They said it was unacceptable but denied that it was evidence of larger problems, basically.

The main crux was a denial that this sort of behaviour led to genocide. I’m not kidding

I would like to see the counterpoint to DHH’s blog post. There seems to be something missing because saying a names list is part of or indicative of genocide/systemic etc seems too far out to only be that.

Pessimistically, I’ve witnessed similar exchanges that didn’t seem plausible to me, but yet were very real to the people making the claim. I remember a friend who was convinced that their trans friends lives were in danger after the 2016 election and claimed that management not denouncing the election and allowing friends to work from home for safety was “literally the same” as attacking them. It was so weird having them walk through the logic I thought they were joking. Fortunately, everyone lived despite continuing to come into the office (until covid of course).

We haven’t seen the full argument that the employee used but it was based on this resource from the ADL as I understand it: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

The argument here is that treating this kind of mockery as acceptable is part of what enables gradually more serious hateful behavior in a society at large. I don’t really think this is that controversial.

Whether it’s appropriate to bring it up in a work context to explain why something is racist, I’m not sure. I probably wouldn’t do it myself. But I do find it weird that DHH acknowledged the list was bad but doesn’t seem to believe there was anything ethnically or racially prejudiced about it. Children are excused occasional meanness without explanation, but adults generally aren’t.

Based on the post there doesn’t seem to be anything racially motivated so the pyramid doesn’t seem to fit since the list was funny names, including 6/70 non-English names.

Even if it was specifically offensive, bringing up a diagram like that in a specific instance as a path to genocide is such overkill it kind of kills the discussion.

While I think that system racism and casual denegration is bad and society needs to work to eliminate it, putting it on the same spectrum as genocide is like showing a chart that includes a light bulb and the sun as part of a discussion on luminosity. Yes, it’s technically correct but not useful for conversation. Making fun of foreign peoples’ names and genocide are both racist. But the odds of such an act leading to genocide is googol:1 given that there are billions of acts of this type of name racism daily vs rare instances of genocide.

Which, until I see more of the discussion and the list in question, I'm inclined to believe given the blog post someone else posted where they outlined the problem and their specific response.

I think when something like that flies under the radar for over a decade, serious organizational problems are not far behind.

They also admitted it wasn't under the radar, the founders says they'd known about the list for years.