What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2014/febr...
It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.
The paper bag test doesn't make paper bags racist. It's a shade test.
> It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.
I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it is, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.
> I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.
I sat in a meeting where two young, white colleagues informed another colleague that the term was racist and we should come up with a different one. I tried to push back gently, but I am a white man and as such have no standing in the DEI hierarchy. So it was decided in this meeting full of white people that we would no longer use the term as it might cause offense to someone, maybe. And the two young engineers were satisfied they had made the world a slightly better place. I found it disturbing but don’t know what to do.
Woah this suddenly made the behavior of some people who gave me the creeps but were doing "all the right things" make sense. Thanks.
On the brownbag thing, I've had someone tell me we shouldn't say "picnic" because of a racist etymology. When I showed her this etymology wasn't real, she said it didn't matter. We still shouldn't say it because it might harm someone. This doesn't make anti-racism absurd. I think there are real heroes there. But that interaction sure felt absurd.
Don't be anti-racist. Just don't be racist and call it out where you see it.
You won't get through life without being hurt and learning to understand the meaning behind people using words is a skill you cannot skip to acquire. Misunderstanding happen and you need strategies to deal with them. It can but rarely results in conflict. You cannot expect everyone only using thoughts, associations and words you are content with. It is a false strategy without solution.
I would argue it also gives an indication of how “mission creep” works.
(A well-used term like “tarball” now being deemed potentially offensive, presumably because it sounds like “tarbaby”, even though it’s obviously just referring to a bundle of files archived with the “tar” command.)
While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby."
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguag...
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this came to be written. Were there brainstorming sessions where people threw out random word associations to show willing, combined with a fear from the rest of the group of accusations of racism for calling it out as arrant nonsense?
Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.
> DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
This is not a problem with DEI. Look at the landgrab that is enterprise management.
> In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
Your premise is off, so I can't answer this.
> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.
This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.