A Uber DEI exec placed on leave after hosting event “Don't Call Me Karen”
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
What the hell is even a DEI exec? If you want diversity, that’s something your existing HR head can handle…any DEI executive is a plain grifter. It’s the same sector that produces authors like Ibram Kendi earning hundreds of thousands from their BS books or that BLM foundation founder who spent donations on real estate because, of course, running an organization is not her skill set, it’s grifting.
As an outsider to DEI groups, I've never noticed that kind of infighting. But maybe they just kept it behind closed doors.
Of hundreds of slack channels one of the few that was private was the "Diversity, equity, and *inclusion*" channel.
The fact that it's behind closed doors is all you need to know.
I'm one of the least likely persons to defend DEI initiatives.
But I could imagine legit reasons for certain DEI channels to be private. E.g., if they're used to discuss potential HR responses to employee complaints.
There’s a lot more to DEI than potential complaints and limiting inclusion just to protect that small percentage seems counterproductive.
It's certainly plausible.
FWIW, I wasn't sure that the aforementioned DEI channel had a good reason for being private. I was just responding to the "that's all I need to know" assertion.
> They’re engineering Trust and manufacturing a facade of safety. The fact that these teams exist is all you need to know.
When, in fact, Trust and Safety is an extremely common department for larger organizations to have, and it deals with ensuring the platform is safe and trustworthy.
In your case, I wouldn’t at all be surprised that the channel was for DEI volunteers to coordinate events or something along those lines.
If your existing HR head has been handling it for years, and you still haven't made any significant progress, appointing a person in charge of DEI is something that the CEO does to be able to say "hey, we're doing something about it".
DEI goals are so vague as to be non-existent which make it possible to continue to use DEI as a moniker on the path towards ideological obedience.
If you are really interested in where this all comes from I'd suggest perusing James Lindsay's New Discourses which is centred around this subject. DEI finds its origin in Critical Social Justice which in its turn is an offshoot from "Theory" [1], short for "critical [2] postmodern theory". New Discourses is full of references which makes it possible to trace back anything found there to its source - which is more or less all that Lindsay does, he starts at some academic utterance related to this subject and traces the references back to their roots.
In particular, DEI (we're almost always referring to what I'd call "institutional DEI", a particular organizational orthodoxy about proactive inclusion and avoidance of bigotry") is not, in fact, an offshoot of Critical Theory, or Critical Postmodern Theory, or Critical Social Justice, or Critical Race Theory, and the point where you're pretending you can distinguish these things in a tweet (some of them are actually at odds with each other!), you've already given away the game.
Stop looking at the messenger and start concentrating on the message. In this case my question was centred around the absence of anything to support your statements around the origins of "DEI" while Lindsay's statements check out due to the lengthy trail all the way back to the 1800's. Do you have anything to support your statements, anything free from circular references where A says B as supported by C where C says B because A says so? Where does DEI come from according to you?
I'd look at the spaces vs tabs or text editor conflicts as a sign that this behavior is not limited to DEI folk.
I think DEI is critically important for organizations as missing out of ideas because someone is discriminated against is a disadvantage for the organization. But I think this is really hard and threatens people in their positions who don’t want to be fired and don’t want to lose hiring authority. So lots of superficial things are done (like hiring DEI officers and lots of training).
I think it’s much harder to change culture and think that people need to internalize and adapt rather than having ineffective and distracting policies (eg, every position must interview one minority or every department must have a minority leader, etc ).
>“We have heard that many of you are in pain and upset by yesterday’s Moving Forward session,” the email said. “While it was meant to be a dialogue, it’s obvious that those who attended did not feel heard.”
>Employees greeted the news that Ms. Lee was stepping away as a sign that Uber’s leadership was taking their complaints seriously. One employee wrote that the company’s executives “have heard us, they know we are hurting, and they want to understand what all happened too.”
Let me get this straight. Employees are "in pain" and "hurting" and "feeling not heard" because the head of DEI (who happens to be an Asian woman) said that people should be sensitive and not use the term "Karen" as a casual slur against white women who actually represent a broad spectrum of experiences? I consider myself progressive, but it feels like we've completely jumped the shark with some of this stuff.
Many people will be familiar with the "Karen" meme through the various news stories of a woman calling the cops on a person of color who's neither breaking the law nor acting suspicious. But other people know "Karen" as a stereotypically entitled woman (yes, probably white) likely to demand a manager, a refund, whatever. Nothing explicitly connected with race (except her own).
So on the one hand, you have "Karen" as a way of calling out racism by white women. On the other, you have a stereotype of an entitled woman that leans very much on her whiteness but not her own racist behavior.
Taking the former interpretation to be some kind of factual truth is ridiculous. There is no official single definition of "Karen", no official alignment on some "wrong vs right kind of racism" axis. It's a meme, an amorphous collection of related ideas that no one owns or is responsible for.
I am deeply skeptical about the sudden rise of DEI "professionals" and this story does nothing to relieve it. At a minimum, you have to have empathy with people who don't share your opinion, or whose background leads them to different conclusions. Where is that here?
Wow, that's a pretty dishonest way to defend Uber by implying that this is term is only (or even mainly) used to point out racism. People should be ashamed of this revisionist nonsense, but that's too much to expect.
Most Karen memes I see are about wanting to talk to a manager over some perceived slight like not enough croutons on their $18 salad.
That Karen’s also do racist stuff is not the main point of karening.
It's not shown in the memes, but the person Karen is screaming at in those memes is usually not white.
I don’t track my meme views, but I expect I’ve seen the meme thousands of times and experienced Karen IRL dozens of times and it’s usually directed toward a person of the same race. For IRL I think it depends on where it occurs (ie, Karens in white areas are more likely to scream at whites).
This is pretty minor, but I think it’s important to accurately assign racism where it exists. If everything is racist, then it’s not as important and it’s harder to differentiate racism that is a much higher priority to stop.
That seems like an extremely dubious claim. Do you have any racial statistics for customer-facing service sector workers to back that up? In my experience, businesses in most American communities tend to hire young relatively attractive white people for these roles (there is an ageism and racism angle to their hiring, but that's beyond the point being discussed here.)
https://time.com/5857023/karen-meme-history-meaning/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/27/karen-race-whi...
Really? Business Insider's Hannah Getahun and Lloyd Lee are dishonest here right?
I thought Karen was used as a pejorative term for 50+ women among which I guess Karen is a common name. Lex Reddit.
Exactly the kind of slurs I guess a diversity officer should address. It is some sort of ageism.
But I guess break something down enough and you can make an argument for everything being offensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)#Racial_context
>Time called the meme "Internet shorthand ... for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries—following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood."University of Virginia media researcher Meredith Clark has said that the idea of a white woman in the vicinity of whom Black people feel a need to be careful because she would not hesitate to use her "privilege" at the expense of others "has always been there; it just hasn't always been so specific to one person's name".
There has not been any theme of racism.
I’m a big fan of culture change but shy away from initiatives with the express purpose of changing culture because it’s so hard to measure and attribute cause.
Many years ago I held a hackathon, a first in my org, and people said they had fun and connections were made. I had many people ask me to be on committees and groups to improve culture and I didn’t have time but paid attention to what happened. They held parties and stuff, and weren’t harmful but didn’t seem to do much. The point of my event was to hire new programmers and the fun and cultural aspects were positive byproducts.
I think you need to do specific things and then mix in culture change. Making culture the primary purpose makes it too hard to succeed.
An example of a DEI activity that I really like is focusing scholarships on HBCUs as the purpose is to get really smart people into jobs, not just to increase percentages of workers from specific races.
https://www.fatherly.com/life/male-version-of-karen-meme
And shouldn't Uber also host an event called "Don't Call Me Brogrammer?"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/25/uber-and-th...