Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.

My point isn't that anyone disagreeing with a particular suggestion is arguing in bad faith, it's that there are enough bad faith arguments that it becomes effectively impossible to have a productive discussion.

> Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage. For that matter, am I an exhausted person who is simply tired of accusations of "wokeism" being thrown at me when I advocate for basic respect and decency, or am I a bad faith actor who tried to sneak an outrageous claim into a reasonable sounding post in order to undermine people who are in favor of DEI programs by making them all sound unreasonable? I may know that I'm simply exhausted, cynical, and seeing a steadily increasing amount of anti-DEI rhetoric here, but such is the state of discourse that there's no way for you to know for sure one way or another.

Personally I’d focus on arguments instead of motivations and skip arguing with those were it seems it will be or when it becomes unproductive.

> Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage.

Or perhaps your experiences on DEI run contrary to the typical experiences of other people? You seem awfully eager to call other commenters bad faith or misinformed, but do little in the way of introspection. It reminds me of an old joke:

Someone sees on the news live coverage of a car driving the wrong way down the freeway their spouse uses to commute. Worried, they call their spouse to warn them, "honey there's a car driving down the freeway, be careful!"

"It's not one, there's hundreds of them!"

As for myself, "DEI" has been a thinly veiled dogwhistle for illegal hiring policies at 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at for the last 10 years. Examples in include: explicitly designating segment of headcount as exclusive to certain races and genders, setting specific percentage quotas on the basis of protected class (and these quotas were well above industry-wide representation of these groups), and constructing separate hiring pipelines depending on race and gender.

However, I'm not going to accuse people who have different or opposing views on DEI as acting in bad faith. 75% of the companies I've worked at used DEI as a dogwhistle for illegal policies, but that's still a very narrow slice of the world at large. I'm not going to allege that people are being disingenuous or acting in bad faith because I recognize that people have different experiences with DEI and can arrive at vastly different opinions on the acronym while acting entirely in good faith. I suggest you do the same.

> when I advocate for basic respect and decency

Try using those words instead of the woke buzzwords. Everyone else is having the same reaction to "DEI"/etc that you're having to their common arguments.

Anyone still using the term "woke" in a serious discussion at this point is using a thought terminating cliche.

(I still catch myself using it sometimes, and will try to do better.)

> Anyone still using the term "woke" in a serious discussion at this point is using a thought terminating cliche.

In December 2020, New Republic published an essay by the African-American Marxist Adolph Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania), entitled "Beyond the Great Awokening: Reassessing the legacies of past black organizing" [0] in which he criticises "the Woke".

Now, you may or may not agree with his criticisms, but he is not using "a thought terminating cliche". On the contrary, he means something quite specific by it: a contemporary form of progressive politics which prioritises race over class, as opposed to Reed's own classic Marxism which prioritises class over race.

I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it.

But, on the other hand, I think the phenomenon which Reed labels as "Woke" is a real thing, and if we aren't to call it "Woke", what then should we call it? I get the impression that some people don't want to let people call it anything, as part of a strategy to put it beyond criticism.

[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...

> I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it.

This is the point I was trying to make.

I agree with you that it is best avoided whenever possible.

However, I think the other points I made, that (a) some invocations of it are legitimate, and (b) it serves a useful purpose in labelling a real phenomenon, for which we don't have any widely accepted alternative label – still stand.

So avoiding using the word is a good heuristic, not an algorithm.

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