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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

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It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

Agreed. In tech especially, certain minority groups (East and South Asians) are over represented so our processes must evolve to deal with the situations that result from them.

I'd rather the processes evolve to treat all discrimination on factors such as race or caste as bad, regardless of the race or caste of the people doing the discriminating.

> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.

Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.

How does one "neoliberalize" intersectionality? What parts of intersectionality are "capitalist-corporate-compatible"?

That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them.

It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.

Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.

> ... the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

I think this is a textbook description of intersectionality[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

you may be thinking of something different from intersectionality.

this situation is a perfect example of one of the most basic foundational concepts of intersectionality.

- person A is discriminated against because of some trait

- person A may use whatever power they have to diminish another person because of some trait their own group has historically oppressed.

discrimination isn’t a direct straight line. it’s much more complicated, it intersects in many strange ways.

That’s the theory, which, if you actually took to its logical conclusion, would result in treating and evaluating every individual as an individual, and the entire concept of group identity as a short-hand mechanism for assigning “intersecting identities” would have to be abandoned.

That’s not how it is applied in practice.

It does not logically follows at all. Nothing in what previous poster said prevents analysis of group behavior or treatment. It does not make it impossible to talk about race or gender or age - it only makes it less naive.

It makes it impossible to assign an individual identity — and evaluate individual behavior and status — as merely a function of their coarse-grained group membership.

It does not make it impossible at all. And it also does not need to. You can talk about how groups are influenced or how they interact without making all the interaction to be result of "merely" just that.

It does not follow logically but it still is prudent to do exactly that for reasons that intersectionality doesn't have a perspective on.

I'd imagine this type of situation could also be especially tricky since both sides of it have _some_ claim to minority/victim status.

Not that it isn't still fairly clear what needs to happen, but it's not hard to imagine how even doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons could end up spun as if it's a squabble over a prayer room or something, like "clueless white HR department fires productive manager after disrespecting his cultural and religious background. When will they ever learn??"

True. This explains maybe the first 5 minutes of the issue. In practice, HR usually leans on Legal for these types of questions. It likely boiled down to “do we want to be sued by a whole team/department because of a bad manager doing unethical thing? Or do we want to get sued by that one manager?” They had to weigh the risk of each since it probably wasn’t clear either way which was the legal thing to do (much like the debates here). They chose wisely in terms of risk and that’s why it came off as “legal’s” choice.

From what I saw I don't think it was malicious at all either. I think the HR team really just sort of froze for a while and didn't know what to do when faced with something new to them.

The frustrating thing for everyone is that it was an obvious case of discrimination and HR stalled for a long time. I don't want to get into details but it played out more like HR had a playbook that was stupid simple and suddenly the role players weren't what they expected and they didn't act.

Meanwhile everyone knew it was discrimination.

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