IBM's Red Hat Sued by Stephen Miller's Legal Group for Anti-White Male Bias | Hacker News Reader

IBM's Red Hat Sued by Stephen Miller's Legal Group for Anti-White Male Bias

finance.yahoo.com

20 pointsfreedomben25 comments

> The conservative legal group said Red Hat announced DEI goals that involved “quotas”, aiming “to remake its workforce demographic, seeking to reach 30% women globally and 30% associates of color in the United States by 2028.”

If true, this is a pretty clear case. If explicit racial and gender quotas isn't discrimination, what is? This goal could be equivalent phrased as "reduce the share of male employees below 70%, and the share of white (and probably Asian, too) below 70%".

It's unlikely to be inequitable and have discriminatory effect until the makeup of the staff are similar to that of the actual population. If the resident population is 30% minority but only 3% of the company staff are, it is neither de facto nor de jure discrimination to prioritize undoing the existing actually discriminatory workplace.

The people in the workforce are often significantly different than the general population. A quota of 50% women programmers or 50% male nurses will match the population but require a 4 to one disparity between female and male applicants.

Correcting the disparity is entirely the point.

So would a company be justified in setting a cap of 1.7% for Jewish employees? Or how about setting a quota - or "inclusion goal" or "diversity milestone" or whatever other euphemism - of 98.3% for gentiles. After all, it's just correcting the disparity.

Disparities that arise due to discrimination are a problem, and should be ameliorated by eliminating the discrimination. Anonymize applications, make zoom interviews blinded and voices masked. I'd be totally behind that.

Disparities that arise due to differences in preferences are not to be "corrected". Some cultures prize doctors more than others, "correcting" that disparity isn't eliminating discrimination, it's perpetrating it. "Correcting" software development roles to be closer to 50/50 male and female is no less sexist than setting gender quotas on pediatrician mandating fewer women in the field.

Racially discriminating against individual people to achieve a desired racial composition of your workforce isn't "undoing discrimination", it's racism and discrimination itself. It's determining somebodies worth as an employee based on the colour of their skin. IBM is simply a racist employer.

This is also de jure racism in the United States, although not most countries, because diversity quotas are specifically banned by long standing precedent. Tell me with a straight face that tying bonuses to a specific percentage of people in your department being a certain race/gender is not a quota. HR departments generally know in order to illegally satisfy quotas you are supposed to not say you're running a quota on paper, you're supposed to obscufate what you're doing things like hiring 3rd party recruiters who will do the discrimination for you, you're supposed to recruit out of certain communities in a racially bias way, and establish plausible deniability for your racism. What they did is very clearly illegal racial discrimination, and it was even before the Trump Supreme Court, and they apparently didn't run this past legal.

Now a workplace not having an equal distribution of people of different races is a red flag for racism happening, but it isn't itself racism. There's more Asians than other students at schools. Is that racism? Nope, they just tend to get higher standardised test scores, they aren't actually being favored on the basis of race. Just because a racial composition of an institution alarms people, does not in fact justify racism, and it definitely doesn't mean that racism is anti-discriminatory.

Looks like Red Hat screwed up.

You're supposed to discriminate against Gen Z white men who have never been in the workforce at the hiring stage, where they can't even prove that you discriminated against them. You aren't supposed to actually dismiss older white men who already have power and savings and employment history and insight into the internal dealings of the company. They'll sue you.

I guess IBM was tripped up by its desire for youth and hatred for its older employees though.

> Hanlon's Razor states: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence.

This is IBM we are talking about. I was laid off 5 weeks into my first job post-PhD there

Being sued by Stephen Miller is a pretty good indicator that you're doing something reasonable.

If being racist is reasonable, then reasonableness is overrated.

Are you familiar with the kinds of things Stephen Miller says? You might want to be before defending him

to get an idea, he hangs out with Steve Bannon and Roger Stone

Yeah, awful horrendous things like, "companies and universities should treat applicants without regard to protected characteristics like race, gender, and religion." Truly heinous.

one quote without context does not counter the litany of awful statements Stephen Miller has made throughout his career

It's interesting that despite repeatedly insisting that Miller has said awful things, you have yet to actually share said statements.

Because HN has rules about comments and reaction baiting that I'm not going to break

They are easy to find with a search engine if you want to learn

Do not attempt to hide behind the HN rules here, if it's not insulting another member and it's relevant to the discussion it is permitted to share bigoted quotes. Sharing Miller's statements to substantiate your claims that he's a bigot is totally within the rules.

I have searched him and did not find any bigoted quotes. Even his SPLC page only has quotes of him wanting to restrict immigration, which is a common and mainstream opinion and quite the stretch to use as an example of bigotry.

Are explicit gender and racial quotas reasonable?

Constitutional law says they are in some circumstances when practiced by the government.

IBM is not the government. And those circumstances are fairly narrow, reserved for situation where a company explicitly discriminated against applicants in the immediate past. And not the "systemic" kind of discrimination, like requiring a college degree. But explicitly refusing to hire people of a particular group.

Like most things, it depends, in this case on some combination of context, degree and purpose. I don't know the particulars of this situation, but based on my priors I'm much more inclined to believe that RH is doing something reasonable then that Stephen Miller doing something reasonable.

What Red hat is doing is described in the article:

> Miller’s group cited video footage of IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna and Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier discussing diversity. Krishna says in the video that corporate executives’ bonuses can be affected if they don’t meet DEI goals.

The video reference is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53zscZdtdA

Notably, the CEO explicitly states that "people of color" does not include Asians. It's very likely that the 30% quota exceeds the representation of "people of color" in the workforce. Remember, quotas and caps are two sides of the same coin. "Reach at least 30% women" is the same as saying "reduce men* to below 70%". And in a field where men make up 80% of the workforce, that's unambiguously disadvantaging men.

* and nonbinary to be pedantic

That is not very much detailed information at all (and also contradictory... goals!=quotas).

It details not only the specific percentage quotas, but also the negative consequences for failure to meet the quotas.

I also contest the notion that goals are distinct from quotas. If your company says, "meet our goal of hiring X% women or we'll dock your pay" that's not a quota?

Goals and quotas are not mutually exclusive. What's the difference between, "our hiring goal is X% women" and "our hiring quota is X% women"? Some say that a quota necessarily requires a negative consequence for failure to meet the quota. But if your failure to meet the percentage "goal" results in a negative consequence like docked pay - which is what IBM is doing - then the goal is indistinguishable from the quota.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 states:

> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -

> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

The purpose is racism. They are intentionally acting to racially discriminate against current and prospective employees.

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