The context it was said in made the statement rather jarring. I am all for their initial stance of "no politics" etc, but their all-hands was a face palm all around.
A lot of the framing around implicit bias and white privilege is actually straight up generalizing about a group based on skin color. That's racist. This business that it's not racist if it's against white people is seriously wrong - and racist.
Employees calling the organization 'White Supremacist' is the thing that should be 'jarring' or at least controversial. There are arguments to be made, sure, but the language is fairly extremist.
And either way, I believe that kind of conversation doesn’t belong in public channels at work. They make project management software. The company doesn’t need to be political activists. That’s my belief and I am entitled to it.
It’s also ok to disagree with that. If social activism is important to you, you can find ways to align that with your career. Good on you for doing that, and good luck.
However, saying that all companies, as well as all of their members have to align with your view of the world is crazy talk. I expect more companies to do this, and you can choose to not work there.
> To which Singer responded: “I said we have different ways of framing … If you want to debate whether it exists anywhere, then yeah. But not here at this company, not with the people I associate with.”
Edit: to add quote
> I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.
His reply was focused on white supremacy in America, he didn't mention a misunderstanding about referring to just the company. There's that other quote from him, but it's strange his entire reply focused on the country if he was just referring to Basecamp.
And in the meantime his interlocutors have acted to remain anonymous... I grant benefit of the doubt to Singer.
So yes, the article does claim that he said this. Obviously he contests this, but it appears to be just his word alone against other people who were on the call. The balance of evidence does not appear to be on his side, here.
Anonymous sources are the norm in all kinds of reporting; there is no real reason to be surprised that no ex employee is volunteering for the kind of harassment that signing their name to this story would draw in, especially now that Breitbart and a variety of alt-right grifters have decided to take big, public pro-Basecamp and anti-“woke” worker stance. It’s easy to say “if it’s real they would say so publicly”, but honestly the vast majority of us here, myself included, would not do so if it meant getting harassed by the Breitbart crowd.
This of course does not mean that this is real. Just because I could imagine myself being an anonymous source in such circumstances does not mean that such sources exist. But in this case we can be savvy media consumers and look at the official pushback from Basecamp and those named, and the pushback is incredibly small in the number of contested details. Singer corrected literally one quote on the record. This implies to me that Newton is largely on the money in terms of factual events.
Also, the flip side is also true; we don’t seem to have a lot of current of former Basecamp employees coming out to defend the company and decry these articles as being wrong. Instead we have ... silence. Now everything I said above about wanting to be anonymous is still true for these hypothetical people as well, but if you’re going to complain about the lack of people on the record attacking the company, then surely the lack of people defending the company (executives excluded, natch) on the record should also be a data point, should it not?
I also don’t buy it when they rush to scrub a ton of his chat history after this. That’s fishy as hell.
> those allegations are just brought out by people on the left anytime they want as a cudgel to stop all debate on a topic.
The irony of course is that this entire situation was accelerated by DHH and Fried creating a new policy saying “no politics or get out”. The people stopping all debate here are management, not the amorphous “left”.
I find the selective application of epistemic uncertainty fascinating. Why not treat his rebuttal to the article as completely unsubstantiated?
Or for that matter, why didn't he refute quoting Breitbart in the office, if it's not true? He was clearly given a chance to comment, the article includes his version of that meeting. Why are we forced to go into "nobody can possibly know" mode when there are three people saying he did that, and precisely nobody publicly denying it?
It's also not "unsubstantiated". You just don't seem to believe the people who are claiming it. That's very different.
> They didn't scrub history after this. They deleted those forums a week or two before all of this (according to the article), in an apparent attempt to stop the political chatter. It seems when that didn't work they came out with the no politics policy.
You're correct about the timing, my mistake. I do not buy their motivations one bit. Given how publicly political DHH has been, this strikes me much less of "no politics here anymore" and more of "no politics the moment it's critical of us".
> There is still zero evidence that any of this has to do with white supremacy
I don't see any evidence that anyone originally claimed that the list of names was white supremacist, only that it was a bit racist to mock Asian or African names. This is why they appeared to have been talking about implicit bias so much, which became such a hot button issue later. And I think it's perfectly fair to pull in a bit of implicit bias training in this context, as well as some customer data protection training as well.
Discussion of white supremacy cropped up when Ryan Singer allegedly said "I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist", which appears to have made things spiral wildly out of control. I don't think it's a great idea to throw out the term white supremacist without a ton of evidence, but I can 100% see why someone would after having one of their executives effectively accusing everyone on the DEI committee of being racist against whites.
> so someone making that claim is ridiculous and is meant to stop all meaningful conversation.
Ryan tried to shut down discussion with this "Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi". You don't get to complain about inflammatory, conversation ending rhetoric after coming out of the gate with that. Doubly so when you hold power in the company.
Oh, and all this happened after the company had deleted all the threads and publicly announced the policy change to the world first. Its not internally consistent to accuse the “left” of shutting down the conversation with heated rhetoric, given the timeline of DHH and Fried’s decision to ban previously allowed office speech.
I realize this thread has all sorts of such things going on in it, but this was a noticeable step hellward.
'White Supremacy' classically means men in Pointy White Hats.
The CRT people now use it to mean 'regular white people' because they, in their regular, day to day actions, uphold oppressive systems i.e. 'White Supremacy'.
The denial is usually of the later, not the former.
Many progressives are now using the denial of the later, to imply denial of the former, as a kind of bad faith rhetorical weapon, which I think is unfair.