Isn't that horribly patronizing?
I'd feel offended if someone treated me with kid gloves based on my skin color.
I'd feel offended if someone treated me with kid gloves based on my skin color.
I don't want to work with white colleagues who are biased against non-white people. I have been in this situation at a very small startup. I wasn't the only person to notice or complain about it, so I know it wasn't "in my head". So I left.
But I also don't want to work someplace where white colleagues are overcorrecting for deep-seated cultural biases. Ideally they don't have to correct at all. I've been in that situation as well, at a large company with a extremely woke / "D&I" culture. So I left.
Exit isn't a systemic solution — only an individual one, and only for market participants with options.
It's also not cheap, but the psychological and emotional cost of being judged by group membership -- for me, at least, is greater.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that the kind of pan-social "affirmative action" advocated by diversity consultants is a double-edged sword, and not without its own risks and costs. At best it's a stopgap measure of sorts. (The diversity consultant operates under perverse incentives, and doesn't have anything like a Hippocratic Oath constraining his/her advocacy.)
I've been lucky and have found a few places where that pervasive sense of cultural bias wasn't present. It would be easier to find such places if startups, and engineering teams in particular, would try to hew to traditional standards of professionalism on the job.
I don't want to work with people who are biased against white people. I support equality and I genuinely want to see people treated fairly but I can't help but take offense to the notion that because I'm white I am less or should feel guilty.
Raising others up doesn't require pushing anyone down. Well, anyone that isn't in a white hood, anyway.
Sure, in theory. In practice, bias against whites exists, some of it catalyzed by woke ideology. (By woke logic) White-presenting people are really the only ones with standing to speak to such bias in their own lives.
> Well, anyone that isn't in a white hood, anyway.
Ah yes, the IRL downvote: call someone a racist / Nazi / fascist / Klansman.
> bias against whites exists
Not in any meaningful way, especially when compared to the experience of POC in America.
> some of it catalyzed by woke ideology.
Sometimes racists lose their jobs. That's not racism against white people.
> White-presenting people are really the only ones with standing to speak to such bias in their own lives.
I'm white. We don't experience meaningful bias. Trying to claim so is just attempting to appropriate victimhood from actual victims, and detracts from anti-racist movements.
Another paragraph before someone angrily hits reply and says "BUT WHITE PEOPLE IN TRAILER PARKS! BUT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION!" I said meaningful bias. I've experienced racial discomfort. Doesn't change the fact that no matter what angle you take, my life would've been harder if I'd been born black.
But it does need to be called out when it happens. Otherwise we allow it to continue. Protecting the status quo is not neutral or unbiased when the status quo is marginalising certain groups. And no, white people are really not remotely marginalised in any meaningful way in western countries.
Couldn’t find the whole thing, but I agree it seems constantly talking about race leads to more racism and not less. Seems so opposed to the civil right movement stance against segregation.
Racism is real and POC Americans (to scope the discussion) are experiencing it. Maybe Morgan Freeman has the perspective that pretending it's not real will make it go away, but that doesn't change the fact that black programmers are underrepresented, or that police forces are staffed with avowed racists, or that... Etc.
Obviously, if it is coming across as patronizing, then you are doing it wrong. The point is to try to get to a happy medium. Like shooting for the stars in hopes of getting to the moon.
I'm not suggesting anyone be patronizing. I'm simply saying you should be aware of the fact a co-worker might be feeling a certain way, and then notice & speak up if you see, for example, their idea(s) being misattributed to others.
The idea that being an ally would be patronizing is comparable to people responding to "black lives matter" with "all lives matter". Yes, all lives should matter, but all lives don't matter until black lives matter. If you work somewhere where white people are being systemically held back, you should speak up there as well, but I doubt that is the case.
Not a racist but am torn between ignoring race - wr’re all people stance - and the behaviour described as patronizing. My conclusion is that nobody has a clue how to deal with this mess. We need to have some sort of clear guidelines on what is best tto do in these cases without offending nor patronizing. Im an Eastern European immigrant to the US and in my US education it has been drilled into me that there is no such thing as race, we’re all related and so on while emphasizing on different cultures. I took African American studies and did learn a great deal of injustice at the expense of blacks in America. But it seems I didn’t learn how to behave properly. What am I doing wrong? Should we set clear guidelines or leave them ambiguous?
Once representation is more equal, I think the "ignore colour" option becomes more feasible. But we're not there yet.
Another user mentioned that it feels like kneeling on the ground and using "baby talk." That's not what's being said here. It's simply taking a moment to observe yourself and other colleagues potentially engaging in unconscious (or even conscious - you may have an avowed racist hiding it very well on the team!) bias.
This is being an ally. It's not patronizing. The reality is that systemic racism against POC in America is real. Ignoring that only aids the status quo.
It’s not like “white” people aren’t colored
You taking the anthropologic perspective isn't scientifically incorrect - race doesn't actually exist, after all, in any meaningful way. However it is sociologically incorrect to call white people "colored."
To me these ungrounded imaginations are clearly stemming from the idea that some people are objectively not colored and others are colored. I’ve never come across this “POC” term but if it’s not racist I don’t know what racism means by dictionary.
Deny that black Americans are terrorized by cops. Pretend that people of color is a non concept all you want. It won't change reality.
You are aiding a racist status quo when you fight against ally causes like BLM.
of course one might work to end qualified immunity for example or to equalize the education and economic gaps without being a Marxist.
let's not confuse ends and means.
Acknowledging the personhood of people of color is not synonymous with supporting BLM. One might broadly support the ends of BLM while being uncomfortable with the means.
I sense a conflation of the statement "Black Lives Matter" with the movement "Black Lives Matter" with a third, completely unrelated concept, that being lootings and property destruction. Are you insinuating that the people who want the world to know that black lives matter are the same that are looting target? Despite extensive arrests showing these people to be agent provocateurs and white supremacists?
Furthermore, it's not really accurate to even say "the Black Lives Matters," as if it's an organization. If anything, it's unfortunately extremely disorganized, with extremely disparate groups and goals (i.e. defund vs abolish vs reform police arguments), almost complete lack of a central, trustworthy 501(c) to donate to, and lack of leadership. The politics of the movement are also extremely disparate - communists, anarchists, libertarians, pro-gun anti-gun, Muslim, Christian, non-religious. It's all over the place.
The only unifying thing behind people who say "Black Lives Matter" is the belief that Black Lives Matter. That's why to say "uncomfortable with the means" doesn't mean you're uncomfortable with, say, someone burning down a police station, it's more precarious, or you end up like the White Moderate that MLK warned against as the greatest threat to civil rights.
Okay, I'll stipulate for sake of argument.
As the apostle famously said, faith without works is dead. If one believes that black lives matter, then one works to that end. Yet what should one do? Is there (to abuse the analogy) a set of ten commandments to follow? If there is no organization, then isn't one free to pursue justice for people of color as she sees fit?
It is easily seen that two people may assert "Black Lives Matter" and work towards conflicting ends.
One might, for example, work to prohibit abortion, seeing it as means by which the state sanctions genocide by murdering people of color (who have higher per-capita abortion rates than whites).
Someone else could advocate for unrestricted free-as-in-beer abortion, believing that economic inequality among women of color is driven in no small part by the disproportionate burdens placed on them by childbearing and the destruction of the nuclear family, to say nothing of reproductive rights of women.
I suppose having no organization allows for a big tent--a sort of catholicity, if you will--to unite such disparate groups of people, but it seems ineffective to me. After all, a house divided against itself cannot stand, as someone else famously said.
One way to help solve that problem is to have clearly stated policy goals (e.g., end qualified immunity) with targets to meet (e.g., here is a political contest we have a chance of swaying to get another vote against qualified immunity). A suitable organization can put people in touch (e.g. lawyers, grassroots campaigners, et c.) to get things moving. Maybe it's already been done, but in general this seems to be missing from blacklivesmatter.com.
Liberals eating eachother alive and liberal movements being terribly disorganized is certainly an issue, but what I'm arguing against on here is people denying that BLM has ground to stand on. blacklivesmatter.com not having been updated in like, 3 years, is separate from that issue.
Of course, "POC" was first used in a Western cultural context, and it may not translate in a straightforward way to an Asian context. I am sure racism also exists in Asia--xenophobia is a universal human weakness--but it may require different language to accurately conceptualize and the dynamics might be very different. It also might not be nearly as pressing of an issue as it is in the US. I don't know.
But if you've never heard the term "POC" before, you're clearly not familiar with the racial dynamics in the US. I would encourage you to learn more before dismissing a term as racist or judging the BLM movement in the US. I can't speak to the activists in Asia you mention, but I assure you BLM is a very much needed movement in the US.
Self-identified race maps to distinct genetic clusters with >99.8% accuracy [2].
If all of western world would cut the BS and use something like “white asian non-christian” which is what “yellow” stands for in actuality, I can tolerate those racial elitism a bit better.
One might be tempted to say it’s not about skin tones, but people taught in white/black/yellow system tries to fit surface albedo of actual human beings to those visual wavelength responses out of cognitive dissonance, through pigmenting, cinematographic techniques or other technological means, or by verbally abusing creators, artists, races, cultures so I strongly believe accurate visual representations in the context of pure racism matters if it’s not going to completely entirely permanently disappear by tomorrow morning.
You guys hate it when we don’t look #FFFF00, like for real. That happens and that’s insulting.
Side point: I’m not American, and what you wrote reads like “you guys” means “white Americans” (I’m not sure which political block, if any, is implied); this impression is in part because in my experience only Americans say “in actuality”.
> East Asians were almost always called white, particularly during the period of first modern contact in the 16th century. And on a number of occasions, even more revealingly, the people were termed “as white as we are”.
(...)
> But by the 17th century, the Chinese and Japanese were “darkening” in published texts, gradually losing their erstwhile whiteness when it became clear they would remain unwilling to participate in European systems of trade, religion, and international relations.
> Calling them white, in other words, was not based on simple perception either and had less to do with pigmentation than their presumed levels of civilisation, culture, literacy, and obedience (particularly if they should become Christianised).
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2184754/chine...
Your conversations are the opposite of the ones I've had.
Isn't there some way to act as an ally to a minority population that doesn't involve patronizing?