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Comment by gdudeman | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of comments quickly taking issue with and interpreting the phrase “anti-racist” as being actively racist.

If you give Jeff he benefit of the doubt here, you can read this to say they’re going to think about whether layoff choices are made with implicit bias and/or racism and be thoughtful about that.

It’s possible that the non-benefit of the doubt interpretation is valid, but I don’t see evidence of that here.

HN is a place where debate is welcomed, but drive-by comments accusing them of going out of their way to lay off white and Asian employees when there is no indication that’s what they’re doing is not helpful to the discourse.

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>>If you give Jeff he benefit of the doubt here,

Sorry, not giving a virtue-signaling billionaire the 'benefit of the doubt' - he explicitly says that race was taken into account when deciding who to fire and who not to - that is de-facto a racist statement.

You don't fix racism by being racist.

If jobs need to be eliminated, they should be eliminated by making decisions about which departments/projects/initiatives are no longer needed, which people are no longer performing well, or which area's are not profitable etc.

As soon as you say, we took into account peoples race when deciding who should be fired, it is racist, period.

This is a tired debate that won’t be resolved here, but here’s the other perspective anyway:

Suppose you work for a company and your boss is from Country X and you are not. Your boss hired several other people from Country X and regularly socializes with them more than others in the office.

When layoffs come, your boss instinctively advocates for the people he is closest to, which happens to be people who look like him and speak the same native language. “That’s not fair!” you say. “I’m a higher performer than them. This is just favoritism.” Your boss says that he did not take race into account in his decision.

Your company agrees with you and tells your boss that his favoritism is unacceptable. There are now processes in place to flag this kind of situation. Your boss grumbles “well I didn’t take anybody’s race into account before, and now I have to. This is racism!”

Except they do take race into account. Have you never been on a hiring committee for a tech company? There's a just-barely-legal imperative to prioritize all nonwhite/nonasian and nonmale candidates. In some corporations, this goes as far as mandating that an equal number of nonwhite/nonasian candidates as white/asian candidates make it to the final interview round.

What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?

Humans have a known exploit called "lying". It's well-documented being abused in the wild and there are no patches. Keep that in mind whenever someone is telling you something that is in direct contradiction with their actions.

> What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?

To continue the analogy:

Your company is growing again and your boss continues to hire a bunch of people from Country X. HR contacts your boss and tells him that he can’t just keep interviewing/hiring people from his country. Your boss responds that he is hiring the most qualified applicants.

After several months of your boss hiring people from Country X, leadership steps in and says that he must interview people from other countries. He starts interviewing to a wider group of applicants, but funnily enough, he persists in mostly hiring people from Country X. He swears that he is not biased and is only picking the very best candidates.

Leadership steps in again and says “Look, you need to start hiring other people. I don’t care how impartial you claim to be. There is talent all around the world, and narrowly hiring from Country X is becoming a liability to the company. We would like to see at least Y% of your new hires need to come from places other than Country X.”

Your boss contacts the media and files a lawsuit. After all, the company is explicitly, actively discriminating against applicants from Country X, right?

Yes, so long as the boss can prove that the hires from country X were superior to the alternatives for their respective roles. The most competent people deserve the jobs the most, period.

> and nonmale candidates

This is hilarious in the context of white-collar work, considering that women absolutely dominate college degree issuance, and have for quite some time now.

Still, there is a shocking shortage of women in highly technical engineering roles. I'm a board member of a local college's Women In Tech group, and have donated a few thousand dollars of my personal money to the group. There are just not as many women as men who are interested.

And if everyone picked every pregnant woman on leave and every minority, leadership should totally just assume that it wasn’t some bias or racism. /s

It makes sense to review to ensure that there is no slant to your layoffs to me.

Philosophical issues aside, the Supreme Court is sort of ok with “fixing racism by being racist” if it’s done to compensate for historically being racist.

Many countries do this and it's not controvertial. The UK Equality Act says that given two candidates of equal ability, it's legal to pick the candiadate from an underrepresented background purely because of that.

> As soon as you say, we took into account peoples race when deciding who should be fired, it is racist, period.

Oy. I expect better from HN discussion, because this is a solved problem.

Auditing your decisions for implicit bias along racial lines _is not racist_. In fact, it's the opposite.

Totally agree. Saying they are ensuring that their layoffs didn’t disproportionately impact minorities and pregnant women doesn’t mean disproportionately fire white men.

> implicit bias and/or racism

I think it'd be better for them to re-market this principle as "bias-free" or something more generic. Calling it "anti-racist/anti-oppression" is, fair-or-not, going to invite this reaction from outsiders.

Wouldn't that just be "not racist"? "Anti-racist" _is_ an active position.

"It's not racist or discrimination because I say it isn't"

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