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Comment by sh6678 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think its a race issue so much as a physical appearance issue. Height, attractiveness, facial structure, body size. Certain people look "presidential" and they command a lot of automatic respect just based on appearance. There are plenty of minority people that have this quality. There are plenty of white males lacking this quality.

Look-ism is the huge issue that is almost never talked about. In most companies you could probably better judge how successful new hires will be just by how they look in a video of them talking vs a sample of their work or credentials.

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I think you're right. Minority, female, etc., are often just noisy proxies for what you call look-ism and I would also add normal-ism.

What you call normalism is regression to the mean. Lotta guys in tech? Hire a woman. Lotta white folks in the movies? Hire an 'ethnic' looking actor. The pendulum swings to and fro, and all the while we snip the ends off of the bell curve to make everyone feel like they fit in.

Fitting in is not a way to create progress. Adaptability and inclusiveness is. That was the point of diversity training in the first place, not normalization. Cultures function much more efficiently when diversity is introduced into the medium.

The real reason for the stagnation in social order is the fear of being pushed outside the herd if you are too near to the edge. We must become more inclusive, and fight the laziness that manifests itself in regressing to the mean.

"Look-ism" this is huge.

The more 'interaction' and 'first impressions' need to be made, the more 'look-ism' is essential.

Lawyers, bankers, execs etc..

Tech is even getting a little bit like this, with some shops getting a little to 'beardy' and 'tuquey' and 'hoody' for me :)

> Certain people look "presidential"

I agree, I know a guy who is head of sales of a company and he has that "Presidential look" and my brain automatically thinks that he is a leader every time I see him.

Let's also not forget ageism, heightism, voice-ism (positive affect of rich voices).

And ableism and...

There probably needs to be a general purpose word for this...

I gather kyriarchy was coined to serve this purpose, but I don't think it's widely used.

Fascism is the general term.

Judging anyone by anything other than what is called for when doing the actual work is inherently superficial and therefore fascist (fascia, on the face). Fairly synergistic connection there regarding the popularity of a certain face-themed webpage.

We can make up labels all day to make it fresh or more precise, but the logos/pathos/ethos of the term 'fascist' is sound in every instance of excluding or including someone based on anything but propensity. It is interesting that we can't acknowledge it, like we are all so wrapped up in finding our niche that when we do, anything that would jeopardize that is immediately regarded as false.

Like, who would you be if you aren't actually as talented as you think you are?

But I digress.

It's hard to say "looking presidential" isn't related to race or gender when ~98% of presidents have been white men (assuming you're talking about the United States president!)

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