Let's say a company is set to hire 1,000 employees. For the first 900 hires, they intentionally exclude white people. Should they, then, make up for this intentional exclusion by then prioritizing white people in their hiring? Or should they correct the problem by giving those who were intentionally excluded priority?
In other words, should the racist status quo be allowed to continue, or should it be intentionally corrected?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/occupational-segreg...
Punishing people today who had no input into situations in the past, only because of a characteristic they have that they can not alter ... that's just breeding more resentment.
A teenager of my acquaintance was accepted last minute to an educational opportunity, it was well over-subscribed. When they got there they found there were actually places on the course which were not filled. The reason? Those places were only for people of the opposite sex. Students missed the opportunity due only to their sex. How is that fair for those students who missed out?
That's exactly the question: When people miss out due to intentional discrimination, it's not fair.
Should anything be done about that? Of course!
I fail to see how this is controversial, except that people don't want resources to go to those who were discriminated against.
In an ideal world, everybody (in in this case the US) would have access to the same standard of living, the same standard of education, and everyone would start at the same point in their career, so that employers can do blind job applications (censoring out an applicant's name, age, gender, etc) and hire on merit alone.
But that ideal is still far away, as is blind interviewing. Especially in tech where people are judged not only on merit, but on personality as well - you have to work with them, after all. And that's when things like classism, racism - not even the morally indefensible or conscious type - show up.
Should you make up for it, by giving the next cookie to the kid who didn't get one? Of course!
Should you do this even if the other kids kick and scream and say it's "bullshit"? Of course!
You have two kids a boy and a girl. You give the boy a cookie, and the girl gets nothing. Eighty years later your adult grand kids buy cookies and give them to all the little girls in they neighborhood and explicitly exclude the boys because their great aunt didn't get a cookie.
This fixes nothing. The original girl got nothing, the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies. And later generation boys are harmed regardless of how deserving they are of receiving a cookie.
Your non-analogous analogies are strawmen and we really don't need to make analogies or strawmen if we want to discuss AA, DEI, or discrimination. We're all adults and are able to communicate without using analogies or metaphors.
If you're going to talk about generational effects of racial discrimination, then, the answer is, yes, there is plenty of evidence that racial discrimination has a profound impact between generations, even if the primary racism was against a previous generation.
Anyone who uses group metrics to include or exclude an individual is just being racist, sexist, or some other -ist.
There's also the third option: stop discriminating entirely.
No. More racism isnt the solution to racism.
Because its not correcting a past mistake. But rather make new ones that inevittably are going to lead to even more resentment. And also hurting the ones you are supposedly helping by making them question whether they got in through their abilities or through diversity points. Which can lead to quite a large reduction in their self confidence.
I would call the cookie example irrelevant to this.
Treating someone differently because of their race, no matter if positive or negative, is racism.
1. It will make some people resentful.
2. It will cause "doubt" among people who benefit.
In essence, your first argument is about further benefiting the people who are already in an advantaged position. And your second argument is blaming people who would benefit. Yikes. That is some twisted logic.
I will NOT let you put words into my mouth
> 1. It will make some people resentful.
Thats not the reason I am against racism, that is a consequence of racism. The resentment will lead to racism against the people who benefited from the racism. You can't break that cycle with more racism.
> 2. It will cause "doubt" among people who benefit.
It will lead to a lower self esteem, which leads to less likely to negotiate for high salaries, which leads to a wage gap between different races in the same profession.
There are MUCH better ways to get a "better" ratio, like expanding the pool of applicants of underrepresented groups. For example, through advertisments in areas where such people could be located. I have nothing against that.
What I have a problem with, is justifying racism in the name of fighting racism.
> In essence, your first argument is about further benefiting the people who are already in an advantaged position. And your second argument is blaming people who would benefit. Yikes. That is some twisted logic.
This, to me, reads like arguing in bad faith.
In a predominantly white society, it is perfectly conceivable that you'll hire predominantly white people even if you are completely unbiased, purely because they are strongly over-represented in the population. White people hiring white people is thus not a statistical outlier, and while there is definitely nepotism going on in this cadre as well, it's less easy to pinpoint just based on the race.
On the other hand, you will likely have to go out of your way to build a team mostly staffed by minorities unless there's some other bias, e.g. that minority is over-represented in your specialty. In this case, if you have a team purely of a homogenous race that is otherwise a small minority of the overall population, it is more of an outlier. That's not saying there's nepotism at hand, but the likelihood of such a team composition arising naturally without some direct bias is simply lower than in case of a team composed of the major race of the population.
Anything not aligned with the breakdown here is just straight up racist hiring practices - 60% white, 20% hispanic / latino, 15% black, 5% asia (subcontinent & se asia).
Though id love to see this shift (Women in stem!!)
So, every field and job market has exactly the same distribution as the entire country?
Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
It's basically p-hacking: if you come up with enough ways of analysing data, you'll find something "significant".
Amazon possibly has enough employees in the fuller distribution of income / qualifications that would be an interesting dataset for slicing, but of course you will always find rouge slices and while they may have a reasonable explanation othertimes they do not - why are 90% of CEO of a listed companies are >50 years old, 22% of the population is under 18 its unfair they are not represented (lets not get into the number of old people in politics)
The problem is that, if the only answer if there's no "reasonable explanation" is to imply the existence of some kind of discrimination, you're going to include a lot of weird things under that category, and often make complex problems appear simple.
Scott Alexander wrote a good article "Black People Less Likely" that discusses a similar idea. There's often possible explanations for local bias, ideas of unfair treatment and rude old white people, but sometimes you hide a lot by addressing at a local level. If what is identified as a problem is present at all levels of the hierarchy from social clubs to CEO positions, it's useless to ask why more xyz people aren't CEOs.
I enjoyed that one, thanks.
Aren't they? Women are worse at pretty much every sport than men, and NBA teams are very far away from average racial representation in general population.
Even with non-physical activities, asians are overrepresented in many technical areas, and there were/are even lawsuits [0] about discriminating asians in favour of other races in colleges.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
> Arcidiacono suggested that the applicant's race plays a significant role in admissions decisions.[8] According to his testimony, if an Asian American applicant with certain characteristics (like scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities, family background) would result in a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, will have a 36% likelihood of admission.[8] Hispanic and Black applicants with the same characteristics will have a 77% and 95% predicted chance of admission, respectively.[8]
So yeah... chances of getting a male asian programmer are relatively higher than their representation in the general population.
I live in a former socialist country (we had red stars, parades and a dictator), and considering race or any other non-merit based factor in eg. high school and college aplications would be seen as wrong (and in case of race/gender, racist/sexist). Same for jobs.
This response seems to indicate that you wish it were, which seems like an acknowledgement that it isn't identically distributed. In which case, it seems a bit premature to jump to "straight up racist hiring practices" being the only explanation for disparities between any given field and the country-wide demographics.
> Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
No, it seems to be you trying to suggest this. I'm pointing out that there could be alternate explanations besides "straight up racist hiring practices" that could cause any given application pool to deviate from the general population. This could mean anything from small-number statistical sampling fluctuations, to lack of aspirational representation causing a demographic to enter the field, to general structural suppression in society etc etc.
Very few companies are directly in the position to directly influence the development of people who will be in their application pool in several years time.
Whites (non-Hispanic) are only 28.9% and Asians/Indians are 40.6%.
Not all of them were in electrical engineering I guess.
1. You're in a minority group (relative to the hiring pool), and your hiring decisions are skewed towards hiring other members of the same minority group (relative to the hiring pool)
2. You're in a majority group (relative to the hiring pool) and your hiring decisions are skewed towards hiring other members of the same majority group (relative to the hiring pool)