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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

What is Black+ and Latinx+?

This is the first time I'm hearing this term and can't find anything about it in the report or online.

Maybe the reason for the attrition.

I'm a white dude but work in a foreign country (also predominantly white). For the most part I'm just "one of the guys". I only really feel like an outsider when corporate policy dictates we have to talk about cultural sensitivity towards foreigners and I happen to be the only foreigner in the room.

For people of different races, I assume this feeling is switched on practically all the time because now the differences aren't only felt during HR mandated meetings. And moreover, they're not differences that have any bearing on the person's contribution to the company (any more than my status as a foreigner does).

I don't understand it. I've never been in the minority where I live but this is how I imagine it feels being in a group that is being singled out for some reason or another. Every person is a completely unique individual and focusing on things like skin color just seem insane to me. Why not focus on the fact that we are 99.9% the same but have different experiences which make us valuable and interesting.

Old tactic: divide and conquer. If people stopped bickering about race, they’d quickly realize their economic class similarities, leading to things like unionization. BigCo can’t allow this, for obvious reasons.

It worries me that more of HN doesn't understand this.

It’s kind of a case of the more you talk about how different something or someone is the more you kind of focus on the difference. At least seems that way.

I work in a US company that has an African American VP of diversity and they regularly post in a diversity focused slack channel. The responses are 95% white people posting platitudes and saying how great the VP is. They do however force people being interviewed to answer on the spot diversity / anti racism questions that really almost no one is prepared for, forcing people to just make up answers to check a box. Seems forced.

You don't solve problems (or racism) by ignoring them, and your experience as a white person in another majority white country is not particularly informative on the experience of a black person in a country with the history of systematic enslavement of, disenfranchisement of, and discrimination against black people. A head in the sand approach isn't workable. It was the black employees themselves who were most vocal in arguing that the company should address race issues head-on, e.g. during the George Floyd protests last summer.

Interesting. Can you name a country that does not have a history of systematic enslavement? Perhaps the commenter is living in a Slavic country where whites were enslaved?

Slavery is just one aspect. Almost no one in Slavic countries (afaik) complains about slavery affecting them to this day because - in all likelihood - probably somewhat difficult to tell who is descendant of slaves and who isn’t. Isn’t as difficult to tell in the US. And the policy that followed after the end of slavery wasn’t done to help those who had been slaves or were descendants of slaves… the policy tried to make them second or third rate citizens. So, the consequences of those things are still felt to this day and are very real. It’s why so many cities in the US are heavily segregated to this day. (Look at a racial dot map of Chicago)

We are almost all descendants of slaves. The issue is not if … it’s when Your descendants were slaves.

Not sure anyone can speak for all Slavic people. However, just because someone complains about something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to others.

Can you name a city in the world that doesn’t have some sort of racial, religious, economic or other form of segregation?

"The data in this section allows people of two or more races to more accurately state their racial background. For example, Black+ includes all Googlers who identify as Black, plus those who identify as Black and any other race."

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/...

This is almost as thoughtful as Slack enumerating all user skin tones via 5 integer values.

I thought making everyone cartoon yellow was more empowering.

Especially on the Internet, with pseudonymity, we're all nothing more than the ideas we present.

An egalitarian dream was twisted into a woke nightmare for bad actors to earn free PR by pitting people against each other.

My theory is that we're all red. Peel back the skin layer of any living human being, and red is what you'll see.

If you say that to a person who insists on taking offense, he would tell you that a white person using red icons might be offensive to Native Americans or people with albinism.

I don't mean "red" as in Native American, and I wouldn't use Native American icons. I mean, when you peel back the skin, we all bleed the same color. Even albinos do.

The point is, once you move past the skin, all our blood looks alike. We all share that.

(I agree, though, that some are likely to insist on taking offense. Also, I note that albinos might have a case to complain about non-albinos who are called "white"...)

"... if you prick us do we not bleed ..."

And, do we not bleed the same blood?

Ha, I set my emojis to the precise colour of my skin, someone (I know IRL) complained that it wasn't my race ... like, that was, at the time, my actual skin colour.

Why is yellow the “neutral” color? Why not black, or red, or white?

Letting people pick whatever color seems more empowering to me.

Because no one is bright yellow irl unless they're a few days from dying of cirrhosis.

Yellow is obviously much closer to lighter skin color than darker skin colors.

I always thought it was because of The Simpsons, but going as far back as the Tracy Ullman show, so that could have been an influence as far back as 1987.

How is it empowering? How long do you think a white employee could post with black colored emojis before someone said something?

empowering for what exactly?

Thanks. Is there a hierarchy? Like if I identify as both Black and White, am I counted in Black+ or White+ or is it double counted? Does the employee provide a ranking?

It's not a hierarchy, and they don't add up to 100%, so there is double-counting. I just did the math on one of the rows from the report using the + labels and that row added up to 104.6%, so we can deduce that 4.6% of people fit into two categories (or maybe slightly less than that including people that fit into 3 or more categories).

My interpretation is that you'd be in both "Black+" and "White+"

The only other group as obsessed with racial hierarchies as the modern woke left was Nazi Germany. Their published classification would seem to fit just fine at Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Classifications...

Doesn't seem like you have any idea what "hierarchy" means.

In the anglosphere (and especially in the US), the ethnic background of a person is given much attention. They have very odd labels with the intent to be more inclusive towards the "corner cases". The 'x' probably stands as a placeholder for 'o' and 'a' to capture both the male and female version.

This seems to be a oddity of the english-speaking cultures and not very relevant to other parts of the world.

"Latinx" is especially great because it sends such a clear message: "We wish to use this ethnic group to make us look like we're concerned about the problems social justice, but we don't actually respect that 97% of the people we're describing don't use that term or want that term."

Americans fixed the word. They also fix their dogs.

I guess neutering jokes aren't funny to a community that really likes Unix.

Invented terms. Latinx is extremely unpopular among Hispanics according to Pew Research, with just 3% using it. [1] A significant majority of Hispanics say it should never be used to describe them in any circumstance.

It's forced cultural desecration, and it's totally unwanted by the targets of the term.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

I think it's for being Black + Gay or whatever other minority.

Latino is for males, Latina is for females so Latinx is for both and other genders and I guess the + indicates belonging to another minority group.

As a non-American this all seems silly but I see the point of it.

I see the point as well, but it seems like a lot of theatrics at this point.

For example: the rainbow flag has always been for the LGBTQIA+ community. Now the flag has the added triangles with white, brown, aqua, and magenta for... black and trans folks? If that visibility makes folks feel included then by all means, but the rainbow colors on that flag weren't meant to specifically represent each aspect of that community to begin with. Maybe I've missed issues of representation in that community but I also don't think of LGBTQIA+ as an organization, just a sort of flag to represent non-cis folks.

And then there's Latinx, which is interesting because >98% of folks actually from Latino countries loathe that and don't recognize it. It's purely an American appropriation of another culture's terminology by the same folks who generally raise issues of appropriation.

I'm trying my best to be an ally but I have trouble keeping up with a lot of these things, even those which are a bit paradoxical. The best course of action I've found is to just treat everyone with kindness, respect, empathy, and an open mind.

Google doesn't track sexual orientation. Black+ means black or black plus some other ethnic minority (Native American, Latino, etc.).

Google does track orientation of employees. They have a breakdown of intersectional hiring in their 2019 report. It may be voluntarily reported.

But the + doesn't stand for orientation. I don't see how being gay makes you any more or less of a racial identity

https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/93d9a4094693cb78...

According to this[0] people can self-identify as "Black+" so if it's purely racial how could people self-identify as that?

0.https://developers.google.com/learn/certificates

> so if it's purely racial how could people self-identify as that?

Mixed race people. My kids would be Asian+ and White+ for example.

You either let somebody tell you their race, or you assign them one. Which one would you be more comfortable doing?

Can you be punished for picking one that isn't assigned to you?

I dont suppose the term was coined by Google so.. Following the same logic, LGBTQ+ doesn't refer to sexual orientation?

What is White+? Maybe Google’s editors add pluses to all ethnic categories?

I want to know also.

My guess is Black or Latino of every gender/sexuality.

I don't think so because in their 2019 diversity report they have breakdowns of Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, Native American+ and White+ in an "Intersectional workforce" chart. I think that has to do with gender and sexuality, so those shouldn't be +

Their hires and workforce representation are ~40% Asian+ but I don't think that qualifies as diversity.

https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/93d9a4094693cb78...

It also has the effect of pushing as many people into the +buckets as possible, making it so all marginal cases are included.

This could be a modern incarnation of the 'one drop' rule, thinking that if you're part minority, that is still the most important part of your makeup. Or, more likely, it's to inflate numbers as much as possible for PR.

If I had to guess, I would say Black+ means anyone who has Black heritage, even if mixed. But it could be a sexual orientation thing too.

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