The racial classification found in this document seems surreal for me (I'm from SW Europe). Seen from here, the US racial categories often seem absurd.
Under Sarkozy's very authoritarian and racist presidency (though in retrospect Hollande and Macron have pushed those same tendencies even further), there were public debates on national television about removing racial equality from human rights declaration (or was it constitution?) because "race does not exist so mentioning it is reinforcing racism".
Putting problems under the carpet does not make them go away. It's important that race does not become the central factor in explaining things (because there's many other factors) because that would be an essentialist reduction that reinforces racism... there needs to be place for class, gender, ability and other components in social studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
EDIT: It's common here in France to hear someone say "How can you talk about racism when there's no such thing as human races! It's scientifically proven, so your claims of racism are ridiculous!"
I think this is probably one of those cases where there's a spectrum, and the extremes are both bad. It's bad to be race-blind at a policy level, since that prevents dealing with unjust race-based disparities. However, it is also bad to encourage people to be hyper-aware of race and racial categories; because that perpetuates those categories, gets in the way of forming natural connections between members of different races, and even can fuel a more explicit discriminatory racism in some people. IMHO US cultural trends are pushing for the latter bad situation (amongst other more positive reevaluations), and those trends are being exported.
It's probably not practical, but I've thought that the most effective way to ultimately solve racism would be to setup schools such that it would be difficult to impossible to have an opposite-sex romantic relationship with a classmate that was not in some respect interracial. In the short term the amount of contact that would force would blunt stereotypes, and in the medium/long term is it would hopefully lead to muddling the racial categories until they're meaningless in a contemporary context.
For example, historical celebrations and references to the resistance movement often credit American intervention for the liberation of France, which for sure played a part, but downplays the millions of indigènes involved in the armed insurrection, as well as the Spanish antifascist bridages who have been erased from history despite liberating most of Paris 24h before the Americans even set foot in it.
On the other hand, colonial and racial oppression throughout the french colonized territories has not ceased after WWII. In some cases, it dramatically increased at least compared to the past decades, with the horrors of the "war" (read: genocide) in Algeria and Indochine for example. In fact, that France promised freedom and equality for all in the struggle against nazism while not holding such promise at all is precisely one of the major fire-starters for the anti-colonial independence movements of the 50-60s.
If you'd like a fictional take on what the French occupation in Algeria looked like, the Battle of Algiers is a good introduction. The movie was banned until the 90s in France because it revealed the horrors of colonization, while even today the government and national education insist that colonization was a disinterested act of kindness to help civilize lesser people... which is of course completely false as Africa and Asia had great civilizations long before Rome was born. The writings of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria (and took part in the armed struggle against colonization), open a lot of perspective on practical details of everyday occupation and resistance.
This is interesting. Shouldn't it be as easy as "this guy here thinks races exist and that some are somehow better/worse"?
This only covers conscious and deliberate racial discrimination, but does not cover cultural racism and other aspects of racism which are broadly studied in social sciences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#Aspects
TLDR: works against white supremacists and nazis, doesn't work against everyday racism we've all been forcefed (through media and schools) since childhood.
I think it's still possible to fight racism without resorting to putting people into these tight cubbyholes.
Especially given that people with parents from different backgrounds defy such classification.
Then again my country doesn't have much of a colonial past - we weren't even an independent state back then, so perhaps there are details that are specific to former empires, which elude me.
I know a lot of feminist/anti-racist/queer activists. None of them are trying to put people into tight cubbyholes. They are actually all pushing for greater awareness of how people don't fit into these cubbyholes. The whole idea of intersectionality* (which is foundational in modern "woke" politics) is based on this.
The tight cubbyholes aspect is often either a strawman presented by people who are against making changes (at the softest end, or actively hateful at the hardest).
Or is something that the powers that be (managers, politicians, whatever) insist on when they implement any changes. Often these are either against what activists are calling for or a begrudged concession to bureaucracy and data collection.
The data analysis aspect is unfortunately important. In an ideal world it wouldn't be, but thats not where we are. It doesn't just highlight outright bigotry, but inadvertant discrimination (eg only holding interviews at times which inadvertantly don't work for people (often women) with child care responsibilities), or even problems beyond an organisation (eg the pipeline issue).
*Intersectionality is about recognising all the different aspects of a person's identity and the different ways that they priviledge/disadvantage them in different circumstances. It was explicitly developed by black women who were being let down by both black support systems which all targeted at black men, and women's support networks which targeted white women. They recognised that just adding a "black women" box only addressed the immediate issue so built a framework to analyse the Intersection of identities more generally.
They are absurd. Hispanic is not a racial category, it's an ethnic category, like being German or German-American.
In my experience tech workers in Eastern Europe are not significantly more progressive than other residents, but if Gitlab's company culture is at least somewhat progressive, it's likely that it attracts people in those countries who tend towards the progressive end of their respective countries' political spectrum. Given that Belarus has a very low bar for what the government considers a "political activist", it's reasonable to assume that some of these people might find themselves in trouble without having to go as far as donning black masks and tossing rocks at police officers.
It's also worth keeping in mind that software development is one of the professions easiest to get into as a marginalized person because you can teach yourself enough to get started and especially when freelancing it's possible to work without ever meeting the other person face-to-face. You'd be surprised how many programmers are queer, disabled or neurodivergent.
EDIT: QED?
Would this apply to a typical Belarusian engineer in Belarus, though? They'd be White, European, and (correct me if I'm wrong) violence there seems mainly directed at protesters and protest leaders. It seems to me like this tailored for the kinds of racial and sexual minorities the US likes to obsess about.
> Tenure of less than 1 year at GitLab may be possibly waived as a requirement if:
> - You are a member of a(n [underrepresented](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#definiti...)) group that is unsafe or in any way mistreated in your country.
> - Violence in your country does not provide a safe environment.