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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I am mixed race, I "look" white myself, but I have an uncle for example that is "obviously black" and suffered actual anti-black racism (nothing serious, but for example police stop him in traffic whenever they see him going out with expensive car while wearing his Capoeira uniform).

When I see a statement like this (copy paste from article):

"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."

Makes me worry. What that phrase means? Apparent-white people (like me) got fired? Because they are white?

In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white. Had to get a loan and pay for private schooling.

What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

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I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged".

I don't agree with this view and I think "reverse racism" is just as racist as normal racism. I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.

At the risk of _going there_, I think if you are optimizing a system, freeing resources that are most easily rescheduled is a globally optimal solution. Senior engineers can be slotted into nearly any task.

It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.

The greatest minority is the individual. "Reverse racism" harms people too. Let's stop pretending it doesn't. Discrimination based on race is bad no matter the source. When can we start looking through an individual lens?

Edit: I concur with parent comment.

> I believe this is driven with good intentions.

Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.

Most people that are white that I know (I'm half Indian - as in the country India - and half white) are actually now more racist (not like going out of way to join kkk) because of the anti-white and reverse-racism stuff that's been more and more out there. I sit on the sidelines like, what the fuck.

I am not sure why you're being downvoted, because I not only have witnessed this happening within my own family/friends (it is sad and scary), but we are now having studies show that some common forms of anti-racism training has a "backfire" effect that produces more racism. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?"

I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns.

I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.

What bugs me immensely about this whole situation is that we can't really discuss it in public. I feel like if I dare express disagreement with current policies and predominant views, I could be fired. I could be publicly attacked and shamed, even for what seems to me like rational arguments along the lines of "let's take a step back and look at this problem from multiple angles".

Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.

I agree, it's creating a very unhealthy environment that is breeding resentment and worsening the issues it's trying to solve.

Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.

Harvard is amazing place. Create a IAT to find out all hidden racist at work. Create trainings to fix the issue. Then perform studies to find out that anti-racism training are failing.

Yeah it's sad, I feel like Martin Luther King Junior's dream was a pipe dream. In a better world or maybe just a better place or time, it would have happened. But what we have now is obviously diverging more and more from his dream.

The most bizarre part of this age is the rewriting of Martin Luther King into a person who thought that Black Americans should be left to sink or swim in a segregated pool, because in the only speech they know he described a future utopian dream where white kids and black kids skipped hand in hand not seeing race.

Pool metaphor: It's not enough for lifeguards not to see race when the majority kids bully minority kids as groups. It inevitably leads to the lifeguards seeing the minority kids as the source of the problem, since they're always in the middle of any fight, and when they're gone the fights are fewer.

MLK actually wanted reparations for the black community for all the work that their slave ancestors did to enrich USA - mostly the white folk.

https://youtu.be/30ui1x-eKIw

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-...

It's not "reverse racism", "normal racism", etc; it's just racism. Putting a modifier on the word to make it seem "different" doesn't do the word justice. It has nothing to do with "privilege" or lack there of as it's purely discriminating based on race alone.

Saying as a blanket statement “white people are privileged” is racist af :)

Say that to West Virgina kids scraping meals off the floor because the coal mines their fathers work have been closed.

Saying billionaires are privileged is rude when you're saying it to a billionaire dying of eye cancer. I don't think that implies much about anything. White people aren't the only class that is privileged in the US, and you can be a member of other classes that more than offset being white. Like 65% of Americans are white. It offers opportunities over the median black person (or native, or hispanic etc.), not the median person, who is also white.

Depends on whether you choose the word “racism” within the context of historical and current institutionalized oppression or not.

People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot.

The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.

Academia seems to have redefined racism to mean systemic/institutional racism, and the result a whole slew of confusion and counterproductive conversations.

Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.

For the record, this is my most downvoted comment on HN to date. As a privileged person I happily stand by it.

> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged".

As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

> white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.

> I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area.

You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)

These complaints are always so interesting because it is like they are discovering intersectionality (privilege/oppression isn't a binary yes/no thing) and treating it like this is a big new observation when the "woke" community has been steeped in this idea for 30 years. If it were the 70s then sure this would be a legitimate criticism of a lot of activism but things are way different now.

> As a brown person

A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.

> don't face trials and tribulation.

Nobody has made this claim.

> A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.

In what sense?

Many (most?) SV startups and larger companies are run by brown people (mostly Indians). I guess they must be the most white folks out there if whiteness is the root of all power.

White people aren't privileged, privileged people are privileged. I sure as heck didn't get any privilege by growing up poor on a reservation. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of my college applications were thrown away because of rural circumstances. So, this new, fashionable racism bugs me a bit.

Coming up from rural circumstances is far more likely to trigger positive discrimination than negative.

I always felt looked down upon by those who grew up in the Twin Cities, so I never had a positive experience.

> I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.

This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations.

Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.

Fair enough, but how far back should we go? AD 1500? AD 500? 300 BC? The Roman Empire had a majority of white people as slaves. This argument is just silly and solves nothing.

I can’t speak to what their particular “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens” is, but when I try to be equitable, the point of the exercise is to be aware of potential biases, and avoid them.

It’s not about preferring black employees or hating on white employees. It’s to recognize the dynamics that race might have in your organization that have nothing to do with job performance.

To tie into your anecdote: if a company hires drivers, maybe comparing a black driver and a white driver solely on the number of times they’ve been pulled over, is not an accurate representation of their driving performance. Being aware that someone could potentially need a better performance indicator is part of what this exercise might be.

There are so many folks from countries which did not have any colonialism which were not implicated in any sort of way in the oppression of folks of non-white skin color which are definitely affected by reverse-racism. Think all of Eastern-Europe for example. In essence this method of dealing with racism is actually antagonizing folks which did not have anything to do with the issue to begin with. It is kind of ridiculous. Why are they affected just because they have white skin? I am sure some non-whites are saying: "It's your turn to see how it is". Actually, it is not. The people implementing these sort of policies are even more ignorant than the original oppressors. They think their actions are just. Which is completely false. Who are they to pass judgement on who is responsible for past oppression.

More of a nitpick but was the USSR not considered a imperialist polity? The ubiquity of the Russian language in Central Asia seems like a strong artifact of colonialism. Even today, Russia is throwing people and resources largely from the (non-slavic) provinces and satellite states at Ukraine. Even in the United States, Eastern Europeans immigrants were quick to assert themselves in the racial hierarchy in places like Chicago.

I’m not saying this to implicate or unimplicate anyone really. It’s more to point out morally elevating one group of people over others (western vs Eastern Europeans) to make a rhetorical argument doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny because of the contradictions inherit in all people and countries.

You see racial equality as a punishment on white people for the colonialism of prior generations?

I think it's a political statement to try to "look better" and gain some "sympathy" from the activist choir.

If this is HOW they are making firing decisions, then this is stupid. To remain viable they need to "cut the fat" regardless of who makes up the "fat". In other words beancounters should not be looking a the "race" & "gender" columns to make business/personnel decisions.

Yeah as someone who went through interview training recently at $BIGCO it felt very weird.

On one side you had the HR reps talking about how you can't discriminate on protected classes etc, but we had to approach hiring from an anti racist lense with a focus on getting certain groups.

I really don't know how both of these work together, I generally support the goals and esp support being aware of diff people and cultures, my family are all first gen immigrants lol.

When the rubber hits the road I don't see how these two mandates don't conflict.

It is affirmative-action, rebranded. The U.S. Supreme Court will likely strike down race-based admissions at higher-ed institutions in the next term, so HR and other gatekeepers will be exploring novel ways to racially balance groups per their preferences.

Just as there is bias in hiring, there can be bias in firing. Effective leaders recognize this and put systems in place to minimize them. Being attentive to those dynamics is especially important in times of stressful decisionmaking, when it’s tempting to take cognitive shortcuts.

Claiming it means “only fire white people” is not accurate.

But the devil is in the details. My skip level manager had a goal something to the effect of equal or lower female attrition. A female engineer left for a better job at Facebook. Not too long after I was on a PIP and while I can't prove they were directly related it didn't exactly leave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. At minimum the bullshit of a PIP I was on would have been looked at a lot more critically if I were female since that would have made the scoreboard 0-2 instead of 1-1.

Not to invalidate OP's lived experiences, but they are Brazilian. Trying to extrapolate race and diversity issues in Brazil with those in the US is a bit of an apple to oranges comparison (and vice versa between the US and Brazil imo).

(Disclaimer - I have no opinions on either side in this issue).

Presumably there are also people in the US who are “white” but who also have “black” close relatives.

If it matters I’m with the OP on this. I’m Romanian, I’m “white”, my mother is, for lack of a better word, “brown-ish” (between “black” and “white”, that is), my brother has the same skin “color” as my mum. My brother has been the victim of racist remarks over the years of which I was not, I suspect because of our slightly different skin “color”.

Nevertheless, I find the essentialist policy the US has when it comes to “races” quite baffling. For example I don’t know how me and my brother would potentially be “labeled” were we to move to the States. Like I said, technically we have different skin “colors” but, after all, we’re brothers.

It's important to understand why race of all things is so foundational to systemic injustive in the US.

The original sin of the US was the Atlantic slave trade. It so happens that almost of the people swept up into that slave trade were dark skinned. And, because that slave trade was so monumentally huge in terms of how many people it brought to the US, a very large fraction of dark skinned people in the US today and all throughout history either were slaves or are primarily descended from them.

In order to morally justify the enslavement of millions of people, white slave-owners manufactured a justification that people of certain races are physically, mentally, and morally different from whites. They created a (factually false) narrative that skin tone didn't just mean skin tone but also implied all sorts of other things about the person.

That narrative is profoundly embedded in all aspects of US politics, culture, and institutions. It's been there since before the three-fifths compromise which is directly in the US Constitution. It's everywhere.

So it's not just about skin tone. It's about generations of Americans growing up in a culture that says people with a certain skin tone are less human, and then building social institutions predicated on that as fact.

Culture and institutions change very slowly (especially when many participating in them actively benefit from their current state) and it takes a lot of work to root something like this out.

My personal opinion is that this is an American problem and only Americans should discuss about this. The same way I am opposed to Russian electoral interference in 2016, in the same way I'd rather not have other non-Americans discuss about this topic UNLESS they have actual authentic experiences with these issues. It's the same way I won't comment about Antiziganism in Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, etc because I simply don't have the relevant context or authentic background to make an informed statement beyond the generic platititude of "Don't discriminate".

The thing is that what gets discussed today in the States then gets discussed tomorrow in Western Europe and the day after tomorrow further East (so, also in my country, Romania). To say nothing of the many US companies that have offices open here in Eastern Europe and whose HR policies mimick almost completely those from the US headquarters.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were 100% right on this, i.e. that US racial things should only be discussed by those directly involved with the same happening in the Romanian case (from where I’m from), but unfortunately that is not the case.

Well, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race (a protected class). So I'm surprised they would explicitly state that as a goal.

Guess they figure no white/asian person is going to file a suit on racial grounds.

Yeah this one stood out. I suspect it’s illegal if they actually did it, but it’s likely just virtue signaling (and it’s worded so vaguely)

Well that is one way to boost their ESG score? Race quotas are coming it appears.

https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20...

It's not uncommon to test RIF-impacted employees for gender, age, race etc against the general population.

In fact, in certain states (like CA), you often list all the ages of the people in the department, and who is and isn't impacted IN THE RIF'ed employee's SEVERANCE PACKAGE. I believe this is employment law driven.

>What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

The fact that it hasn't lost them a lawsuit yet, nothing more and nothing less.

Totally opposite of my experience. I’m just describing mine for an alternative not to be combative or attempt to lessen yours.

I’m mixed and depending on many factors some think I’m white and others know I’m brown (certainly more brown than white folks). Typically, it’s only white people who believe I’m white (which is racist still even if they mean well). The weird thing is, truly racist hateful white people definitely know I’m not white. Like that’s how I really even found out I wasn’t like my white friends, as a child, literal fucking Nazis made that clear to me through violence.

So I’m on the other side of this coin seeing: “they didn’t lay off people because they weren’t white enough” not that people who were laid off had it happen because they are white.

Because you're extrapolating a ton from a somewhat ambiguous statement. All they are saying is that they are trying to make sure their decisions don't disproportionately negatively effect marginalized communities. This doesn't mean racist towards whites or that they will exclusively fire white people.

My read (as a white guy who is minority in religion) was: "great, this company has some defenses to make sure they are being fair to everyone, especially groups of people who don't typically get a fair shake". And that's fine by me. Not that they are firing white people. But that they are making sure they're not disproportionately firing black people or women or any other group that might be marginalized in the tech industry.

> What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

It's meant to counteract the fact that people who are obviously black suffer actual anti-black racism. You have noticed this. I could understand disagreement, I can't understand the confusion.

> In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white.

I don't believe this. It's not how you look, it's what you put on the forms. You may be accused of lying (I imagine) if you look white, but your parents will reveal that you're not. You don't think that, all other things being equal, in America, your uncle will have the same equality of opportunity as you without positive discrimination? He's not allowed to drive a nice car while wearing a capoeira outfit. Driving a car while wearing a capoeira outfit is a right so basic I never imagined that it would be seen as suspicious behavior.

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