your proposed solution?
EDIT, I'd also like to add: Why do you believe this tilt exists? I find it plausible to exist (especially because lots of people seem to make a lot of money talking about it), but where is the evidence for it? What I'm asking for isn't evidence that one group of people are doing better than another, I'm asking for evidence that a group of people are being discriminated against. E.g., if you took the exact same person and switched out their profile photo to showcase a Hispanic woman instead of an Asian man, they would end up with far fewer job offers. The thing is, people have tried doing exactly this, and every time it goes the other way! The exact same application, minus a name and photo change, has the reverse effect from what you would expect if the basis behind DEI initiatives was true.
ChocolateGod
Why is skin colour or ethnicity when it comes to employment even relevent?
grahamj
Because one of them is systemically suppressing the others. The point of DEI is (or at least should be) to counteract systemic bias; how can you do that without looking at the characteristics that are the determining factor of that bias?
tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there, but until that's reality all we can do is tackle it where it impacts people the most - hiring.
Izkata
> tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there
I never thought that. That part of me was irrelevant to the degree, and I found it great that no one cared and were able to focus on the degree.
Forcing diversity topics in and making them a focus instead would have been hell.
ChocolateGod
> counteract systemic bias
What is the bias and causes it?
Because I don't think it's a systemic bias in the hiring system, so why not solve the problem rather than trying to patch the effect.
ConspiracyFact
> Because one of them is systemically suppressing the others.
Prove it.
CyberDildonics
No matter what people think the right thing to do is, making any hiring decision on the basis of a protected group is illegal in the US, no matter who is on what side of the equation.
jrockway
People aren't making hiring decisions based on protected classes. Rather, they're looking for qualified candidates in new areas.
One thing that's common is for people to recommend their friends for jobs. Most of the time, their friends look just like them, because that's the kind of friends that people make. If you base your hiring process around this easy source of candidates, you end up not talking to a lot of people that would be qualified for the position. "DEI" can be as simple as "in addition to employee referrals, we're going to hand out brochures at a career fair".
dsajames
This isn't pressing your thumb. This is throwing away half the scale
cmdli
Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles.
Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.
derektank
If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the total population of professional degree holders
cmdli
The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians, representing around 5% of the population but around 40% of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If we are purely talking about discrimination against white people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire" black person.
whimsicalism
no it’s because the study is measuring net changes and most retiring professional degree workers are white
insane_dreamer
but Whites with a professional degree are much more likely to already be employed, or be able to retire (creating opening for new hires)
enragedcacti
From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From the Daily Wire of all people:
> But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.
> A telltale sign that Bloomberg’s “percentage of the net increase” methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is that, if the departures of whites had been just a little higher, the net change in whites would have been negative instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg’s methodology would then assert that whites took a negative percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic impossibility.
> The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bomb...
wbl
That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know what the turnover rate was.
dahinds
Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).
Spooky23
Thats true, and enhanced in places that reward that characteristic. Hispanic origin is tied to lineage, nationality, or country of birth for an individual or ancestors.
It’s a vague definition that is impossible to verify. Spain itself is a multicultural and multiethnic state. How do you prove that I don’t have deep affiliation with my basque ancestor who settled in Ireland after a shipwreck?
whimsicalism
affirmative action for hispanic people has always been uniquely absurd and exploited by effectively white europeans for as long as it has existed. my college counselor told me to mark "hispanic" on my college applications because I'm of Iberian descent, which I refused to do - but I know of multiple others who did and went to Harvard/MIT.
linotype
So it was racist?
thfuran
Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.
eapressoandcats
The way it’s calculated is just based on the net change, so it doesn’t really match overall hiring practices. At the end of it all high status jobs were still disproportionately held by White people and Asian people.
dev1ycan
What does that matter when all your newcomers are not white? eventually you'll end up with the polar opposite. You should hire based on skill not race or any other thing you have no control over.
neltnerb
Or it will reach a new stable equilibrium based on modern demographics, as things that add to 100% tend to do.
eapressoandcats
Right but part of that is asking why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers. If you’re disproportionately hiring some types of people you probably are hiring on race and not skill.
And yes, some of this is not solvable at the end of the funnel when hiring but as a society leaving a full class of people in less productive jobs due to race (or caste or whatever) is a waste of human potential.
dijit
> why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers.
It’s good you mention workers, because most people focus on the demographics of the population, which is bunk..
Available workers includes factors such as qualification, motivation, aptitude and smaller factors like “did they even apply”.
If your workforce demographics skew significantly from qualified applicants then there’s a problem. If you intentionally want to skew applicants then marketing to them or investing in their training and education is the way, not whatever the hell we seem to be doing.
And a dearth of leadership of a certain ethnicity will change over time, demographics shift over the course of a generation of workers, not in a quarter of a decade like I’ve seen people expect.
jerojero
This point is very important particularly when it comes to gender disparities.
Although women do make about half of the population they do not make for half of the applicants in tech fields, in reality, a lot of women don't even get to the stage of studying STEM careers.
There's some interesting studies when it comes to girls own perceived perceptions on how well they will do in math. With girls perceiving they will not do as well in math subjects as their male peers (even though in assessments they're pretty much equal). This perception often comes from home and it's a significant factor in why girls don't eventually become STEM women.
I think there's probably similar factors at play when it comes to different ethnicities and putting an effort into changing these perspectives has led to some of these DEI measures.
Not to mention the fact that a degree of diversity is an asset when it comes to decision making, as groups with too similar backgrounds tend to fall into conventional thinking (the version of it that's applicable to their respective fields). So some diversity in teams leads to more dynamics dialogue between people which is key for creative problem solving.
I'm not sure, given that a lot of the data available seems to be poorly constructed, that DEI efforts have been too much. Certainly there's a conservative backlash but that doesn't really tell us if these DEI measures have been effective or not at achieving their objectives. Fundamentally, I think there are some people out there who don't really value diversity so they're against the objectives sought by DEI measures to begin with and these voices seem to quite loud lately. I don't think these are the kind of people who would change their minds if shown data and research anyway.
freejazz
Sorry do you actually think that 94% of new software engineering hires at fortune 500 companies during 2021 were black? It's statistical nonsense.
throwawayq3423
I dont think the people of color that got their foot in the door in tech would agree with you.
ksec
I would not be surprised while the OP were sending applications to DEI programmes, most of them went to Asians. Which I assume this still fits the PoC PoV of DEI.
insane_dreamer
But most of those new hires were the lowest level employees -- service workers, etc.
Also, in the US Asians, overall, are not economically disadvantaged like most Blacks and Latinos. So I don't think you can really put them together in this particular context. Notice that the largest group of Professionals were Asian (lots of engineers/programmers from India/China as usual).
(Also at the Executive job level, Whites still very on top.)
typon
In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.
HeyLaughingBoy
As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.
golly_ned
I had a chance to see Amazon Hr's organizational dashboard which listed, among other things, the racial breakdown for each VP in the company. BLACK_NA (which I figured means american-born black employees?) in engineering organizations were generally at about 1%. I knew of one black American engineer in my org of about ~150.
There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.
kragen
As a white software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I only ever worked with one black software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture; usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever hearing one overtly racist remark against black people). I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs, Pakistanis, etc.
Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship before entering the work force? It's still pretty effective — there were lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
naijaboiler
As a person who has been black elsewhere and black in America, the biggest advantage of being foreign born black person is having grown up in an environment where black excellence is not exceptional, it just expected.
In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
kragen
That rings true to me. I couldn't see it until I'd moved to Argentina for a few years, which is also very racist but in a way sufficiently different that I could see the absurdity of the US system of racism from the outside. Dangerous as this is, recognizing my own blindness to my own subconscious racism makes me totally disregard the opinions of people who have lived in the US all their lives on this matter, because I know that 95% of them are looking at the world through the same lens of subconscious prejudice I was, because they've never seen anything different.
Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.
RestlessMind
> I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture
I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
> Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship
Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then?
> lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
kragen
If you've ever been Indian or Chinese in the US, you know the US is racist against you, just not in a way that excludes you from programming work. And, yeah, there's quite a bit of Indian-American senior leadership in Silicon Valley.
I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones.
Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem.
Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.
freejazz
>I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.
RestlessMind
> You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese?
I don't know why you infer that from my comment. I am merely responding to the GP's post which I disagree with. I believe US, or at least Silicon Valley which I am very familiar with, is one of the least racist place. At the same time, it is also highly classist.
Unfortunately, race and class correlate for American blacks. Not so for, say, Nigerian blacks because the ones able to migrate from Nigeria to the US are already the privileged ones in their society. Same goes for immigrants from India, China, Philippines or Egypt.
Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.
freejazz
>I don't know why you infer that from my comment. I am merely responding to the GP's post which I disagree with. I believe US, or at least Silicon Valley which I am very familiar with, is one of the least racist place. At the same time, it is also highly classist.
I don't think you are responding to the other poster's point at all. I think you made up your own, and that's exactly what I pointed out. Because it's so facially asinine.
>Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.
Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV? Anything else you want to swap in so you can make your obtuse points?
RestlessMind
> Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV?
kragen's post literally starts with "As a white software engineer...", so I am addressing the context of being a software engineer, i.e. SV (the metaphorical place, not actual physical location). Broader American culture is besides the point here.
kragen
I agree that SV (the actual physical location) and the US software industry are less racist than most of the rest of the US. But they're still way more racist than, say, Porto Alegre or Caracas, which are no egalitarian utopias either. And the reason for this is, in fact, the broader culture of the US. (Not “American culture” because that would affect Brazil and Venezuela just as much as the US.)
There are significant numbers of upper-middle-class black people in the US, and there have been for decades now. Their kids still don't end up as programmers in significant numbers. White rednecks' kids do; they're facing a pretty stiff uphill battle too, but a lot more of them prevail. That's racism, not just classism.
RestlessMind
[Aside: thanks for engaging in a civil manner, really appreciate that]
> Their kids still don't end up as programmers
I can see that there could be racism which prevents upper middle class black kids from becoming programmers. Do you think it's because of SV (metaphor) or because of racism in the pipeline leading to SV? If it's the latter, can SV even do anything about it?
kragen
It's difficult to engage in a civil way on such a controversial issue. I appreciate your collaboration on that matter as well.
There's clearly a pipeline problem. As Ibrahim Diallo's experience shows, it's not just a pipeline problem; it's also an SV problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53180073
freejazz
>kragen's post literally starts with "As a white software engineer...", so I am addressing the context of being a software engineer, i.e. SV (the metaphorical place, not actual physical location). Broader American culture is besides the point here.
This is nonsense.
pixxel
Did the software suffer? Did you suffer?
freejazz
Hmm, what's missing from this list?
SirMaster
But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring?
There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college.
So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...
typon
Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or Hispanic" people.
DontchaKnowit
Idk wtf companies you're working at but in my short career in a small city in the middle of the country where most people are white by a good percentage Ive worked wkth a ton of black developers.
golly_ned
I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers.
My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level.
One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult.
The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling.
The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.
bigmutant
Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again.
On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for
nomel
I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black.
Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".
svieira
While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).
groby_b
I recommend reading the WaPo article that goes along with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minoritie...
Bloomberg's choosing to misrepresent the data here - this is not about jobs added, it's about changes in the employment composition.
Simple example: Company X has 950 white and 50 POC employes. 10% leave over the year (95 white, 5 POC). They hire 200 more at an even split (50% white, 50% POC). They now have 1100 people, 955 white, 145 POC. So they've gained net 100 folks - and the net change is +5 white, +95 POC. Voila, 95% people of color hired.
It's still a pretty stunning change with a large ramp up in hiring of POC, but it's much less an indicator of preferential hiring than the Bloomberg framing makes it sound.
freejazz
In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500 hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the morning rush hour.
sterlind
I think the flaw works like this:
1. Acme Inc. has 40,000 white employees and 10,000 employees of color on payroll. The statistic would be 20%, if Acme were hiring at a constant rate by the same demographics.
2. However, suppose Acme hired the bulk of its employees during its growth phase 10 years ago. Acme's hiring back then was proportional, but the population has changed. Now only 60% of applicants are white, compared to 80% back then.
3. Acme lays off 5,000 staff (at random), and hires 1,000 (proportionally.) So they've laid off 4,000 white people and 1,000 people of color. And they've hired 400 people of color and 600 white people.
I'm too lazy to do the math but I think that works out as hiring a negative % of white people, even though it's just representative of demographic shifts.
empath75
This is true, but that was a one or two year phenomenon, driven by BLM protests, and at the end of it, ended with white people still having a disproportionate share of senior and management positions.
purplethinking
Wow
pixxel
Are you presenting this as a positive?
dsajames
So this is an example of what not to do.
1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa.
2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely destroy this.
Nice going.
wholinator2
1) it sounds crazy because it's actual statistical malpractice. See the many other comments explaining how it's bullshit
2) the significantly backlash is interesting, primarily because it centers around the bullshit statistics that companies pat themselves with. The hiring process is so nebulous and unknowable to the potential hiree that no person can really know whether they were denied a job due to dei policies. Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI, which really just undervalues the nonwhite population, as if they truly deserved none of the jobs, wouldn't have gotten any without the help. This combined into the rage that certain people feel about what really appears to be a back pat circle around naming a git branch and changing security terminology.
buzzerbetrayed
> Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI
Add that to the list of why DEI is harmful. There will always be a potential asterisk next to minority hires as long as DEI is a thing. It’s unavoidable.
ncr100
This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly.
Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively.
To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure.
I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive?
ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful efforts to make society better. I would not know about this without you:
> If you are black and take a group picture with your white colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume you are the subordinate.
kjellsbells
An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones. The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement". And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI programs, even the good ones.
A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from good management culture embedded at every level in an org.
- It should not be controversial to assert, and product management to insist, say, that products designed for humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person on your staff or in your network of consultants who can explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products, this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.
- It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads? Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of managers.
Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management culture.
nradov
The particular issues around medicine and cars were more due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical companies often didn't include women as subjects in clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has since changed their rules to require broader participation in clinical trials.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-trials/...
Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they are using a more diverse set of dummies.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-women-...
KittenInABox
> Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that.
I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.
golly_ned
That's what I've seen in the metrics. DEI hiring has been an enormous failure. A lot of the concern in non-exclusively-left-leaning online spaces (including this one) about DEI hiring was and is way overblown given how drastically unsuccessful they are in practice. The default like is that "it's bad, but getting better" by showing difference year to year in sectors where the numbers look good, or even just reporting on noise.
iaseiadit
I can only speak from personal experience, but since about 4 years ago, every candidate I’ve been asked to interview for a software engineering position has been Black, Hispanic, South Asian or East Asian. Not a single white American.
Are there no white people studying CS anymore or looking for jobs? Did they all stop applying?
Again, it’s only from personal experience. I never asked any of my coworkers a “hey, do you ever interview white people?”, so it could be a coincidence that I was never matched with any. But I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation…
cplanas
Your experience is very different from mine. I rarely interviewed white candidates, but they were still more common than Hispanic and Black ones. The majority of the candidates were Asian.
muglug
That has not been my experience working for a big US tech company.
iaseiadit
I also work for a big US tech company. If it’s not standard practice, I’m happy to hear it.
0xbadcafebee
If you don't take them can you please forward me their resumes? It's extremely hard for me to find a candidate who isn't a 20s-30s white male named Chad.
iaseiadit
My understanding is there’s a lot of outreach at HBCUs, so you may try that. Also H-1Bs.
The joke that white men are all named “Chad” is tired. You’ll notice I didn’t say everyone I interviewed was name DeShawn or whatever. Let’s move past that.
harrall
Personally I feel if you want to make an impact, you need to provide resources early on when people are growing up and in school.
There’s nothing like gaining inspiration because someone you know growing up is doing it. e.g. It’s much easier to go camping for your first time when someone in your life is “the camping person” and can guide you through it. And the earlier you do it, the higher chance that you end up pursuing it.
In a lot of impoverished communities, they don’t have as many as those kinds of people. Especially not compared to a well-connected family in a wealthy suburb.
I don’t know how you would provide those resources and maybe these big companies already are, but the availability of professionals that young people surround themselves with should not be overlooked.
scelerat
It's why day care, head start, school lunch and the like are super important.
Even before we get to corporate demographics or college graduation, admittance, and application rates, there are millions of children growing up in poverty in the US. Relatively inexpensive social welfare investments can mitigate many of the worst effects, even for those who don't decide to become software engineers.
blindriver
None of this matters if the children grow up in a single-parent household. Keeping a two parent household has an outsized influence on the children's development and needs to be a cultural shift in our society.
scelerat
"single parent households" are precisely why these levers are important: among other things, they help reduce the disadvantages some kids have due to being raised by an impoverished single parent, and gives those kids a leg up in a way which will foster more stable home life and less likelihood of themselves becoming single parents.
drewbeck
Not only that, but more resources and more stability help foster successful relationships. If you want more two-parent households, make it a lot easier to have and care for a child.
ketzo
It can absolutely matter, and in fact it is all the more important in a single-parent household.
You’re right that single vs. two parent household is the largest contributing factor. You’re wrong that it means that no other factors matter at all.
andrepd
Overlooked point but this is very very important. It's hard to understate the importance of good examples and role models while growing up. We are animals which learn essentially by imitation while growing up. We internalise what we see both consciously and subconsciously. It has a massive impact. And in places where good role models are scarce this self-perpetuates.
Not discounting the material/economic conditions, obviously.
cjohnson318
To underscore your point, I've met 5 black engineers in 13 years as a software developer. To put this in perspective, my high school was 50% black, and my college was 30% black. Somehow I got where I am, but almost none of my classmates were able to do the same. I don't know what the solution is.
ArthurStacks
Why is a solution needed? Where is the problem?
I hire developers. They are all white because theres no black people around here. It isnt a problem.
CharlieDigital
> Where is the problem?
Does this matter to you? This depends on the type of society you want to live in and be a part of. My take? None of us live in a vacuum in isolation; we live in a country of 300+ million people. My neighbor's are Iranian, Syrian, Turkish/German, French/Moroccan, Indian, East Asian and all lovely people.
The problem DEI programs should solve is a systemic one where hiring practices might otherwise pass on qualified minority candidates or may not even be presented to them in the first place. The implementation of many programs is questionable, but the objective and why have some form of policy that focuses on broader inclusivity in the hiring process should not be: I want a better America for everyone and not just some subset of Americans.
ArthurStacks
Or maybe theres just less people from certain cultures that want to be a software developer.
Whats next, you want to force more white people to become developers because ethnic Indian devs are becoming too populous in the industry.
In my country most of the blacks are in London and so we have no black devs in our office. We arent going to go out and find some to hire.
n4r9
I decided to look up the demographics on Wikipedia. London does indeed have a higher percentage black population than the rest of the country, but Manchester and Birmingham are very similar, whilst other major cities where you're likely to find the most tech companies have around 5%.
London: 54% white, 14% black
Manchester: 57% white, 12% black
Birmingham: 49% white, 11% black
Bristol: 81% white, 6% black
Leeds: 79% white, 6% black
Sheffield: 80% white, 5% black
Liverpool: 84% white. 4% black
Note: this excludes mixed black and white backgrounds, which make up a decent proportion of people who would describe themselves as black.
So if equal numbers of black people went into tech, and companies hired without bias, then you'd expect at least 1 in 20 people in most tech companies to be black.
You're right that fewer people from black backgrounds are applying to tech jobs, although I think it's a leap to say it's because they "don't want to". It could just as easily be that they find it intimidating, or don't believe they can do it, or they're socialised into other careers. As a company or hiring manager, if you do come across black applicants, it may well be the case that they have had to battle against a lot to get where they are, which shows grit, enthusiasm, and initiative.
ArthurStacks
I'm in the business of making money, not one of getting blacks into software. If they don't want to come for interviews then I'm not going out and finding them.
Also using those stats is flawed because the majority of the people working in those cities don't live in them. The real number (of what % blacks constitute the available workforce within commute distance) will be less than 1% in most of them.
n4r9
> I'm in the business of making money
Respectfully, there is always a trade-off between how much money you make and how positive a social impact you have.
> The real number (of what % blacks constitute the available workforce within commute distance) will be less than 1%
Yes, as I said, it's not the case that black people are as likely to apply for tech jobs. And I agree with you that it's not your responsibility to make that happen. The problem is systemic and goes back to education and environment. However, your tone is a little disconcerting as it seems to suggest that you think everything is fine just the way it is.
ArthurStacks
That is you being ignorant of other cultures and countries and assuming things work like they do in yours.
The few blacks that are in almost all those cities you mention recieve the same education, are the same environment and socioeconomic group as the whites.
It is also a US obsession with US black people and their problems, and thinking everyone should join in on it. This is why when they tried to bring all the George Floyd protest stuff to this region, they were politely told where they could stick it. There are already enough social problems that should get attention and don't, that affect the people living here. Rather than protests about something that has no relevance to anyone living here.
n4r9
Sorry if I misled. I'm UK born and bred, grew up an hour from London, and have been living in London for nearly a decade. I've seen the racial divide between private and state schools, and I've seen how the inner city schools split into the good ones in affluent mostly white areas vs the poor ones in struggling ethnic minority areas. There's some in the middle obviously, but there's a definite split. In the former, teachers will advise which Oxbridge college you should apply to. In the latter, teachers will have a strategy for how to respond if someone brings a weapon into class. Black people might technically follow the same syllabus, but the environment is totally different.
ArthurStacks
That has nothing to do with ethnicity. Only an extremely small minority of wealthy kids are being advised on what Oxbridge college they should apply to. Dealing with weapons in class is advice given to all schools in London and Birmingham. It just so happens that is also where most blacks are.
Outside of London, black people are in no different an socioeconomic situation than the whites.
matsemann
> Whats next, you want to force more white people to become developers because ethnic Indian devs are becoming too populous in the industry.
You managed to sneak in both a slippery slope fallacy and a straw man in the same argument here. No one said what you're claiming.
ArthurStacks
I never claimed he did say that.
zombiwoof
I worked at Apple. In our org of 1000 people there were/are zero black leaders/senior managers
It’s all Indians and Chinese
01100011
But we'll call that "diversity" because they're not white.
It's like the southern Bay Area in general, the least black place I have ever lived. People call it diverse, but it's really just 4 ethnic groups that rarely intermingle. It's not diverse like LA or NYC are diverse.
Manuel_D
None of the companies I worked for considered Asian tech workers "diverse". One actually carved out a separate category for Asian males: ND. Negative Diversity.
I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.
maeil
Where I was at there surely were internal "Asian" community groups with a budget and so on, for one. Don't think proposing a "White" or even "American" or "European" one would've gone over especially well.
gigatree
Has anyone asked why so many companies seem to care so much about the appearance of DEI? And all at the same time? I know there’s cultural shifts towards that sort of thing, probably to fill the void left by religion, but does that explain why the world’s largest private equity firms push them so hard? Seems like something everyone just accepts without question, even though it’s completely out of character for people and entities who only exist to increase their own bottom line (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, it’s just so out of character to the point you’d think it would raise suspicion).
ed_voc
Could it be caused by ESG investments?
Ignorant investors check a box to put their money towards 'ethical' investments, leading companies to create DEI marketing departments to exploit the new investment pipeline.
alephnullshabba
I'm surprised I don't come across this perspective more often. ESG funds reached 15% of the total global securities market in assets under management (although much of this was merely a reclassification of existing investments). It seems very reasonable to conclude that ESG funds/scorings became the primary market incentive driving the corporate DEI initiatives we've seen rolled out this past decade.
Publicly traded companies operate under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (maximizing long-term shareholder value). For consumer-facing companies one could easily argue these initiatives are part of a broader marketing/corporate branding strategy that benefits shareholders. But, for large publicly-traded companies that don't rely on retail consumer sentiment, I presume DEI initiatives were primarily a strategy to attract investment from ESG funds and help quell potential regulatory action/political controversies
I'm ultimately not sure how reasonable my take is (I have no insider experience or knowledge) but would love to hear from someone with relevant first-hand knowledge and get their perspective
KaiserPro
Loads of companies saw a fresh source of capital. but it had strings, you couldn't be an evil mining company, use exploitative labour practices or generally be shitty.
Obviously thats hard to do and still maintain a massive profit, so some did the next easiest thing to greenwashing: hiring some DEI consultants and PR people to take some photos of the three employees with blue hair and melanin.
ESG is still a thing, despite some finance bros making a fuss.
iforgot22
Yes, this is asked a lot, and I've always assumed it was legal pressure. If a company doesn't have enough of X demographic, they can be sued for discrimination, while at the same time it has been illegal to hire based on race. This time the legal pressure in the opposite direction is more obvious.
andrepd
It's marketing, they judge that they will gain more by the good will earned than it costs to hire those "DEI experts". Now that the reaction is in full swing across many territories they start to cut back (see tfa).
It's all very exhausting.
jeffbee
Companies care about attracting all segments of society because if they can expand their applicant pool they will pay less for labor. If I am the only person smart enough to recruit qualified graduates from HBCUs then I get to be more selective in hiring and I also get to offer less wages but still fill the position.
energy123
Companies also want to be in the middle of the pack when it comes to sociocultural norms. There is safety in numbers. When everyone was adopting DEI initiatives, it was the safest for you to do it too. Now that everyone is abandoning DEI initiatives, it's also the safest to abandon it. There is no upside in being the fastest when it comes to bucking society's norms.
0xbadcafebee
DEI programs are simultaneously for PR and morale. You don't want to be "that company that doesn't even have a DEI program". But also you don't want your employees being pissed off that you don't have a DEI program, because they could leave, or complain and decrease morale, which could become a PR nightmare.
But they can be more. Some companies I've worked for used their DEI programs to actively support local communities, organize volunteering efforts, collect donations. Even companies that HN might consider "Evil", I've seen have very strong and engaged DEI groups. It came down to two things: 1) they hired passionate people who took it upon themselves to organize internally and do more with the groups, and 2) they had leadership that (amazingly) gave the support needed for the group to make a positive impact.
But also, some companies I've worked for just had a 30 minute "movie lunch hour" and guest speaker and that was it. So it's obvious to me now when a DEI program is a PR dodge, and when it does real work.
mhh__
Crowning yourself as an expert in a politically contentious field is very lucrative if you can make it stick.
iforgot22
Is this because truly doing race-based hiring has been illegal for a long time? I've noticed they'll target certain demographics for interviews and other opportunities, but identity can't be a factor in the interview itself. It's a fine line.
Aunche
They will target certain demographics in ways that their lawyers can argue are legal such as giving more interviews to Grace Hopper attendees or schools with favorable demographics [1]. This is a great way to poach minorities from different companies without moving bringing any minorities to tech in any significant capacity. This is probably why men are increasingly going to Grace Hopper [2].
[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203845886/women-tech-confere...
whimsicalism
maybe race-based hiring has been illegal and you might be able to win a civil case, but the DOJ certainly wasn't going after companies for not hiring enough white people or men.
iforgot22
Definitely. I think they just had to make sure not to decline a candidate for that reason explicitly. But it trickled down, e.g. interviewers were told not to ask anything remotely related to the candidate's identity and especially not to write it down, even gendered pronouns.
heresie-dabord
> who owned the land where the campus was built
I understand that it is important to raise social awareness about some things. People should not be afraid to talk about real issues. Freedom of speech, the need to listen to people/citizens/customers &c.
That said, the cheerful, forced vapidity in that video is embarrassing. None of those parroted statements is worth a tinker's cuss historically. And none of it is worth a damn in the present time either unless the corporation is going to give billions in reparation to the tribes that were permanently evicted.
Is the Land Acknowledgement Theatre really a strategic attempt to avoid paying damages in many potential class-action law suits?
Is that corporate fear really what drives most of these obsequious recognition statements and policies?
stevage
In Australia, that kind of "acknowledgement of country" is extremely common at the start of all kinds of speeches in different contexts. Slightly shorter, and fixed structure, but very similar content.
It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its detractors.
hedora
That reminds me of a big company around that time. They changed master to main in git, which cost each engineer many hours on average, which translated into many engineer years (decades?) of wasted time.
It was in the middle of a hiring spree. Why not spend that time interviewing black engineers instead?
HeyLaughingBoy
Jeez, the most I ever got was called aside by the VP of Engineering on my last day to give him my opinion of their Diversity program ("since you're leaving, I figured you could be brutally honest with me"). Loved him for that, BTW :-)
But seriously, congratulations!
The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company look good.
MathMonkeyMan
> The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company look good.
This is the most insidious thing, in my opinion. If you're already a hater, now you can unabashedly claim the moral high ground. "Did she interview well, or was she a diversity hire?"
fenomas
One of my theories about DEI programs is: the people running the programs see their only failure mode as "we fail to improve our metric", but the much more dangerous failure mode is "current employees see our program as a joke that creates no value and hires unqualified people".
And it seems like a lot of DEI teams are just completely blind to the latter mode. You sometimes hear about a team announcing an apparently minor change, like renaming something to sound more inclusive, and then go on about how they spent six months discussing it and gathering feedback, and it's very obvious that nobody involved ever asked themselves "when we announce this are we going to sound like a serious team that does valuable work?"
bartread
You say you only placed one? Did you get any feedback on the rejections or were they just cold/ghosted?
So I don’t positively discriminate but, the most recent role I was looking to fill, I didn’t speak to that many candidates because applicant quality was overall poor, but getting on half of those I did speak with were from minorities.
In the end we decided not to hire for the time being because we couldn’t find anyone at the standard we needed (possibly due to time of year - November/December often aren’t great), but I’m surprised that you weren’t even getting people to interview. That, on the face of it, is quite concerning.
perdomon
Why hire a candidate because of their skin color? Shouldn’t employees be hiring for skills and company value fit?
bigmattystyles
Your story reminds me of my friend, also Black, went to engineering college with an overwhelmingly white population (me included). He was in more than half of the pamphlets pitching the school they give out to prospective students. It was so blatant.
bambax
> https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4
I have never seen anything more cringe or ridiculous than this video.
Bill Gates has said publicly that he's a fan of Silicon Valley, the tv show that pokes hard fun at the startup culture. But it's Microsoft that's beyond parody...
jiggawatts
Green washing, security theatre, lip service, etc…
This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
renegat0x0
At the end of the day companies want employees with talent. Yes, they were using DEI as a marketing, and kept hiring using merit, not DEI principles, which I find nice.
weird-eye-issue
Maybe the candidates you presented weren't high quality enough?
1over137
> Like what makes one an expert?
Your skin colour of course.
l2silver
> Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company
I work at pseudo government organization where we take seminars every few months about dei, gender issues, etc... and it has made 0 difference when it comes to hiring. Ultimately my org is trying to reach out more, get to dei events, but that's as far as the effort goes. Once a job application is posted, it's the same old process. Maybe that's fair, but it felt disingenuous, and unnecessary, especially since we weren't great at hiring anyways.
UniverseHacker
I’ve noticed most academic places I’ve worked perpetually use photos of the same 1-2 black people that ever worked there in marketing materials. Including people that left or were pushed out years ago due to racism and unfair treatment. We have constant trainings and workshops on diversity and inclusion (taught exclusively by perpetually angry and abrasive middle aged white people), but everyone ignores me when I point out how specific aspects of the hiring process and work culture systematically exclude people from diverse backgrounds. In truth, at our supposedly “woke” and “DEI hire” academic institution, a black candidate still needs to be much much better than a white candidate to have any chance… and once they are here they will not feel welcome or included.
andrepd
Yes, effecting actual change is hard, pulling employees into a meeting room for 45mins to show them some buzzword filled slides is much easier.
JohnMakin
Thanks for sharing your experience
AdrianB1
Many DEI programs are hit hard by reality: there are only so many people of race X, gender Y or whatever metric Z interested and qualified for a job. The more difficult the job, the less diversity of candidates you have.
I did around 1000 interviews for my current company and about 200 for the previous one. I found that in IT in Europe there are not many candidates to meet DEI targetsand still hire the qualified ones. Even expanding to other continents, we barely made it; the last team I hired was one Latino, one Filipino and one white, 2 out of 3 were male. I interviewed around 30 candidates for these positions and I selected the top 3. These 3 were just above the lower limit of expertise to be hired, so I basically had zero choice, the alternative was to pull triple shifts myself to cover for the missing people.
Let's say you are the director of a steel plant. DEI targets are totally irrelevant, I never heard about a woman working on the plant floor, but I have many cousins who did. Dying at 45 or 50 years old due to lung or throat cancer is not something many women want to, but all my cousins did. I don't believe in DEI in these circumstances. But if you want DEI in "a day in life of a Microsoft /Twitter employee having free food and pointless meetings all day" videos, that is not fair.
So, I don't know why you were not able to place the developers, but think about DEI even more. We have several black people in my department, one of the best PMs I worked with is an older black woman, a good professional will find a place almost anywhere. Morgan Freeman shows that being black does not prevent one from magnificent results, but asking for rewards for being black is not the way.
torginus
What does DEI even mean in Europe? Do you hire stand-in versions of US racial groups?
dijit
European doesn't count unless your skin colour is sufficiently different.
(IE; Italians are "White" but Turks are non-white. Romanians ironically get the short end of the stick no matter the situation).
Mostly it centers on LGBTQ+ and Women though.
krainboltgreene
Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead of the calcification of current systemic problems.
kepler1
Since you seem relatively open minded and objective about it let me ask you this:
How much did you get paid for doing all those consulting gigs on DEI topics?
Just to point out, even as you highlight the hollowness of the trend passing through, you were a part of the industry it created and a beneficiary of people's sudden interest in the symbolism of it even if it achieved little. Tons of people who could justify some kind of vague contribution/expertise were glad to make money off of the political need to pursue this, and be seen doing it.
It sounds like you were one of the more respectable contributors. Others were hangers-on, making money or careers off people's fear of being accused of not toeing the new party line, regardless of how hollow it was. VPs/deans/executive directors of diversity and inclusion at whatever institutions they could sell their services to.
Whether it was good or not at its core, some people had a vested interest in it continuing. It happens equally with every new trend that is hard to set real goals against. (or achievable ones, until it's found out to be empty).
firefoxd
I had my day job. This was something I did just to help. I did not request any payment for the work I did. The DEI teams where in house while I was an outside consultant.
jlhawn
> ... who owned the land ...
they didn't use the word "owned", only "occupied". The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership" and would think of it more like land alienation. As a Georgist, I'm personally very annoyed by these sort of empty indigenous land acknowledgements. I'm more excited about stuff like this Squamish Nation housing development in Vancouver, BC [1] where they actually get rights to use the land how they want even if it doesn't fit local expectations of "indigenous ways of knowing and being".
WalterBright
> The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership"
I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.
Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.
hn_throwaway_99
Thanks for this bit of sanity. Arguing that Native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership, while still having the concept "I'm going to murder you and your compatriots so that I can occupy the land where you live.", seems a bit like splitting hairs.
dcrazy
It’s not splitting hairs. There’s a recognizable difference between a tribe collectively defending exclusive access to certain land, and the concept of transferable, heritable private land interest.
ethbr1
Yes and no.
Even in the US, commons-deeded land between multiple people is still a thing. Albeit one that lawyers hate to mess with because it's more work for them.
For purposes of this thread, exclusive control of an area, absent other claims, would certainly entitle indigenous American peoples to ownership of that land.
throwway120385
We even form corporations to try to deed land as a group. That's the entire purpose of an HOA -- to confer private ownership of community-owned land and equipment among the members of the community as their private land changes hands.
PaulDavisThe1st
HOAs do not confer private ownership of land among members of a group.
They impose a mutually agreed upon set of rules on everyone who owns land that is covered by the HOA (with one of the rules preventing severance of the property from the HOA).
jjnoakes
I'm pretty sure all of the common areas in HOAs that I used to live in were equally owned by all members.
dcrazy
I don’t think thats how my HOA works. I live in a high rise; I believe the HOA owns the common areas but grants exclusive use of certain parts to owners/tenants.
dcrazy
You don’t need a corporation to deed land to a group. Any group of persons can hold title to a property. My wife and I had to choose whether to buy our condo as joint tenants or as tenants in common.
hn_throwaway_99
Fine, but recall what started this discussion, this issue of land acknowledgements (which I agree are absolute peak stupidity which literally managed to piss off everyone on all sides - the right thought it was useless virtue signalling, and lots of actual indigenous people pretty much agreed, considering it a vacuous gesture). For all intents and purposes, native tribes owned that land before settlers kicked them off and said you couldn't live there anymore.
philipwhiuk
> transferable, heritable private
None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.
stonesthrowaway
> seems a bit like splitting hairs.
It isn't splitting hairs. It's outright propaganda invented to justify stealing native land. The idea being if natives had no sense of property, we didn't really steal anything from them because they had no property to begin with.
The other trope justifying theft of the land is of the "dumb indians" who sold the land for cheap. Like indians selling manhattan for a handful of beads.
SpicyLemonZest
I don't think that's accurate. The historic colonizers fully understood that native Americans had a sense of property, which is why even the most blatant land grabs were almost always justified by a forced sale or treaty. I've only ever heard the idea that natives didn't own land from people promoting the myth of the noble savage.
eapressoandcats
Brett Devereaux talks about this in relation to the Mongols and other nomads. Yes they didn’t “own” land but if you trespassed on their grazing pastures they would absolutely use violence against you: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.
santoshalper
Also, OUR idea of ownership, at least legally, is based on the idea of usage and access. You may own a piece of land, but not the mineral rights. You can't prevent an aircraft from flying over your property etc. Ownership is a bundle of rights and exclusions. The idea of ownership meaning "who is allowed to hunt on this land" would fit right into our legal framework of ownership.
WalterBright
I'm also pretty sure that any tribe that built a village and farmed had a very strong notion of my house and my garden.
Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend it.
AlotOfReading
You'd be surprised then. Indigenous property rights aren't homogenous. Many lacked the kind of exclusive ownership that we have in Western systems. (Some) Inuit recognized communal band lands for example, where a particular individual within that band might have rights to a particular resource location while they used it, but their usage was governed by complex systems of traditions and they couldn't necessarily exclude others from separate resources in the same physical location.
Pueblo groups had extremely strong ideas about property lines, but those properties were often analogous to modern corporations where individual families could own "shares" in the property, and exchange those for other shares in other properties to reallocate ownership. Areas within a property could also be "rented" to others, or the entire property reclaimed by the government.
The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems. Capabilities based security vs role based security, to really force the analogy into computing.
mitthrowaway2
Is that really different than traditional Western societies? Medieval European societies had complex systems governing shared rights and ownership of common grazing lands and forests, for example. Those rights changed over time (such as through the Inclosure Acts) but it's not a concept alien to western societies.
AlotOfReading
There's probably an interesting comparative discussion that I'm not remotely qualified to have on medieval European property rights, but there's enough history of colonial settlers wildly misunderstanding indigenous property systems that I don't know a better word than "alien".
ethbr1
"Misunderstanding" seems perhaps overly charitable to the colonial settlers.
Possessing of enough military force to ignore others rights would be more historically descriptive.
Even if they had fully understood all the nuances of indigenous property rights, they still would have stolen the land. Confusion was just a fig leaf.
ponow
Developing defence capacity is a basic responsibility. Humans can scream foul if they lose out to machine hybrids or extraterrestrials.
9dev
So what, it’s your own fault if someone assaults you and takes away your things?
ethbr1
I mean, kind of?
Not in a morally absolving the attacker way.
But in a you had agency and chose to underinvest in defense way.
That said, it's pretty unlikely the rest of the world could have defended against a technologically advanced Europe / Middle East / China, at their respective peaks, and especially after transoceanic sail enabled cross-sea logistics.
WalterBright
> The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems.
Capitalism has very fine-grained ideas about property rights. Consider corporations, for just one example. There are multiple kinds of shares about who owns what rights to the corporation. Then there are all the contractual obligations that, in essence, transfer specific property rights. There are the web of rights that workers have over it. Then there are the rights the government has over it, via tax obligations and regulations. Layer on the concept of "stakeholders" that layer on more ownership rights.
ponow
We need one title one owner. Shared ownership is confusion. Governmens shouldn't run interference between managers and stockholders.
IncreasePosts
Well, I feel like the "traditional way of life" argument is okay for why they should get special treatment. But why should anyone get special treatment if they are going to just, essentially, treat it as way to siphon tax revenue from the larger society?
pshc
Shouldn’t building dense housing in an area with a terrible housing shortage increase the tax base if anything?
colechristensen
I’m perfectly fine with modern corrective actions taken in response to past treaty violations. They were treated with as separate nations in the past and now there are mechanisms for limited forms of self rule on tribal land.
phdavis1027
Because that society committed what are at least atrocities and probably more fairly described as genocide against those societies for like 400 years. A small casino empire seems like the least we could do lol
BurningFrog
The institution of land ownership is very important in farming societies, where land is what produces wealth and health.
Societies on the hunter/gatherer spectrum also value their hunting grounds, but in far less strict ways.
I'm pretty sure the indigenous peoples that lived by farming had well developed concepts of land ownership, but they were the minority when Europeans arrived.
skeeter2020
Or really any permanent settlement. Look at say, Northern Inuit vs. Puebloans.
aprilthird2021
I have always disliked and told people I disliked land acknowledgements because they are designed to earn the social capital of giving the land back without ever having any intention of doing anything close to that.
whimsicalism
funny because i feel that your comment plays into the exact same tropes about “indigenous ways of knowing” you critique
jiggawatts
Here in Australia they use the carefully crafted phrase: “the previous custodians of this land”.
As in… we are the custodians now.
defrost
I've not seen "previous" used ..
eg:
W.AUstralian Health acknowledges the Aboriginal people of the many traditional lands and language groups of Western Australia.
It acknowledges the wisdom of Aboriginal Elders both past and present and pays respect to Aboriginal communities of today.
is pretty generic for a handwave across the entire state.
In specific places, large tracts of land here, the terminology is current custodians - if you recall that whole deal with Mabo and Native Title there are large ares in which the traditional inhabitants are now the current owners under Commonwealth Law that once didn't acknowledge them as human and declared the land Terra Nullius.
Mabo decision: https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Stories_and_Hist...
We acknowledge the Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their continued connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to their Cultures, Country and Elders past, present and emerging.
We also acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and live, the land on which this exhibition was created, and the land on which Australian Parliament House is situated – an area where people have met for thousands of years.stevage
What? No. The phrase is "the traditional owners" or sometimes "traditional custodians". Never previous.
jiggawatts
Bad memory/paraphrasing on my part. Traditional and previous are near-synonyms.
stevage
I don't think that's true. Traditional can also carry the sense of ongoing.
jmyeet
Every single socially progressive initiative every company engages in is purely performative. If those initiatives potentially hurt their bottom line or hurt them politically, they will be dropped so fast your head will spin.
Years ago, tech companies would promote such moves to improve their image, play intot heir role as being "outsiders" or "disruptors" and to attract staff, who tended to skew towards socially progressive issues. There was genuine belief in the missions of those companies. Google once touted its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
But now we're talking about trillion dollar companies that move in lockstep with US policy.
I tend to believe that every US company eventually becomes a bank, a defense contractor or both.
The biggest heel turn politically is probably Mark Zuckerberg, who now makes frequent donations to Republican candidates (and some Democrats, for the record) but we also have Meta donating $1M to Trump's inauguration (by comparison, there was no contribution to Biden's inauguration). Efforts of fighting misinformation are out. DEO is out.
If you work for Meta, you're now really no different to Tiwtter. Your employer now actively pushes right-wing propaganda and the right-wing agenda. There is no real support for minorities. But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
andrekandre
> But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
cyanydeez
Still bettsr than doing fascism with ethnic white nationLism.
Its not like jettisoning systemic racism would happen faster than a generation.
ARandomerDude
Yawn. Focus on being a great dev and not what your skin color is. I couldn’t care less where your ancestors were from or whether you have a penis or a vagina. If the code is good, let’s merge it. If it sucks, delete it.
Over2Chars
Wow.
I'm curious why it took hundreds of candidates to not be hired before it dawned on you that it was not sincere? Wouldn't the first dozen have been enough?
Unless your financial interests intersected with those of the companies you consulted for this "show"...?
But, I applaud your bravery in calling these guys out after they stopped giving you work.
Bravo.
antics
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
tgsovlerkhgsel
> To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together
The problem with DEI-as-implemented is that it often not only contains overt discrimination against a group (based on a protected class), but also prohibits any criticism of this. When someone is being discriminated against, not subtly or silently but explicitly, intentionally and overtly, and then punished for daring to complain about it, that leads to a lot of resentment (both by the people directly affected and by other members of the same class that observe both the discrimination and the silencing).
I'd say that resentment is justified; unfortunately, I suspect the backlash will primarily hit the people that the DEI policies were supposed to help, rather than the perpetrators of the discrimination.
antics
I totally get it. A lot of our wounds are still open, too. I'm not here to tell people how to feel, I'm just advocating for deciding what is actually important to you and focusing all your attention on it until it is resolved. I happen to think that citizens of the US are worth more to each other as sometimes-conflicting allies than as complete adversaries, but that is for everyone to decide on their own.
paulryanrogers
Isn't the point of affirmate action and some DEI measures to correct for centuries of systemic injustice? If so I don't see why groups that have benefited and reinforced their advantages for generations are now so easily offended by efforts to rebalance the scales.
I'm a white male who was raised comfortably middle class. The more folks I've met and the more history I've studied, it's pretty clear I was born with a huge number of advantages many of my peers didn't enjoy. I don't mind them getting preferential treatment, even if I'm more qualified once in a while.
danielscrubs
So you are born in the middle class, then it is a class issue? Will Smiths son Jaden had it way better than you. The axis for where to look is just bizarre.
To really help, make sure the schools in poor areas are top notch, even better than upper class schools, and you will automatically fix the imbalance, without having to use equipment for darkness, dna samples to check the heritage and other clearly bizarre future paths.
aprilthird2021
> that leads to a lot of resentment (both by the people directly affected and by other members of the same class that observe both the discrimination and the silencing).
Agreed. This is the fundamental flaw of a lot of social theories borne out of academia when they land in the real world. They thrive in an academic world where hierarchy is bought into by students eagerly and are transplanted into a world where people must accept hierarchy to survive.
> I'd say that resentment is justified
Resentment never makes anything better, no matter how justified. Unfortunately.
teitoklien
That resentment drove people to vote for powers that forced FB and other bigtech to reduce the discriminations that were creating those resentments
I’d say it did make things better.
llamaimperative
Ah yes I remember all the polls saying “Meta’s hiring policies” were in the top 1,303,886 issues voters cared about
That might’ve drove a few people to donate huge sums of money to information campaigns that fomented hatred, division, and distrust among voters, but no: American voters were not voting on big tech DEI policies.
Feel free to post evidence otherwise.
iforgot22
DEI was a major Republican talking point. This is a thing well beyond Big Tech, like in other industries and in college admissions.
tgsovlerkhgsel
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...
White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something.
I think this goes in this direction. People don't care about "Meta's hiring policies" but they care about "wokeness", and news articles about the former lead to a perception that society has way too much of the latter and that it's a bad thing.
aprilthird2021
It wasn't the driving force of that at all, but I'll rephrase if you want to be pedantic. Resentment is rarely ever only channeled in good ways
algebra-pretext
> “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.” - Amílcar Cabral
getnormality
Thank you for this wonderful message. As a fellow American, I can see you have our common interests at heart, as well as those of your tribe. That is a model for all of us.
antics
Thank you for the response, I am very glad to hear that came through. I think these discussions tend to be fundamentally pessimistic towards the future and I really don't think they need to be. We control our destiny, and we can make it whatever we wish.
Viliam1234
> lack of educational resources
Could you please explain this part? I am not sure how you meant it. Is the main problem that the resources are not in the language of your tribe? Or is that a lack of educational resources regardless of language (e.g. simply not enough textbooks to give to each child)? What kind of educational resources do you wish you had?
antics
Great questions. The kids mostly speak English as first language, and the schools are in English. With the exception of one huge twist, the schools have many educational difficulties you'll find in rural America generally—it's hard to get money for materials and curriculum, hard to recruit good teachers, hard to get students connected to people with practical advice/guidance, hard to get connected to opportunities, hard to reach escape velocity, and so on.
So, what's the twist? Tribal schools tend to be administrated by the federal government which makes problems extremely slow and hard to address. With some asterisks, the local elementary school was basically provisioned as a consequence of a federal treaty with the US Senate, and is/was mostly administered by a the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which rolls up into a federal department that until 2020ish, had never been run by a native person. All of these things make it very tricky to work with.
In spite of that, believe it or not, this is a massive improvement: until relatively recently, the school was a mandatory boarding trade school meant to teach kids to be (basically) English-only maids. This lead to a substantial percentage of the population being either illiterate or semi-literate, with no meaningful work experience, and with very very few opportunities that were not menial work. That inertia is extremely challenging to overcome, and the most natural place to try is the education system, which generally is simply not up to it.
I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play. Some of us got out and whether we succeed in the next generation depends on whether we can mobilize the community to productively take advantage of the resources we do have. This is why it's painful to me to hear about, e.g., land acknowledgements. If you have seen this pain firsthand I just do not see how that can be the #1 policy objective.
lukeschlather
Land acknowledgements are easy. They're not a policy objective. Most DEI stuff, it's the result of being in a room where you're trying to get some real change accomplished and you just give up with the decisionmakers and say "OK, whatever, do nothing about this problem, but could you at least admit that the boarding schools were bad?" And they agree because it gets them out of the conversation. And no, it's not going to solve everything, it might not even solve anything, but it's nice to at least have some agreement on things that we definitely shouldn't do again, even if we have no idea how to fix the damage.
sfifs
Interesting comment... I keep getting surprised by implicit first world assumptions on HN.
I'm not the OP but you could consider hypothetically as an example, would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
macrocosmos
Yes they would. It’s a beautiful part of the country. And I know great teachers that live there.
antics
Unfortunately, our reservation is in central Oregon, which is less desirable. Even if we were not forced out of the ancestral homeland (what is now called the Columbia River Gorge), I'm not sure that would have been better. Although pretty, it is very out of the way, and people do not know that it is in the same class as the Yangtze (say).
insane_dreamer
in the US, schools in poor counties have less resources and less high quality teachers, and the children have much less of an education-focused environment in which they can flourish because of the parent's lack of resources
raise the economic level of the community, and education rises with it
visarga
You make this to be a financial problem, but I think actually it is a cultural problem. Maybe lack of row models or not valuing education sufficiently. Having too much money can be a hinderance to educational motivation too.
HideousKojima
Abbott districts in New Jersey are an obvious counterpoint to this. They are funded at levels equal to if not greater than the wealthiest districts in the state, despite being in some of the poorest parts of the state. I spite of this, over the four decades that Abbott districts have been in place, educational attainment gaps between them and the rest of the state have actually widened.
insane_dreamer
it's not just about the funding to the schools; it's about the economic situation of the parents and their ability to provide conditions where their children can thrive academically
that's why I said the best way to improve the education is to improve the economic conditions of the community
Avicebron
> "The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete"
So in my rural, predominantly white "Non DEI target" part of the country, this is the problem too except when these people apply to hundreds of jobs in software engineering they get crickets.
antics
Well, just one data point for you (YMMV), but in "DEI" contexts I've been a part of, class diversity did actually come up somewhat regularly. I would not say corp diversity efforts I saw were all that successful in staffing that demographic—but they also weren't that successful in staffing minorities either. Mostly I think this reflects a consistent disconnect between what people wanted corp diversity efforts to be, and what they really were.
With all that said I do have a story of my own like this. In 2013 or so I wrote some stuff about spam detection and a Twitter engineer reached out about a job. I was an outgoing new grad from the University of Utah. When I got through with the loop the recruiter said, "How did you get here, we don't get many candidates from Utah." I still wonder what they wanted me to think when I heard that. What I actually felt was deeply out of place and uncomfortable. And it has affected every hiring process I've been apart of since.
gunsle
I always bring this up to extremely woke people. I grew up at the poverty line in rural Minnesota with a blue collar truck driver father, divorced parents, in a trailer park. I don’t say this to get sympathy, I am proud I overcame it. But DEI and other race based (vs economically/financially based) affirmative action is just racism in a different outfit. Are the white people living below the poverty line all across America “privileged”? Certainly not, and as you said, on top of that they are immediately disqualified from so many types of aid. Imagine applying for college and seeing every other minority under the sun have scholarships specifically for them: women, black people, Asians, etc. White male from poverty? lol not you, you’re privileged. It’s ridiculous and it’s been going on since I was in college over 10 years ago.
KaiserPro
but you do see the problem here. Its not the "DEI targets" that are at fault, its the systematic roll back of any protection for any poor community.
The same people that are saying "a new way forward" or "make america great again" failed to put any money to help. Your community doesn't produce anything that those funding congress care about, means that you get nothing.
aprilthird2021
Well, in the non-DEI world, we'll soon find out if the reason this happens was solely because of policies or if low educational attainment seeps into one's college, ones preparedness for a job, one's ability to get a job, etc.
gunsle
lol I have been saying similar things here in Minnesota for years. A lot of extremely liberal, wealthy progressives like to try to change landmarks around here to the native language version. I have no issue with this at face value. What I do have an issue with, is these people acting like this is doing anything to help the local Native American tribes. Why would they care if a lake they probably never visit and a flag they barely look at are changed? Especially when they weren’t even asking for it? What does that do at all to actually help our local Native communities struggling with the things you listed above? Absolutely nothing. It’s all a parade to make these people feel like they’re doing something while having to sacrifice absolutely nothing from their own lives. It’s honestly pathetic.
bastardoperator
I don't have to be invested in a cause to know that diversity in problem solving can be a key component to success hence global technology companies, or that promoting the ideas of equity and inclusion are things most humans can benefit from. DEI is not about change or solving a particular problem, it's about awareness of perspective and seeking to understand others.
antics
To be clear I am not arguing for or against working with a bunch of people from totally different backgrounds, demographics, etc. I am arguing that, because we can't do everything we should decide what really matters to us, commit to it in the long term, and invest in it to the exclusion of the many other completely worthy causes. I know it sounds obvious, but at least for the communities I belong to, the industry committed shallowly and as a result accomplished very little.
bastardoperator
It sounds like you're confusing affirmative action with DEI. A broader perspective benefits everyone. Different lived experiences contribute to a broader perspective. It's not about checking boxes or filling quotas and it's not specific to any particular group.
akoboldfrying
>to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on.
I strongly agree, but sadly I think what you're saying here is probably almost incomprehensible to a broad swathe of middle-class white Americans, to whom being seen to be outwardly supportive of every DEI-ish cause has essentially become something like personal hygiene -- a thing you do perfunctorily and without thinking. It's just "what you do", "what a civilised person does", etc.
I'd be interested to hear more about what you have seen work and not work for economic development in these communities.
antics
In our area, it is mostly resorts and casinos. Economic development gives everyone in the area jobs and opportunities. This has changed the picture from "Indians begging the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and local government for resources" to "we have a robust economic engine which is a critical part of the greater surrounding community, and which we'd mostly all like to succeed, but need to work through details on." It's not perfect and there's still conflict but it's much easier to work together in the latter situation.
pepinator
This is such a superficial take.
JohnMakin
I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
swatcoder
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
> This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It was about keeping regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated public some crumbs, but they don't need to worry about that for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.
fmajid
You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.
chrislongss
These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.
sgerenser
Not only that, the “diverse slate” requirement, which is mentioned in the Meta posting, is actively harmful to PoC jobseekers. When I was at a Microsoft, I I knew of multiple cases where a candidate was already essentially decided on, but they had to continue what was essentially “sham” interviews of at least one woman and one PoC in order to check the diverse slate box. Complete waste of time on all sides.
jvanderbot
I worked with a talented engineer who happened to be female and she was constantly behind because she had to attend each interview this small company did. Even she, a big supporter of these efforts, had to laugh about it.
themiddleupper
The company i work for does not have any quota and neither does meta. There is no lowering of standards to hire somebody, just more effort to get wider application pool and outreach programs to schools. Also DEI is not just based on colour or ethnicity. There are other groups like mothers, neuro divergent people etc.
darth_avocado
I know of a famous tech company where majority of workers were white, not even Asian and Indian people, who usually tend to over represent in tech. Around the BLM times they put in policy that they had to interview people of color. What most managers did was just interview people of color only to reject them, often judge the candidates too harshly to ensure no laws were broken. They often interviewed the same candidate for multiple positions, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. Obviously if they were investigated, nothing provable would ever come out. But stuff like that is pretty prevalent in tech.
sakex
Name and shame
VirusNewbie
Microsoft did this. I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before).
Less you think I'm complaining about algorithmic interviews, I passed Google and Netflix technical rounds just fine.
Microsoft managers were the most disinterested group I've ever interviewed with, and it was only later that I found out I was picked to interview for multiple teams because of a DEI recruiter, and then found out that MS had initiatives forcing managers to interview people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock. The IQ difference between the people at Netflix and Google compared to MSFT was astounding.
rootcage
I used to work at Microsoft and was on the other side, unfortunately I had the exact opposite experience. I interviewed and rejected a candidate (due to poor technical performance) then had the hiring manager contact me asking if I would reconsider as he needed to "increase DEI" footprint of his team. He wanted me to lower the bar for DEI reasons.
1over137
>Seriously, sell your microsoft stock
Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
gunsle
Okay but you can’t rely blame this on DEI or racism for sure. Plenty of people have had the same experience (myself included) with tons of companies and their hiring processes, it’s not like being given unfair conditions in interviews definitively amounts to racism or Microsoft being performatively woke. It happens to everyone. Even your anecdotal experience with the other companies being “better” is just that, random chance. I’ve had great interviews and bad ones, and 99% of the time all it comes down to is the mood of the interviewer and how much they like me personally.
Jagerbizzle
What part of the org were you interviewing in?
VirusNewbie
Azure.
dijit
I have no trouble believing that the engineering competence of Azure is especially low.
astura
>Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock.
Well, if they were only interviewing you for performative box-checking reasons so they could hire the person they really wanted to hire then they would have a strong incentive to come across as somewhere you didn't want to work at. A disinterested interviewer is going to come across as not so bright. So this is hardly a fair assessment of the talent at Microsoft.
OTOH my professional interactions with Microsoft employees has always been positive. They've always been extremely capable and have gone the extra mile for me.
VirusNewbie
No, they were not smart engineers. one literally interrupted me to say “you can’t solve this using recursion, you need a for loop”. I clarified if they meant for stack space reasons and they said “no, it just doesn’t work recursively”.
The system design round, they got confused with some basic queueing concepts. It was a shit show.
superultra
> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution?
There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.
ncr100
Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.
xvector
Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority)
Now we are just seeing a return to reality.
throwawayq3423
Turns out the whole "culture" thing was made up. You just do what is best for your business.
liontwist
Which as it turns out, is also easier for employees to reason about and navigate.
Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.
eapressoandcats
To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.
andrepd
Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.
chrislongss
"Trillionaire" media moguls were on board with the previous regime for at least the last decade. They are realigning now, not particularly surprising.
andrepd
Hardly. Social media algorithms optimising for engagement is surely one of the main reasons we're in this hyper-polarised environment. So yes, their marketing said DEI, but their algos pushed far-right propaganda onto my screen.
liontwist
if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.
andrepd
Yes it's called boiling the frog + shifting the Overton window. Threatening to invade allies, or having an unelected halftrillionaire direct the government of the US and openly push for regime change across Western Europe (to give two examples from just the past week), would be unthinkable in 2015. Now it's just "oh there's this guy again, anyway what's on" / "mild political irritation".
So yes, you're right that it's a bad strategy to keep the alarmism on 11 for a decade (because this normalisation is what eventually happens), but wrong to think that it's not actually a true problem.
whimsicalism
I don't see how very real differences in hiring practice are performative, but maybe that's just me.
jandrese
It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.
purplethinking
DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.
darth_avocado
> If you were a woman of color in tech you’ve been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are.
Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?
RestlessMind
Many woman of color are simply not entering the pipeline. But those who are there get wildly favorable treatment compared to people from other demographics with similar capabilities.
fzeroracer
Wildly favorable treatment according to who, exactly? Or are you just being slightly subtle about your actual point here?
Explain it to me since I've been in the industry for quite some time here and I can't say I've seen what you're hinting at.
gr3ml1n
One of the solutions to the 'POC Pipeline Problem' was to overhire for non-technical roles that could be used to hit diversity goals.
kccqzy
I think there is a difference between diversity initiatives before 2020 and the DEI initiatives since 2020. As far as I can see, the latter is indeed is corporate puffery, where employees maybe join a half-hour seminar to talk about DEI every year, and perhaps there are new DEI groups for employees to discuss this. But the diversity hire initiative before 2020 was much more substantive that resulted in real meaningful changes to company demographics.
code_biologist
It was always puffery, just money was cheap before 2020. Engineering managers I worked with before then were gung ho to grow their head count, even if it meant hiring iffy engineers. After 2020, they got told new head count would be much more limited and hiring got a lot more selective.
cbsmith
I think it very much depends. When BLM happened, I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of discussions with executives from a variety of companies about diversity programs, and the things I heard...
"I thought after Obama was elected, that diversity was no longer a problem" "When we thought of diversity, we thought of it in terms of hiring more women" "We just don't get the applicants. There's nothing we can do."
The whole BLM thing really shook up their thinking and approach to diversity. Now, I think a bunch of them did really engage in "corporate puffery", but I did see a lot of cases where tangible changes were made to diversity programs.
...and then more recently they seem to be firing their entire DEI teams. :-(
_factor
Half hour? Try a two day video on lesson.
themiddleupper
Mentioning that a poc is successful only because of their colour is harsh. Maybe they bring value and have qualities that other candidates did not have. DEI only widens the pipeline, no private company lowers their standards.
zo1
The "well" has been poisoned for all such groups of people, and DEI as a concept will eventually be held accountable to the harm it did to the groups they supposedly aimed to help. DEI as a concept was a leech to society, feeding on good will and injecting itself everywhere. To the detriment of both sides, and almost never to the detriment of actual prejudiced individuals.
naijaboiler
are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
Ask a "woman of color" how much of this perceived advantage they actually enjoy in real life, especially from their perspective. You will be shocked the gap between what you presume and what the reality is.
strix_varius
> are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
As a hiring manager in a fortune 100 who saw firsthand the delta between white men and everyone else in terms of the amount of justification required for hiring, promoting, and firing... yes, I do know this for a fact.
StanislavPetrov
When you sit in on staff meeting, and the president explicitly says, "we are not hiring or promoting any more white men, only women of color and those of other marginalized groups", you absolutely know it for a fact. This in fact occurred, and continues to occur, as I can personally attest, at a for-profit college in NYC. And in fact, although ~10 people have been hired over the last few years, none of them have been white men.
Obviously that isn't to say women of color have it easy (nobody has it easy these days), but it is beyond dispute that this sort of discrimination is rampant in certain industries (like higher education) and in certain cities.
And for people who say this is illegal (and perhaps it is), when a white man (not me), who was a victim of this policy (many accolades, highest performance reviews, seniority), was repeatedly passed over for promotion by women of color and other "marginalized" people, filed a complaint with the NYC EEOC office, he was met with derision.
purplethinking
Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.
xvector
This perfectly fits my old big tech EM who was totally incompetent and made life miserable for everyone on her team to the point where all but 2 people left (team of 12)
She also took back to back maternity leave throughout her time at the company, 3 times in a row, before leaving. Didn't even know it was possible to have kids that fast.
Conferences bend over backwards to have her speak. She has no clue what she is talking about but at least she gets to put it on her LinkedIn I guess.
dmazzoni
Do you actually have experience with those programs?
Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.
As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.
That's just one example of what they do.
You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".
AlexandrB
> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".
And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.
ChocolateGod
> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason
Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.
arccy
there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
hollerith
Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.
code_biologist
Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power networks based on race, or those power networks are doing less.
hollerith
> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
What evidence do you have that Sundar or Satya used any power network to progress in their career?
Could it not be that being a Brahmin in India was not all that promising to an ambitious young Indian man and in response he decided to start fresh in another country where he had very little in the way of useful network connections?
RestlessMind
> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
eh, what? Why would US corporate culture give a shit about Hindu castes? Google and Microsoft boards appointed Sundar and Satya, but I don't think those boards could tell a Brahmin from a non-Brahmin.
UncleMeat
Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.
rufus_foreman
"bamboo ceiling" is not a statistic.
UncleMeat
Underrepresentation of south and east asians in leadership roles is, though.
dijit
Do you have anything to back that up with, as far as I understood it Indian CEOs are responsible for significantly higher percentage of market valuations than their population percentage in the US.
Palo Alto Networks & Arista, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Netapp, Micron... Even World Bank has an Indian CEO.
cyberax
Can you provide the stats? I'm looking at the BLS data and I don't really see anything relevant.
pc86
The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in these scenarios is that Asians are not typically underrepresented in the engineering field, company founders, prestigious schools, etc.
The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to help people who look like the people starting the programs.
chrislongss
Even following the charitable interpretation, grouping a dozen of cultures with very different educational and economic opportunities into a single "asian" designation is a bizarre practice.
danudey
There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.
If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).
If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.
com2kid
Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.
Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.
HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.
It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."
naijaboiler
This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.
Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.
End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.
DangitBobby
Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?
com2kid
Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?
I honestly fail to how that could happen.
For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.
Manuel_D
If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.
If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?
zo1
Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.
Occams razor comes to mind.
chrislongss
Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.
jordanb
> Do you actually have experience with those programs?
I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI.
The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR.
Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc.
Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most.
The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.
Karrot_Kream
This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.
surgical_fire
If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people.
I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.
userbinator
I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do.
That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.
Plasmoid
One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.
hombre_fatal
> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring.
It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.
This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.
whynotminot
> Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.
Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.
Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.
I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
blitzar
The memo sent from on high (multiple years):
You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.
maxwellg
Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually happening? I find it extremely doubtful.
notahacker
Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...
blitzar
The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading.
When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable.
The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.
curtisblaine
This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.
asdasdsddd
There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.
fn-mote
GP mentions race and gender, so this response isn’t making an impression on me.
The point the GP makes - why was the promo/hiring committee unable to find a breadth of candidates - is a troubling but real part of many of our daily lives.
Maybe there weren’t any. That’s usually the reason/excuse given. That should still be a cause for concern.
pc86
Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now.
No department should be vetoing any hire in a different department. Having an engineer veto a hire in the DEI department is ludicrous on its face, but no more ludicrous than having a DEI department tell the engineering team they're not "allowed" to hire a qualified applicant because of their race or gender.
a1j9o94
It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?
Manuel_D
Protected class cannot be used as a factor in hiring. Saying "we can't proceed with an offer until we've hired at least one woman and one URM" (which is what Meta's DSA entailed) is indeed using protected class as a factor in hiring.
asdasdsddd
You are confusing policies and qualifications, its on the engineers to decide the qualifications and HR to run policies on sourcing.
asdasdsddd
Why is breadth of candidates defined by race and gender instead of experience and expertise. If the DEI department improves breadth of experience and expertise, by looking into alternative hiring streams, thats great, but people who defend DEI always approach it from the race and gender first which is a tell tale sign that race and gender are the primary objectives. And in my experience, when race and gender are the goals, formal and informal quotas appear.
9rx
It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."?
I get it. I don't think a 14 year old looks suitable for a senior role either, but looking past that is the point. You never know what someone can offer.
matteotom
well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience building software in an enterprise setting, of course they should be considered for a senior role
9rx
What about 10 years of experience building software translates to the director position being talked about? Would a 14 year old who has 10 years of (real) experience working on the family farm be equally suitable or is there something about software specifically that primes people for being directors?
matteotom
sure, replace building software with leading large teams. The general point still stands
9rx
So you echo that until you find a 14 year old who has managed a large team for at least 10 years you haven’t tried hard enough? I don’t want to rest on my biases, but…
matteotom
No, it is obvious that there are not any qualified 14 year olds, and it is also obvious that there are qualified minorities - if you can't find qualified minorities, you should look more closely at your recruitment pipelines.
9rx
It might be obvious based on your criteria, but remember that you invented that criteria based your arbitrary biases. Those with 10 years of real experience are statistically more likely to be qualified for the job, that is hard to disagree with, but being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question. That is why the bias spoken of exists! But the point made at the business told about earlier is that statistical likelihood does not preclude outliers who deserve equal consideration.
Your original comment suggests you come from the software industry, in which case you know full well that there are programmers who have been at it for a few years who can program circles around those who have been doing it for 10. Not everyone progresses at the same rate. Years of experience across a wide population will provide positive correlation, but is not anywhere close to being an accurate measuring device and says nothing down at the individual level. To discount someone with less years of experience than your arbitrarily chosen number before you have even talked to them is the very same lack of inclusion being talked about.
matteotom
> being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question
Source?
9rx
Your previous comment. You spoke to the recruitment pipelines that are more likely to find white men, which means that when there are more white men in earlier career stages, there will be comparatively more white men ready to move into next level career stages. That is simple mathematics. Of course, you already knew this as this is exactly why DEI initiatives began. Why act like you don't know what is going on with an exceptionally tired meme?
danudey
I find it interesting that being underage and in middle school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now? Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"
pests
The request was to “consider people you normally wouldn’t for this role”
I normally wouldn’t consider a 14y/o for a senior position. I wouldn’t consider a child to run our armed forces either.
It is you who put women and other minorities into that group with this comment of yours. You are the one to compare being underage and in middle school to being on the same level of a woman.
9rx
Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN too. I thought we were better than that?
hamandcheese
My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles.
We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer.
I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).
gitremote
It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?
hamandcheese
> because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities.
I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative.
OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.
whimsicalism
Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.
BadCookie
What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair.
My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.
ip26
The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.
BadCookie
There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process.
I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually).
On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.
gip
This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing.
The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.
brailsafe
> But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired. That's just one example of what they do.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
snambi
Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.
AndyNemmity
Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.
nozzlegear
> the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].
What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
[2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR