I think some humility is in order. It's possible that one is a perfect, unbiased judge of character. On the other hand it's possible that one is just human, with a predilection for equating "like me and my friends" to "nice" or "professional".
Personally, there's a part of me deep down that does want to discriminate, and I have to kick that part's ass any time it rears its ugly head. Even being part of several marginalized identities is no guard against it.
I live in a country where the differences are handled almost the exact opposite to what is done in the US. Instead of spreading positive discrimination that reinforces the idea that we're all different and actually promoting communautarism, we believe that our differences are fundamentally a private matter and when we want to build something together we leverage our common interest and values. It's all idealistic but in practice our racism isn't as widespread and brutal as other places, which is why I'm convinced it is the right way to follow
The best example is that it is forbidden to have public statistics based on religion. Not because religion doesn't matter (it does), not because religion is irrelevant (it isn't), but because pointing out our different beliefs is the best way to pit people against each other
Not sure that’s such a good example. When something is painfully obvious to everyone, the suppressing statistics only leads to more resentment, conspiracy theories and political unrest (or support for far-something groups).
A good example is terrorism in Europe. You can be pretty sure that if the race/religion isn’t mentioned, it’s not white & atheist/christian.
This last part is crucial for not being indifferent or sticking your head in the sand. We ignore the differences, but we don't ignore the bastards that do take those differences into account.
I'm sure discrimination is banned at Basecamp.
Is kind of like a Credit Score, but determined by Twitter. The process is opaque and you cannot dispute it. You also can't get your Privilege Score beforehand, but you WILL be told your relative Privilege Position compared to other people if you say something wrong.
It doesn't make sense. You are essentially if you are non-minority, your opinion should be ignored unless its in-line with the opinion of those in the minority. How is that respecting an opinion as "valid"?
As if a social worker could only help out with problems s/he had experienced him/herself already.
> Hope that made sense.
A bit, not that much
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination.
We all appreciate attempts to understand and empathize with us. You can go very far by talking with us and trying to place yourself in our shoes, but we don't appreciate it when you talk over us, attempt to silence our voices, or, case in point, put words in our mouths and exaggerate our points beyond recognition.
Please try and engage this topic in good faith and not through pedantics and wordplay. If you fundamentally disagree that the victims of discrimination should have the loudest voice in the matter, I'd love to talk further.
There is not always such a thing as "the experts".
People who look the same, grew up in the same place, have the same parents, can still have the opposite opinions.
Then, who is the expert -- when they disagree with each other, the complete opposite.
(Real world example from where I live.)
I'm not in the US though, actually things seem a bit weird over there. The history looks quite different here where I live.
> put words in my mouth all day
Not sure what you have in mind, I still think that what you wrote, sounds weird (I hope you don't mind). As if someone who got bullied in school, automatically should know better how to mitigate such problems in school. (Be an expert?)
I'm playing along with your analogy here, but I actually think it's a terribly weak analogy. Racial discrimination is often so ingrained in the culture that its perpetrators aren't always hulking bullies menacingly taking lunch money from people. They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it for a bit when it's convenient for them. They can't fathom that the experience of the discriminated may be so vastly different than their imagination permits, simply because they haven't experienced it firsthand.
Too many of us have been silenced and told to shut up both explicitly and implicitly. When it comes to racial discrimination, we will not go unheard. In this instance, in this matter, our voices do weigh much more than yours and that's simply the fact you'll have to live with.
No, I think not. Look here:
> When you form a student-led committee on anti-bullying but mysteriously exclude all the victims
That's, what's the right word, changing the analogy into madness.
I said like this: "Not only group X can have good ideas about something"
and you seem to believe that that means: "X must be silenced" -- that's weird, to say the least.
I never said that, and I don't think that, and I feel surprised, maybe a little bit ill, that you somehow misinterpreted what I wrote, that much.
> They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it
I suppose there are such people.
> have been silenced and told to shut up
I feel sad for the cases when that's happened to you and others
> our voices do weigh much more than yours
That's odd, you start writing "our" and "yours" as if you now believe that I'm in some antagonist group, just because I said "not only X can have good ideas".
I'm happy that my friends who look different than me, different skin color for example, don't think like that. We think about each other as "we" together, not as "us" and "them".
I think it's good to end the conversation here. In any case I'm probably not replying any further. And if you did reply to this, I think that that reply would misinterpret something I wrote, but I wouldn't reply and point out what that misunderstanding was about.
And for the sake of clarity - Yes, anyone can and will conjure up great ideas and solutions. No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
For your convenience, let me paste my original comment that you had a beef with:
> Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. Hope that made sense.
I thought it was clearly implied that the voice of the discriminated be priotitized over others 'in the events of clashing opinions'. If that wasn't the case, then I apologize for my weak writing. English is obviously not my first language.
Lastly, when you engage in a discussion with a minority person in matters regards to treatment of minority groups, do not be surprised that terms like "we" "us" and "your" get thrown around. It's simply how conversations naturally flow around such topics, and not indicative of the speaker's bias towards identity politics. You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described. And that's not even mentioning my wife and her family.
Have a good week mate!
Ok, I definitely agree with you about that
> No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
Oh ok. I first got the impression that you did, thanks for replying and explaining
About the quote:
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face,
I read that as having ideas about what to do about it, whilst you seem to have referred to what has happened to minority people in the past.
I'm thinking that "discussing" here is a bit ambiguous and I'm sorry that I didn't realize I had interpreted it differently from what you meant
> English is obviously not my first language.
Not my first either :-)
(btw I'm a bit surprised, I was guessing that you had grown up in the US in a primarily English speaking part of the country)
> You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described.
I'd think we would be good friends if we met
Have a good week & summer you too
In this situation, you are saying it doesn't effect you so you have the privelege of not caring.
Totally fair! Wish everyone were in that position.
Edit: let me be more specific. In a company, I don't want to hear "Are the women compensated the same as the men?", I want to hear "Is everyone fairly compensated?". There is a very big difference between the 2.
So you have to look at the data, gather the facts, and force the issue:
---
Is everyone fairly compensated?
Yes
But, it looks like a woman is paid 20% less than a man for the same position. Is everyone fairly compensated?
Yes. (Insert sexist reasoning here).
Are women compensated the same as men?
No.
Why is that fair?
---
You could repeat this same thought process for so many other examples, where the general concept of fairness is rooted in inequality, bias, and prejudice.
Look at this very thread. Just a few posts above this one is a guy who says he works at a firm where 40% of all recruitment efforts have to be for female engineers. Those sorts of policies are everywhere. That's actual, concrete discrimination. Firms put bonus pots aside for women, they set up competitions and career opportunities from which men are banned. Men are being barred from board positions and top executive roles all over the place.
At the last place I worked, after firing the head of sales the CEO announced at a company all hands that the next head of sales had to be a woman, and that's why the firm had been without one for so many months. It's of course illegal but the agencies that enforce these laws are run by people steeped in identity politics, so they aren't enforced. When one was finally located she turned out to be wildly incompetent. In the first management offsite she got up and said she had no idea why anyone bought our product. She didn't mean this in a "the product is bad, I'll shock them out of denial" way. She meant it in the sense that she really didn't understand what the product actually did (it was a rather obscure product for software developers). In a sales meeting with a customer she started trying to convince the customer not to use our product, apparently without realising she was doing so. The prior male head of sales had been fired simply for displaying low energy, this woman is of course un-fireable despite demonstrating repeatedly she has zero understanding of the companies products!
That same company invited a third party training company to use the offices at the weekend to run programming classes. These classes were open to everyone except straight, white men. I kid you not, that was the actual rule. If you were a white male you were expected to bring social media evidence that you were gay. Like, photos of you making out with other men or something like that. The justification for this was to keep the lessons "safe". Myself and my (gay) manager went to HR to complain, the head of HR spent 30 minutes trying to defend it. There was no apology and nothing was done about it.
This stuff is routine, it is daily life. It passes by without notice. If even one of these things happened in the reverse direction at a large company it'd make international news.
It's this kind of poisonous ideology that Basecamp are trying to expunge from their firm with this announcement, and what can the average man do but applaud? Who doesn't want to just come to work and have peaceful relations with their co-workers, regardless of race or gender? Only leftist activists, and which firms really need them? They're far more trouble than they're worth.
This is a huge insult to any woman that is good at their job.
In my team we hire the best. That means that any woman in my team is on average as good as any man in my team.
If we had quotas, that would mean that the men in my team are on average better than the women, since they pick the best of both segments, but one segment has way less candidates. How do those women feel to be places into the bucket of "filling seats"? How do project managers select who they want on their team? And then they cry that people are getting discriminated. Self fulfilling prophecy.
The scope of creating a workforce with more representation is not small and probably requires long term planning, constant feedback, and buy-in from stakeholders on all fronts. Companies who only want to appear inclusive are bound to take unilateral, drastic measures in order to meet an observable target without considering the higher order effects.
Basecamp’s approach is just avoiding the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Employees who felt unwelcome at work won’t suddenly be happy when they can’t even talk about it. Power to make changes will be concentrated at the top with people apparently determined to keep the status quo.
People who practice positive or negative discrimination should get with the program.
Is it really difficult to admit that we don't yet live in a perfect society?
Any western civilization has equality of individuals as one of their core values, next to democracy, separation of powers, freedom of speech, etc.
> Is it really difficult to admit that we don't yet live in a perfect society?
We will never live in a perfect society. That's why I say people should get with the program. Anti-asian violence is a crime that can and should be prosecuted.
I really detest such things, and the "problem" is easily solved by "I don't give a fuck".
I don't give a fuck if you are male or female, or anything in between, if you are, black, white, yellow or whatever, neither do I care about your sexual preferences, or your religion. And neither should anyone else care.
I do care about how well you can do your job, how well you fit in our team, etc.
I helped hire most of our team members, and by luck they are very diverse in all of the above mentions traits. But who should care?
This is 2021, nobody should give a fuck about those things anymore. If you do, in either direction, you're part of the problem, not the solution.