Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

>but creating townhall meetings and parading your black/brown employees around like show ponies is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling.

It doesn't just undermine the self-esteem of a PoC, it undermines the self-esteem of white folks, too. Hiring or promoting people due to their skin color is just wrong, no matter what skin color that is. As a white dude, seeing my PoC teammates in the past celebrated not for their accomplishments, but for something they had no control over (their skin color) is sad.

"John in Engineering is really talented, and works his tail off daily. He has come up with some really ingenious solutions to tough problems that have allowed us to grow as a company....but we're celebrating him because he's black, not because he's a kickass engineer". Seen things like this before, which make no sense. Celebrating an employee who is awesome at their job for being awesome at their job is great. You're a company, after all, not a social club. The goal is to grow and make money. Celebrate anyone who can do help with that, regardless if they are black, white, yellow, orange, green, pink, whatever.

Diversity is cool, but when it's put into practice and not shouted from the rooftops, it's even better.

> PoC

> White folks

I just want to mention that one of the worst aspects of all this is trying to sort people according to (here apparently a binary) label. There is not really such thing as either of these categories - it's stereotyping of the worst kind, and takes us back many generations

I’ll never forget a coworker explaining to me that in America she’s PoC, but back home she’s white. That really blew my mind.

> I’ll never forget a coworker explaining to me that in America she’s PoC, but back home she’s white. That really blew my mind.

I think that's a huge and extremely valuable lesson.

That's because there is no such thing as "white" ethnicity. It is a word used to categorize us vs other. This is not my theory, afaik it's a fact. A fact which seems to upset a lot people. Based on previous conversations, it appears to be the most controversial knowledge which I posses.

The generally accepted "white" ethnic groups have changed over time. Irish people were once not "white" in the USA. Neither were Slavic people. These two groups have the some of the lightest colored skin known to man.

No one is white. Some people pass for white.

On that topic, there’s a fascinating essay by Benjamin Franklin explaining how Germans aren’t sufficiently white* and shouldn’t be allowed in America in such vast numbers.

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid=85&...

> What is perhaps most striking about Franklin's essay today is his sophisticated use of "social science" data to convince the British ministry to alter its colonial policies. Particularly jarring, however, is Franklin's plea that America be maintained as an entirely Anglo-Saxon society.

*This was probably a few centuries before one would use the word “white” in this context. Too many pale folk who don’t qualify. It was more about calling out ethnicities directly as people still do in Europe.

It gets even worse, where people are pushing for BIPoC instead of just people of color, indicating that black and indigenous are of primary import, and the rest of the non whites are relegated to "other people of color"

The goal of the bipoc label is to exclude asians from diversity stuff.

Yellow is not a color? I always assumed that Asians are included in PoC.

What we learned in school decades ago is no longer considered correct by some people. Also logic is not a strong point of DEI people, for them math is racist [0] and logic is the basis of most math, so it is also racist.

Also white is a color and white people are not even white, but pink [1].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29650790

[1]https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pink_skin

Technically, white is all colors.

It seems that some Asians are already over-represented in certain fields, like sciences. I heard somewhere that being Chinese makes your chances of admission worse.

Side issue, but I grew up in Sweden thinking asians have yellow skin.

After living and working with asians for decades in the Bay area, I have yet to meet a yellow one. To my eye, they're on the same white(pink)-brown-black spectrum as the rest of humanity.

Well yeah...

White people are pale to darkly tanned

Natives Americans are brown, not red

Black people are brown, not black, some not even very brown

Indian people are shades of brown too, and yet can be far darker than "black" people.

Japanese people are brown, not yellow

None of the colloquial color terms for races are accurate when you sit down and think about it.

The one time it might have been accurate is redheads are often pale enough to be white, so of course we call them gingers/redheads.

It's all a bit silly.

So are Black and Indigenous. The point is to lump Asians into "other" and only pay lip service to their inclusion.

Unless the goal is to make political hay of asians getting assaulted on subways, in which case asians are "people of color" who are "victims of white supremacy."

I always understood bipoc to be used primarily in places where either black people or indigenous people (usually both) had way more oppression than any other race. America is a good example of where bipoc makes way more sense, because they literally stole indigenous kids right out of their homes and built an economy on making a race of people into property. There's something to be said that there wasn't a case where all indian people who immigranted to america systematically had a generation of their children taken, shoved into a school where many of them were renamed, abused, starved, raped, experimented on, and eventually died there, never to see their families again.

Oh heck, let's not even address that saying "people of color" is respectful, but "colored people" is racist.

I'm assuming good faith, and that you truly don't understand the difference. I'd be curious to know if it's because you're old enough to remember when "colored" was "fine", or too young to have an understanding of the racist usage of "colored".

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-da...

"While the distinctions can be complicated, the information is readily available for anyone willing to seek it out. That means reading and having meaningful conversations with people of different races."

Sorry, both are racist--they're just two almost identical ways to say "not white." It's a term that gets used primarily by white people--most black people consider themselves black, not "poc," most Guatemalans consider themselves as such, not "poc," etc.--to erase all the differences and distinct interests between all these groups and reduce them to really the only think they have in common: that they're not white.

That’s similar to how “Asian” is used. Ask a Vietnamese person if they would include themselves in a group of Chinese people.

Asia is half of earths population, so “Asian” cannot possibly mean anything.

Yet the NAACP...

For anyone not aware, it stands for The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, when polite society was at "colored people" on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill for "African Americans". Or are we fully at BIPOC now?

> Yet the NAACP...

TFA I linked to explicitly addresses this.

This is genuinely one of the less helpful comments I've seen on HN.

Instead of simply saying the reason is 'X' or even providing a link to a resource that explains why. You have linked to an article that can be fairly summarized as "Educate yourself".

This is possible even less helpful than LMGTFY link.

> You have linked to an article that can be fairly summarized as "Educate yourself".

And crucially, provides a reading list for doing so. I posted this understanding that anyone not interested in educating themselves is not going to find prescriptive recommendations for doing so useful.

That reading list is a who's who of insane woke ideologues.

What I truly understand is that if it is racist to say "colored person", then switching the terms around on the euphemism treadmill doesn't fix anything.

Give it another decade, and I promise you that BIPOC will be a racial slur. I've just ditched it ahead of time, so I won't have to write apologies about how I "didn't know better back then."

Didn't you get the memo? We cannot "move forward" until we properly asses people based the the fantastically shallow marker that is skin color!

> He has come up with some really ingenious solutions to tough problems that have allowed us to grow as a company....but we're celebrating him because he's black, not because he's a kickass engineer

The soft bigotry of low expectations.

Why are you making the assumption that they added a silent "for a PoC" on the end of the first statement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com