Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Not only does an organization aimed at empowering corporate women not need to tackle racial issues, they will cause harm by trying. Affluent, educated white women have interests that are fundamentally in conflict with the interests with those of most minorities, who are disproportionately working class. And their money and power makes it inevitable that, if they meddle in those issues, they will distort and disrupt organic movements by and within those minority groups.

For example, black people are the most likely of any racial group to express the traditional view that being able to provide for a family is very important for a man: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/20/americans-s.... Among women without a college degree, which disproportionately includes racial minorities, fully 44% would prefer a homemaker role to working outside the home: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer.... There’s lots of black women who would prefer the return of good union jobs so that they wouldn’t have to work outside the home. This is not surprising—if a career that confers power and money and social status isn’t realistically an option for you (and it will never be for the majority of people) then your other options look much different!

Whenever affluent white people parachute into stuff like this, the minorities involved inevitably become a canvas for them to project their own interests and motivations. And varying interests within those minority groups get swept aside in favor of whatever happens to line up with those of the white people with money and power. It’s bad and wrong.

Or it's a way to increase your status while not doing your actual job. "Look at how moral I am!". I'm wondering how long this crap will continue. I'm hoping it becomes a cliche and embarrassing soon.

The elaborate and nonsensical (and costly) virtue/fitness-signaling will only continue to escalate, because just like with clothing fashions, the difficulty and cost of staying in the trendy vanguard is the entire point. Scott Alexander (and probably others) had a pretty good analysis of the phenomenon.

Let's see how economy will do... If things get very tight I think there might be hope that corporations will focus on more important things. Like good products and making profit.

You might have a point here, maybe the era of cheap money funded this nonsense.

I am taken aback because I'm a hard leftist and almost always disagree with your sentiments, but . . . I agree with that, mostly.

The middle paragraph needs a bunch of caveats and explanations and exceptions based on our political views and media we pay attention to, but yes, right on.

White liberals in America actively and passively coopt and undermine non-white minorities in general, and absolutely the black community, specifically. Even FDR screwed black people. Thank FDR for implementing real estate red-lining as we know it, for example, while well-meaning liberals elevated poor white people to the middle class and put them in their own houses.

Yes, these things are bad and wrong. And they're also largely taboo.

The very good book "The Color of Law" doesn't pull its punches about how much stuff FDR did that was harmful to black people: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten.... But with FDR, at least you had a traditional coalition. Black people and white segregationists voted together because--even with redlining, etc.--both groups benefited from federal investment into what was at the time a very poor south. George Wallace was a pro-labor, New Deal Democrat.

That coalition politics is still powerful. Joe Biden is president because Jim Clyburn rallied black southern voters in the Democratic Primary. But to a great degree, the minority politics has been co-opted by white liberals in academia, the media, NGOs, and corporations. Any minority voices in the mix are either hand-picked by white liberals (e.g. professors at prestigious universities) or depend on white liberal donors (e.g. NGOs). Advocacy is coded as "black" or "Muslim" or "Asian" even if it has no meaningful support from black, Muslim, or Asian voters. That advocacy reflects what white liberals already wanted, whether or not it has any nexus to what people in those minority groups want. It also reflects trade-offs in terms tone, willingness to compromise, etc., that reflects the attitudes of affluent white people with no skin in the game.

And often, those efforts are downright self-serving--diversifying the ranks of corporate executives and board members, while continuing to ship the lower-skilled jobs disproportionately held by minorities, to the benefit of overwhelmingly white shareholders.

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