Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

Tangential to the current discussion but why do I always sense a reluctance to include matters relating to social class in these programs? When I bring it up during D&I discussions I'll usually get blank stares, and in one instance there were crude comments made about needing to beef up building security first.

View on HN

DEI took off right after Occupy Wall Street. The whole purpose is to destroy the class discussion entirely and use DEI issues as a weapon against anyone who brings up class. That's why DEI feels so disingenuous, because at its core, that's exactly what it is.

Bingo, much like the political brinkmanship that is the current left and right divide it’s all a distraction from that moment of class clarity.

This is exactly it. The entire DEI-driven conversation about "white privilege" is designed to distract from the reality that privilege in American and Western society is based on social class and economic status, not on skin color. Those two things are often correlated due to historical race-based discrimination, but they are not the same, and there are many many millions of white people who are lower class and treated horribly in America on the basis of their socioeconomic status.

DEI is all about dividing poor people based on immutable characteristics so they don't have a way to effectively organize against the wealthy elites. There's a reason DEI is most popularly held and enforced by elites with high levels of education, and not by those who are the working masses.

Frankly, it's /exactly/ the same stuff that was done to create white vs PoC racism in the US prior to the civil rights era to divide the working class to prevent labor organization. It's just the other side of that same coin, and basically the same tactics with a veneer of paint.

Socioeconomic class has always been the primary leading indicator of outcomes for people born in the US, and that has not changed significantly in the last 30 years as DEI rose to prominence.

That's definitely true. As an example, if you're a low-class white male kid, you're actually quite disadvantaged compared to the general population (for example in educational outcomes). But the DEI initiatives in most companies won't recognize this, as they often don't look past skin color and gender.

My brother is about 8 years younger than I, and we both grew up in a small city, but city none the less.

There really wasn’t talk about sexuality/gender beyond someone being gay vs straight, or some group of kids being in a gang (there were a few subgroups depending on ethnicity, which they proclaimed themselves)

He’s nearly out of high school, and now it’s very much focused on DEI. After the states standardized testing is accomplished, most focus is on equality of outcome talk, about how he being a young white male has oppressed groups of people unconsciously, and that he should feel guilty.

Fortunately he’s smart, and questioned this at a young age. And a family that accepts him and helps him. But I fear this stuff could make less well off kids feel excluded, shunned, and guilty, and could ferment vengeful ideologies against society, which we need far less of.

It’s sad how divided as a country we are. I hope for us to get past this, even as cliche this sounds, for the children.

I've started getting into socio-economic diversity, and having some success pushing it as a diversity characteristic at work. Whatever your other diversity characteristics are, coming from a lower socio-economic background just makes things harder.

Because DEI efforts come from the Ivies that are vestiges of class privilege. It's hard for people to recognize they can be oppressed as well as oppressor, privileged and disadvantaged at the same time. Even though this is the entire point of intersectionality, it's still hard to be self-aware.

The thought leaders of intersectionality, by virtue of their thought-leadership, have a privilege and a reach almost nobody else has. This does not discredit them, but it's awkward to acknowledge that those who preach about privilege are sometimes meaningfully more privileged than the people they preach to.

When people point out this privilege it looks like derailing from their perspective. Because when unprivileged people talk about oppression nobody pays attention to them, but when privileged people talk about it their privilege is then used to discredit their arguments. They can't win!

This exact effect poisons discussions about wealth inequality. When poor people talk about inequality they're ignored because they're sore losers. Rich people are ignored because they must be virtue-signaling hypocrites.

It’s easier to hang out with different colors of people from your social class and pretend like you’ve solved all the problems in diversity. People from lower classes also have icky views that don’t align with yours so no thanks!

This is a complicated question, but at least one aspect of it is that American culture has always had an incredibly difficult time admitting there is such a thing as social and economic class division and confronting it head on.

At least some of this is probably cultural, it's part of our foundational myth that we broke the rigid class structures of the old world countries and we want to believe that is true. There is of course at least some kernel of truth to it, in some sense, for some kinds of people, historically speaking.

The other reason is that there has been a multi-generational extremely well funded initiative to cultivate media and public opinion against the idea. It's everywhere and is the basis of much of the "culture war" signaling we see around us. Examples include the idea that driving a pickup truck or avoiding lattes is some kind of meaningful class marker, rather than things like who owns and controls the capital of this country.

That effort has been highly effective, in part because it's been well executed and in part because of the total collapse of the concept of a labor party in this country, leaving us with two parties ruled by different professional classes.

Because the people hired in diversity programs and to run diversity programs are more extreme outliers in wealth relative to the groups they represent than the mean non-diverse candidate. Diversity outreach largely benefits the 1% of black people.

your employer doesn't want you talking about social class because they're the ones who have to pay you enough to get out of one class into another. It's much easier if they talk about your DIE 'identity' instead of paying you more.

It's starting to get traction. For instance, this is a government-sponsored organisation in the UK trying to encourage it in banking: https://www.progresstogether.co.uk/our-purpose/

There are similar orgs for consulting and law. Not heard of any for the FAANG/start-up/tech world.

Thanks for the link. I'll keep this in mind next time I try to force the issue. If it's already gaining traction in the banking sector tech has no excuse.

No worries. I've started an Employee Resource Group for it an my current place. As someone else said, socio-economic mobility is the tide that raises all boats.

Because the focus on ID Pol came after Occupy Wall Street started threatening the people in charge, by changing the focus from class to race, sex, and sexual orientation they manage to keep the middle and lower classes fighting each other instead of pushing against the fact that during COVID was saw some of the largest redistribution of wealth imaginable in this country.

Social class, attractiveness, intelligence, charisma, mental health, physical health, luck, etc. all play a big role in your success in life but we don't try to equalize those at all.

Race and gender are probably just really easy to quantify vs "we have a program to make sure we hire people who are dumb, ugly and socially awkward".

Not even joking, we should have affirmative action for ugly people. Everything they have they had to work twice as hard as attractive people for.

You can’t see social class. Social class barely exists as a politically relevant group identity. None of this is about justice. It’s about distributing spoils to politically relevant groups. People don’t care because there’s no benefit to them or their political coalition.

Because people believe that social class is your own fault. That people can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they weren't lazy. Not that I agree with this.

This. In US especially, the thought processes around race are just ...catastrophically delusional due to our terrible history with it. And by that I mean it seems to reduce us to rituals like DEI because we simply are terrible at reckoning with it in meaningful, material ways.

But the resistance to dealing with race and class together is real, in part because class is seen as individual problem. Race is seen as more cultural, systemic, or the province a minority running around with sheets on their heads.

I've personally only seen strong efforts to dissect them both, in earnest, at the same time, in the margins of society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com