You are leaving something out that seems quite relevant to me, which is that the list wasn’t just objected to as unprofessional but that the conversation was escalated to the highest possible level, linking it to genocide.

One person mentioned the pyramid of hate and you think it makes sense to point that out when talking about a policy that spans all employees? It’s clear basecamp doesn’t know how to handle difficult discussions, but politics is business. The state, laws and political institutions are the basis of all wealth and power. Their cowardice means their business is now in jeopardy.

We have lots of difficult, sometimes racialized discussions at BigCo. It makes us better at engaging with the world outside our walls. It’s not unnecessary or distracting from our work because our customers live in the same world we create products and services for, it’s part of our work.

Look at Apples stance on privacy, that’s based on a lot of difficult political discussions that culminate in corporate policy. If we did away with politics, we couldn’t have come to some of the decisions we have until forced by legislatures or our competitors.

It’s unprofessional to call a coworker a racist or say they are one step from genocide.

The ADL graphic clearly shows far more than one step between the list and genocide.

Right? Who's being hysterical here? The coworkers who rightly recognized the harms of racist speech or those who crow that such recognition is tantamount to an accusation of genocide.

That clearly is not the meaning of the graphic displayed however.

That it is about professionalism doesn’t seem to be in dispute.

Who’s professionalism might be, though.