Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanjeetsuhag | Hacker News Reader

> Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.

Can someone explain this ?

Feminism wasn't always as intersectional as it is now. For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color. Suffragettes are a very good example of this problem.

There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it helps white women but not any other underrepresented groups.

> For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color

Some of the early suffragettes - including the first female senator in the US[0] - were not just racist, but outright white supremacists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Latimer_Felton#Racial_...

She might've been racist as fuck, but I seriously do not get how she could be declared as "one of the biggest barriers to progress". She wasn't even allowed to vote, god damnit.

It's completely incoherent. If the power is overwhelmingly in the hands of straight white man, than straight white women very unlikely to become not some of the biggest "barriers to progress."

White women make progress towards equality faster than any other group that's being discriminated.

The argument is that instead of focusing on the core issue that discrimination is inherently bad and needs to be fought against, white women put the focus specifically on them. This means other groups are ignored until white women have achieved their goals until a new conversation can be started.

I'm not sure whether other groups would have made progress sooner without this problem but it's a possiblity and that would make white women significant barrier.

I admit it's hard to go from that further to biggest barrier but I don't think one should discard that notion too easily. "Moderates" pushing for some bad compromise is the worse is better of politics. MLK famously considered white moderates to be a bigger issue than racist groups at one point.

That seems to be humanity in a nutshell - fuck you, got mine.

Most of us are not altruistic enough to put other people ahead of us and ours. Self > family > clan > tribe > race > everybody else. However you choose to segment your identity up and what characteristics you base it upon, that's generally the hierarchy of fucks you give about other people.

That's a problem that needs to called attention to, critizied and addressed but not accepted.

It's a hard problem we've been working on for at least a couple thousand years. When we find the universal solution, the philosophers can pack it in.

Meanwhile, I've got to live as best I can in the world as it exists, rather than as I might ideally like it. There's a lot of smaller, more manageable windmills out there.

Yeah, whereas now it's dominated by white women who get book deals off the back of their supposed anti-racist credentials, whereas the black activists who they got their arguments from (and watered them down, naturally) languish unmentioned in obscurity. There's a a lot of complicated history and anger behind the distrust of white feminist activists, most of which I don't think ever reached the mainstream media in any meaningful form, going right up to probably the present day even.

I can't deny that I feel some amount of Schadenfreude. And also a strange longing for popcorn.

To further extend from the suffrage movement, it is important to note that minorities (men & women) didn't legally have the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence the hierarchy is that white women are the "next-in-line" when it comes to diversity before any other type of minority group.

More info there:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white...

  > A person familiar with the matter told us this talk was not
  > done by Sanchez at GitHub, but was part of a seminar geared
  > specifically for people of color.
  > 
  > We were told that it was based on research published in the
  > Racism Review as part of its "Trouble with White Women"
  > series in 2014.
  > 
  > In particular, one article delves into data that suggests
  > that white women have "disproportionately" benefited from
  > affirmative-action policies. It then suggests that instead
  > of being advocates for affirmative action, white women
  > "have been at the forefront of lawsuits brought to
  > challenge affirmative action."

If you try writing a technical book as a woman, other women will discourage you, saying, "No one will buy a computer book written by a woman."

No joke.

That's not true, this book [1] is written by a woman and got a lot of support :

[1] http://www.amazon.fr/CSS-Secrets-Lea-Verou/dp/1449372635

(it's really good btw)

It's absolutely not true, and in fact the #1 book in Amazon's "Computers & Technology" category last week was written by a woman.

Despite that, it's a belief that's out there, and it prevents some women from even trying (which is bad).

Practical object oriented design in Ruby by Sandi Metz is hugely popular, and not just inside the Ruby community, and rightly so, it's one of if not the greatest texts on programming I've read.

I've only bought one Ruby book and it's POODR by Sandi Metz. One of the best programming books I've ever read.

yes, it's blatant sexism and racism.

doesn't this also cross a legal boundary? if you're an independent activist fine, but both race and sex are protected categories in the workplace

I'm having a guess that companies decide they want to be 'diverse' and not all white guys and the easiest way to hit the number target is to hire some women. The quota approach seems a bit flawed - they should be mostly colour and sex blind, perhaps dropping the bar a little bit for disadvantaged groups.

Another funny thing is after going on about hiring more dark skinned people a lot of companies are hiring Indians just because they are good at the job (eg Nadella) so they're having to say no not that sort of coloured person, the other lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com