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Comment by chickenfries | Hacker News Reader

This comment made me think that someone had disparaged them for their political beliefs or religion, but after reading that doesn't seem to have happened, unless they left it out for some reason, but that would be odd. In fact, if I understand the letter correctly, the straw that broke OP's back was this:

> https://www.outreachy.org/apply/eligibility/

To which I say... really? Ok, that's too bad that you don't want to be a contributor anymore because there is a diversity scholarship... somehow I don't see that as a long term problem for LLVM though.

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I do not know how that looks to other people but to me these rules look both sexist and racist.

To me it looks like trying to give a hand up to minorities. Do you look at tech and say "man, if only the white guys could catch a break..."?

As someone who would qualify for the linked program, I agree. A lot of words just to say "no Asians allowed".

I wonder how these people would feel about someone who claimed that Japan or Taiwan was a "Pacific Island".

Can you or the parent comment on my you think that the above program is racist/sexist?

Maybe because it excludes people based on their race/sex?

Helping the disadvantaged is a noble goal, but race/sex is a poor proxy for privilege. That program would accept an African queen and exclude an Indian untouchable.

Pretending that racism and sexism don't exist and never existed is a nonsensical stance to take and is usually a stance taken by someone who feels that they never have to worry about them. Programs like AA exist because it still is a problem. There are still a lot of people in power with those disgusting ideas. When it was argued that voting rights act was antiquated because racism was no longer a major issue, North Carolina's government went and gerrymandered their state to group black people together and give them less power[1]

Programs like that are out reach to help people that have been looked over or would have been discriminated against out right in the past. They're there to help people, not to punish anyone.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-c...

Who's pretending that racism and sexism doesn't exist? I don't see any previous comments on this thread saying that or even remotely implying it.

There was a comment in the previous thread suggesting that the diversity scholarship was sexist and racist. In a world where racism and sexism were absent, then a scholarship directed towards a particular gender or race would be racist or sexist. I believe the point of the original poster is that to label the scholarship as racist or sexist is to assume that we live in a world with racial/gender/ethnic equality.

Isn't denying someone eligibility on the basis of their skin color and sex racist and sexist? Again no one previously denied or even alluded to racism/sexism not existing.

I look at it more holistically. Men are not underrepresented in the industry and open source community. Neither are the various races not addressed by this particular scholarship. There are other programs you can apply for to get paid to work on LLVM or other open source projects, such as Google Summer of Code. I don't see how this program could actually have a detrimental effect on anyone, let alone a racist or sexist one.

My issue is that the scholarship lumps all the Asian groups together, as if Indians or Chinese have the same language, culture and representation in technology as Hmong or Cambodians. It just plays into racial stereotypes[1] in America.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority#Issues_faced_by...

I agree, as an Asian who is not Indian or Chinese, the scholarship could be made more inclusive. The invisibilty of minorty asian populations is a problem in America in general.

If the courses are run specifically for a group of people, based on their attributes, this subjects them to bias before they even walk in the door.

One way that this sort of sexist/racist approach could be detrimental is if it's served by one, or few, organisations, the courses could accidentally (or, in extremis, purposefully) be using methods that cause entrenchment of existing partitions between different groups of people. Perhaps one set of courses teaches in a certain innocent manner, and the minorities that consume the course therefore learn in a particular way, or leave out key issues.

There's also the possibility of being indoctrinated against those groups that are not welcomed; again, not necessarily on purpose - I don't intend to demonise such organisations.

Somewhat analogous to recent machine learning/algorithms being found to be prejudiced as their programmers may be unknowingly prejudiced - e.g. facial recognition working poorly for faces of people with dark skin.

Nope. People have publicly declared that out of fear of the social justice movement they will ban people, refuse to communicate as soon as disagreement with the prevailing political view manifests.

That's what's in the CoC that's objectionable.

> made me think that someone had disparaged them for their political beliefs

Funny how you do that in a post that disparages him for his political beliefs. But your post is nothing compared with the attacks elsewhere in this thread. Scroll down and read a bit, and you'll see plenty of that happening.

Before you say "but it's not about excluding people", let me remind you about James Damore and Brendan Eich. Those were valuable people, attacked and damaged because of their (in Damore's case PERCEIVED, not real) political beliefs. We all know that the majority of Hacker News supported those actions (although how many supported them because they were afraid to be attacked, and how many actually supported those actions is not clear).

And why do people do this ? Attack others for political reasons ? Most, of course, because they're afraid of SJWs. Because of what happened to Damore and Eich and many others. But SJWs, ostensibly, do this for tolerance of course ! THAT's why they're EXCLUDING people for their political views. For tolerance.

Alaternative view: the SJWs are just socialites looking to exclude others, that's all. Aggressive and ... not interested in the only thing that matters : technically interesting work.

I commend this person for speaking up.

> Damore and Eich...THAT's why they're EXCLUDING people for their political views

The actual exclusion can be seen by walking around the engineering departments of FAANG companies (or Market Street startups) and seeing virtually all male, white or Asian faces. One in eight Americans are black - where are they? That is the real exclusion. Damore was fired for effectively boasting about this exclusion.

It's illustrative that you ignore the massive exclusion of blacks and others from non-sweeping, non-cafeteria server jobs, and get ALL CAPS semi-hysterical that those who are dumb enough to align themselves with these exclusions and subjugations are the victims and excluded ones.

> Damore was fired for effectively boasting about this exclusion.

He did not boast about it, "effectively" or otherwise. That's a straight-up smear, attacking his character when you can't counter his logic.

Maybe I'm absolutely wrong, but as far as I could tell, Damore's memo did not mention race at all.

You are wrong. Race is mentioned multiple times in Damore's memo, such as "At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases", etc.

> Before you say "but it's not about excluding people", let me remind you about James Damore and Brendan Eich.

Bingo.

James Damore may be the tipping point where people start pushing back against this bullshit. To me, he's Galileo to Google's Catholic Church. He's the heretic that dared to defy the high priests of PC, and he got put on the rack for it.

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