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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

If I understood correctly, Adria is not another employee, but has the role of developer evangelist. In that role, your twitter account is very much an extension of your job.

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In that light, I do not understand how this woman is still employed.

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/6039856858

Who exactly is she "evangelizing" for? All developers? I find that really hard to believe given her extremely public politics.

I can't imagine what an HR department would have to say about the advisability of firing such a person.

Seriously, does she really believe racism is only one sided? I had to read that tweet more than once to be sure I was reading it correctly.

I've seen a similar message crop up in EO training lately. But there they differentiate between "Systemic racism" and "Individual racism". I'd guess she's just parroting without understanding... I hope.

This tweet is from November 2009 - over 3 years ago. Adria didn't start working as an 'evangelist' for SendGrid until March of 2012.

This is actually the academically accepted definition of racism. In that definition, only white people can be racist. This came as a complete shock to me in my race, class, and gender course. Be extension, it also means women cannot be sexist against men, as men are considered in the position of power.

Again, these are the academically accepted definitions.

It isn't "the" academically accepted definition, though. It is one definition that's accepted in some social sciences depts., usually sociology, and usually ones w/ critical theory-oriented faculties. Walk into Georgetown poli sci and tell them white people can't be racist.

Edit: also consider that the way Adria phrased it IS NEVER the academically accepted definition, because black people are fully capable of becoming an oppressive class vis-a-vis white people. It may not be the case at this time where Adria lives, but it certainly can be the case. So the statement that black people can NEVER be racist towards whites is less an elucidation of this definition, and more an expression of Adria's own racism.

I second this. The person is there at the conference as a rep for her company therefore it's speaking for the company.

> In that role, your twitter account is very much an extension of your job.

I'm not sure I agree with you, but I think this is an interesting point in the debate and wanted to acknowledge that even though I don't have a snappy response for you at the present time. Hopefully other people engage this point. It seems worth talking about.

Maybe what you are getting at is "are we okay with jobs where your personal social media account is a job function?". I personally think no, but at this point, we can't put the "social media" genie back into the bottle, and it is only going to get worse with products like Glass.

Many journalists nowadays have a twitter account because of their work, and news websites syndicate from their personal accounts.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there's an increasingly blurry line between someone's employment status and someone's personal views and I think that should be extremely uncomfortable for everyone involved and generally means our community will be less likely to engage in honest and forthright dialog as people with personal views.

And I think the extent of this is a whole big can of worms I'm not sure I'm in a great position to address as a researcher at a university with surprising levels of freedom to shoot my mouth off and not care what anyone else thinks.

While I personally know plenty of people in evangelist roles and while I consider them friends, I can't say I'm qualified to really talk about where a line should be wrt separating their personal and professional speech. I hope someone who is qualified to discuss it approaches this point, because I think it is worth discussing and increasingly important.

tl;dr: I really hope this discussion continues but I'm probably not the right person to talk about it down this particular wormhole.

The distinction between "professional life" and "personal life" is artificial anyway. Business connections are regularly between people who are friends outside of business. The way you act at the bar may be seen by business contacts. Reputation gets around. Social media is just making it more apparent.

Some things are different in because of it - but honestly if you care about your public image, you shouldn't share 'private ' jokes on a very public medium.

It's also part of her branding. She consults and her primary web site is "butyoureagirl.com". It's completely appropriate for her to tweet her opinion.

The thing I took from the photo (which I agree was a bit much) was that this woman of color was surrounded by a bunch of white dudes with corrective lenses. There was a man of color farther back, but diversity was not on display.

One of the guys even had a weak smile as if he was thinking,"ohmanagirlislookingatmeandtakingmypictureimayloveher." But I'm assuming he's straight, which is my own lens on the moment.

I hope that her goal was to portray that lack of diversity rather than to shame the two participants in the conversation.

Having finally gotten through the DDOS-filter, I see from her account of the situation that my hopes were not enough to change reality. There is a bit of "here's an opportunity to make my point," that leverages a minor incident to reinforce her larger message about inequality.

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