Or you know, you could put down your I'm offended hat for a second and read it as:

"We ensured we didn't fire just blacks, browns, and pregnant women. Because sometimes that does happen -- where a downsize disproportionately targets a minority group."

Apologies if I'm missing something, but the CEO's statement seems ambiguous about whether they're trying to:

(a) avoid disproportionally laying off some demographics, vs.

(b) intentionally disproportionally lay off some demographics to reduce layoffs of other demographics.

(Edited for clarity)

But what happens if they do fire based on need and performance and that group leans for heavily towards a minority class? How do they know it’s not some other influence (presumably races aren’t perfectly evenly distributed across the company).

And if they find such an imbalance do they just pick random majority class people and fire them instead?

If so how do they choose people?

Indeed. Anti-racist is not code for anti-white, despite 4chan and Elon Musk and the alt-right constantly beating that drum. Twilio is doing the right thing and making sure they aren’t blithely doing a racism like HBOMax did recently: https://www.thedailybeast.com/laid-off-hbo-max-execs-reveal-...

There's no way to defend what Twilio said here. None.

What they said was that race was a factor in considering who was laid off, or how they were laid off. There's no way to polish this turd.

> Because sometimes that does happen -- where a downsize disproportionately targets a minority group.

Why would a downsize disproportionately target a minority group unless you directly admit that part of your management is racist?

It can happen for tons of reasons. Some coincidental, some were initially benevolent.

Imagine a company with an office in Atlanta, that hires a disproportionately large number of black employees relative to the rest of the company due to the proximity to more diverse engineering talent. Then they close the whole Atlanta office and lay everyone off.

Or

Imagine a minority tech influencer that does a great job of recruiting underrepresented people to the part of the company they work for.

Or

"We're staffing up our test engineering group, and we're making a new junior test engineer program that targets career switchers." => "Hey, we're getting especially good employees from underrepresented groups in this career switching program, let's double down the advertising to these groups." => "Times are tough, engineers can test their own code. Let's axe the whole entire test engineer group."

I'm sure you can come up with your own examples also.

I'm not immediately against Twilio's actions here (though the messaging is pretty bad), but not one of these examples strikes me as a bad thing beyond layoffs being bad in general.

Deciding whether or not to close an entire office should probably not take into account the racial makeup of that office. You either have the funds to keep it open if you don't, because if you now keep the office you have all these other expenses and end up having to lay off even more people.

If someone doesn't meet the bar to survive a layoff saying "oh but they help us hire people with green skin, keep them on!" is pretty blatantly saying "you're not good enough to do your job, but you're a good enough token to keep your job." It's offensive and discriminatory.

Recently hired, early-career/less-skilled, and QA/test are always let go first before mid-career and seniors who aren't at the top of their pay band. If you're at the point of double-digit percentage layoffs, the testing group is a pretty attractive target.

I think the issue I have is that I have no problem whatsoever with examining your hiring (and firing) practices to try to eliminate implicit or unintentional biases against any group - disadvantaged, underrepresented, or not. What I have a problem with is saying "here is a completely legitimate, bias-free business decision that is in the best interest of the company (e.g. closing the Atlanta office for cost savings). But it hurts this minority group, so we're not going to do it, which puts the business on less solid ground and has a larger net negative impact."

If bias results in you disproportionately impacting one group over another, you should fix it. If business does, it's more racist to try to "fix" it by taking everyone's demographics into account.

What? I can't invert my mind enough to understand this phrasing.

There doesn't have to be an admission. It could be overt and conscious, or it could be subconscious (e.g. associating minorities with having less competence without even realizing it).

What is the definition of "disproportionately"?

If 12% of purple-skinned employees were laid off but only 10% green-skinned ones, is that disproportional, confirming racism?

Because the people in charge are often in the majority group and when they're going down a list of names, their biases come into play.

Policies with no racial component often disproportionately target a minority group when metrics or properties that are purportedly race-neutral are, in fact, biased. Basing firing decisions on these qualities (arrest record, credit history, where they attended college) doesn't have racist intent, but it likely to have racist outcomes.

Absolutely a shocking thing to say. But the implementation details are sparse. Even if this is something like "ABC skin color gets a larger separation package", that's functionally equivalent to "XYZ people get a smaller one because they don't need it, due to the inherent benefits of their skin color."

At the end of the day, skin color should not factor into WHO gets laid off, or HOW they are laid off.

Assuming positive intent, when you say "At the end of the day, skin color should not factor into WHO gets laid off, or HOW they are laid off." Maybe Twitter is just agreeing, and they're reviewing the layoffs to make sure particularly skin colors and other groups are not overrepresented, all else being equal. There is a lot of opportunity for conscious and unconscious bias when someone is looking at their team or organization for who has to be let go.

Neutrality is not the principle of antiracism. I cannot assume positive intent, because anti racism explicitly excludes merely ensuring post-hoc that discrimination did not occur.

Anti-racist policies, are by definition (per Ibram X Kendi), not neutral. A neutral policy that does not intentionally benefit minority racial groups, is classified as racist under Kendi.

Edit: Further more, per DiAngelo, investigations should not see IF racism took place, but HOW. Neutrality is not an option. And per Kendi again:

> The only remedy to racist discrimination, is antiracist discrimination.

> The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

> The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

How ANYONE ever took these principles seriously is beyond me.

Dr Kendi has spoken at Twilio and their policies have been shaped based on his thinking, as per: https://www.twilio.com/blog/commemorating-celebrating-junete...

I cannot wait for the supreme court to strike down affirmative action. It is coming and it will be a glorious day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

This needs to be discussed openly and without bigotry. We need to confront the issues of racism on both fronts that includes reverse racism.

Reverse racism doesnt exist.

Its just racism.

Absolutely. The case is going to be labeled as 'racist' despite of doing exactly the opposite. Asian community in USA is waking up to this reality and it is causing strain in the society.

Fairness/Competitiveness is deeply rooted in humans (and primates): https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html

If you go against it, you're asking for societal upheaval.

I'm not white I'm latino.

I can't imagine what I would feel like if my company said something like this and I was a white guy. I guess I would be really sad, offended and discriminated.

I've seen hispanics from Mexico that look like Henry the 8th. Theoretically I'm assuming that they'll be singled out by this cult too. Being a latino won't help.

Latino isn't a race.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it's true. Latin origin is an ethnicity, it's not a race. Most people in South American are of latin origin. Many of them are black.

They're two completely separate things.

To be clear, I am 100% onboard with diversity and inclusion, I do believe in giving a fair chance to under-represented groups and I'd be happy to report discrimination in my organization to HR so that we can all build a more positive work environment for my coworkers.

But this is something else, instead of saying "we will fire the bottom 11% of performers in the team" or "we fire the bottom 11% based on seniority", they come outright and say that when choosing between two "similar" employees they will fire the least "diverse" person. It's madness.

> they come outright and say that when choosing between two "similar" employees they will fire the least "diverse" person.

They don't come outright and say that. They come outright and say something that could mean that, but could also mean "when choosing between two "similar" employees, we ensured we didn't always fire the most "diverse" person."

When faced with multiple possible interpretations, you're treating the one you find offensive as the only possibility. It's not. It might be the case, but there's no way to know from the text.

A white guy laid off in that instance would probably feel relieved. To elaborate, white men already reference diversity metrics to rationalize why they were not hired so naturally they would do the same when laid off.

Do you not realize how discriminatory this statement is? Can you imagine making a similar statement about a different ethnographic group?

Apparently not. As a white guy I don't think it would really be appropriate for me to make a similar statement about other groups.

On the face of it, it doesn't make much sense that your ethnicity should affect the truth value of your statement. Being a certain ethnicity can make you more likely to have the requisite experience for certain perspectives, but it can't actually alter the reality of an argument.

Even if you make a generalization about your own ethnicity, it's still a generalization that's not particularly helpful. If an argument is considered inappropriate because it targets a different ethnicity and is also an unhelpful generalization, it does not suddenly become helpful when retargeted to the speakers' own group.

This is not how I understood the phrasing. Layoffs can include a mix of randomization, removal of non-critical areas or groups, and quantitative low performers (reviews). The initial output of the layoffs may have skewed in one direction incorrectly representing marginalized communities or maybe not. Twilio says they would attempt remove a bias to baseline.

Removing bias is an objectively good thing. "You fired too many ________ people, and not enough ________ people" is not attempting to remove bias, it's attempting to hit a quota, virtue signal, or just being outright racist.

Without seeing internal company data (that a lot of the execs probably don't even have as it's across several teams), it's impossible to say for sure which one Twilio did, but "anti-racist" is going to be a dog whistle for a lot of people who will assume it is the latter.

Exactly, diversity (as practiced in the US) and meritocracy are incompatible.

If it can be proven that that's what they did, it's likely illegal.

How would you even begin to prove something like that? No exec would be dumb enough to send an email that says "we see that the bottom 11% in your organization is mostly marginalized groups, we can't let you fire them". It will be a wink-wink nudge-nudge during a 1-1 meeting.

"As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens."

Any one who isn't asleep at the wheel is well aware that corporate/institutional newspeak terms like "Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" means anti white and asian.

IANAL, but, it'd be tough for sure. You'd need to compare who was fired to who wasn't and contextualize with metrics that made it clear it wasn't coincidence.

The legal process itself opens the door to proving it. You sue them, and if you survive a motion to dismiss among probably some others, you’ll get to go into discovery.

Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

If 90% of the people who work at Twilio are white, and 90% of the laid off people are white, that isn't discrimination.

If the decision to fire is based on the demographic makeup rather than the individual's performance, it would still be discrimination (in a purely ethical sense)

Wouldn't actually anti-oppressive lens be that the lowest paid would get highest compensation for being fired or being kept and the highest paid would be kicked out and given least? After all money is the only true metric of oppression in capitalist free market society.

I find there’s a leap there from “we are trying to make our firings not racist or oppressive” to “they are firing all the whites and Asians”. It’s clear that you think is true, but I don’t see it as clear-cut. Can you back that claim with anything solid?

> how people can be onboard with this?

I think people are not and you might be jumping to conclusions from the previously mentioned leap.

Honestly, I don't get the hate for this.

If the layoffs are NOT based off of performance, as the CEO says:

> By no fault of the Twilions impacted today,

Why not ensure they are equitably distributed? Is it racist somehow to ensure that black people aren't the only people laid off?

The debate then has to do with whether ethnicity is the most salient feature of individuals and whether equitability should focus on it as the main criteria.

> If the layoffs are NOT based off of performance, as the CEO says:

Performance motivated layoffs are where a company decides they're going to do a reduction solely to cull underperformers (like what IBM has done historically with their "up or out" yearly staff reductions).

When it comes to a economically forced reduction, management is 100% going to first cut the underperformers or those whose roles are no longer needed due to a change in business direction.