This is a conflict between separate attempts to solve the problem.
On the one hand there is yours -- if we report this when it happens then having the information will aid in solving the problem.
On the other hand, there are laws creating liability for companies that discriminate against employees. Someone could use records like this against the company in court, so you are creating undesirable liability for the company by reporting it.
This is a common problem. If you allow plaintiffs to use a company's records against them, they either stop keeping them or the record keeping becomes a compliance issue driven by lawyers concerned with corporate liability, which then takes precedence over other concerns like using the information to meticulously measure and resolve issues.
Nobody likes to admit that trade offs like this exist, but it takes admitting that they do to get to the point of being able to evaluate which method is more effective and choosing between them.
Fortunately there is a win-win solution to this - unconscious bias training! Minority employee and manager's lives get a little easier, company shows that it cares and made corrective/CYA action, any employee who discriminates on race will clearly be doing it against company policy. Pretending like it didn't happen is the worst policy, IMO, because it gives an impression of condoning such behaviour, which creates more liability.
It's not a win if unconscious bias training doesn't actually work. I have yet to see it change the behavior of racist people. Do you have any papers that show that it works?
So far it just seems like a way for a company to cover their ass via a PR stunt that disrupts a bunch of employees' days.
> So far it just seems like a way for a company to cover their ass via a PR stunt that disrupts a bunch of employees' days.
Quick question - do you feel the same about sexual harassment training? I think it's good for every employee to be clear on the common baseline on what behavior the company deems unacceptable and the consequences thereof.
Let's detach this from racism for a moment, and hypothesize on ethics. A number of companies have/had issues with staff members virtually stalking users. Would you rather colleagues not report such incidents for fear of creating legal liability? Should the companies not have a policy against this and offer training on ethical handling of user data? No amount of company training will cure an engineer's creepiness, but drawing lines in the sand is important - it might prevent creepy behavior while they are on the clock - even if it may look like its CYA.
Things that come from a CYA perspective are compromised. The motivation is to check a box at the lowest available cost, which is not the recipe for competence. It's not hard to screw something like that up and end up training people to consciously consider race when making decisions.
There is legitimately a trade off between honestly convincing people to care about something and passing laws requiring them to appear to care about it under penalty of financial liability.
Oh, wait. Maybe we're talking about different problems. My problem is my intern having a bad experience due to unconscious racial bias. What problem are you trying to solve?
Lawyers exist to mitigate legal risks, not to solve racism. The parent was just pointing out that anything documented that admits racism occurred creates legal liability. The triggered the lawyers defense mechanisms where they need to clearly document that there was no discrimination in the legal sense.
So the point is that there needs to be a way to report unconscious bias events for data points that don't put the company at legal risk just by having them on record.
This is equivalent to "solving" software defects by refusing to record the bug because somebody is scared of a quality lawsuit. It not only doesn't help, it is very likely to make the problem worse.
That's why it's a conflict. The map is not the territory. If you give them an incentive to reduce reports of discrimination, they will have an incentive to reduce reports of discrimination. Which interferes with other methods that require meticulous reporting.
Perhaps you could do an experiment!
Absent fMRI recordings from the elevator lobby, I of course cannot prove that it was unconscious racial bias. But we can't prove most things in life with that level of evidence. Nevertheless, we have to operate in a complex and dynamic world. This is my best interpretation of events. It was also the best interpretation of the person present, of my boss, and of several other people in the company I discussed this with.
I guess my point is we're talking about unconscious bias, and your story seems like it could be an example of just that. If it's unconscious you wouldn't know -- we can assume something is racist that really isn't.
If we can't know, how can we approach these situations and be sure we're without bias; particularly if we want to call others out for their [apparent] unwarranted biases.
An example, a neighbour is a bit discomfiting to me, my wife refuses to be alone in his presence, but he's Polish; so is she xenophobic, or is he a jerk (or both I guess). He's the only Pole in our street, an outside observer could easily conclude she was being xenophobic.
Well-dressed is "over-dressed" if everyone else is wearing t-shirts.
If everyone is in t-shirts and skirt/slacks and I'm "well dressed" in a suit and tie, I'd say I'm overdressed in the context of that situation.
To be fair though you brought focus on how he was dressed when it sounds like you should have said "he was dressed normally for our office". It really came across as if he stood out because of his choice of clothes.
Which is of course the pattern of these discussions. In exactly the same way my intern got cross-examined for being black in a white space, any mention of racial bias gets cross-examined because white people are very eager to defend the honor of white people. How was he dressed? Was it too rough? Well then it must be that he dressed too well! Never mind that all of the other people dressing well don't get stopped. And this cross-examination happens despite the fact that the sort of racial bias described here is in no way rare and is demonstrated in all sorts of formal research and oceans of personal anecdote.
It was his judgment, my judgement, and my boss's judgment, that this was an unconscious racial bias incident. Neither HR nor the black employee group thought otherwise, and they deal with this stuff all the time. Is it possible we're all wrong? Sure. Is it possible that the anonymous white person was actually a space alien beamed down and probing our defenses? Sure. But based on the preponderance of the evidence, we decided what we decided.
If that's not good enough for an anonymous rando, that's fine by me. If you'd like to learn more, read any one of the books I've mentioned in this thread. Preferably DiAngelo's, as it goes into detail examining exactly the type of reaction you and others display here.
Now it's my turn to ask a question: why was it your immediate reflex to (rudely and dismissively) justify a situation that you know nothing about?
Because your story, as told, leaves that pretty massive gap. A supervisor in charge of interns being recognized vs the temporary intern not being recognized is the occam's razor answer that also popped into my head as well. The fact that you didn't offer any evidence as part of the story to explain why the obvious answer wasn't the answer does raise the question of whether or not that had occurred to you.
Oh, so "do you have some kind of telepathic mind reading powers" was a sincere query as to my abilities? Because in your experience it is a common thing that actually happens?
> since your story reads like fiction to me
Ah, this is another example of your politeness? Saying that it seems like a long-time participant posting under his real-world identity is just making things up? You will have to tell me more about which etiquette manual is telling you that assuming somebody is a liar is the friendly thing to do.
Second, I never said he was racist -- that's your interpretation. I specifically avoided that term because when white people are experiencing white fragility [1], which is certain to happen in a large group discussion like this, then they immediately cast any incident in into the common post-Civil-Rights-era frame of "racist=bad person" and start defending their fellow white person, who surely must be good. What I talked about was unconscious racial bias.
Third, your demanding "proof" is unreasonable. What would count? Should I have fMRI scans done of the person's brain under various stimuli? Even that wouldn't be enough; you could argue he might harbor racial bias, but that it wasn't active at the time he grilled my intern. I just looked at the last few pages of your comments here, and you have offered all sorts of reasonable opinions without ever giving a bit of proof. You are bringing up a standard that couldn't possibly apply and that you don't hew to yourself. You might ask yourself why.
Fourth, I included evidence. First, there was the testimony of the one witness who, even though he's still in college, has had to become an expert in America's still pervasive and demonstrable white bias against black people. Second, there was my testimony as to the nature of the environment and the rareness of an event like this. Third, as I mentioned, I talked about this with my boss. In all of our judgments, under the preponderance of the evidence, this was an unconscious racial bias incident. Nobody at the company thought otherwise, including HR and the black employee group, who deal with this sort of thing regularly at that company.
Fifth, it's not my job to prove anything to internet randos. It's your job to understand America's racial dynamics and how this fits in before commenting. I told this story knowing full well that I'd get salty replies from people who would react with instant denial to any description of a bias incident caused by someone like them (a well-meaning white tech dude). Why would they do that? Well, if you have studied American racial dynamics, you'll already know the answer to that. And if you haven't, I recommend that you read one or two of the four books I've already recommended in this discussion. You'll learn something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
[2] https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/d...
You should note that you're very invested in defending the honor of a white person that is even to me totally anonymous. And then go read DiAngelo's book.
I'm not sure that reporting individual incidents of this to an HR department and causing resentment and division between people over these things is really worthwhile. It's just a fact of life as much as any other overarching, long running cultural tradition. Things are changing, but it's simply a generational issue that we are left with the legacy of institutionalized racism, purposely designed to legitimize industrial scale human exploitation.
[0] https://www.history.com/news/brown-v-board-of-education-doll...
But personally, I plan to raise a ruckus like this whenever I get the chance. MLK made a strong argument for creating a "constructive tension" [1]. It was his theory that the necessary changes don't just happen, but require the discomfort of the people with the power to fix things. If my intern had wanted to let things lie, I certainly would have. But since he was ok with me reporting it, I saw it as my duty. To society certainly, but also to the company. They had a serious diversity effort and worked hard to give interns a good experience. I would have been negligent had I let an unconscious mistake from one employee undermine that.
Plus, as a white dude, it's easier for me to advocate for these changes. Not only because of my default privilege, but because I'm seen as a disinterested party. I never get accused of "playing the race card" or "misandry" when I come out against some racist or sexist nonsense. So I hope more white people will put their shoulders to the wheel here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail
They would likely get the same "third degree" treatment. Why? Is it because global capitalism does not like football uniforms?
The more likely reason is that while one may not know every person in the company, they have a general idea of what the company composition is. One likely knows that this particular company does not have a lot of disabled people, or people who wear football uniforms, or black people. So anyone who does not fit the common profile will get more scrutiny.
This of course leaves the question of why isn't a black person common in the software company. I don't know an answer to that. Anecdotally, this starts at high school, if not earlier -- there were no black people in my high school calculus class for example, despite the school having ~25% of black students.
Two, I think your analogy is ridiculous. He was dressed perfectly well for the environment.
Three, he was not "visually distinct"; the skin albedo of African-Americans is of a similar range to South Asians. He was racially distinct.
Four, if you don't have any idea why there are fewer black people in high status jobs in America, let me suggest you read some history and sociology. This is a well-studied topic. Just in this thread I've mentioned four different books, any one of which would be a good starting point for you.
> Three, he was not "visually distinct"; the skin albedo of African-Americans is of a similar range to South Asians. He was racially distinct.
Are you saying that people who are racially distinct are not also visually distinct? I do not think this is the case. Skin albedo is not the only important thing, people also look a the face, so face features matter too.
Or are you saying that someone who is visually distinct, but not racially unusual, would not get special treatment? For example, imagine that you worked in the company for a long time, and never saw a man in wheelchair. Suddenly, there is a man in wheelchair asking to be let in. Would you let him in? Or would you ask him some questions to make sure he really works there?
> Four, if you don't have any idea why there are fewer black people in high status jobs in America, ...
I am much more interested why there were no black people in my high school calculus class (and similarly, disproportionately few black people in my college computer science classes) -- because it is pretty clear to me that if you did not take calculus in high school, the chances of you becoming a programmer are very slim.
I just googled and found this article: http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html . That article, says the reasons are racist teachers, black parents, other black students, black neighborhoods, racist guidance counselors. As someone who is not teaching children in any capacity, I am not sure how can I help there. Sure, I can read the books so I feel more guilty -- but I am not sure how will it help to get more black students into the calculus classes.
The same author gave a great talk about the book: smart, funny, and very informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ey4jgoxeU
I do agree that people are racially distinct, but only if people are trained from an early age to treat those specific racial as significant. In Africa there are 27 major ethnic groups; to Africans those are visually distinct. To Americans, they're all just "black". The category of "white" is similarly artificial. [1] The boundaries of "white" have varied greatly over the years. So yes, I agree Americans will quickly classify somebody by race, but it's not primarily a visual difference, but one of specific cultural training.
I am saying that "special" treatment is not at issue here. The treatment was not just special; it was somewhere between suspicious and hostile. One of my colleagues there was just short of 7 feet tall. He was visually distinct but read as white. He often got treated differently, but never suspiciously. I doubt a white dude in a wheelchair would have gotten the third degree; my expectation is that people would immediately open the door for him.
As to calculus in high school, I know plenty of people who are programmers without it. I certainly have never used calculus while coding, so it doesn't make a practical difference.
As to how you can help, I think the best things to do are a) learn about America's history here, b) learn what present-day social structures help continue the diminished-but-still-ongoing oppression, and c) talking about them frankly. As somebody who didn't grow up here, you'll be able to see and talk about these things in a way that white people will listen to. Good books include Loewen's "Sundown Towns", Ijeoma Iluo's latest book, and Julie Lythcott-Haims recent memoir.
I hope that helps!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_White_People
I could envision a similar scenario happening to the well-dressed white NBA player who forgot his badge and the staff of the practice gym are questioning if he really works there vs. tall black dude with hoodie and sweatband who gets let in right away because he doesn't look out of the ordinary.
Or males in the nursing. Or females in construction. The list goes on.
In fact, let me tell a story. I was once working at a large, successful tech company as a manager. One of my interns was black. Super sharp, very personable, in an ivy league college, and, as will become relevant, a very sharp dresser. The average white male developer wore a t-shirt and a hoodie; he wore nice, stylish collared shirts. Every day he looked good.
Between our area and the nearest kitchenette was an elevator lobby. One day, he gets up to get more coffee, walks into the elevator lobby, goes to the other side, and realizes he left his badge on his desk. He is now trapped.
Now I had done that exact same thing more than once. What happened to me? Well, I waited around for somebody to walk by, tapped on the door, and said, "So sorry, I just left my badge on my desk." They'd smile in recognition, say something pleasant, and wave me in.
What happened to him in the same situation? He got the third degree. Who was he? Who did he work for? What did he work on? How long had he worked there? Etc, etc. It was clear the (white) guy he was talking to was suspicious that he didn't belong there, that he was not the programmer intern he said he was.
When he got back to his desk he looked distressed. I, not wanting my interns to be unhappy, pried a bit. He told me the story, leaving out any details on the person. He was confident it was unconscious bias; he didn't think his fellow programmer meant harm and didn't want to get him in trouble. But still, it bothered him. Even in this supposedly very cerebral, very liberal place, people immediately saw him as not belonging.
That of course wouldn't have happened if he'd had me with him. Because if I, a white person, were treating him as if he belonged, then he would have been seen as belonging there by the other white people.
Now as a good corporate citizen I (with his permission) mentioned this to HR. I thought they'd want to know that an unconscious bias incident had happened. No names, nobody getting in trouble. Just letting them know so they could tally it and, if the numbers warranted, give more training on unconscious bias. Not just for interviews, which we already had, but more generally.
I quickly got a reply back from a high-up HR lawyer, who was entirely defensive. Their main point was that surely this (anonymous) white person couldn't have meant anything by it, that there was no legal problem here. Well duh, I used the words "unconscious bias", so of course I knew there was nothing meant by it. I just wanted them to take it seriously, because actual harm had been done. But they gave me the brush-off.
Happily, I also talked to the black employee resource group, who jumped on it. The intern ended up feeling heard and that the incident was taken seriously. Which was a relief to me. But it made me aware how often this sort of nonsense happened, and how rarely the harm it does to my black colleagues gets taken at all seriously.