Some people have redefined racism to mean that it's impossible to be racist to the majority. I.e. white people.

Another argument is that it's necessary to be discriminatory in favour of minorities to level the playing field.

I share your opinion, but not everyone does.

Well, two things:

1. I think few companies are out there "hiring by race or gender". At most companies I know, affirmative action means hiring by skill, but making sure at least XX% of the hiring pool are women, black, etc. This really just means your resume is more likely to get seen and maybe you're more likely to get a first round, but not that "you're being hired by race or gender".

2. You could argue this is still unfair (although as previously stated, you're still hiring people who earned it based on skill). Unfortunately not doing anything would me more unfair, specifically by stagnating things in the problematic state they are now [1].

In the macro-historical context, white Americans brought African slaves to their country, and actively deprived of wealth and knowledge, right? That was a societal, conscious commitment to push these people down.

Now that they're free but seriously lacking wealth and behind on knowledge too, they're expected just create that wealth and knowledge themselves. Thanks to "unfair" institutions like public education, this is going to happen regardless, but very slowly unless there's a societal, conscious commitment to push these people up.

[1]: Having a huge chunk of your society be alienated not only socially but also economically leads to conflict, could worsen the gap instead of improving it, weakens social and cultural ties, etc.

Diversity initiatives are like a graduated social tax. As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color. Just like I can pay more in income taxes than people in different financial situations.

It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.

Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.

What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.

"As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color."

How is this true? What if someone is a broke straight white man with three kids and someone else LGBTQ person of color is a young childless heir of fortune? How is the first person possibly privileged in comparison with the second one?

Looking from Europe, America seems to be very determined to recast its very obvious class problem as a race (or even gender) problem, even if it means introducing disadvantages based on immutable characteristics AGAIN. Two wrongs do not make a right and this farce will bite you again in the future, just like slavery and old style racism did.

I mean if you compare a rich person to a poor person yes the rich person is going to come out ahead in most social metrics but we're not speaking of wealth inequality, but social divides outside of it.

That said, in the United States, non-white men were systemically marginalized and prevented from participation in society to the same degree. There are numerous examples of this over the last four centuries, but they did not decrease in fervor until about a generation ago. For many reasons, our class divide is correlated to our racial divide. That doesn't mean we don't need to fix both, just that the there are two problems to fix there.

Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide. Is it so hard to recognize that we have different social problems, and a different history? And that things we talk about might be colored one way, because race, gender, and sexual orientation impact real people on a daily basis? Do you reject the idea that bigotry exists independent of class and it's something we need to work on?

"Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide."

That is the Internet - Americans commenting on Europe, Europeans on Islam, Muslims on Israel, Israelis on India, Indians on China etc. The distance may make you wrong, but it also may make you notice more general outlines of the forest you are commenting upon, while the locals see only individual trees.

Theoretically, complex societies should be able to fix multiple problems at once. In practice, it is very easy for one topic to exhaust ALL the oxygen in public debate.

2020 was all about race and other immutable characteristics in America. Among all that, class problems such as enormous healthcare bills that destroy lives every day, are basically forgotten.

Of course that there are many facets of bigotry out there. But: would you rather be a black upper middle class than a white unemployed person without good marketable skills?

These days, I would say that the answer is very different from the KKK days.

There are still absolutely situations where I'd prefer to be the first person over the second. For example, when interacting with a police officer, or when visiting certain towns. Or when attempting to get medical care (there's strong evidence to suggest that physicians are worse at treating black patients, and are prone to ignoring complaints from women, independent of class).

While class problems do, absolutely, exist in the US, race problems also exist.

In America, class isn't just about how much money you have. It's also about what accent you speak with, where you went to school, and very obviously what you look like. Many people who aren't necessarily familiar with how this works have an idea that money is all that matters, and that e.g. a black woman has the same opportunity as anyone else to attend the right schools and speak with the right accent and then get a high paying job at Google, and thereby enter the highest level of the professional class. But of course, you can see in this very thread many examples of how someone who has done all of these things can be considered to not have earned the right to speak out or have academic disputes with prominent people.

The first problem is you’re making the issue worse, not better. It feels good to some white men to publicly announce that they are unworthy of anything positive in their life, but if anything is reductionist, it’s that. Trying to justify racism to combat disproportionate representation (which is not an indication of racism or bias whatsoever, and we know this) is the type of evil behavior (not to mention mental gymnastics) that have no place in a society that has made so much progress. Also, your usage of “caste” is highly inappropriate.

> It doesn't bother me

How fortunate for you. On the other hand, other people are hurt by the explicitly racist policies you endorse. You don’t speak for them.

> in my own caste

Why don’t you speak for yourself, instead of speaking for others and assuming they’re “in your caste”, whatever that means?

Er, if this is unrelated, why are you commenting something that you must be aware is certain to stir up unproductive, culture-war-y discussion? Anyone who's been within 10 feet of hiring responsibilities knows you can't even think about race and gender when considering a candidate.

Right, you can’t even consider it, just mandate that race and gender factor into the candidates interviewed for every open position, make the diversity of your workforce a performance goal for executives and report the racial and gender makeup of your workforce in quarterly company updates. But no, can’t take it into consideration when hiring, of course not.

yes, we should hire based on merit and not color of skin or gender. hate when companies fill in seat just coz there has to be a women etc

Ok, but how do you do that? It was easy in classical music; they just started doing auditions behind a curtain, without any verbal Q&A, and suddenly a field that used to be dominated by men became pretty much 50/50, and all the people who said that men were better at the highest echelons of musical achievement had to shut up.

But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process. There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias, so you need to look at alternate methods. Setting hiring targets is one way to do it. If you're going to complain that the targets are unfair, you can't just say "Well shucks, guess we have to stick with the system that produces massively unequal outcomes." You've gotta propose a system that's less unfair than the status quo.

"It was easy in classical music; they just started doing auditions behind a curtain, without any verbal Q&A, and suddenly a field that used to be dominated by men became pretty much 50/50"

Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

> Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.

The argument made in the article you cite is ludicrous, blind auditions cannot possibly hurt diversity. If there is a problem when blind auditions are used in hiring for professional orchestras, the problem is elsewhere in the pipeline, and the way to fix it isn't replacing blind auditions, its fixing issue further up the pipeline.

There may be a pro-diversity case for using something other than current skill as a factor at other stages of the pipeline which are intended as, in whole or in part, educational and where current skill is being used not as a measure of current professional competence, but as a proxy for potential. But even there that's largely a poor substitute for identifying and addressing the factors producing a skewed pool.

That's a good point; the original experiment is a good story that for many was proof that prejudice exists, but it doesn't mean blind screening is a panacea.

There are some fairly easy steps you can take that other, more-diverse organizations have taken. First, you have to get rid of your referral pipeline, because hiring people your employees already know is the opposite of diversity. Second, instead of recruiting from organizations you've already heard of, like Stanford where this person came from, you park a full-time recruiter at institutions with practical diversity, like Houston, Georgia, UNLV, CUNY. Finally, you go for diversity of thought, by hiring philosophers and carpenters instead of CS grads. I know for a fact that were I to hire into my AI Ethics department, the last person I would recruit would be a Stanford AI researcher. I'd go directly to the philosophy department.

> First, you have to get rid of your referral pipeline, because hiring people your employees already know is the opposite of diversity

That's assuming people only know their clones.

>There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias

Other companies have tried. Names and vitals deleted from resumes before any people involved in the hiring process see them, remote interviews conducted over IM or with voice masking. That's one benefit I see with the much-maligned leetcode-style interviews, is that your identity is completely isolated from the process until the very end.

>There's no equivalent to the curtain

There's no reason you can't do an interview over text-chat instead of in person -- hell, with most of us working remote for the foreseeable future, that's how the majority of on-the-job communication will happen anyway.

> But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process.

This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.

So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.

(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)

I would have just down-voted this, but I hate it when people do that to me rather than actually respond.

In this case, I'm not going to respond in much detail, other than to note that there are 30+ years of writings about affirmative action which get deeply into this issue. Your summary of it is misleading and incomplete.

This person was advocating for exactly that, so it's no wonder they were fired.

Having a diverse workforce is very valuable. The paradigm shifts that can come from voices of different backgrounds are invaluable. Can those growing up under racism be considered a skill? seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but it can definitely benefit the employer.

> We should hire by skill alone

Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.

Yes! I'm not shocked to see that this response is the one that gets downvoted instead of the chorus of content-free agreements, but that's HN for you.

While I do agree with you that technically this is correct, the issue has quite a bit of nuance.

It's a hell of a lot easier for a white male to pick up those skills because of culture and society than it is for most other groups of people.

I think there's a lot that can be done to help minority groups succeed and I'm a little less concerned about what's "fair" to white males like me.

Do you think the predominance of men in tech is "hiring by skill alone" and that it just happens there are almost no skilled women?

Do you think it's possible that you can "hire by skill alone" and given two equally skilled people - one man, one woman - always hire the man, and that you could hire some equally skilled women if you randomised or removed whatever male-bias exists in your hiring?

Do you think it's possible that there are equally skilled men and women available to employers to hire, but that employers have built frat-boy workplaces where only men are interested in working, and cultures that drive away skilled women?

Do you think "hire by skill alone" means always hiring the most expensive people - like buying jewellery by value alone? What if a company can't afford to staff with all the maximally skilled people, but can get 80% of the skills for 50% of the money?

What about hiring people who can be trained or skilled up, and training them?

What about teams, where the collective skills can be greater than the sum of their parts, but maybe not if all the parts are identical?

Until recently, men outnumbered women by 10:1 in CS programs. That went on for 30 years or so.