San Francisco school board halts appointment based on race
abc7news.com
abc7news.com
> Three Latinas
> Three white women
> Two African Americans
> One Asian American
> One Pacific Islander
> All current members of the PAC are women. Brenzel would have been the only man, and he happens to be white.
How do you even parody this?
> About 33% of SFUSD students are Asian, 28% are Latino, 15% are white and 6% are African American. The school board argued that adding a white male would tip the balance in the PAC. Whites would then become the "dominating race."
What if we didn't encourage a world in which people identified with and advocated for their own race? I.e., you have some extra white people (or whatever race) on the board but it's not really a problem because they aren't lobbying for "white interests" (whatever that means). In what world is segregating everyone to their own racial lane going to deliver more equitable outcomes for individuals? Surely this is only going to enforce antiquated, racist ideas that race is a useful predictor for anything at an individual level (i.e., "I know everything I need to know about a person from their race"). Surely this is the very essence of racism? Do these people really not understand that they're being far more racist than their broader society? Or are they aware of their racism but using terms like "anti-racism" and "equity" deceitfully?
EDIT: Looks like TFA was flagged off of the front page, which is really too bad because this seems like a very important topic and very relevant to much of this forum (considering how frequently we deal with racial employment policies in tech or the broader BLM threads over the summer or general SF/SV happenings).
Agreed. How on earth did the "Each race only looks out for their own kind" mentality get labeled as progressive?
Take for example anti-trust, which sought to destroy the power of big trusts in the Teddy Roosevelt era -- and was itself destroyed by the progressive Watergate Democrats in the 70s, about 60 years later. All these anti-trust rules were considered old fashioned, obsolete, and policies of a discredited generation. They were called bigoted and not with the times.
Or the social hygiene movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_hygiene_movement), another great crusading Progressive cause, that sought to make illegal prostitution, alcohol, public nudity, and other attacks on morals. Few remember that the Women's Temperance movement and the Women's Suffrage movement were part of the same movement, and the progressives of those days really wanted to build a virtuous society, in much the same way that the current crop of progressives is obsessed with virtue, or the 60s crop was also inordinately focused on being virtuous, except for them being virtuous required dismantling the laws of the previous virtue movement. All the moral purity laws from the social hygiene movement were dismantled by other progressives in the 60s-70s.
Or the union rights movement which was triumphant during the FDRs period, but was systematically destroyed primarily by Democrats in the 1970s-1990s (Clinton putting the last nail in the coffin). Unions were viewed as bigoted, old fashioned, and not with the times.
Similarly the civil rights movement of the 60s is being systematically dismantled by the culture warriors of the present era, who view color-blind policies as the legacies of a discredited generation, of bigotry, and not being with the times.
The good news is that if our current pro-racism movement triumphs and the nation re-segregates, there is a good chance that grandchildren of the current generation will themselves dismantle that system as being old-fashioned and not-with-the-times.
In either case, Progressivism needs to be viewed as an act of rebellion first, and the policies are whatever they need to be in order to rally the most people to the moral revolution.
This part very interesting:
>The good news is that if our current pro-racism movement triumphs and the nation re-segregates, there is a good chance that grandchildren of the current generation will themselves dismantle that system as being old-fashioned and not-with-the-times.
Combine this with the ongoing "Great Sort" where people are more and more moving into areas that best conform to their value systems, it's possible that the country will break apart into smaller pieces before there's an opportunity for a future generation to reject the current obsession with identity labels. It's interesting to see how quickly a large share of the population has adopted the primacy of label collecting when for most of my life the phrase "I'm a person, not a label" was common, especially in progressive circles.
This used to be a role filled by states, when federal policies were kept limited in scope.
To point out making this claim, while also noting that what people consider 'virtue' changes, is implicitly treating relativist ethics as valid; Leaving this assumption unchallenged is a key part in enabling counter-productive 'inclusion' when it occurs; Similarly, it allows one group to define it's ideology as 'virtue' simply by being 'new' or 'modern' without needing to define 'why' it is virtue...
(to note: This is not at all the same as, and I'm absolutely not saying that 'inclusion' is implictly counter-productive)
> "looking out for your own kind" is not racist
If "your own kind" is based on """race""" [0], it is, no matter who's doing it. Words have meaning, either they apply to everyone or they don't apply at all.
[0] aka ethnicity, skin color, &c. because "races" don't exist anywhere on earth other than in the US
> because "races" don't exist anywhere on earth other than in the US
Race doesn't exist, except when it does for BIPOC or when talking about the concept of Blackness or whiteness. You're probably thinking, those aren't races those are ethnicities! But what does it matter? These are terms used to separate people into groups and even if you switch the words the concept remains.
If you're saying I'm using Race/Ethnicity incorrectly just know that on every form I have ever filled out about demographics race was a choice from "African, Asian, Caucasian, etc." and Ethnicity was only two options, "Hispanic/Latino or Non Hispanic/Latino".
Not even one sentence in and we already in a "left vs right" argument... Newspeak isn't a leftist thing, it's a "people who know the power of words" thing
> Remember when ICE was running "concentration camps"?
It's just as despicable when it's coming from one or the other, and that why you shouldn't side with either
> But on every form I have ever filled out race was a choice from "African, Asian, Caucasian, etc."
And this is exactly why we should reappropriate words and their meaning, and not fall into the trap of complete deconstruction of language(s)
To be honest, this captures my frustration perfectly. I have a concept I am trying to communicate but I'm essentially being told "no, you're not using the right term". If I were to go back and change "people on the left" to "Newspeak users" it wouldn't substantially change what I'm trying to get across. And I feel like all we are doing is bickering about word-choice.
> I no longer subscribe to the "words matter" philosophy,
This is your point
> considering how fast and loose people on the left
this is your argument to support your point
Either keep the political side out or use example of both sides. Otherwise people will think you're trying to charge one side for the issue
I won't comment on what's fair (who am I but a drop?). But I think that's the viewpoint.
My "own kind" includes people of all races, religions, genders, and ethnicities. If you separate people based on their race, don't trust people based on their race, etc, you're a racist.
What you would hear from the KKK is that the school board would be 100% white Christian males, and they don't want anyone who isn't one of them.
There is a difference between wanting representation and wanting to exclude all other representation.
There is a difference between men thinking no women deserve a seat on the board, and women demanding equal seats on the board.
Again - I won't comment on what is fair. But I will draw a line between the difference.
It's the same thing with "white male privileges", when you start fighting literal "white males" in general and not "the system which is biased against females/people of color" you already lost, no matter how much energy you put in the fight. I'd even say the more energy you put in the fight the more you'll lose, both politically and humanly
People at the bottom of the ladder are equally fucked no matter if they're white, black, &c. while the people at the top are thriving like never before and doing everything they can to stay in charge. There is an insane amount of hate in a lot of people these days, hate generated by decades, if not centuries, of abusive systems, it should be redirected toward meaningful goals instead of these meaningless token achievements. Reading and learning about modern progressivism feels like a parody of previous civil right movements.
People have all the reasons to be upset, some people more than other, that being said the fight should be vertical, right now it is mostly horizontal. We have to think in term of classes, not races, otherwise we're heading towards self destruction
It saddens me to see the woke ideology taking hold across the United States. It is indeed fundamentally racist and brings us back to our most tribalistic behaviors. It's the kind of thinking we learned a long time ago to put in the past. But now it's making a resurgence. And it's spreading. But articles like [this](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...) and the most upvoted comments within it give me hope that the west hasn't become entirely mad. It seems the French have observed the discourse of modern American events and see how decisive and destructive the ideology is. I'll quote the top comment within this particular article.
> Yes, importing the American political correctness/woke/cancel culture will destroy France. How do I know this? Because it is already destroying the US. It fuels social division, and it distracts from the real problems, which tend to be economic and environmental. Much of the recent scholarship coming from the US, obsessed about race and gender, is completely useless and extremely ideological. It is no wonder that many of the most important books of global interest from recent years, such as Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century, do not come from the US. US universities are not free environments of vigorous intellectual debate anymore, and the faculty lives under constant fear of uttering the wrong word or phrase, and of being canceled because of their ideas. If a child of mine decided to study social sciences or a humanities field, the US would the last place I would send them to. I'm glad France is standing up against this nonsense. It gives me hope.
I think about this a lot. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the countries lauded for their economic equity or environmental leadership are also largely homogenous societies.
I don't know what the answer is for a fundamentally multicultural country like the US but obsessing about race and "representation" surely isn't it.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately and it reminds me of the "melting pot" metaphors we learned about in middle school. Rather than having a bunch of disparate, competing identities I think America is only going to work well when we form a single united, composite identity. I'm not sure if this is nationalism or not, but if it is, it's an ethnically-inclusive nationalism which seems markedly better than the scary kinds of nationalism from the 20th century and earlier. It probably does imply some assimilation, but it's not necessarily everyone assimilating to some "white identity"; rather, everyone assimilates toward the composite "American" identity (whatever that is). I'm not sure if this is what "multicultural" refers to or if it refers to the more progressive ideal of segregated ethnic lanes competing with one another, but the last 5-10 years makes me feel like the latter is untenable.
The other part, the segregated ethnic lanes is often referred to as "patchwork quilt". The idea is there is no assimilation only people living side by side in harmony, but we're seeing exactly how those borders between identities are creating mayhem, not harmony.
The theory might not be correct
Bulworth: "Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color".
From the movie "Bulworth":
Patriotism is liking your country and wanting other people to become part of it if they want to. After all, if your country and culture is the best then people should be allowed to become part of your culture and thereby become better!
Nationalism is liking your country and wanting other people to be kept separate. After all, if your country and culture is the best then anyone else is inferior and shouldn't be allowed to dilute your perfection!
America had some really high end social technology to address this. Having freedom of religion and people who practiced many religions has, for many other countries, been very divisive, see India/Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and many others.
So the U.S. created a civic religion to ride on top of all of the other religions. The civic religion has the pledge of allegiance instead of a prayer, co-opts mostly Protestant ethics, and instead the Bible, it has the constitution, and a set of semi-mythical stories like George Washington not being able to tell a lie about chopping down the cherry tree, and Honest Abe walking 10 miles to return two cents change.
The trouble with all of this stuff getting cancelled is that it's not being replaced with anything that serves the same functional purpose of putting everyone on the same page and fostering trust among people with different backgrounds.
It's no accident. The easier it is to divide the workers against themselves, the easier it is for capital to come in and rob them all blind.
HN loves criticizing "wokeness" but it's good to understand these divisions and how they have been used against us historically to maintain economic power structures that exist to benefit wealthy property owners.
The issue is that you can't put a bandaid on this and call it a day. You won't solve anything by appointing more minorities. Until people get wise to the real game being played by capital, we'll continue to fight among ourselves for scraps based on cultural identity.
> US universities are not free environments of vigorous intellectual debate anymore
This seems like one of the most pressing dangers we are facing right now. How can this be changed? Where can people go to have honest intellectual debates?
I think you're flipping cause and effect here.
We can see plenty of examples in the history of the US of people, when left otherwise unencumbered, either ignored the needs of others at best or put their own race first at worst. The idea of segregation isn't being introduced here, existing segregation and related behaviors are being responded to. They aren't saying "this man is unable to perform this role due to his race" in a racist-against-this-person way, they're putting additional structural checks in place as a preventative measure.
So here people are trying to make that structurally more difficult. Which is arguably a more realistic and rational choice than simply saying "things will be fine if we get better people."
Can we not agree that categorizing people by their race is going to reinforce their racial identity at the expense of a broader collective human/national identity? And can we not agree that reinforcing racial identities and weakening the collective identity is going to create competition among and animosity between the different racial groups? And can we not agree that it is this racial animosity that births all of the evils of racism? If we can agree here, then surely this does the opposite of making segregation/racism "structurally more difficult"?
> Which is arguably a more realistic and rational choice than simply saying "things will be fine if we get better people."
Desegregation isn't "things will be fine if we get better people"; it's the active dissolving of racial lanes ("dismantling racist structures" might be a good phrase if it weren't coopted to mean the exact opposite). And it has been the only thing that has worked so far, so why should we think that it's a worse choice than segregation?
> They aren't saying "this man is unable to perform this role due to his race" in a racist-against-this-person way, they're putting additional structural checks in place as a preventative measure.
Its not about the intention of the emitter, its about the receiving end of it.
It seems that if we flip this so that the receiving end is part of a minority we would all think this is utterly racist independent of the intention, how is it not?
edit: typo
I don't get how people think stuff like this is some existential threat - when we have much bigger very real problems in this country, like 30% of the population thinks the election was rigged, and armed militias are flexing their muscle taking over statehouses.
It's a very weird form of focusing on the molehill and ignoring the mountain imo. Like walk me through how this kind of nonsense is this ever going to spread to Johnson County, KS - as opposed to being contained in hyper-liberal enclaves. I can walk you through a lot of scenarios as to how the stuff I mentioned above is a real existential threat to our democracy.
I removed my original mention of downvoting. I shouldn't have had that in.
https://www.bwscampus.com/our-community/commitment-to-divers...
We already have: Race-specific clubs on Universities.[1]; Race-specific departments on Universities.[2]; Race-specific video playlists on YouTube. [3]; Race-specific filters for map apps. [4]; Race-specific brands [5]; Race-specific merchandise [6]; Race-specific professional feeds [7]; Race-specific video channels [8.1][8.2]; Race-specific graduations [9];
I could go on endlessly with this list. You see the trend. America is socially segregating itself. So the concern you raise with race-specific water fountains is valid. Though that form of segregation, specifically, may not return, but other forms will.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/company/bbsasfsu/about/ [2] https://equity.sfsu.edu/blackunitycenter [3] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbpi6ZahtOH5pZK-VXFwj... [4] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/blac... [5] https://www.target.com/c/black-owned-or-founded-brands-at-ta... [6] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/01/apple-celebrates-blac... [7] https://www.linkedin.com/news/daily-rundown/special-edition/ [8.1] https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/81299227?so=su [8.2] https://www.hulu.com/black-stories [9] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/more-t...
Because everyone who doesn't like the consequences of their decisions will blame everyone else. They might even be right, but it could/would increase conflict. Boundaries are frequently decided via violence.
Same thing with schools/companies with diversity quotas. If the person is "diverse" you can never really know if he/she is there on merit or if someone had to lower the bar to fill the quota. But if they aren't "diverse" you know they are there on merit.
Am-I the only one?
I would have thought that we would have realized that racist (and any other "group"-ist) selection policies are ridiculous and would have rejected them by now. At least by people who have a basic understanding of how group statistics apply to individuals...
But no. The "woke" madness is doubling down, and dialling the madness up to 11.
What this meant in practice was that White and Asian men were only interviewed of they already had industry experience or went to a top 20 college if they were a new grad, and majored into computer science, EE, math, or something akin to that. For diverse candidates we also interviewed candidates from boot camps, less selective universities, and people who changed interests late in their studies and minored in a tech major. Diverse candidates also got two chances to pass the phone interview. The on-sites were mostly fair, though a handful of hiring managers were known for being particularly lenient towards diverse candidates. I wouldn't say that we ever hired anyone who wasn't capable of doing the job but it was clear that some candidates were more desirable than others.
I don't think it manifested in much in the way of people having their capabilities doubted for their race or gender. At the end of the day people's abilities are demonstrated through their work. When you're trying to fix shit you're not going to stop and wonder whether someone got a second chance at the phone screen. I'm Latin myself and I never felt judged for it (though to be transparent I'm of almost entirely Iberian descent and don't have an accent).
But there was definitely friction with HR. Our head of HR (or people ops) was very against any mentioning of these practices, and repeatedly said that saying our hiring process is favorable to some people is offensive and could fall afoul of our code of conduct. We held a poll on whether or not employees thought our hiring process was unfair to men. 83% of men responded that it was. Curiously she refused to share the results from women (rumor has it it was just as high). And to put the cherry on top, HR had the worst gender diversity of any org in the company, >90% women.
The fact that the same org that was responsible for resolving harassment allegations and other such disputes had goals aimed at increasing the share of women and URM also caused friction. Some suspected that this would lead to impartial investigation.
In the end it wasn't something people spent much time thinking about. I was pretty irked about leadership's dishonesty and hypocrisy. But I, and probably most people, didn't resent diverse coworkers for it. They didn't choose this, and many didn't approve of these practices either. It was mostly HR that was a laughing stock in private throughout much of the company.
Personally, I think it's fine to see more potential in a underprivileged candidate who came from a poor background vs a candidate with better interview performance but great education. But percentage targets aren't the way to go about it.
Wait... they tried to hide their own hiring practices?
I'll say it: If HR is doing technical recruiting and has anything to say regarding who to hire at an engineering company they are doing it wrong.
And yeah it was really awkward seeing HR trying to deny the existence of these practices. You could see publicly accessible Dropbox Paper docs titled "diversity hiring tips" and it'd link to census days on female and URM names, spreadsheets of ethnic fraternities and sororities, and so forth. Recruiter bonus policies, which included a diversity bonus for each diverse hire was also publicly accessible. When we did campus recruiting recruiters told us (the alumni engineers) to mark candidates resumes with a star for women or URM, two stars for women + URM, and "ND" for asian males - "Negative Diversity".
The idea that this was a secret was a joke - and the polls proved it. The reality was probably that for liability reasons HR didn't want us talking about this openly. So this talk about how it was offensive was probably more about instilling a chilling effect.
That was my biggest gripe. They talk about how offensive and hurtful it is to say we offer more or less opportunity based on race and gender. But they have no qualms actually doing those things.
Here in America that's completely illegal.
> The reality was probably that for liability reasons HR didn't want us talking about this openly.
That's a very polite way of saying they knew what they were doing was illegal and they didn't want to get caught.
> Recruiter bonus policies, which included a diversity bonus for each diverse hire was also publicly accessible.
So at the end of the year, there was absolutely no incentive for HR to pressure someone into hiring a lesser but diverse candidate to reach their quotas and cash that bonus. Totally unbiased.
Wow, that just feels kind of offensive, and like a big lawsuit waiting to happen.
It didn't really affect engineering quality because like most workplaces pretty much everyone was nice enough and qualified enough.
The interesting effect the hiring pipeline did have was that it acted like a dragnet catching a broader cross section of the population. The end result that the group of women working there was much more diverse in background the group of men working there and I think there is a lot of merit in that.
I am very much in favor of giving the job to the candidate who has less going for them, all else being equal and creating hiring pipelines to increase the ratio of their resumes that cross hiring managers' desks. But having race, gender or other things people don't get to choose as part of your first pass filter on applicants seems like it's likely to further the problem it's attempting to solve if applied widely enough and on a long enough timeline.
Depending where you are from, those practices are illegal
If you hire based on physical traits it's only logical to assume that a person may have been hired based on criteria other than competence until you get to know the person. It's the unfortunate byproduct of these hiring practices.
Having no males on the committee seems like the biggest issue of them all, especially considering that male performance in education has been suffering for so long. I would argue that having no male voices hurts PoC especially as so many Black and Hispanic men are already being crushed by the system and imprisoned en masse. How does this decision help them and their families?
funny that this the only possible angle we can argue for more male representation. What case do we have for male representation if lack of didn't hurt POC?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
We can start by ending the war on drugs, which has imprisoned millions.
And I like you response - stopping specific instances of discrimination are how I believe we should approach this problem. However, in your other post you pointed to a single statistic that hides an enormous amount of complexity. I assume since you presented that statistic as evidence of a problem, you know what the correct statistic should be. How are you able to tell there's a problem if you don't know what the correct answer is? (this is the part I'm currently struggling with myself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
I can't say incarceration rates are applied unevenly because I don't know what the correct answer is, but I see people saying "x% discrepancy in outcome is evidence of discrimination", but I don't know what the correct %'s are, so I don't know how they arrived at that conclusion. How do you know that US rates are highly inflated compared to other countries? And, what is the correct breakdown of incarceration rates by race?
You can see for yourself both in terms of rate per population and total(!) prison population:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
> And, what is the correct breakdown of incarceration rates by race?
Even, otherwise it suggests something is wrong with society that needs to be fixed.
Right, but the US has many differences that could factor in to those numbers being different. How do you determine the signals from the noise?
> Even, otherwise it suggests something is wrong with society that needs to be fixed.
I agree with the idea that large discrepancies require investigation, but I don't see how you could expect extremely large, different groups (defining those groups being a massive challenge alone) of people to have the exact same outcomes. That seems statistically nearly impossible.
Putting 2M people in prison is not an acceptable outcome to me. Hence my argument to proactively try to support groups that are currently most at risk.
https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Cried-Wolf-Timeless-Fables/dp/098...
Heres another one that teaches a similarly valuable lesson.
https://www.amazon.com/Chicken-Little-Classics-Phidal-Publis...
We're going to reach a point in this society when you call someone a racist (deserved or not) and they just say "pffft... whatever..." and go happily about their business totally unaffected. Social Justice is having its moment now and this is what they're doing with their time in the spotlight. Somehow the same people who put lunatics in charge of their own movement now want to install similar lunatics in every place they can. This will stop someday and it will stop hard.
The times when "you are a godless atheist" was a serious call out threatening your social standing are still within living memory.
Black person: We need more of my kind on the board. <-- woke
Brown person: We need more of my kind on the board. <-- woke
That view is endorsed at the highest levels of corporate America, politics and MSM. And somehow we're supposed to believe that "white supremacists" control the system. The current state of America is quite laughable.
I like the idea of fewer better paid jobs but I have no idea how we transition the current status quo from here to there.
edit: so 20 year old data is being masqueraded as modern civil rights realities. never seen that before in any other topic.
Take a quick browse at the EOCC enforcement actions, or California's DFEH, and other agencies and other court cases.
the laws are not pre-emptive.
And age
There are other laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and those may be applied to tech companies in some situations. That law was recently used to sue Harvard for discriminating against Asians in their admissions process.
Much bigger problem than the other "neo___" that we hear so much about.
exactly. and we can call this different branch of racism "neoracism".
IMO "racist" has been thrown around so much that I think a new term that specifically describes this new woke branch of racism will have more muster.
[edit: Yes, apparently. Nice to see the insanity is at least consistent.]
Somehow proponents of one size fits all centralized public education don’t seem to recognize that they’re no different than the CCP forcing Tibetan children into government schools to get reprogrammed into their ideology and revisionism.
They are looking for people with specific backgrounds as they will represent so that they'll be in those communities and see things from that perspective.
That means they are selecting for factors outside of that individual’s control, which is dystopian but what has happened a different way all along.
Why would anyone think that race is a good proxy for one's background? This seems pretty racist, in the most literal, original sense of the term.
On a long enough timeline it's unfortunately a self fulfilling prophecy. (This goes for whatever demographic groups you use to divide people into, not just race.)
and the politics will be with people in the same community as them, that's the point.
public figures make themselves hard to contact outside of the organic backchannel of just being there when they were growing up. this has benefitted one group while the concerns of other groups are not able to be addressed in this way.
we don't have a system devoid of those things and now it will happen with different people represented by their own neighbor
I'm not advocating anything in this comment
You're not gonna have to wait 20yr to see CA crash and burn from afar. The root cause is going to set up shop and start doing its thing closer to (your) home and it will do so on a much shorter timeline.
I really liked your analogy, too. "Let's screw things up and see what happens. No worries I have unicorn stock and can move to somewhere better and bring my wreck with me."
I read a comment one time that said "Denver used to be the Kansas City of the West, now it's the SF." It saddens me how true that is now.
It is not that different from Covid.
There are extremists, such as the woke-class of progressives, that probably will not change their minds about anything. The same probably goes for the alt-right and QAnon class of Trumpists. The only way for these kinds of people to change their minds is some event or accountability to be had.
The main body of California residents are pretty cool, free loving, hard working, and probably have a lot more in common with you than they'd let on if they knew you were different. If you talk about ideas without using labels (Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative) then their ears and minds are usually open. I observed the same thing with devout conservatives in Texas.
People adapt to the culture that surrounds them and unfortunately the culture in hyper liberal cities has hit rock bottom.
I do not care for your ethnicity, race, gender, or religion. If you are qualified for the job, you get the job.
I just remembered reading on TechCrunch a VC fund which only accepts bids for women only led startups. How the hell is something like that allowed? I was honestly temped to apply just to see what they would say. Sorry you are a man, please go away.
And I know there are going to be people to downvote me for stating this, but just imagine if the opposite happened, if someone made a young male VC fund... Heads would roll...
Also, this stuff comes to Europe. It's already in Germany where some public jobs have to meet certain male/female quotas, but also the universities, which are filled with this PC crap.
Austrian Greens split over wokeness into two parties. German Greens are basically taken over, with a few personal exceptions (Boris Palmer). And given how much climate change interests voters, we may get a hefty dose of racial wokeness as an unexpected side effect.
US had a big cultural impact on the rest of the world.
so many people are willing to deflect to an argument over an academic definition of racism that nobody uses colloquially, except when convenient for some people to levy their own race-based discrimination at others and exempt themselves from criticism
the federal government has prosecuted race-based discrimination for 50 years, thats what their own agency calls it, "race-based discrimination".
we have the anti-troll spray already created by Congress, and it seems like nobody noticed
Occupy wall street was a populist movement. so was the recent gamestop pump.
* Why should one force black kids to learn white people math?
* Why should Latino kids be forced to learn native american history?
And why does it matter that he is gay? What the fuck is happening, have people gone insane?
Should be obvious by now.
I hope in the future, all races will be so intermingled that some generation of kids don't really care about anyones skin, or religion, or culture, just as we did with the hair.
But I'm afraid we are far away from that one.
And leaving that aside, chasing equality of opportunity is fair and just, but chasing equality of outcomes (AKA equity) is unjust and discriminatory. Progressives need to abandon that train of thought because it corrupts institutions in the very manner we are seeing in this story. Unfortunately I am also seeing a trend of big companies, particularly tech companies, adopting "equity" into their language. The move from Diversity programs making work accessible and comfortable for everyone to trying to create equal outcomes based on arbitrary group distinctions is moving them away from meritocracy and towards a victimocracy (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Victimocracy).
As things stand, there are two major dimensions of misrepresentation on the committee: it is completely over-represented by women, and it over-represented (33% of the board vs 15% of the student body, and would be 40% if the candidate was brought on) by white people, and significantly underrepresented by Asian Americans (1 board member vs 33% of the student body).
Unless one makes the ridiculous argument that we "just shouldn't see race" despite it being a highly operative factor in our public lives, there is nothing wrong with the school board considering the problems of racial under-representation. They are seeking a qualified candidate who helps them address many dimensions of their demographic representation issues. There are likely many candidates who would be just as qualified but would better represent the community, like an Asian American man.
In fact, they didn't summarily say no to the candidate, just that they want to see a more diverse slate of candidates, and encouraged the individual in question to reapply. Of course, that part isn't mentioned by people who want to cast this as anti-white discrimination.
I don't think it's ridiculous at all. Why can't we just be fair to everyone regardless of color?
Because our society is structurally and historically configured to not be fair to people based on color, such that even individuals acting in their own non-racist self-interest (i.e. choosing a home in a "good school district") end up amplifying the effects of the racist social and power structures [1].
The only way we can move toward a world in which we are "fair to everyone regardless of color" is to dismantle the endemic systemic racism that currently exists. Denying the existence of structural racism is what is ridiculous.
1. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/A_Shared_Fu...
Yet it is people like you perpetuating this.
> is to dismantle the endemic systemic racism that currently exists.
And how does codifying and encouraging racist behavior help with that?
Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism until...?
Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, “I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.” Hear what I’m saying?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeixtYS-P3s
the failure to heed such wisdom is erasing all of the progress we made toward achieving MLK Jr's dream!
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Structural racism is both real and documented both in laws and policies [1], and its geographic and demographic impacts [2]. No amount of imagining race away is going to change that.
Also, Morgan Freeman is not an authority on how to combat structural racism that is tied into our economic, healthcare, housing and educational systems. He's a damn great actor, though.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimi...
What do you see as the steady state? Are the systems we're building now to be explicitly race-aware, like hiring quotas by race, the steady state we want to shoot for? Or do you see these practices as a stepping stone to some farther goal?
They are absolutely a stepping stone toward a society where opportunity is not heavily skewed against historically underprivileged racial groups - something like Dr. Kings dream.
But it's false to claim that we would be there today if we just pretended to not see race, and to claim that we have addressed either past or current structural racism.
Converting Lowell to open lottery for example will ironically increase the white student population at the expense of Asians. Does this make Asian voters more or less likely to vote for Republicans next time around when they demagogue this?
Even if a lottery system is the right move, the way school board members communicate is toxic.
Do school boards even do anything useful? They seem primarily to be a vehicle for people who want a future in politics, and often involve politics manipulation of schools that don’t necessary benefit students like injecting creationism into textbooks.
Maybe the state legislature should be left to manage school districts state wide instead of allowing these local fiefdoms of tribal warlords.
However, it is important to keep in mind, that in outcomes that matter most to many (incarceration, life exepectancy, home ownership, high-paying jobs), institutional sexism and racism are real and heavily favor white men.
Both these things are true, but there is some attention bias in omitting the second.
It always makes me a little sad when people see something wrong happening and their first concern is not about the issue itself, but rather about how bringing attention to the issue might lend credence to the views of their political opponents.
Perhaps a more constructive way to say this would bave been:
"I worry that this story may lead individuals to conclude there is a broad pattern of reverse discrimination across the country."
My argument is that there is not such discrimination against White males in the population more generally.
Thanks and apologies again.
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
I concede the point about sentencing (but not incarceration rates), I suppose some other examples of the institutional sexism and racism I was thinking of would be things like:
- There is a broad gender pay gap (14 to 24%) across the US workforce, even when controlling for variables such as part-time work and parenthood[2] - Fortunte 500 CEOs are 70% white male, whereas the US population is about ~36% male, (based 73% white total). [3] - Government over-represents white males, e.g. about 78% of the House/Senate combined are White and and 24% women [4,5], although this is getting better
My worry is that (political party notwithstanding) some people will interpret single incidents like this as evidence of broad "reverse discrimination." While that is true in this single incident, it does not seem to be true in society considered more holistically.
Thanks again for pointing this out.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/818001/rate-of-imprisonm... [2]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-019-00743-8 [3] https://thesocietypages.org/specials/fortune-500-ceos-2000-2... [4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/08/for-the-fif... [5] https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/slideshows/116th-congre...
That study doesn’t even take into account years of experience but instead estimates it based off of a model that doesn’t take into gender itself.
So it’s pretty fatally flawed in the assumption that a woman 45 years old with a child has the same expected experience as a 45 year old man with a child. The heavy expectations on women to child-rear in the US mean that expected experience between men and women of the same age is going to be significantly different. Their failure to take this into account could explain a significant portion of the divergence in the pay gap as ages increase (the gap is small at young ages).
If everybody just totally ignored color of the skin in any way, like totally, rasism would be non existent. Is that so hard?
Bless your heart.
I fear that if we don't find a way to put a stop to this, anti-white and anti-male discrimination will be fully accepted in the near future, which would be absolutely terrible for our society.
[1] https://thepostmillennial.com/french-leaders-concerned-ameri...
I'm concerned that framing it as "anti-white, anti-male" is understating the problem. We're educating a generation of people to identify strongly with their own race and that society should be racially organized. I don't see how you can do this without getting almost everyone to lobby (socially and politically) on behalf of their own race. Sure, you'll have a few woke white people who are anti-white, but you'll end up creating many more "white identitarians" (for lack of a better term)--which is basically what we're already seeing with the uptick of far right groups. Obviously this is bad for white people and bad for people of color; racism is one of those rare lose-lose scenarios and yet we have a powerful contingent advocating for it (albeit in the guise of equality and justice).
The only way how to square this growing complexity of ethnic mixtures with a rigid racial system is something like "one drop rule" akin to the old South.
Because most people don't give a crap about race. There's a loud vocal minority that shapes the policy nobody cares about.
The loud vocal minority is perfectly capable of building a dystopia if no one has the stones or stomach to oppose them.
Not really. Even White racists had better solutions to that problem better tuned to dealing a complex system of admixture of multiple races (cf, apartheid South África); the “one drop rule” was White racists solution for the narrow circumstance of dividing the world into two categories, White and Nigger, and maximizing the latter in order to maximize the exploitation possible by those who were in the former category. Even strictly hereditary systems by White racists were often more complex and not much like the one-drop rule except that they involved some rule.
I mean, lots of other possibilities open up once you realize that the “races” are effectively ethnic (shared cultural experience) groups shaped by historical categorization based on assumptions of heredity, rather than biological facts with a necessary connection to heredity that can only be defined in strictly hereditary terms. Especially if you get beyond systems created explictly by and for White racial oppression, but, again, even the categorizationn system in apartheid, for all the ill use the categories it produced were put to, reflected that understanding to a much greater degree than the one-drop rule, which also made categorization, while largely rigid, potentially, though rarely, fluid.)
Let's hope we never have to dig this up
There seems to be a parallel thought process and definition of words that the "woke" operate by that are completely different than what is commonly accepted as the definition of a word.
Words like "racist" mean something completely different. Things like "it's impossible to be racist if you are black" and making people feel ashamed of themselves for the skin color they were born with (if they are white).
In the original story, seems like their decision is clearly racist and also sexist but it seems like these definitions are only selectively applied. It seems like "diversity" to them means no white people not having an equal distribution of races. They are doing the very things the are arguing against but it doesn't seem to register. How is this possible?
No, they are not 'selectively applied' - in their view.
In 'their version' of 'racist' - they cannot be racist - only White People can, because it's a matter of power. Even if you're only 15%. Get it?
This is one of the 'root causes' - the rhetorical position that The Woke have taken is highlighted in 'White Fragility': White people are all White Supremcists by definition, they are all walking, talking 'root causes' of the problem, and therefore cannot even have any real knowledge of the problem. All they can do is shut-up and try to empathize.
So this is not 'racism is judgment based on race' it's 'racism as White people have power and others don't ergo, they are racist'.
It's a masterful rhetorical technique: your opponents are by definition wrong.
Scientologists do this. They are taught that they are 'clean and clear, essentially above human' and that regular people are 'broken people, like animals' and there's no point in arguing with a dog. Some of their rhetorical techniques are shocking.
That's a great world to live in, right?
It speaks to our worst prejudices. Every day on TikTok I see racist and misandrist content, mostly by White Women and it's not only 'ok' it's pass off as 'enlightened'.
It's a very powerful thing to be able to take ostensibly a moral position, but then to also bigoted at the same time - I feel it's the intellectual parallel to the power that police feel when holding a gun against someone who is 'bad'.
One group can run around wielding their arbitrary moral policing, the other can't speak on the issue and so you have bad public dynamics.
I don't know the answer but Phase 1 I think should be to recognize that irrespective of power, that bigotry is bigotry and actions, headlines, policies etc. that are race based have to be treated with caution, very conservatively (small-c), with deliberation.
We simply don't live in the same world and same society. American people struggles are very different from European people struggles, and even inside Europe each country's population have their own personalities, quirks, vastly different history, culture, morale code.
Just look at how the "woke" US medias spinned the anti islamism (pro tip: islam != islamism) laws that were being discussed in France recently. It's almost as if ISIS struggle was compared to African Americans struggle. Some (most?) cultures are just not equipped to deal with other cultures' issues
And even in the same countries, or cities, thanks to social medias and totally biased paper/tv medias it's extremely easy to get sucked in a bubble.
I have to disagree with that. My personal impression is that Americans are the most accepting of other people's fortune, so much so they need an excuse before they can attack the rich and powerful, something on the moral plane because riches themselves are not considered a sin.
In Canada, they would lose their jobs immediately.
I'm not sure who is right in all of this, but I do think that rational discussion ought to be had among the plebes and bureaucracy, and the problem with the more authoritarian woke is that they will destroy anyone who does not agree.
I think one simple, ugly, but useful tactic is to refer to these policies as racist - because in a way they are.
'Racism' is the weaponized term that the crowd will use to try to destroy everything they don't like.
But since their acts are almost entirely racially based, the argument is easily made the term 'racist' applies. Even though they generally would not agree.
Because the shoe fits: making boards or any group hyper-representative based on race is basically racist, so use the word.
The hypocrisy on that one is spectacular.
Basically any other politician in North America would be completely destroyed and cancelled forever.
Ironically, I think public reaction was appropriate - he obviously was not intending malice, it was just a bit inappropriate.
But make no mistake, if that were to have happened to anyone else they would have been destroyed.
I think that public opinion is basically irrelevant, as most people are not really offended by all of this stuff.
But special interest groups, individuals with power, and institutions acting out of caution, and occasionally opportunity (i.e. how can we make money or leverage this scandal?) would be sup-groups to identify and characterize.
He's been caught several times in Blackface and when asked directly about other possible incidents he would not reply. Does that seem transparent and heartfelt?
Everyone who gets caught in Blackface apologizes, and they are usually heartfelt, in the sense that in most cases, there was no malice intended.
He was treated differently because he's the champion of 'one side of a narrative' - and without his figurehead, the movement would be lost as none of the political movements in Canada have any truly popular figures among them.
Given that Trudeau is a champion of progressive causes, and the he, alone among politicians of all stripes was caught doing the most 'visibly offensive thing' (just Google 'Trudeau Blackface' and see the photos) - it really does exemplify the height of hypocrisy.
Hypocrites. Look at how Asians are targeted in hate crime in France, by both whites and non whites. Covid being called the "China virus" threw oil on this fire.
Here, the issue the school board is that it has only 1 Asian America (10%) for a 33% SFUSD student body.
The way I see it, Asians always get the short end of the stick, for some reason unknown.
In the US, there are anti Asian admission policies in most universities, and somehow we can't make that stop.
Maybe because they are called "equal opportunity" and made to favor other races who can use it to get admitted with a fraction of the SAT (and predictably fail, while other races with higher scores are not even given the chance to compete).
Now we hear France hypocrisy and think it will make this right. People, look at what happens there and tell me to my face you think they got it right and we should emulate them:
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3043079/racis...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37720780
I say no. French thinkers would be best to focus on their own problems, and leave us alone.
We have a problem with Asian representation, but so far I have not seen anything I can support.
In this case, the NYT article cited by the PostMillenial article was much more well-balanced with opinions included of multiple French political parties, and if someone wants to read more on this, they should read that article.
They should not read the PostMillenial article, which only mentioned what the French far-right (Le Front National) party & similar political leanings mentioned and they neglected to mention they were only including those points of view.
For an even more concrete example:
From the PM:
> Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist told The Times, "It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture," said.
From the NYT:
> “I was pleasantly astonished,’’ said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics.’’ Made up of established figures, many retired, the group has issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro.
> For Ms. Heinich, last year’s developments came on top of activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the staging of a play by Aeschylus to protest the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors; elsewhere, some well-known speakers were disinvited following student pressure.
> “It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture,’’ Ms. Heinich said.
Do you see what I mean?
I wonder if it reflects current brain flow (are American students coming to French university in greater numbers than French students going to the US?).
Maybe the solution is to build an ecosystem where the culture and practices is exported instead of imported.
I never thought of it that way. That being said after 50+ years of Americanisation of Western culture (through movies, music, &c.) it's not really surprising that it flows that way. I think a lot of the American "woke" culture also emerges from things that are very easy to empathise for and trigger an outrage response. For example the George Floyd case which somehow triggered dozens of protests in Europe: no one with a fully formed brain can watch the video and not be outraged.
I also feel like a lot of the American ideas about progressivism are fairly "feel good" measures that are very easily adopted (everyone wants to be upset about something, everyone wants to be themselves/special, &c.) and are all somewhat based on "identity", it feeds the "us vs them" part of the brain very nicely.
Two semi-serious responses come to mind:
"Wait, which one?" or "Haiti paid huge reparations to France, isn't that good enough?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uphold_Democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Haitian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
"CARICOM, an organization of Caribbean countries that included Haiti, called for a United Nations investigation into Aristide's removal, but were reportedly pressured by the U.S. and France to drop their request"