I don't agree with this view and I think "reverse racism" is just as racist as normal racism. I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.
Edit: I concur with parent comment.
As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area.
You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)
This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.
A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.
> don't face trials and tribulation.
Nobody has made this claim.
In what sense?
This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?"
I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns.
I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.
Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.
Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.
Pool metaphor: It's not enough for lifeguards not to see race when the majority kids bully minority kids as groups. It inevitably leads to the lifeguards seeing the minority kids as the source of the problem, since they're always in the middle of any fight, and when they're gone the fights are fewer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-...
Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.
It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.
This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations.
Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.
People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot.
The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.
Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.
It’s not about preferring black employees or hating on white employees. It’s to recognize the dynamics that race might have in your organization that have nothing to do with job performance.
To tie into your anecdote: if a company hires drivers, maybe comparing a black driver and a white driver solely on the number of times they’ve been pulled over, is not an accurate representation of their driving performance. Being aware that someone could potentially need a better performance indicator is part of what this exercise might be.
I’m not saying this to implicate or unimplicate anyone really. It’s more to point out morally elevating one group of people over others (western vs Eastern Europeans) to make a rhetorical argument doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny because of the contradictions inherit in all people and countries.
If this is HOW they are making firing decisions, then this is stupid. To remain viable they need to "cut the fat" regardless of who makes up the "fat". In other words beancounters should not be looking a the "race" & "gender" columns to make business/personnel decisions.
On one side you had the HR reps talking about how you can't discriminate on protected classes etc, but we had to approach hiring from an anti racist lense with a focus on getting certain groups.
I really don't know how both of these work together, I generally support the goals and esp support being aware of diff people and cultures, my family are all first gen immigrants lol.
When the rubber hits the road I don't see how these two mandates don't conflict.
Claiming it means “only fire white people” is not accurate.
(Disclaimer - I have no opinions on either side in this issue).
If it matters I’m with the OP on this. I’m Romanian, I’m “white”, my mother is, for lack of a better word, “brown-ish” (between “black” and “white”, that is), my brother has the same skin “color” as my mum. My brother has been the victim of racist remarks over the years of which I was not, I suspect because of our slightly different skin “color”.
Nevertheless, I find the essentialist policy the US has when it comes to “races” quite baffling. For example I don’t know how me and my brother would potentially be “labeled” were we to move to the States. Like I said, technically we have different skin “colors” but, after all, we’re brothers.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were 100% right on this, i.e. that US racial things should only be discussed by those directly involved with the same happening in the Romanian case (from where I’m from), but unfortunately that is not the case.
The original sin of the US was the Atlantic slave trade. It so happens that almost of the people swept up into that slave trade were dark skinned. And, because that slave trade was so monumentally huge in terms of how many people it brought to the US, a very large fraction of dark skinned people in the US today and all throughout history either were slaves or are primarily descended from them.
In order to morally justify the enslavement of millions of people, white slave-owners manufactured a justification that people of certain races are physically, mentally, and morally different from whites. They created a (factually false) narrative that skin tone didn't just mean skin tone but also implied all sorts of other things about the person.
That narrative is profoundly embedded in all aspects of US politics, culture, and institutions. It's been there since before the three-fifths compromise which is directly in the US Constitution. It's everywhere.
So it's not just about skin tone. It's about generations of Americans growing up in a culture that says people with a certain skin tone are less human, and then building social institutions predicated on that as fact.
Culture and institutions change very slowly (especially when many participating in them actively benefit from their current state) and it takes a lot of work to root something like this out.
Guess they figure no white/asian person is going to file a suit on racial grounds.
https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20...
In fact, in certain states (like CA), you often list all the ages of the people in the department, and who is and isn't impacted IN THE RIF'ed employee's SEVERANCE PACKAGE. I believe this is employment law driven.
The fact that it hasn't lost them a lawsuit yet, nothing more and nothing less.
I’m mixed and depending on many factors some think I’m white and others know I’m brown (certainly more brown than white folks). Typically, it’s only white people who believe I’m white (which is racist still even if they mean well). The weird thing is, truly racist hateful white people definitely know I’m not white. Like that’s how I really even found out I wasn’t like my white friends, as a child, literal fucking Nazis made that clear to me through violence.
So I’m on the other side of this coin seeing: “they didn’t lay off people because they weren’t white enough” not that people who were laid off had it happen because they are white.
My read (as a white guy who is minority in religion) was: "great, this company has some defenses to make sure they are being fair to everyone, especially groups of people who don't typically get a fair shake". And that's fine by me. Not that they are firing white people. But that they are making sure they're not disproportionately firing black people or women or any other group that might be marginalized in the tech industry.
It's meant to counteract the fact that people who are obviously black suffer actual anti-black racism. You have noticed this. I could understand disagreement, I can't understand the confusion.
> In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white.
I don't believe this. It's not how you look, it's what you put on the forms. You may be accused of lying (I imagine) if you look white, but your parents will reveal that you're not. You don't think that, all other things being equal, in America, your uncle will have the same equality of opportunity as you without positive discrimination? He's not allowed to drive a nice car while wearing a capoeira outfit. Driving a car while wearing a capoeira outfit is a right so basic I never imagined that it would be seen as suspicious behavior.
When I see a statement like this (copy paste from article):
"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."
Makes me worry. What that phrase means? Apparent-white people (like me) got fired? Because they are white?
In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white. Had to get a loan and pay for private schooling.
What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?