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Comment by zmk5 | Hacker News Reader

"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?

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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.

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

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!

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

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.

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