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Comment by antiverse | Hacker News Reader

>- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.

Not surprised to hear people saying this, but am surprised that nobody brings that up as a plainly racist/sexist thing when it is said. Bystander effect?

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I have observed some people pushing back, but it's rare. I know there is a fear of dissent to the DEI dogma. Particularly if you're a white man. If you're a minority you have more leeway to dissent and it will be fine you'll just be ignored or perhaps have someone read the pro-DEI talking points to you. After Damore firing most people just think it's not worth it I would guess, why risk it? And if you're a founder why risk a campaign against your company when you need to raise funding etc.

The only person who would gain anything by saying that would be a white man, who would just be told that his opinion isn’t important because he’s a white man.

Which is racist.

I sat next to a guy who once complained that our new Pakistani CTO fired our black coworker for no reason (he was a top performer but was called “lazy”) and then proceeded to fire 3 Indians and only bring Pakistani candidates to the final round of interviews. He was called racist for pointing this out by HR (all white women) and he was the next person to be fired and replaced by a Pakistani developer.

Moral of the story being that unless you already have another job lined up you shouldn’t even question things like this publicly as it can cost you your job.

That would be a good lawsuit case.

Difficult to do because when you want to do something like this there are a lot of tools that can be used to cover up for the behavior. There was a paper trail of “evidence” created that would give them a degree of protection. This particular company was also acquired by a very large corporation shortly after & odds of winning a lawsuit against them are basically 0.

This wasn’t the only thing they did either. They had to sell the company on not particularly favorable terms so they also invented a lot of reasons to get rid of people just before their stock options vested. Basically everyone but the 5 people at the top got fucked.

Any time I've pushed back on that racism, the person has redefined racism so that what they are doing isn't racism any more. Typically that involves the phrase "systemic racism" instead, as if the need to qualify the type of racism doesn't invalidate their point.

Unsurprisingly, racists aren't willing to actually discuss racism and instead do whatever they have to in order to justify it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Protip: “race based discrimination” is what the federal government prosecutes for 40 years, and it cuts the knees off of the segregationists that are playing a semantics game with the word “racism”.

So just use race based discrimination, thats the unproductive thing after all, the representatives have been far ahead on this one.

They’ll just say racism and sexism only exist in a context of oppressed and oppressor. It’s all been carefully worked out by certain academic intellectuals, long before it vectored into the mainstream (apparently by way of Tumblr)

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