But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today?

If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.

Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?

It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.

How is race or sex aware hiring going to help with eliminating subconscious bias? It reinforces bigotry, because it gives a rationalization for bigots to not respect their minority coworkers, as they can claim that they were not subject to the same scrutiny when they were hired.

What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action? Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity seem to have mixed results at best.

I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing as making ethnicity/sex invisible. But actually implementing enrollment and employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers could make it nearly invisible.

That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their childhood.

Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying. Like ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in statistics.

Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.

Who cares what coworkers claim? If job performance is used for evaluations and promotions, then fairness is preserved.

And the assumption that minorities can only be hired by insufficient scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How about that?

I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population? Then you're doing it right.

I would care if my coworkers were bigots, and I would especially care if they were prejudiced against me, how can you effectively work with someone who doesn't respect you? Pretending bigotry doesn't exist is the same thing as pretending that race/sex aren't visible. You will also have to apply the same affirmative action when promoting people, as a couple of years work experience doesn't erase the generations of privilege you're competing with.

I never said that minorities can only be hired by applying insufficient scrutiny. What I will say is as a group, minorities can only be hired in a proportion that is different to the proportion of minorities in group of qualified applicants if some weighting is taken off the job relevant qualifications, and applied to their membership in minority groups.

If you could come up with a huge list of entirely fungible, interchangeable resumes and interview notes, you could consciously pick minorities first without harming the quality of your recruiting. What kind of roles would have that weak of a job market though?

If candidates aren't fungible weighting any importance to race/sex means taking some weighting off something else, and it means that bigots will assume individuals from minority groups are less qualified, because of the fact that the group as a whole is less qualified, because of your own policies. It perpetuates both inequality and bigotry.

If you merely know about the race/sex/whatever of your candidates then you're already giving some weight to those attributes whether you want to or not.

If we had some way of scoring candidates numerically, then yes, you'd just pick the biggest number. But I've never heard of a hiring system that worked like that. There's always some subjectivity. You can look at a bunch of resumes and rank them, but a good chunk of that ranking is guesswork and opinion. That gives room for your biases to play, and you'll end up with the "best" candidates tending to match those biases. And don't tell me you don't have any racial or gender biases; you do, everybody does.

You shouldn't give up a 9.9/10 because he's white, and hire a 2.4/10 because she's black. But if you have a bunch of candidates around 8/10, consider hiring the minority candidate who's a 7.9 rather than the candidate who matches the existing demographics of your team and is an 8.1. Your numbers are probably ±3 anyway, so it's not the irrational decision it sounds like it would be in a universe of pure numbers.

So you'll just take a guess at your biases and then try to counteract them arbitrarily?

I'd like to know how you even begin to judge what ethnicity someone is just by looking at them. Sounds like an extremely fraught game to play.

Part of the answer is surely to try your utmost to take all the subjectivity out of the process. I've mentioned it here previously, and people said that they enjoy getting to make subjective value judgments of candidates. I think that is a poor attitude.

This is the kind of process I was thinking:

One person strips CV's of irrelevant info (names, ages, schools, etc). They hand that to another person who decides who to interview. When the candidate is interviewed, pre-determined questions get asked, and then notes are taken of their answers and any relevant info, and that gets handed over to the person who makes the ultimate hiring decision.

Even that process probably leaks a bit, but it's better than simply trying to guess.

You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your company and you will see them.

Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.

OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?

Yes to both.

We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.

I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.

I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.

I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.

I don't believe the two approaches conflict.

We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.

(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)

Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:

  > It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
  > you've already achieved it.

What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.

Do you think that may have a positive effect?

I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...

Unsurprisingly, alpha males usually don't find the story charming. ; )

I think the next generation will tend to do what we do. If a certain profession has a racial makeup that greatly differs from that of the general population, that will tend to cause the next generation to think of that profession as being typically whatever race is predominant. In short, if you grow up in an environment where almost all programmers are young black women (being deliberately opposite here) then you'll tend to see young black women as being more qualified, all else being equal, and this will perpetuate the disparity.

It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.

Let's say we all started ignoring everything you're talking about today.

Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k.

This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford.

So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people will start ignoring all the other social signals? Even if you ignore everything else, being born to a white family in itself means you inherit centuries of advantages

This is the justification behind affirmative action. Even if it might not be "fair" when looking at an individual case, its also pretty unfair when a kid just happens to be born to a family that has had opportunity robbed from them until extremely recently.

Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections

    Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly 
    the same area as a white family making $30k.

I've heard this figure several times and no one using it has yet cited a source for this. Could you please provide a citation for this figure and any secondary sources that study primary sources attempting to explain this disparity.

I don't doubt this figure could exist at some time pre-1990, but I don't understand how this could possibly be the case since the start of the housing bubble that burst in 2008 in which many many firms pretty much threw out all prejudices in the pursuit of money as people tried to source any and all loans to sell Wall Street. They not only threw out prejudices, they actively overlooked issues that might correlate with and work against some identity groups like credit rating and earning power.

>Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed.

>Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.

(From http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...)

> Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections

If you think it's a good goal, how would you would try to achieve it?

Well... Things like affirmative action do help price in the advantages race have given people, at least for a while. A stronger safety net works too.

Obviously in combination with "magically getting rid of all racist/sexist thoughts".

But doesn't affirmative action necessitate the exact behavior we want to eliminate, making decisions based on body attributes?

The logic here seems circular. How do you get from a world with racism/sexism/etc issues, to one without? Simply by assuming it to be true?

How does acting like the problem doesn't exist solve the problem? If that's not what you mean, then do you mean we should all just suddenly stop being racist/sexist/bigotted/etc? Just like that? How would that work? How do you get your neighbor to go along with that? Or white middle manager, who means well but is uncomfortable hiring people of certain ethnicities or sexualities because of "culture fit"? It seems that anyone willing to do what you are saying, if I'm understanding it correctly, is probably already of the belief that a world without racism/sexism/etc would be better, and already behaves in the manner you suggest. In which case, we still live in a fucked up world and system where these things are actually still big problems.

When is the disease distinct from the cure? At a certain point, we need to move forward and strive towards a harmonious ideal. Otherwise we delay true equality.

I agree that we need to move forward, but I think it's better to focus on tactics that can succeed.

What about tactics that are antagonistic and counter-productive? Isn't it about time someone asked "What could possibly go wrong?" when discussing each tactic?

So I shouldn't celebrate the interesting and cool things about other peoples' cultures (and my own)? That's sad.

I agree it may be idealistic, especially because part of the problem is people thinking themselves into a category, and adopting it as an identity. It is however the right direction, because all this "racial" problems are caused by categorization of people in the first place.

> We live in a world where this is not remotely possible

No, you live in a COUNTRY where that seems not remotely possible.

Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way:

"'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859

The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage groups--anti-anything groups, really.

It can be boiled down to: "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about treating other people badly because of their appearance or where they are from, and NOT MENTION IT," and people like you saying, "That's impossible. We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now. You shouldn't even suggest that it's possible to make any progress in human society."

It boggles my mind that you could even think this way. But, then, people thinking and acting in unreasonable ways is the root of these problems.

You are setting up an enormous straw man. When you say people like the GP say:

> We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now.

That is emphatically not what the GP is saying. The problem is not the ideal that race should not matter, it's that history does not go away, or more generally we can not build the ideal world from first principles.

Those with privilege often wish it was as simple as simply being "color-blind", then everything would be fair, right? Wrong. Because even if no white person harbored racist thoughts of any kind, we are still saddled with racist institutions and wealth distribution. Even if police magically became completely egalitarian, black people would still suffer the brunt of police brutality, because they still live in the poorest areas where there is the most crime.

The bottom line is that, if you are a white male (which I am), then you really and truly should be listening and not proclaiming any strong opinion or solution, because privilege is a blind, and so you really are not qualified to have an opinion about what should be done about sexism or racism. I feel like this is especially onerous for geeks (again, like me) who value their ability to reason, but understand that your (my) feelings being hurt is much less of an indignity than most black people face on a regular basis. Don't get defensive and try to prove how non-racist you are. Instead just take a deep breath and realize that this country forcibly imported 10 million African slaves. Despite how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, there really is no way for that legacy to ever be erased.

No. As a white male, as any other type of male, you should be seeking to be educated about the subject on which you wish to voice your opinion. Having privilege does not render privilege invisible.

You saying "If you are a white male, you should hold your tongue" is hugely problematic, because it means white males should not be part of the solution to racism and should have no voice in any changes.

I disagree. That is, indeed, effectively what the GP is saying: that we can never rise above the mistakes of the past. That we can never let go of the past and move forward. That we will always be guilty of the sins of people who lived on this plot of land 150 years ago.

And that's all balderdash. In fact, go back in time a few decades, and this was not such a big deal. We were moving on. Fast-forward to today, and we have a new generation of agitators learning how to be outraged at the distant past, fomenting dissent and unrest.

We are not saddled with racist institutions--we are building a new breed of them. And poverty knows not skin color.

And what is it with this idea of police brutality? "black people would still suffer the brunt of police brutality, because they still live in the poorest areas where there is the most crime." There is less police brutality in this country than there has been at any time in its history. Those people you're talking about are suffering from crime. The problem is not police brutality--the problem is crime. Most murdered blacks are murdered by other blacks.

Frankly, how dare you tell anyone that they are not qualified to have an opinion on what is just or fair or right or wrong. That is a stone age attitude if I ever heard one. What you are advocating is effectively a detatched kind of /lex talionis/, one in which the distant descendants of people who were wronged are asked how they should be compensated by the perpetrating of further injustice upon innocents who are in no way responsible for said wrongs of the distant past.

And as a rational human being, I am fully qualified to recognize that injustice, regardless of my skin color or sex.

It's ludicrous. Ask any human being, "Hey, some folks way up your family tree a long time ago were treated wrongly. Therefore, we can give you some free money and bump you to the top of the resume pile. Is that okay with you?" and what do you think they are going to say? The problem is that, in some ways, it is a zero-sum game, because every time one person is given preferential treatment over another, that other person suffers. And that is unjust, unfair, and wrong.

And at the same time, in some ways, it's not a zero-sum game, because when one person suffers injustice, we are all wronged. The only way to stop this is to stop all injustice and treat all people equally. That is the only truly fair, just, and right thing to do. Justice should be blind, and that includes being blind to skin color and sex.

> Don't get defensive and try to prove how non-racist you are.

Why are you saying these things? Show me where I am defensive and trying to prove anything about myself. I am not and have never been the subject of this discussion. You're parroting lines, not participating in a discussion.

> Despite how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, there really is no way for that legacy to ever be erased.

So, tell me, what is the statute of limitations? When is the expiration date? Apparently 150+ years is not it. Apparently the 600,000 deaths of Union soldiers who died as part of the effort to end slavery isn't part of the equation. So what is it then? 200 years? 500 years? 1,000 years? The dissolution of the nation altogether? If there is truly no end to this "legacy," then why are we stopping at slavery? Why aren't we going back more hundreds or thousands of years to all the other horrific tragedies perpetrated by one group upon another?

Quite seriously, where do you draw the line, and who are you--or anyone else--to make that call?

You don't bail out a sinking ship by pouring water into the ship; you stop the leak and pump out the water. You don't heal broken bones by breaking other people's bones. You cannot solve racism by applying more racism.

The actual analogy would be:

"We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about slavery, and NOT MENTION IT."

Do you see why this would not be an effective way to eliminate slavery?

This is a very strange mental exercise you're asking, but I'd like to explore it as a thought experiment for a moment if I may.

Can you implement and maintain a market without mentioning/discussing that market?

I don't see how any activity, economic or otherwise, can exist much less persist if you can't discuss it.

How would one buy something if they don't understand what it is or its utility?

Why would someone engage in selling something if they don't know a market exists for that product and don't talk about it (market it)?

Could racist groups like the KKK persist without resorting to racial language to communicate their ideas?

This thought experiment is rooted in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

False.

Yours is akin to saying, "Let's sweep slavery under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist."

Mine is akin to saying, "We should no longer even consider enslaving people or treating people badly because their skin is a certain color."

Yours would certainly be ineffective in eliminating slavery because it advocates pretending that it doesn't exist.

Mine is standing up against slavery and saying that the underlying principle used to justify it is morally wrong.

Applied to the issue of reverse racism, yours would be akin to saying, "Let's ignore or even advocate one kind of racism, while condemning another kind."

Mine would be akin to saying, "All racism is wrong. We should all stop being racist in any way, period."

I think the issue is that one side bases its position on moral principles, while the other side bases its position on utilitarianism.

One side says, "Two wrongs don't make a right. -1 - 1 = -2". The other side says, "It's acceptable to do wrong to compensate for another wrong. -1 - 1 = 0."

One side says, "We are not all-knowing or all-wise. We cannot fairly do a concrete injustice to an innocent person to compensate for a perceived injustice done to another innocent person." The other side says, "This innocent person should not complain about being treated unjustly, because this other innocent person has probably been treated unjustly."

One side sees it as a zero-sum game. The other side recognizes that, as long as racism exists in any form, we all lose.

ok

HA! no. What's being advocated by this '...NOT THINK... NOT MENTION...' is essentially racial pacifism. In theory, yes, we shouldn't perpetrate violence or war upon each other. But if those who seek to eliminate violence rely solely on pacifism, it leaves those with no such intentions to perpetuate war uncontested. Should people ignore genocide because they idealize a non-violent future?

The thought promoted by the OP (of this idea) seems to imply that by setting an example behavior based on our ideals, others, with no such ideals, will somehow be compelled to adopt them. I just can't imagine anyone actually thinks that's true.

A German citizen in 1940 doesn't want anyone to see murder in the world, so he sets an example by NOT THINKING and NOT MENTIONING murder. And millions of people get murdered by his fellow countrymen who don't share the same ideals.

Pacifism has it's place and is often respectable. But non-confrontational, silent pacifism is a holey personal journey and has little hope of having any influence outside oneself.

  > "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and
  > NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible.
  > Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

This saddens me.

I'm somewhat curious on knowing some other data points on your spectrum of (bad) idealism..

But the 'not remotely possible' claim sounds like you've decided for all of us that we're incapable of ever thinking of skin colour in the future the same way we think of, say, hair colour today.

I suspect your position is based upon your current cultural surroundings, in which case I'd prescribe travel. Lots of it.

The point is to not ignore racism by pretending it doesn't exist.

I don't think anyone is advocating that we ignore racism, let alone that the ideal state is one where it exists and we ignore it.

Rather, we aim to be in a place where racism simply doesn't exist.

I am painfully aware that for many people this is an unsettling proposition as it sounds like rampant fantasy and/or they don't comprehend how (or believe that) any society could reach that position.

But in turn I believe those people exhibit a poverty of imagination, and are exhibiting an ignorance of various historical examples of comparably profound cultural shifts.

Not talking about race has been the status quo in tech. Only in recent years have people even brought it up. To think that not talking about it further will cause racism to not exist is the fantasy.

The parent's point was that not all places are racist in the same way and when you see the diversity in how racism plays out across countries and cultures, you realize that is exists because people believes it exists.

Racism is not reality.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

from "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978) http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

Just to point out... the US is the western only country on the planet which cares, or even mentions, people's skin colour/race AT ALL.

Literally every other western country calls people... people. A man is "a man" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc man". A women is "a women" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc woman".

Continuously giving skin colour qualifiers in descriptions of people... is (to non-US people) bizarre, and seems to be a large part of the language used to keep racism alive in the US.

That's as far as I've been able to tell so far anyway. :(

You haven't been paying much attention then. Especially with all of the refugees coming into Europe, there is absolutely racism and discrimination based on race.

There is also a long history of racism in Australia towards the indigenous population, and more recently towards immigrants.

Pretty much everywhere you have two different cultures meeting you have racism. The modern western cultures are no exception.

That's not at all what I said. I'm saying the US is the only country which prefaces descriptions of people with info about their skin colour. It seems (to someone not from the US) a truly strange cultural behaviour.

[note - edited for clarity]

I dunno if Europe is really recent, or just a bigger problem now. My experience of Berlin circa 2009 was that the natives were as racist towards Turkish immigrants as my hillbilly folk back in the states were towards Mexicans. There were also waves around that time about North African and Muslim immigrants in France.