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Comment by taveras | Hacker News Reader

It seems that you consider employers keeping track of employee race, ethnicity, and gender data discriminatory.

Employers are required to provide this data to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: the federal agency charged with enforcing federal law which makes workspace discrimination illegal.

This agency came to exist through the legendary Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was supported by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, along with Presidents JFK and LBJ.

You'd be forgiven for not understanding American politics.

But any American would be foolish to consider that race and ethnicity do not play a role in how our society is structured after over 200 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow.

Racism has been a poison built into the structure of our country's institutions, and being race conscious is a part of the cure.

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> It seems that you consider employers keeping track of employee race, ethnicity, and gender data discriminatory.

That's not what I understood from their comment.

I think a lot of controversy on the topic stems from people defining racism differently. From how I remember - racism was initially about categorically treating people differently depending on their race. That still exists in some areas/workplaces etc but has been mostly solved from a societal viewpoint.

What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.

Fwiw, I agree with the initial statement by them: statistics around race are always inherently racism and don't really show issues unless you drill down into the localities (checking racial representation in localities, as there is where the initial racism continues to exist).

The other issues have to be solved differently, as they're not about race and more about how that person got into that position (which might be caused from the initial racism, but that's unlikely to be the reason limiting them today)

> I think a lot of controversy on the topic stems from people defining racism differently. From how I remember - racism was initially about categorically treating people differently depending on their race. That still exists in some areas/workplaces etc but has been mostly solved from a societal viewpoint.

This is the John Roberts "our country has changed" perspective. There is definitely not consensus across US society for it. It is a view strongly held by some and strongly rejected by others, correlating largely with political affiliation.

There's not even consensus that discrimination is bad. About all you can say is that spouting explicitly racist views is no longer accepted in polite society.

> What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.

The struggle today is the same struggle it's always been. The same factions who opposed having laws punishing discrimination passed decades ago are arguing for the dismantlement of those laws today. Those factions didn't accept that the discrimination those laws outlawed was problematic before, and they still don't today.

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