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Comment by questime | Hacker News Reader

What does Anti-Racist layoff mean?

What can it possibly mean except when given the choice, they chose people to layoff based on their skin color - so in other words, in trying to show they are not racist, they made firing decisions based on race, not based on seniority or performance.

That's an absurd interpretation. They almost certainly mean that they're going to make sure to examine who's being let go for evidence of bias. If layoffs usually hit underrepresented groups harder, then the less racist thing to do is to make sure you aren't disproportionately firing, say, all your Black employees. That doesn't mean they're looking to fire more white people.

What if reality happens to be 'racist?' What if there naturally happens to be a gender / race to performance correlation at their company at this time? Do you think they will perform their review and stand behind their 'racist' findings? Or do you think they will give more benefit of the doubt to certain people until their layoff gender / race distribution more closely matches their idealized a priori distribution? I think that's the debate here.

If someone manages to prove the racists are right then that will be a very weird world to live in and I have no idea how to speculate about it. I’d expect it’s about as likely as someone proving god exists, but I’ve seen overwhelming evidence that people are racist and that that racism permeates society.

Sometimes the underperformers in a company just happen to skew a particular race. Publicly announcing such a layoff demographic would naturally allow for accusations of racism. That is what I am calling reality being racist. The summary facts of the situation can be called racist and it can be very difficult to defend that accusation without sharing huge amounts of internal data. So companies don't simply stay away from racism, they stay away from decisions that could be called racist. The difference between these two strategies is the problem. Touting anti-racism makes the problem worse, because it widens the gap between the two strategies by weaponizing accusations of racism for any action that remotely allows them. "This company tried to win brownie points by claiming it is not racist but look at this clearly racist thing they did."

Honestly I have some trouble following your comment. While not conceding your assertion about underperformers naturally skewing to a particular race, I'd like to point out that a company saying they're going to view things through an anti-racist lens likely means as little as checking to see if there's a disparity in who is being let go, and, if there is, double checking to make sure they're not choosing who to let go in a biased manner.

It can also mean they're making sure minorities aren't overly represented among layoffs, or something completely different; not so wise of them to signal virtue while not elaborating on what they mean.

"As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens."

Isn't this illegal?

If proven, yes.

I bet Twilio has arbitration clauses in their contracts, though.

What do arbitration clauses have to do with violating federal non discrimination laws?

exactly - arbitration clauses are not going to help with obvious race-based discriminatory statements from the president being used to pick who should be fired.

They're not making any claims of actually having done anything non-figurative.

Im from Twilio, It's out of context on the email to outsiders, It's just a thing thats everywhere in our wording to be an anti-bias/anti-racist company. It's part of the Twilio values/corporate template.

It's not something written for this email in particular.

That's good to know - It's strange to me that they don't see how this language could be seen the wrong way on a layoff email. It's not a leap to read this in a discriminatory way.

Thank you for the context!

I've seen you copy/paste thus statement a couple of times in this forum. Can you explain the context if possible, so it makes sense to "outsiders"? We like to learn here.

Ive copy pasted it twice, It's a thing, a value - "Be anti racist", we have support groups and communities and regular engagement built on this principal. This was an internal email , although they should have know that this goes out, even then I don't think they would anticipated it.

It absolutely does not mean they skewed the results or targeted to keep their diversity intact.

what hes saying is we made sure there was no bias , that's all. Although it might read like something else, anyone from twilio would understand as it's a common phrasing.

>>even then I don't think they would anticipated it.

It is in their 8-K filing to the SEC, how could it not be anticipated that would be public?

>Although it might read like something else

because the way you are using "Anti-Racism" is not the same as what the wider public know to be the "Anti-Racism" popularized by Ibram Kendi which is much more than just "not racist" or not biased as you claim here

It means race was a factor in who was laid off versus who wasn't.

Anti-racist terms are inherently racist, given these outcomes are decided based upon a persons race.

I guess non-racist layoffs would mean not disproportionately laying off minority groups. So anti-racist layoffs would mean disproportionately laying off majority groups? So then it would be anti-racist in the sense of rolling back historical racist impacts.

In reality it's probably just empty talk since they know they'd get sued for actually doing anything beyond making promises.

> I guess non-racist layoffs would mean not disproportionately laying off minority groups. So anti-racist layoffs would mean disproportionately laying off majority groups?

No, it almost certainly just means trying not to disproportionately lay off minority groups. You don't have to swing ist the neutral point and to immediately discriminate against the other side, you just need to stop discriminating.

I don't know why so many commenters assume that the only options are to be racist towards non-whites or to be racist against whites. There is a middle ground of just trying to not be racist at all. I imagine you could even come up with a term for it which would really clarify what the thing we're fighting against is, because otherwise people might think that it's trying to push whites down rather than stop pushing other people down. Maybe "anti-racist" would work.

To be clear, I was just trying to figure out what an nonsense phrase like "anti-racist layoffs" could mean.

> Maybe "anti-racist" would work

Clearly not, because it's an easily and frequently misunderstood term.

Anyway, the problem with anti-racism isn't terminology. It's an individualized solution to a structural problem, and so is doomed to fail just like conscious capitalism et. al.

>> Maybe "anti-racist" would work

> Clearly not, because it's an easily and frequently misunderstood term.

To be clear, that second paragraph was mostly me being frustrated with the fact that a term which seems like it's so straightforward in its meaning is such a source of confusion and outrage for so many people. It's baffling to me that someone would assume "anti-racist layoff" meant "we're going to decide who to fire based on their race". At the very least that's clearly much more of a legal nightmare, and would be an extremely bizarre thing for a company to say out loud.

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