As a wealthy white male, I couldn't agree more. For people like me, politics is a choice. But as my female friends of color often remind me, politics is not a choice for them.
^^^ privileged white male
I felt this way as a poor minority. This statement people keep bandying about that white people are forced to repeat lest they seem racist is absurd.
- A women-only Slack channel.
- Women-only events, such as a free screening of Wonder Woman. The men at the company were expected to work during that time.
- An "ally skills workshop"[1], which attempted to indoctrinate us with an explicitly racist and sexist ideology.
- A Diversity Council that had the explicit goal of increasing the number of non-white non-men in engineering. One time when I was invited to a meeting of the council, I said that their goal should be to eliminate bias in the hiring process (such as by blinding resumes, replacing phone screens with text-only mediums, etc). I was taken aside and chastised for my statements.
If I had actually said my opinions, I have no doubt I would have been fired for my beliefs. If that's what happens when people are encouraged to bring their politics to work (especially in SF), I will gladly take the "no politics" option.
1. Slides from the workshop: https://files.frameshiftconsulting.com/Ally%20Skills%20Works...
Edit: the slides have been updated since I last saw them. The slides presented to me were closer to this version from 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170911021528/https://files.fra... Though even that version is more toned down than what I saw.
Believing that the teaching you how to be a good ally is racist and sexist (against white men, I assume) is probably why you didn't fit in great there. I read that whole slideset and there's nothing racist in there - unless you're counting the scenarios of "what not to do."
If it's "stop the world" important and absolutely needs to be dealt with right now, interrupt it, same as you would any other break. Otherwise, deal with it like you would any other situation.
"Marginalized person: Any woman who wants to work for pay for an employer"
"Oppression: The self-reinforcing system of stories, TV, news coverage, police, and legal system stereotyping Black people as criminals, that benefits non-Black people and harms Black people"
What TV shows has the author been watching? For my entire life, at least 95% of the depictions of black people that I've seen on television have been positive, sometimes to the point of being pandering. (For example, if a show has a black character and a white character, and one has to do something wrong to advance the plot, it will be the white character, because that won't cause outrage, while the reverse will.)
"You are eating lunch in the employee kitchen when a group sits down near you. One person comments loudly “If I ate that, I’d be as big as a house!” A higher-weight coworker is sitting nearby and can clearly overhear."
It's not clear who's talking to whom here. If it's someone commenting on the lunch of a coworker with whom they're not sitting, well, I've never seen behavior like that in any workplace, nor have I heard of anything like that happening. If it's someone commenting on one of their lunch-mates' lunches, then it's none of the "higher"-weight coworker's business.
"Higher weight people face workplace discrimination, particularly women, regardless of ability to do the job Body size is falsely equated with virtue: self-control, hard worker, in good health"
Body size is correctly associated with self-control, energy, and good health. The proportion of overweight people who couldn't reach a normal weight if they ate sensibly and exercised is tiny. The "healthy at any weight" meme is absurd.
"Black people face a much a higher bar than white people during hiring (and in general), and white people often get a pass or exceptions to the process"
Bullshit.
"A co-worker shares an article on your work Slack claiming that white men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, saying "I don't agree with all of it, but it has some good points." Another co-worker replies, saying that they disagree with the article but we have to be tolerant of co-workers with different political views because diversity of thought is important too."
Men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, on average. You have to be willfully blind not to see that this is true. Why does this make people so angry?
""Office housework" is necessary but unrewarded work (taking notes, organizing parties, tidying, etc.) People of color and women of all races are expected to do more of this work and punished for not doing it"
Bullshit.
"On a company mailing list, someone writes “How would you explain this [technical thing] to your grandmother?”"
Old women (and, to a lesser extent, old men) are much more likely to have trouble with technology than are young men (and, to a lesser extent, young women). Again, why does this make people so angry?
Intersectionalism is just borderline personality disorder in ideological form.
You're projecting emotion on your perceived opponents ("why does this make people so angry") because your dismissal of their arguments depends on it. If you instead took this discussion seriously, you'd lose the ability to be sure you were right.
I don't expect you to have a revelation overnight, but sit down and think sometime about why this topic is so scary for you.
I called two claims bullshit, so I presume you believe that one of them has been proven. Which one? Citation?
I'm not projecting anything onto anyone. I--like many other reasonable people--am bewildered by the intersectional left's refusal to accept reality. They are in fact the ones who become enraged when you point out obvious truths, such as that men and women are different.
The topic doesn't scare me, but if the discourse in the West continues down its current path, intersectionalism could become a dangerous thing. The core of the ideology is resentment, and history has shown that these resentment-based ideologies often have horrific results. (See, e.g., the the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, etc.)
Anti-black media bias. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/5420/
Racial hiring bias: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.short
Men aren't somehow biologically more in tune with computers: https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf
"Office housework": https://worklifelaw.org/publication/climate-control-gender-r...
So I guess it wasn't that half your claims were scientifically wrong, sorry. It was all of them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Ally is a verb, not an identity
That's... that's a noun.
> Ally is a verb, not an identity
> [...]
> Acting as an ally is about action - it is not an identity, which is why we talk about "ally skills" instead of "allies"
(In military slang 'ally skills' could be adjectival use, but I'm pretty sure this is using it like 'friend skills', a noun.)
I take the following sentences as confirming this reading:
> Being a marginalized person takes no action - it is an identity:
> Acting as an ally is about action - it is not an identity, which is why we talk about "ally skills" instead of "allies"
> Depending on what is most relevant about you to the situation, you may switch between being marginalized and acting as an ally
Those slides present a rather extreme ideology, which is not based on (and is often flatly contradicted by) evidence.
Western society has a long history of producing ideologies centered on guilt and sexual propriety, and intersectionality is just the latest iteration. It's a descendant of puritanism.
Heck, despite what happened, I still like and admire the leadership of the company.
> 2 hour-long workshop: most common complaint was "Too short!" >3 hour-long workshop: only a few complaints that it was too short
There’s no other data or reasoning presented. Surely other factors must be important and it seems unwise to select a time solely on these two points.
Using evidence to support statements is even more important when introducing a new concept to an audience.
While it does sound like a good idea to eliminate bias, appearance is a contributory factor in the hiring process. If someone turns up with matted hair, hasn't showered in months, and is wearing a pizza stained t-shirt then most companies won't want to hire them and most employees won't want to work near them. Good idea in theory, not really in practice. You're going to have to have a face-to-face interview at _some_ point and that's when (mostly subconscious) racism/sexism/\*ism will
Also, that first slide from the workshop presentation reminded me how much I hate the push for people to declare pronouns. Contrapoints tweeted about this from a trans perspective[1] and got labeled "problematic" by a lot of leftists.
[1] https://arcdigital.media/contrapoints-and-the-scandal-that-s... (referencing the first set of tweets)
Such a person would probably stink, which is a sensible reason for employees not to work with them. Such a person also appears to demonstrate either being unaware of (very unlikely unless their sense of smell is broken and they don't have any friends who have told them it's a problem), or not caring about inflicting their stench on their prospective coworkers, which probably implies something bad about their judgment and considerateness, which is also a sensible reason not to hire them.
If you never saw the person until hiring them, that could be an issue; but if it were a line item in company policy (maybe alongside the dress code) that employees shall not inflict a stench on others, then at least you could get on their case about it on day 1, and have a fully justified reason to fire them quickly if they didn't shape up. Of course it'd be more efficient to have not hired them at all, but there will always be some problems you just don't find out about until later. I don't think this particular failure mode is common.
The problem with this kind of identity framing is that politics is central to it. One wrong step and your enemies of color (for instance) may play their victimhood against your prosperity and it'll become brutally obvious how political you are by merely existing within a demographic.