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I think moreso than specifically meaning JeanHeyd was target as such due to race, the implication was rather that since JeanHeyd had previously raised that the lack of diveristy in speakers at the conf. was an issue, some members voting on this may have held onto that.

But, it's ironic (and sad) that the same person who raised the issue of diversity in speakers - who would have been the first PoC doing a keynote - was treated like rubbish and essentially pushed out to the point they no longer feel comfortable being part of it at all. It's also interesting to note that while the issues the voting body had with their talk was solely to do with the content of the talk, it begs the question of if any other participant would be treated the same way in dealing with that issue arising. In my experience it's not uncommon for that sort of irony to play out, but that's purely anecdotal.

Also, of course white is a colour but I've always seen PoC as a slightly more language-open alternative to the previously commonly used "non-white" which feels notably like language from an era long past.

There are a few reasons that people prefer the term nonwhite over POC in certain contexts, and I think most people using it are using it intentionally because of them. The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing:

> Political scientist Angelo Falcón argues that the use of broad terms like "person of color" is offensive because it aggregates diverse communities and projects "a false unity" that "obscure[s] the needs of Latinos and Asians".[39][40]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color

Another criticism I've heard is that the terminology for POC originated among black activists during the civil rights movement in the US who were reclaiming the term "colored" used in the Jim Crow/segregation era, and so it's only really appropriate for black people to use.

The former term (nonwhite) is iffy too, but sometimes it's a better descriptor

To be clear, I haven't heard many people voicing the second criticism -- I think most people using "nonwhite" subscribe to the former point of view

> The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing:

By that logic, white would be homgenizing as well, or? Someone from Prague has little in common with a person from Massachusetts or St. Petersburg.

Yes! You get it. The difference is that “white” is constructed as an in-group identifier, that has been adapted as needed to include previously non-white groups such as Jews and Italians.

I'd look towards stratified sampling to think more formally around the issue.

POC is homogonizing because it's reducing the space from N strata to 2: white and non-white, blending n-1 strata.

Per wikipedia:

> Stratification is the process of dividing members of the population into homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should define a partition of the population. That is, it should be collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive: every element in the population must be assigned to one and only one stratum. Then simple random sampling is applied within each stratum

Using this definition, white and non-white are mutually exclusive, while location of origin forms a different axis for comparison.

In more social sciences, you might look to intersectionality for an explanation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling

[1] https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resour...

I fail to see how non white doesn't also reduce the strata to 2, however. Where is the third stratum?

Moreover, who is white or non-white is political: currently a certain blood quantum is necessary for being American Indian; yet, in recent history under the one drop rule, for African Americans it was the inverse. The difference is material, as former was entitled to a say in land on a reservation, while the latter did not.

I'm pretty sure "person of colour" means literally the same thing as "non white" in the US, I find it hard to care about such minor differences in phrasing.

It’s annoying but important for those of us grappling with the long term effects of slavery and segregation and continued anti-blackness.

Yeah I'd tend to agree with the issues it being a homogenizing term as a whole (ie. often used awkwardly), however in this context where we're using it in order to refer to homogenization (that being, those who have had historically less power in white/male dominated industry), it seems a little softer of a homogenizing term as compared to 'non-white'.

Although, my perspective is of course informed by how I've internalized my local community use this language in certain ways. In South Africa, where white people are just 8% of the population, it seems stranger to make reference to the subject through that caveat rather than in, say, a US context the inverse may seem more uncontroversially worded.

Interestingly, as a side, I'm considered coloured in South Africa - a term taken on here by mixed race folks as a disambiguation of the American term, in a similar fashion to how you describe the origin of the PoC term.

PoC feeling like language from an era long past when

An 'era long passed' perhaps? Can't quite figure that one out. I think I was looking for the term 'bygone era' but couldn't think of it.

I agree with your statement as a whole but have a small nitpick (on your small nitpick)

> as if white is not a color

But ‘person of color’ doesn’t include white people in the same way that ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t include racism against Arabs. Yes, Arabs are also of Semitic descent, and yes white is a color, the meanings are not one-to-one mapped from their components. To deny that is to deny large portions of the English language.

Yup. The actual meaning of a composite symbol cannot in general be guessed from its constituent elements.

This is pernicious in languages where the writing system has even a little of such character, and leads to stuff like e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22

It's OK to use this sort of playing with words in your stand-up routine, (e.g. Tylor Tomlinson's "Lot of my friends are settling down. Some are just settling, period, end of sentence") in a song, a book title, that sort of thing, but we shouldn't pretend we've got a serious argument here, we've got a coincidence maybe, at best.

Not to mention the fact that construction can be messy for other reasons. I present a bit from George Carlin's routine on airline announcements:

"Here's one they just made up: Near miss. When two planes almost collide, they call it a near miss. It's a near hit! A COLLISION is a near miss. explosion sound Look, they nearly missed! YES, BUT NOT QUITE!"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22

As a (somewhat) native Chinese speaker, the contents of this page is kind of confusing to me, because as far as I can tell, the original saying sounds correct, or at least not wrong.

If you search online for the phrase "有危就有機" (literally meaning: where there is danger there is opportunity) you'll see many results. It's a common saying (that said this could be due to influence by the English world, who knows).

It's true that "機" by itself can have different meanings, and "in isolation" probably should mean 'change point' rather than 'opportunity'... but that's kind of splitting hairs since the meanings kind of blend together. Also, in Mandarin I don't recall seeing any use of "機" "in isolation", making the claim rather contrived. In my native Cantonese, "機" in isolation usually means "機會" i.e. chance or opportunity.

I also observe that the wikipedia page points to non-Chinese sources that "debunk" the myth. I have no idea why they felt the need to be so pedantic about this case... Meanwhile, on social media we routinely see quotes attributed to Confucius, and sometimes it's a fun game trying to figure out whether the quote was legit, poorly translated, or completely made up :P

"somewhat" is a strange word to use in this context and probably warrants more explanation. Are you perhaps a child immigrant, and so you have a few early years of exposure in an environment with Cantonese everywhere and then moved somewhere else?

Yes an English Wikipedia article will tend to cite English text on the subject, because the assumption would be that it's mostly being read by people in English so text written in another language is less accessible. Also the quote it's debunking is English (it's by US President John F Kennedy), not Chinese.

Ah yes. It's strange but I can explain.

Cantonese is a bit different from the "standard" Mandarin Chinese, so that's one factor. I also grew up in a very bilingual environment in Hong Kong, and had a short stint living abroad during my younger years (I started primary school in Australia, so I basically learned to write in English before I learned to write in Chinese.)

My schooling is like 80% in English, and even today with bilingual documents I read things much faster in English than Chinese.

Thanks for explaining what you meant by "somewhat". One of the people whose opinion about JFK's quote gets a lot of play is Victor Mair, Victor thinks it'd be better to focus on teaching Pinyin rather than get Chinese kids to invest so heavily in the Han writing system which makes alphabetic systems look trivial - and if you're willing I'd be interested in what you think of that as somebody who learned the Latin alphabetic writing system (for English) first, but was heavily exposed to spoken Cantonese much before that.

Learning the Han characters is difficult, and for a foreigner learning the language, if you mostly want to communicate verbally it's quite obvious which the easy path is.

But for native Chinese children, learning Han characters is a matter of cultural identity :) Also, once you've spent the time learning it, the ability to comprehend ancient Chinese texts up to ~2500 years old is pretty nice. Most people don't need to do this (but I do), but it's kind of a culturally accepted overhead of keeping the cultural continuity. I think most learned Chinese teachers recognize this "problem", but it's just accepted as a fact of life, and I don't think it's gonna change any time soon.

I personally paid this "cost" too, Chinese was my most dreaded subject in school, and I while I never had any issue recognizing/reading characters, I couldn't hold them all in my head and I'd often forget how to write random characters (up to this day it happens - and I've written a lot of stuff). It's not a problem now because on a computer/phone I can type the pronunciation and I'd find what I wanted, but still.

FWIW, note that in the countries that used to be influenced by Chinese Han culture (Vietnam, Korea, Japan), they all used to have some form of Han character writing system, which then they subsequently switched (fully or partly) to a pronunciation based system. Outsiders rightly think we're nuts to keep the existing system, but it's just not gonna change.

Agreed - see Etymological Fallacy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy>

> ‘person of color’ doesn’t include white people

In most contexts, it doesn’t include Asian people either.

I'm generally not a fan of the way people go about D&I, but the fact JeanHeyd has brought up the problem before makes it more pertinent.

Whoever on the Rust team made the decision to reach out and downgrade JeanHeyd's talk seems extremely incompetent.

Optics matter a lot here and a large portion of leadership roles is optics. It's careless to not take context into account, like the recent history of poor Rust-related optics (E.g. trademark thing) and JeanHeyd (The person they invited) talking about lack of black representation.

They actually speak to this somewhat (rting + acknowledging someone else's commentary on the issue mentioning the same) on Twitter. If you view their tweet history and linked tweet, you'll see that they speak a bit to the sorry state of representation at these conferences in general

https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662511693136637952

I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, to be clear, but in my mind, leaving the burden of pointing out inequity to victims of it isn't great either. I guess a less problematic approach would be reaching out to that person directly to see if they feel like that's what happened, and how they'd like others to respond if so

FWIW, JeanHeyd did mention the issue themselves as well after a while[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662511693136637952

Only to say

> I haven't even considered this angle until this [other] person's tweet.

> "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever)

You might want to look into the historical basis for this term before you make snarky comments about it. It comes across as dismissive. My understanding is the term "person of color" evolved from "colored" (which originally just meant black (in America at least)) and now encompasses non-white people.

"Colored" is now considered offensive by most, so why isn't "person of color" also viewed the same way? Both terms describe the same opressive system of nonsense racial hierarchy, after all.

This strange dichotomy caught-out Benedict Cumberbatch some years back https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/26/benedict-cum...

I don't have a great answer to this other than "language evolves". Your comment could also be extended to other terms that have gone out of favor, such as "Negro" being replaced by "African American" and more recently "Black". I'm not a linguist nor a historian so I can't comment extensively on the "why" of this evolution.

It's complex but the reductionist explanation is that it is in part due to the euphemism treadmill, and in part etymological origin. "Colored" comes from the era of segregation, while "people of color" comes after.

But don't get too comfortable, as "people of color" will probably phase out soon as well. My money is first on "BIPOC" (as an initialism, usually sounding out the letters), giving way to "bipoc" (as an acronym, lower case, pronounced /baı-pok/). But I'm too white to make that call, just a guess based on linguistics patterns.

Even "BIPOC" is not without controversy. But afaik, no one has proffered an adequate word to describe "folks that have too much melanin to be considered white".

https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/08/colored-person-vers...

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/918418825/is-it-time-to-say-r...

> But afaik, no one has proffered an adequate word to describe "folks that have too much melanin to be considered white".

Such a word is not necessary or desirable, because the categorization system it supports is not meaningful or useful.

Of course it's necessary and desirable. The "categorization system" in question already exists, whether it ought to or not. Bipoc have a more difficult socioeconomic situation, because of their skin color. Should "LGBTQ+" as a category not exist, because they are people just like straight people?

It is useful and meaningful to talk about the plight and state of, and advocate for, "Group XYZ that has been marginalized and experienced systemic violence throughout history, specifically because they are XYZ"

All of these people are "bipoc", supposedly:

- Dark-skinned descendant of American slaves, living in the US

- Dark-skinned recent immigrant to US from Africa, whose parents were important government officials, and one of whose distant ancestors sold slaves to Europeans

- Descendant of Navajo Indians

- Descendant of indigenous Hawaiians

- Descendant of Japanese Hawaiians

- Decendant of Japanese immigrants from turn of 20th century, who were interned in a camp during the war

- Japanese immigrant who moved to US in 2005, for university

- Son of migrant Mexican farmworkers

- Descendant of conquistadores whose parents were top executives in a large Mexican corporation

- Lebanese Muslim immigrant

- Lebanese Christian immigrant

- And so on…

What interesting characteristic do these people all have in common, that "white" people don't also share? Absolutely nothing, other than that they don't tick the "non-Hispanic white" box on stupid USian forms.

It is transient and fleeting, and it has little to do with melanin. People of Jewish descent, Italians, and even the Irish, used to be considered non-white at various points in the last 100 years in the USA. People whose skin is almost white can still be considered black if, say, one of their grandparents was black. But people whose skin is dark at the end of the summer are nevertheless white as long as it turns pale during winter.

“Person of color” can be found in legal documents going back to the early 1800’s. There’s no “evolution” here. It’s all for political purposes. “Colored people” became “black ”became “African Americans” became “Black” (capital B). “People of color” is more broad and used to form a progressive coalition against “whiteness”, or rather the Western European tradition. In fact you could argue PoC doesn’t include Blacks as BIPOC is the fresh term to convince non-white people and so-called “white allies” to organize together so as to obtain power against the white oppressors.

Yes, when you examine the history here it appears neurotic, paranoid, and divisive. But I’m sure a few people have been able to acquire a slice of power from exploiting it.

The rest of us will just continue to politely smile and nod and then roll our eyes and smirk as we turn away.

Can we not? That point you're picking on was one sentence in the post ("As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.")

Trying to expand it into a giant anti-anti-anti-woke frame is a little distasteful. Even if you're one of the people who thinks any discussion of race is racist, can't you just accept that some people view lack of diversity as a problem worth noting and leave it at that? It's evidence, right? Certainly "Rust has never had a non-white speaker" seems like a problem, even if it's not. It's not wrong to note it in passing in the context of another argument.

It was a small part of the post and I think it was explained fairly. It's part of the context, and they don't think it should be ignored. JeanHeyd doesn't have to have mentioned it (or even thought about it) for it to be considered relevant by someone else.

The behaviour is disrespectful regardless of colour, yes. But someone's skin colour does influence other people's behaviour.

"White" is rather emphatically not like other ethnic or racial labels. Throughout the history of the US, who counts as "white" has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time. In the era of the founding fathers, the Irish, Spaniards, Italians, all considered not white. Then during various times, often driving by waves of immigration of some other ethnicity people were freaking out about, drive a process to include them in whiteness as allies against the new threat.

There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested. Otherwise I just want to warn you that the way you phrase this comes across as rather ignorant and stepping on the border of racism.

> Throughout the history of the US

Is the US the world's only country?

Throughout the history of the world, who counts as XYZ has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time.

I recall when we stopped being Yugoslavian, and started shooting at each other, as Serbs or Croats. The Russian guy sitting next me married a Ukrainian woman a decade ago. Recently Russians and Ukrainians started shooting at each other. There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Of course not, but the context is a conference in the US.

And you got it wrong. The Irish were not considered non-white. The ethnic divisions were (and are) most definitely not just White vs PoC. It used to be extremely important whether a person was a Catholic or a Protestant, for example, all other kinds of Christianity being conveniently ignored.

I liked JeanHeyd's blog because he is a good writer (but a bit on the chatty side). I also love what he does for the C standardization process. His skin colour is completely irrelevant.

> The Irish were not considered non-white.

They absolutely were and you can find writing by Ben Franklin in their own words saying so explicitly.

...Calling a PoC ignorant, lecturing them and imploring them to read about racism... whew...

Them having been on the other side of the saddle, I'd bet they're familiar. How about simply listening to what they have to say without instruction, seeing their perspective and taking it in?

I assumed nothing about the person and am simply relating history.

You're relating ideological narrative that fits your political beliefs.

Not sure what that has to do with how, in today's US society, the 'White' vs 'PoC' labels and paradigm is used by an extremely divisive and toxic 'Us vs Them' mentality. Even when completely off-topic. Which the parent was making an obvious allusion to. The fact that you even dared to threaten him with gross insinuations says a lot about you, or more broadly about the US in general.

I'm not from anywhere close to the US cultural sphere.

This aspect is one of the reasons I'm very uncomfortable with all the classification of people into races. There's always a hierarchy implied, even inside the white category, a ranking of more or less white, questionably or unquestionably white etc. It's not the world I want, I don't want to internalize these (unspoken) classifications of people.

It's not the world I want either but denying this is what exists in reality in some false appeal to "can't we just ignore race" is equivalent to saying to people who are currently discriminated against "suffer in silence."

You do what you want but I'm not going to do that.

I agreed with you up until you casually insinuated ChillBill is racist.

Like WTF? Rude. This is exactly the kind of behaviour ChillBill is talking about. Racism is a big deal. You can't just casually be throwing it in anywhere without backing up what you're saying.

What exactly did ChillBill say that borders on racism? Why does that step on the border if racism? Why are you that sure that you'd warn him/her/them?

I think your comment shows a level of ignorance on the matter that's not warranted. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You seem to genuinely care but you have not done enough work to understand the intricacies of the topic. It's a difficult one, and you don't have to if you don't want to, but to lecture me on my phrasing shows a deep level of ideological holding that you may have, I would advise you to listen/read more, and always steelman your arguments.