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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.”

Wow this literally sounds like an episode of The Office (S1 E2)

Definitely not the most damning thing in this article but the one that really jumped out for me.

Can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea

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I did some googling on this and this exercise is recommended by organizations such as University of Houston's "Center for Diversity and Inclusion". More details given below.

We can have a fun discussion on whether such activities are constructive. But it seems very unfair to paint Google as a prejudiced organization for carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by organizations who specialize in this field. The fact that this exercise was cherry-picked and presented without context, makes me wonder what else in the article is being painted in an unfair light.

https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

"Come up with list of groups that we have stereotypes about (AfricanAmerican, gays/lesbians, disabled people, athletes, women, etc). You can tailor this to the class.

2. Divide the class into small groups and give each group one of the above categories.

3. On big paper, let the groups generate all the stereotypes they can think of for that group (encourage them to be honest, say what they hear about these groups). Then discuss (and list) the source of that stereotype, how it's reinforced, and the effect it has"

4. Let each group put up their paper and read their stereotypes and the other categories to the group.

5. End with a large group discussion of what they can do to end stereotyping (i.e. educate themselves, take courses, get to know members of the group, join an organization, etc)."

"It seems very unfair to paint Google as a prejudiced organization for carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by academics who work in this field."

Yeah and the guy who invented the lobotomy was awarded a Nobel Prize. Following the advice of academics is not a license to take off your ethics hat.

License, no.

... but it makes for great legal cover.

And that's all this training is about: legal cover. One of many kubuki theatrics one must engage in as a corporate drone.

This is just the following orders excuse, but with more institutions participating.

As much hay is made of "just following orders" being no excuse, one sees it made so often because it does work, depending on the context.

(In a sense, it even worked in the Nuremberg trials---basically everyone tried was executed, but the entirety of the German army and the civilian populace who supported the Nazi party were not, even though they, too, were "just following orders").

It would be more honest if they all said, "we weren't thinking."

I think they would have even been acquitted on the charges of criminal conspiracy if they used that argument.

Surely you don't think they went through the trouble of having this diversity exercise in order to encourage discrimination? This is a case of someone who's trying to reduce bigotry being stupid, not unethical.

1) You selected one PDF from one organization, that has no visible attribution to anyone, generalized that to "recommended by academics", and based on that questioned the light of the rest of the post.

This is poor reasoning.

2) You uncritically examined the diversity activity. There is a large difference between deftly running an activity like this and horribly running an activity like this. The undertones of the original post is that this was handled poorly.

I would hope that here on HN, people would recognize that uncritically accepting 'best practices' or making an 'appeal to authority' is insufficient.

> You uncritically examined the diversity activity

That's also how a company trying to do its best to cover the sometimes ambiguous intent of diversity law will often interface to academia, so it's a fair approach in this context.

(Remember, critically examining a diversity activity rather than doing what academia guides as best practice can open a company up to more liability than the opportunity to "defer to authority" on the topic. "We didn't, in our opinion, think this approach was best so we trusted our guts and didn't do it" is a much worse defense in a labor-practices case than "We followed the program as set forth in such-and-such university's diversity exercise policy handbook").

>That's also how a company trying to do its best to cover the sometimes ambiguous intent of diversity law will often interface to academia, so it's a fair approach in this context.

Agree that it provides cover for an org to defer to experts and best practices.

Hard disagree on the "fair approach" part. An outside individual examining this activity can be better than an organization simply trying to cover its legal bases.

1) Yes, I selected an organization that is explicitly aiming to facilitate diversity and inclusion in professional workplaces. You appear to have completely misunderstood the chain of reasoning here. I did not claim that the above exercise is constructive. Rather, my claim is that this is the exercise recommended by at least some organizations that specialize in promoting diversity and inclusion.

> You uncritically examined the diversity activity

Your post assumes that the people running the organization are capable of critically examining diversity and inclusion related matters. Sometimes, people are best off acknowledging that something is completely outside of their area of expertise, and deferring to the advice given by specialists. I certainly do this very frequently, when it comes to advice given by my doctors or lawyers.

If you wish to critically examine any and all advice you come across, more power to you. But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

> There is a large difference between deftly running an activity like this and horribly running an activity like this. The undertones of the original post is that this was handled poorly.

There is no details or explanation in the article whatsoever, providing support to the conclusion that the activity was run horribly or poorly, and not simply following the exercise instructions given. I would hope that here on HN, people would avoid jumping to conclusions based purely on conjecture.

> But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

"Just following orders" does not absolve one of responsibility.

If I "listen" to the advice of a specialist to call an African American the n-word, and then I scream the n-word repeatedly in front of others, then those people have the right to call me prejudiced. The onus is on me to prove my lack of prejudice, not on my accusers. The alternative is enabling racial supremacists to hurl vitriol so long as they "do a bit of Googling" and supply a PDF that says "expert says epithets are ok!"

Do you know the difference between authority and morality?

Then you would have been willing to risk your job (as it was implied to have an element of accountability) AND you think you have an established ethic that would reject this exercise. That is a rare position and quality, which should give you pause. ie Not everyone is you.

In a court of law, if someone sues over the scenario you've described, appeal to authority is exactly how a defendant would argue that what they did isn't considered racist and therefore doesn't violate the law.

To understand the pathological behavior if megacorporations, look to the law under which they operate.

> But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

Wait, why not? Why is this appeal to authority iron clad? Why is this authority better than any other? If I claim to be a "specialist[] who [is] trying to promote diversity" and I am doing bigoted things, where does that leave my authority?

I don't believe defending an appeal to authority by asserting that your authority is correct is a sound line of reasoning.

Hi, I understand that this can be a hot button issue, and I know when that happens to me I sometimes misread or I am hasty in my response. Perhaps that's what has happened with your response here. I took a few minutes to read your posts again, set them aside, re-read them, and am now responding. I hope to not misrepresent your words.

You did not engage with my first point. I agree that sometimes people are best off deferring to experts. In this case, we have no idea who that is. The University of Houston is far too generic. I would want to know are any of these people Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPoC)? If so, does they or their viewpoint match up with other specialists in this field? ^Getting a map of the territory and vetting your resources are absolutely things anyone should be capable of doing, especially anyone at an organization of Google's scale and with its resources.

"you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists" 1) I did not call you prejudiced. You seem to have inferred that. 2) In the general sense, if someone is wrong/prejudiced/racist, it doesn't matter who the advice is coming from, it can and should in fact be point out so that it can be learned from.

As for your last quote of mine--I said "undertones" and you ignored that. Perhaps your inference based on the author's writing is different. Based on my experience, I read those undertones as a diversity exercise done poorly.

Hi, I appreciate the response. I agree with you that I know very little about University of Houston or its Center for Diversity and Inclusion. FWIW, it is one of the top results when I google for "diversity exercise", but make of that what you will.

My larger point is not that the exercise is great and should continue to be used. My larger point is that the exercise is something that a reasonable and well-intentioned person could have chosen, in a sincere effort to promote diversity and inclusion. This seems to be a point worth making, given the parent comment of "can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea".

When I first read the linked article, I had a similar shocked reaction. Knowing the origin of the exercise, and its purposes, is very valuable context that the original article should ideally acknowledge.

Making a list of prejudices against particular groups and discussing their negative effects sounds beneficial. Shouting out a bunch of derogatory stereotypes with no consideration or discussion does not. How these things are handled matters and how failures to handle these things well is then handled also matters.

The best-practice seems to indicate assigning people randomly to groups so they can examine their own biases. This instance at Google was to assign people to their own stereotypes so they can wallow in it? Not the same thing, is it?

We lack evidence that's what happened.

If you assign people randomly to labels that are supposed to be disjoint from their attributes (but you use the pejorative names of real attributes), there's a non-zero chance you'll randomly assign someone to the group named by the pejorative version of an attribute they have.

> it seems very unfair to paint Google as a prejudiced organization for carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by organizations who specialize in this field

The site [1] says the "diversity exercises listed below are geared toward college students, faculty and staff." Out the door, they're being mis-applied.

The PDF [2] is attributed to the "Office of First-Year Programs Northern Kentucky University". No names, let alone specialists.

For an organization (Google) claiming to be scientific about its decision making, they seem to have misapplied a program with a propensity for being abused, put it in the hands of someone without "a background or expertise in facilitating exercises that may be culturally sensitive," and retaliated against individuals who complained.

This is worth calling out.

[1] https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

[2] https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

You're right, that's a good call out. I'm certainly not well-versed enough to know the nuances between diversity training intended for University staff vs Google staff. My first instinct is that "college staff" covers a very generic and broad set of workplaces, hence why it seems reasonably applicable to Google's workplace as well. But I might certainly be mistaken.

I was mostly responding to the parent comment which stated: "Can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea". I'm not endorsing this exercise myself. But given the above source and purpose, I can wrap my mind around why a reasonable well-intentioned person might think this was a good idea.

I think the scholarly consensus is that the blue-eyes-brown-eyes exercise, at least as applied to adults, is of limited value and might in fact be net harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott#Academic_research...

(It would make sense to me that this exercise is helpful in a time and context where people are open about segregation, and you want to train children out of absorbing it from their culture. Corporate diversity training is a wholly different context: if you have employees who do not already believe that segregation is bad and do not actively want to prevent unjust discrimination, fire them or at least prevent them from managing or interviewing people. No hour-long training is going to make your racist boss suddenly realize that racism is bad.)

This exercise seems like a much more extreme form of it, where you're encouraging people to say stereotypes about actual people who are in the room. Is there any academic study saying that it works? Or is this just something on a .edu website?

(And aren't there studies showing that if you make people listen to stereotypes of a group they belong to being unintelligent, they'll perform worse on standardized tests?)

The "blue-eyes/brown-eyes" experiment was essentially a lighter variation on the better-known "Robbers' Cave Experiment" in psychology. You arbitrarily divide people into two groups, like "blue-eyed folks" and "brown-eyed folks" (in other words, the arbitrariness is quite overt and visible) and then look at how conflict and cooperation play out between the two groups. That's a far cry from what happened during OP's "diversity training" exercise.

(It turns out that conflict won't necessarily arise in that kind of situation, but that it's exceedingly easy for a bad actor (such as the experimenter herself) to manipulate the groups into hating each other. Reference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-... )

To me, the issue here isn't (just) that someone felt extremely uncomfortable with a diversity exercise - it's the way their concerns were handled. Rather than empathizing with the person and learning from the experience, HR ignored the person's discomfort, and chose to "do some digging" on them instead.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) exercises are designed to make you feel uncomfortable because coaches believe discomfort is evidence of your "DEI muscles" being exercised. The thinking is that you cannot change your attitudes, opinions, and behaviors unless you can first become uncomfortable.

Causing discomfort in a respectful way is one thing. Causing discomfort by encouraging employees to call someone racist and homophobic names is a very different thing.

But again, the main point isn't the diversity exercise. It's the way his complaint about the exercise was handled.

>"carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by organizations who specialize in this field."

It doesn't matter that the exercise is recommended or designed by specialists in the "field" when the entire "field" is wrong-headed and backwards in the first place.

The field of diversity studies (grievance studies) serves only to divide and exacerbate the very problems it identifies while ignoring actual solutions.

The justification for the field and its methods consists of a set of assumptions that are intently racist, sexist and divisive. This is bad enough, but then the internal logic guiding the field, built upon these initial assumptions, is weak at best.

Ultimately the diversity mafia is able to throw its weight around unimpeded because people are afraid that if they criticize it or its methods they will be slandered as racist or sexist. It is driven by the clear benefits it gives to people who can claim membership in certain classes, so of course they have a clear incentive to endorse and spread its divisive and unproductive rhetoric and methods.

I'm interested to read more about these programs. I confess that superficially they seem ridiculous to me. Is there a link that you are aware of to the research underlying these activities?

Whether it works or not it's a psychological manipulation, and it should be unacceptable to force it on people. Absolutely dystopian.

It's about "identity." For someone like me, the concept consists of bits like favorite ice cream flavor, what kinds of pets does someone like, how they respond to various holidays, how they might feel at a party with unfamiliar people, how they felt the first time they struck an animal while driving, when and what kinds of tips do they leave when nobody is looking ... character is who you are in the dark, and I am interested in the little things that distinguish people from one another.

For others, identity has been deconstructed into a series of theoretically independent (believe it or else) variables where each option is totally okay. Gender, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic background, physical disabilities, mental "challenges," and so on, along the axes of oppression. That's how people divide out for that bunch of folks and apparently, you had better play along. The "I know you don't like to ask questions" bit is bleakly ironic.

addressing your specific point (and note: ignoring the submitted article): I think everyone wants to think of themselves the way you want to define identity. It's a great model and I think of myself that way too.

However not everyone has the opportunity to be thought of that way by others. When you say "axis of oppression" well, that's a loaded term for an odious situation, but that odious situation really exists. Who you may choose to sleep with is none of my business unless 1 - one of us wants to go out with the other or 2 - you are a friend/colleague and get married or have some other life event for which I can be glad for you. That's not how the world actually works, so calligraphies attention to it helps those of us who are not (say) gay appreciate the difficulty others have and try not to make things worse (at least that's the hope).

The existence of oppression doesn't make you some sort of oppressor, but don't you want to have sympathy for your fellow humans? We are all at a disadvantage some of the time.

I"ve literally been on both sides: I was born in a country where I was legally of the wrong hereditary background. When I came to the US I was magically received as "a white guy". That's great: I get to define myself by ice cream preferences etc and I see nothing wrong with that. I notice I get a pass for certain screw ups and am taken more seriously than, say, my far more educated girlfriend. Do I wring my hands over it? Certainly not! But I do recognise that not everyone gets the same chance.

I register on more than one of those axes. You likely did not consider that, or if it did, you didn't factor in.

It isn't about sympathy, it is about looking at a person as more than the just the fill-in-the-blanks set of labels. People aren't just some combination of tick marks in the privileged-or-not checklist. Saying that someone who who chooses to view the world as more than that necessarily lacks sympathy is ... kind of crappy.

And yet here we see people (in the article, which is what we are discussing) reduced to just "homos" or "Brown people." People are more than that.

"However not everyone has the opportunity to be thought of that way by others."

In this day and age, who thinks that "homos" is a good label to use? And this is at Google, holy crap. How does a place that I'd expect to be filled to the brim with forward thinking techies even hire a person who thought this was a good idea?

Also, how would they know who to put in the "homo room?" How were people assigned? Did a senior executive walk up and down the hall, looking in offices, and going "gay, black, gay, gay, asian..." Something has to have been left out of the story, this is way too crazy to ever happen.

I mean, the article author is openly partnered and in a same-sex marriage... I'd assume members of the policy group he leads know he's gay.

That doesn't tell us how he was assigned to that group. It might have been a dice roll. Or maybe he chose to be in that group.

To some extent... it doesn’t matter. I’m gay: and if you randomly assigned me to a group that has to listen to gay stereotypes, it would still be wrong. Even though the method of assignment is technically okay.

Why it’s wrong is debatable. But at least for me it’d be wrong because honestly... that would drag up a lot of psychological trauma for me. Like “I need to take some time off work” bad.

Even if you can predict who that will happen to.. and you try to account for it.. there is no margin of error here that’s acceptable, especially when the material in question could be completed another way.

So yeah. This is a really, really bad look for the Googs here. :(

Yeah, I agree. I think it would disturb a lot of people, including me.

The intent was probably to expose people to prejudices they don't usually experience with their cis/white/male/wealthy selves.

In which case one would have wanted to have those people roleplay as minority identities.

The writeup's phrasing is definitely weird, if accurate. Not sure why people of color would need to be exposed to what it's like to be treated as "brown people"?

Then again... given the logic behind most HR training, I'd be unsurprised if someone misunderstood diversity training guidelines and instead tried to put people in "their groups." facepalm

"People of color" is the modern "black" (African heritage), and excludes dark skin colors from other locales. "Brown people", weird as it sounds as a phrase, is broader and includes dark-skinned groups like Middle-Eastern, but I think arbitrarily excludes Asian.

Really? I'm not sure that narrow of a definition is the commonly used one.

Wikipedia has it as even broader than my use: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color

I've generally heard it as either "non-white", "non-white, with emphasis on 'brown' skin tones", or "non-white and not covered by a more specific group" in common real world use, depending on the context.

My suspicion is that the exercise is to allocate people randomly to these groups. Not based on their actual ethnicity / inclinations.

This article doesn't actually contradict that, since random selection will put some in their "appropriate" category.

So, either that, or the person conducting the exercise totally misunderstood it.

> How does a place that I'd expect to be filled to the brim with forward thinking techies even hire a person who thought this was a good idea?

If you spend 10 seconds on Blind you'll find the most out of touch thought processes with regard to race, religion and sexuality from employees at big Silicon Valley tech companies. Very different from the general population, not forward thinking.

> Very different from the general population, not forward thinking.

IDK about SV tech companies, but I don't think it's accurate to characterize the general population as "forward thinking" on those issues.

My point should have been clear that its less forward thinking than the general population

And you could extrapolate that I’m also referring to the bay area

Ah, that the companies in SV are less forward thinking than the population of, specifically, SV. That could be.

Every unmoderated forum looks roughly like Blind or worse, so you can't draw any conclusions from it except that such people exists in tech as well.

Oh, they're even pushing this on kids now in some education circles: https://ruthking.net/racial-affinity-group-guidelines/

It was quite the scandal: https://nypost.com/2016/07/01/elite-k-8-school-teaches-white...

> this literally sounds like an episode of The Office

It sounds like something out of Kalanick's Uber or Neumann's WeWork.

That's the first thing that popped into my mind too lol ... The one that ends with Steve Carrell and Mindy Kaling!

I worked there and can't really imagine that happening at work, but the article rings pretty true in general so I don't have a reason to doubt it.

This strikes me as standard (maybe poorly executed, possibly exaggerated in order to make a point) anti-stereotyping training. You can find many similar curricula or exercises online.

The fact that the author frames this, without context, the way he did seems dishonest.

https://ubwp.buffalo.edu/ccvillage/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

"The first member of each group should now display the card so that the small group can see the identifying word. During the next three minutes, the remaining group members are to take turns expressing stereotypical remarks about the category of persons named by that sign. The remarks do not necessarily need to be reflective of opinions held by the group members but may reflect things they may have heard or seen growing up in your family, at school, at work, or in the media."

https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

https://www.skillsconverged.com/FreeTrainingMaterials/tabid/...

https://studentlife.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Diversity-ba...

https://www.ouch-video.com/ouch_stereotypes.html

https://officevibe.com/blog/diversity-and-inclusion-activiti...

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/international_proj...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHi1XA2pAZQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePbipufCPYw

You can post as many examples as you want, there's still no way I'd participate in an activity like this.

That might be wise. There seem to be an infinitude of ways this could go off the rails very badly.

What if you were labeled as a bigot for refusing to participate in mandatory diversity training?

You can certainly make that choice for yourself, but the system will not reward your behavior with promotion to a position of power where you get to call the shots on whether trainings like this are held.

> What if you were labeled as a bigot for refusing to participate in mandatory diversity training?

Easy. I'd quit.

Exactly. And the system therefore selects for people who would accept that training, and those people end up deciding what trainings are acceptable.

> and those people end up deciding what trainings are acceptable

In an ideal world companies like these would be arbitraged away, so to speak, as the people who decided to quit when presented with this stupidity are presumably smarter/more intelligent compared to the ones that decided to stay and play the whole charade, so the companies hiring those smarter people would in the long run be more efficient i.e. more profitable compared to the original companies which went down the "stupid diversity training" way.

Again, this is what would happen in an ideal world. The problem with companies like Google is that they're de-facto monopolies so there's no way for the market to arbitrage them away in the foreseeable future.

> What if you were labeled as a bigot for refusing to participate in mandatory diversity training?

"The gay guy who wouldn't go into the room we labelled as 'for homos' is such a bigot for not Going Along"

This diversity exercise was so poorly conceived it was used as a plot for a mainstream sitcom. Evidently, NBC thought that - even for mainstream television - the exercise is enough of a farce that most of their viewers would see it as such, and find humor in it.

If a company is so spineless and devoid of morals as to gate promotions against such a poorly-thought exercise, maybe it's not the most worthwhile promotion to have on a resume to begin with.

This particular training seems like a management aptitude filter for Google.

> The first member of each group should now display the card so that the small group can see the identifying word. During the next three minutes, the remaining group members are to take turns expressing stereotypical remarks about the category of persons named by that sign. The remarks do not necessarily need to be reflective of opinions held by the group members but may reflect things they may have heard or seen growing up in your family, at school, at work, or in the media.

Guess what we used to call this kind of thing:

"...the session is held, ostensibly, to benefit the target, by eliminating all traces of […] reactionary thinking. […]s resisted this at first, because […] conflicted with the […] concept of saving face, but […]s became commonplace at […] meetings during the […]'s due to public popularity"

I'm struggling to see the connection.

It’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

Sorry for my pun. Thanks for the link.

What's wrong with stereotypes if they don't lead to discrimination?

Stereotypes are inherently inaccurate. Believing them inevitably leads to discrimination.

Yes, but they are funny.

What's more interesting is how it got past legal.

That episode is just asking for a huge legal and PR blowup.

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