I find it a reach that you're complaining about grouping when used in this context:

> For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in “diverse” tech spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet white guys.

This is a paragraph directly talking about an initiative to increase diversity that ultimately had little lasting impact, but is making no judgments about either the group of "diverse people" that didn't stick around nor the group of hires that followed.

There's no thinking about either group there as individuals, nor positive or negative overall descriptions of them, just an anecdote about an HR initiative at a particular company that didn't really meet its objectives.

What's there to be offended by, asks this person who hadn't even encountered the term "cishet" before this article but falls in the group?

You're right it does seem like a small thing to pick on in this context.

I think it stood out to me because like you said it's not a common term. It gets used in specific communities and areas (academia) but it's a term that the group it is describing doesn't actually use, it's an outgroup indicator, and it's more negative than similar terms like poc, bipoc. It's a culture war signal, even when not intended.

Do I care about it? Not really, but it is a really small thing that would go a long ways towards inclusion as weird as that sounds.

The statement as a whole is equally effective with just "white guys" since most people can draw their connotations from the context and those that can't wouldn't know the word anyway (and researching it throws them into the deep end). Reading between the lines (fairly or not), adding that descriptor implies a value judgement beyond the baseline lack of diversity. It draws attention to the individuals as the problem rather than systemic or emergent issues.

>you say cishet white guys and you can group up a whole lot of people without thinking much about them as individuals.

I can empathize with the "turnabout is fair play" logic of it...

>Do you believe this is constructive language that bridges the divide that's part of these issues?

...but, like you, I question its effectiveness in bringing us all together. My guess is that it generally triggers a sense of awareness in those who are already somewhere on the "allied" spectrum and that it triggers defensiveness and entrenchment in those that are on the fence or further away. There is clear benefit in the former and detriment in the latter. As you said: "know your audience."

There's no "turnabout" happening in being prejudiced against a group full of unique people, many of whom aren't so prejudiced.

I can't imagine that you are arguing that non-white, non-cis, and non-hetro people haven't been prejudiced against by whitecishetromales. That's where the "turnabout" comes into play.

If you are pointing out that the "turnabout" is also prejudicial, then I obviously agree. The point I was making is that when it is misapplied, it's potentially helpful (in creating additional awareness in those who are on some spectrum of "allied") and when it is accurately applied, it's detrimental (as it is likely to lead to "defensiveness and entrenchment"). In this way, it may also serve as a way to measure our own position.

Also, I don't think anyone knows whether "many" is accurate. The same point is made by saying "some."

> If you are pointing out that the "turnabout" is also prejudicial, then I obviously agree.

Yes. It's never really "turnabout" to employ prejudice, because by nature you're not targeting the people who targeted you, you're targeting a broader group and repeating the error.

Labeling, as used in this article, is hardly even turnabout. The dominant group may not explicitly create a term to label themselves, but the act of exclusion requires separating out the "other," and so labeling the non-other isn't so much an act of "turnabout" as just putting a word to an already-created group.

The people originally assuming all white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be lumped together are the ones who have and continue to try to restrict jobs, property, and liberty from being given to people outside that group.

People will go a very long rhetorical way to try to refute the idea that if you want to fix racism in the US you need to address the very real and still very powerful and connected white racists. That problem won't magically fix itself because the people who desire racism to continue actively pursue it. We can't even get rid of the confederate flag, for goodness sake.

> if you want to fix racism in the US you need to address the very real and still very powerful and connected [] racists.

Yes, exactly. And assuming all white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be lumped together helps said racists, as might be expected from their being the ones who originally did so.

That lumping is, again, descriptive. And it's an often-useful description/category in large part because of that historical racism.

Getting worked up over that is a huge waste of time, to the point that I now wonder if it's a sideshow. If we waste our time arguing about if this "the diverse hires left and the new hires after them were white" description is bad, we've been successfully distracted.

The idea that anyone is actually offended or feels harmed by that paragraph we're talking about is absurd - could you imagine how such people would feel if they were part of one of the out-groups instead and didn't just get lumped together but also had been attacked by the centuries of racism in the US?

This is the paragraph in question, once again:

> For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in “diverse” tech spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet white guys.

If you don't let yourself look at the demographics, you blind yourself to any ability to evaluate effectiveness in terms of fighting the historical and present effects of white supremacy in the US. Note that the "diverse people" are similarly lumped together because it's non-judgmentally discussing the effects of a policy, nothing more. I don't see any way someone takes offense at that paragraph, but I see lots of ways someone would pretend to in order to make reactionary/distracting claims about if we even need to try to fight that historical racism.

> The idea that anyone is actually offended or feels harmed by that paragraph we're talking about is absurd

It surprises me that you don't see that language like this is the same language used against marginalized groups. Nobody but the person that is offended gets to decide how they feel.

We as people of lots of overlapping concerns have to be empathetic or we'll get more factionalism instead of unity and inclusion.

I don't see it as at all the same thing. People get offended at slurs and insults, and I don't see why I should interpret this usage as either. Do you think the "diverse people" referred to in that paragraph should also be offended?

Someone here is upset about the author "assuming all white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be lumped together" - I fail to see how they're lumping those people in this story together any more than they are the other group.

Someone here is upset about the author "being prejudiced against a group full of unique people" - I fail to see the prejudice in the quoted paragraph.

Someone here is upset about "cishet white male shaming" - I fail to see the shaming.

I don't see marginalized minority groups getting offended at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican experience in the US for that same sort of grouping.

That the term wasn't invented ourselves[0] seems to be the only real case being made here, but its an abbreviation of two technical terms, not an obvious slur. We could make an analogy to someone getting upset someone using one of one of "African American" vs "Black" vs another such term, but then we're getting pretty well into niche territory versus talking about something obviously offensive to everyone the term describes.

[0] as far as I know, anyway, though I suppose it could've been.

> I don't see marginalized minority groups getting offended at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican experience in the US for that same sort of grouping.

I see your point but I think you are making really big bunchings of value judgments. I live in a Hispanic community. There are lots and lots of people in that group that are cishet white males, their family members aren't going to call them that, though. Not a small number of them find being cishet as only morally acceptable.

It's similar to latinx. They are terms that are used in very specific groups and mean something important there but when they get used across boundaries different groups are basically talking about different things (it's a freedom fighter/terrorist issue).

So would we be having this dicussion if the author had written: "Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cisgender heterosexual white guys."?

My guess from your comments is: probably not, from your perspective? Much of your original post that I disagreed with is about the use of the term itself.

But I don't get that sense from the reactions posted by others, since those other quotes I included don't seem to be justified by this article at all, to me.

> could you imagine how such people would feel if they were part of one of the out-groups instead and didn't just get lumped together but also had been attacked by the centuries of racism in the US?

You do realize that the majority of white cis heterosexual people live outside the USA right? This is often a source of frustration for me, as people in the USA don't seem to realize the rest of the world exists. All of these things about whiteness, white cishet and white supremacy don't really translate well outside of that context.

> The people originally assuming all white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be lumped together are the ones who have and continue to try to restrict jobs, property, and liberty from being given to people outside that group.

Isn't that exactly what the author is doing by using the term "cishet white guys" though?

Cishet white male shaming is one of the most pernicious festering culture sores in the world today. We exist, we are real people, we want respect and representation, and our voices matter.

About the cishet thing, I think that's fair use in this context. When discussing diversity, it is normal to name the groups discussed. As the cishet is usually seem as the default, I'd say it is important to address it properly, as not to assume that as universal. Is this divisive language? In some way, yes, but that's the point: we use it to discuss the divisions we observe in society.