Head of Design at Dropbox descriminates in her hiring based on skin color

My friend group is approximately 50/50 white non white. I didn't do that on purpose. I fell in love with an Asian woman and married her. The friends I picked up just happened to be a spread of ethnicities.

One thing that I've learned is that it's much easier to get along with people from different cultures when you treat them as an individual and their ethnicity as just one of the parts that make them who they are. It's silly to treat that as the defining feature of a person.

I think people conflate things worth observing and fixing at the population level and things the shape your interpersonal interactions. Yes it's good to work on equal outcomes for people of all races but of that becomes a dominant driver in behavior things get weird.

I have met more than a few people who unironically think saying things like "White people are so stupid" or "I hate white people" is fine, but saying something like "Black people like fried chicken" is a harmful and racist stereotype which is unacceptable. Their reasoning is that it is impossible to be racist to the majority. That doesn't even make sense, but I've found it is impossible to convince this kind of person otherwise. Instead, I tell them their comments are personally offensive to me and they are hurting my feelings. I've yet to hear a single one apologize.

So I've made it a personal goal to purge these racists from my social circles, and to steer clear of people with this attitude.

In case people don’t use/hate the twitter client.

I'm not sure I get the implication of this tweet. Are white men not supposed to be able to get jobs, or be in a position to hire people?

I think that Dropbox is right to do so, as soon as it identifies that a given ethnicity is overrepresented and does not reflect its target audience.

'divide et impera'

The moment a universal idea is replaced by particularism, she is dead.

In-group/out-group

It's just a question of who gets the roles of ruler, ruled and scapegoat.

> Therefore, I choose to prioritize folks in our BIPOC and URM communities.

Americans have an obsession with race (more broadly, identity) that I think borders on unhealthy. As far as I can understand, at the most general level, the reason for the obsession is to address historical or current hardship due to factors outside one's control. This obsession is everywhere: in school admissions (high school and college especially), in social conversations, in framing unjust law enforcement practices, in employment, and so on.

What makes me uncomfortable is just how much appearance plays into assumptions about an individual, because even when it comes with good intentions, it just seems so... shallow. Why aren't there more questions related to the aspects of one's life to determine what kind of hardship/discrimination one has endured? Why must it solely focus which appearance/race/recognized group you don? Where are the questions to describe in detail unjust financial hardship, personal discrimination, or unfairly limited opportunities? Why claim a person adds diversity before you even know how adding such person (without making superficial assumptions) will add to diversity, equity, or inclusivity? For example, does this black candidate have major setbacks as a result of ancestral slavery that we should take into consideration for equity purposes, or is this black candidate a well-educated wealthy recent immigrant who grew up in a nation's upper class who currently doesn't feel discriminated against? There's no way to find out without the candidate voluntarily offering this information. Institutions love to use outward appearance as a proxy for what it purports to improve. And even if they didn't, given how badly managed and flooded recruitment currently is, I can't imagine that there is enough capacity for recruiters/computers to sufficiently handle the answers to such personal ambiguous questions.

In 2009, Chicago Public Schools in its high school Selective Enrollment plan moved toward awarding more points to people who live in low-income neighborhoods. While this is nowhere near perfect and is susceptible to gaming, surely this must be a better system than the one that asks for your race in a drop-down select or a list of tickboxes?

Lastly, without getting into too much detail, I know how easy it is to take advantage of these systems. Since no one can verify your cultural identity, and no one verifies your family/individual income, it's extremely trivial to put yourself at the front of a digital priority queue by claiming that you are such-and-such identity, and if necessary, with such-and-such socioeconomic hardship. You can also be mixed-race.

I'm fine with the game that Americans love, but can't we do something so that it isn't so easy to game, or base it off better and more varied heuristics?

In electoral politics I believe some Republican research suggested they could get a higher vote differential by discouraging people from voting for Obama by portraying him as too corporate and centrist than by attacking him for being too communist or whatever.

Which makes sense when voting is not fully representative and can be gamed with single issues.

But it feels like a strategic error in the wider court of public opinion.

Yes there might be a small hardcore that truly think renewables are bad for the planet or libs are bad for equality, but surely those ideas of equality and environmentalism, which are already out there and winning are only going to be made stronger?

The actual selection process cannot discriminate.

There's obviously a lot of Twitter comments to take in and out of context, but just because you put some [rightly] questionable comments next to positive action doesn't mean discriminatory hiring processes.