Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
>> Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo.
I'm not a big culture warrior, but I believe that if as a company you choose to do a thing, you do it fully, from top to bottom.
Yet the outcome described is exactly what you get when you have {status quo} + {new initiative from leadership} + {failure to dedicate time and resources to following up and implementing}.
People are always going to be resistant to change. Middle management is especially resistant to change, not unreasonably.
Consequently, effective change takes follow-through, verification, reminders, and eventually termination to actually implement. Otherwise, everyone shrugs their shoulders and returns to what they've always done... and punishes whoever is still dancing off the beaten path.
> "According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste."
And, another excerpt:
> "To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.” Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment."
Clean your own house before pointing at your neighbor's dirty yard...
99% of corporate DEI initiatives are performative in nature. I realized it when the majority of companies were pushing employees to read a book on systemic racism written by a white woman who was obviously using it as an advertisement for her corporate consulting and training business.
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.
Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.
Cultural change takes time.
When you still have a practice occurring among over a billion people you can't simply throw it out and declare everyone doing it a bigot. You have to transition in steps and get buy in.
Put another way, you wouldn't march single handedly into Saudi Arabia and tell them Islamic law is dumb and they are dumb for following it.
This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs."
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.
Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
Yeah this is good in general but needs tempering through a bit of conflict resolution/appeal process built in. Discrimination issues can often just be the result of misinterpretations and blind spots people have, especially when bridging cultural divides. There's some stuff that crosses a clear red line, but most behaviors are subtle and often unintentional and the approach to dealing with them productively should more closely resemble relationship/marriage counseling or the sorts of reconciliation processes they do in post-conflict zones.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements. And it then came with a side of misquotes of The Bhagavad Gita and selective quotations out of the Manusmriti to argue that simply identifying yourself as a Hindu is inherently discriminatory and violent towards lower castes. As a history major and religious studies minor in college I took issue with just about every historical and theological "fact" they brought up but didn't think it was worth arguing. But there was nothing particular to the organization we were in and no specific instances of issues reported internally by anyone so I had a hard time understanding why this was happening.
There's a particular historical narrative among certain political movements in India that depict Brahmins as basically collaborating to institute a conspiracy to to impose a caste hierarchy across all of Indian society for millennia. It's a very simplistic and one-sided reading of Indian history and Hindu philosophy, but it has gained a lot of traction within social justice/DEI spaces and particularly with groups that are more focused on pushing an ideological project.
It would be analogous to having a Louis Farrakhan disciple on to talk about being Muslim in the workplace. There are many better people to raise those issues who will bring them without the side of eliminationist rhetoric. It's one thing to meme about people with privilege or be dismissive in a casual context, but at the workplace (or really any public venue) that sort of talk is just mean. It's especially frustrating because this discrimination actually is a blight on Indian society (though most of the issues in the US are in the realm of microaggressions rather than structural or overt discrimination). But that doesn't excuse just peddling nonsense in response.
I admire that you kept your composure in the face of such ludicrous demands. An employer has to be insane to think they can even suggest how I should interact with my own family.
The group has, since, dissolved for obvious reasons.
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.
People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.
But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews.
I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.
Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. - 1 Samuel 15
That's one example. The old testament claims God commanded the total extermination of multiple nations competing with the Israelites [1]. This extermination is celebrated to this day during the Purim festival [2]. When someone mentions Judeo-Christian morality, know that the first part of that duo is not remotely "turn the other cheek" - it is literally old testament.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_warfare#Wars_of_ex...
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves"
And from the Big Guy Himself, Deuteronomy 20:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves [...] However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"
Does that count as one isolated instance, or six?
(Just btw: I offer the above merely as a counterexample to a rather glaring claim, not as a criticism of Judaism. Just because I was taught as a small child, by christians, that everyone who disobeys god deserves to die, and if they don't it's solely due to his mercy, doesn't mean everybody contextualizes these passages that way. Also, the term "murder" is slippery because it isn't a synonym of "kill". If you argue an instance of slaughtering people is justified or legal, you can make it "not murder" by mere definition.)
"The Holy Quran Experiment": https://youtu.be/zEnWw_lH4tQ
(And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not)
Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
This is clearly a defense tactic used to avoid criticism and I see it employed heavily by apologist. Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve. But in this case, they are well aware of their wrongdoing, which is why they employ such tactics.
Honestly it depends on how that criticism is framed and who it's being directed towards. It reads differently if the criticism framed as "I care about you and want you to do better" versus "I dislike you and have developed a narrative that justifies mistreating you." It also matters whether the criticism is directed as feedback (e.g. "When you do X it makes me feel Y and I think doing Z would be better") vs. directed towards a third party to intervene in a prosecutorial way.
Ironically, that often results in Jewish people being disproportionately tarred as anti-Semites, because they have specific and knowledgeable criticisms that they're not willing to just let go of.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-labour-antisemitism-ac...
> Jewish Voice for Labour tells EHRC that Jews almost five times more likely to face antisemitism charges than non-Jewish members
For instance, there’s many who feel that some of the criticism against Barack Obama was racist. Not because it isn’t ok to criticize a US president but because prior presidents hadn’t been treated similarly/held to the same standard
You clearly have one/several specific organizations in mind, but I’ll point out that my comment was about the content of criticism rather than the track record of the group making it. Track record gives a hint of whether someone might be acting in bad faith, but it is perfectly possible for someone to usually offer fair assessments but let their prejudices slip though with regards to members of one minority group or another. In fact, some would argue that everyone has such blind spots and that they can only be mitigated, but never eliminated.
Not sure I understand your point about guilt by association, but if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist… then I think we’re probably going to disagree.
That is a (very) thinly veiled version of exactly the tactic we're talking about, and I probably shouldn't engage with it, but ... who says something doesn't affect whether it's true. Why is the demand for perfection - dare I say purity? - so one sided, and limited to certain topics? If a racist says that it's wrong to assault peaceful pall-bearers at a funeral for a journalist who was already a victim of a highly questionable military action ... well, they're right. One should of course be careful not to validate anything else the racist might say, or to let them shift focus/proportion beyond where it belongs, but rejecting truth because it was stated by The Wrong People is exactly what the racists themselves like to do (not to mention every authoritarian of every stripe). It's not reasoned ethical debate. It's pure blind partisanship, which is not healthy even in an otherwise good cause. Set aside the ad hominem and guilt by association. Consider whether something is true no matter who says it, and whether its truth suggests change.
Hardliners of all stripes tend to recognize and actively exploit blowback.
If for example you had a talk in Google Israel that presented the discrimination against Israeli arabs in modern Israel, I suspect you'd get a decent turnout and positive response (especially as Tech is unusually left leaning).
If you had a talk that mentioned colonialism (like you do in your post) you'll just get people fruitlessly arguing with each other ("This is our land from 2,000 years ago, the arabs are the colonists", "This is our/your land thanks to a UN decision, settlements that go beyond the 1948/1967 borders are colonialism", "All you jews are colonists").
You'd just end up further dividing your employees into hostile groups, even if they were previously able to work together (by just being silently tolerant of each other's opinions).
> I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic.
I think this one is a problem "on both sides".
There are some on the Israeli side that will try to silence criticism by equating it to antisemitism.
There are some antisemites that will express themselves in the form of "reasonable criticism".
There are some that will innocently make some criticism that seems reasonable to them, but due to ignorance of the situation or facts, lack of nuance or just the difficulty of communicating cross culturaly via a limited medium end up with sometimes that seems antisemitic when examined at depth by "the other side".
And no matter which way you go, it is very hard to tell where you are.
In fact in Jewish tradition Amalek remains a force to this day.
The word means basically nothing on HN, outside it’s use in political slurring.
It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true.
> a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo
Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types").
> But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists
Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy.
Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left and right. It’s better to plug the leak than try and save the boat by scooping water out.
Anyway, right-wing violence isn’t the only threat—left wing people campaign against liberties (especially free speech and equality) and they have their own violence (nationwide riots, property damage, assaults, and even the occasional terrorism). Moreover, left-wing people have their own anti-democratic bent: the “not my president” stuff in 2016 and calls for revolution, agitating for and rationalizing political violence, etc. I’m not comparing left-wing and right-wing sins, but rather noting that we want to defend against both and mercifully the solution is the same: deradicalize institutions.
If that's the time frame you're predicating your analysis of race politics in America on, you're not the non-partisan analyst you think you are. Racist mobilization of white Americans started well before Obama's 2nd term, well before Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, ML.
The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust):
> The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this.
> Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc.
> Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc.
http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html
Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples.
For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants.
The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.
This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated.
Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?
Now there was a period in American history when only white male landowners really had opportunity to vote, but that notion has been soundly repudiated, hasn't it? Even then there was a significant group who advocated for the expansion of voting rights to all. See composition fallacy again.
Similarly, the right to emigrate or own land would not be restricted to members of certain religious groups (imagine if that was the case in the United States!). Hence Israel doesn't actually meet the basic requirements of 'democratic norms and values', does it - and nor does Saudi Arabia. Curiously however, these two states are often referred to as "America's closest allies".
As far as repression, well the targeted assassination of an American-Palestinian journalist in Jenin is just one more example of this. See also the targeted assassination of a Washington Post op-ed columnist Jamal Khashoggi, ordered by Mohammmed bin 'Bone Saw' Salman in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, for comparison.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-...
'They were shooting directly at the journalists': New evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces
Since when can non-citizens vote in US national elections? Let alone people living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else is/was under US military control.
A valid comparison would be claiming that Native Americans were not citizens of the US government and hence had no right to vote for members of Congress, wouldn't it?
To be more specific, my view is that all people born in the West Bank/Gaza/Israel should have the right to vote in Israeli elections, and Palestinians outside Israel should have the same right to emigrate to Israel as New York Jews do. Some will disagree, but that's basically how the American system works, and I think it's a better system.
Further, there's been plenty of people born in and living in the US (under your definition of "a country includes any territory under its military control") who weren't able vote in US elections. There's residents of US territories who are technically citizens but cannot vote unless the migrate to the mainland. And the US has never granted voting rights to people living in countries under US military occupation.
Personally, I'd suggest using the definitions that people use for themselves. And if you do that, you'll find that there are both religious and ethnic components.
First, some members of group found at a disadvantage are upset. This is regardless of how many other members of that group express that they themselves are not. You can dispute facts, but you can't deny people's feelings.
Second, the disadvantage is then used by some people to justify something that fits their agenda, prejudices of beliefs, whether it makes sense or not.
So I can hardly blame anyone responsible for managing a huge number of people of avoiding sensitive topics. Besides, a corporation is not exactly the place to discuss these things: they need to be dealt with as a society in general. If you try to introduce these topics into your workplace, you might even achieve the opposite of what you want, because people will do whatever you expect them just to keep their jobs, but won't change their opinion because their manager told them to, or because they attended a workshop where it was explained to them that their culture is inferior, for example.
It's not that Google gave up. They were never going to allow it to begin with and the organizer likely just hoped it would fly under the radar.