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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

Would you be okay with white and Asian people similarly applying in-group advantage towards their own races to the detriment of ours? The software interview process is capricious, but this doesn't justify racial discrimination. If we're so nonchalant about racism favoring us, we're hypocrites for criticizing racism favoring other groups over us.

I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, despite benefitting from it in a narrow and immediate sense, because it makes people justified in carrying out their own discrimination potentially to my detriment.

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>Would you be okay with white and Asian people similarly applying in-group advantage towards their own races to the detriment of ours?

This isn't a great take because there's tons of in-group advantages going on today that are deeply rooted in racial discrimination.

The U.S. is still reeling from its deeply racist housing policies. What does this have to do with this DEI thread?:

- Wealth is the highest indicator of educational attainment, and in turn education is a high indicator of wealth. [1]

- Zoning laws were explicitly racist and meant to keep out certain races from white neighborhoods. My parent's home built during the WWII era in the SFBAY had covenants attached to it that stated under no uncertain terms that no PoC may live in the home (No longer enforceable of course). The racist roots of these laws is not a matter of speculation.

- Most household wealth is through homeownership. [2]

- High quality education is tied to housing via school districts, more expensive houses are located in schools with better funding and higher quality education.

- Many zoning rules such as absurdly large minimum lot sizes, high setbacks, height limits (Designed to make it more expensive to buy for PoC in particular) remain in place today. It's a positive feedback loop where those who had an advantage are more likely to retain that advantage.

As OP stated, life isn't fair, and the rules are indeed rigged to favor those in power. Rebuking a group for using their limited advantages while ignoring the plethora of advantages for those up top isn't very equitable.

[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017....

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

There's different reasons we design different systems to combat discrimination or lop-sided outcomes. White and Asian people, if that is their only identifying class characteristic, are not discriminated against generally. An argument could be made that white and Asian people from poor backgrounds don't make it into programming as much, but again - class lines. We probably should compensate for class more in discrimination laws.

Black and Hispanic people do face more active discrimination. That has to do more with outward appearance and last names.

Vets on the other hand are an example of a lop-sided outcome. It was discovered a while back that most vets often went into blue collar professions and didn't really climb that many ladders. They instituted a rule where campaign badge holders and disabled vets must have their resumes reviewed first. Working on the west coast I can attest it's rare to see vets at all. I've met more vets from non-US military in the tech world than I have from my own country (not complaining, but worth noting). There's definitely a small contingent of people who would put their political disposition into hiring if they saw a candidate was a vet, but military are coached to chop their military experience from their resume once they have a stack of experience to avoid this.

All that to say, if I were OP I would not be okay with what you proposed just on a facade basis. If it incorporated class distinctions I might agree.

I don't think I've ever been discriminated against for being Latin. Quite the contrary, I likely had significant advantages on account of my race in university admissions. I'm not sure if I've had such advantages in tech hiring, as I don't outwardly advertise my Latin identity precisely because I don't want progressive race-realists to use it as a factor in hiring, but if they did find it it probably did help.

Unlike military service which has a discrete set of experiences and criteria, race is just something you're born with.

Every story is going to be different I think. Having tools that marginally shift our statistical outcomes makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense to me is the people who propose specific proportions as a set of diversity criteria, as it's difficult to determine what those proportions should be. At the moment I think most people are comfortable saying, "better than what they are".

It also stands out in my mind that most of these statistics rely on self-identification. I don't know if anyone's dug into the validity of self-identification.

If the current representation is X% and you want it to be "better" than what they are then you're just implicitly setting a quota of (X+1)%.

> Asian people, if that is their only identifying class characteristic, are not discriminated against generally.

Harvard would like a word with you.

But in all seriousness, Asians face the discrimination of being perceived as foreign and “the other” more so compared to other racial minorities. So the claim that they generally don’t face discrimination is not true.

Yeah, poor choice of words on my part. They don't face discrimination in hiring. They make up a fairly large chunk of tech engineering.

Ah, well, I didn't want to go on some long tangent. I'm sure elsewhere in the thread people are hashing out the pros and cons of giving underrepresented people an unfair advantage.

I just wanted to say that I don't think anyone should feel bad or like an impostor if they manage to get their foot in the door some way other than the traditional routes: you get lucky on a coding quiz, your dads meet at the country club, you bust your hump for 10 years in crappy jobs to work your way up to a good one, etc.

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