Why Purdue should remove 'This is Engineering' viral video

Notes for the next time I want to make a fun video with friends at school:

- Arbitrarily remove 1/4 of our male participants. Replace them with female engineers. If only one female engineer available, trim the team to four participants (3 men, 1 woman). If no female engineers, no video.

- Trim people based on their color skin. For added humor, tell the people I remove from our friendly video that "at least they won't have to take a train" or something related to racist treatments through history. Because after all, the only reason I am removing them based on their skin color is to fight racism.

- We can't have nice things. And we can't mock people either. If an actor is mocked in a video, make sure to blur him completely in post-processing to avoid any of this actor's features to be recognized: earrings? hair? skin? five fingers? Be serious people, we can't mock an actor with five fingers on each hand, think of the stereotypes involved!

- People can only use skill that their "ancestors" and "culture" created. This means if this friend wants to showcase his Didgeridoo playing but he's no Australian mate, he WON'T play the Didgeridoo. Same goes for reggae tunes which can only be used if you are all jamaican (This is a very important point: while I may think this is doing a tribute to Bob Marley, this is actually "stoner racism").

- Include minorities in my video. The more tokens, the more communities will watch my video and like it.

- Remind myself that if a "white male" is ever in the front row of my video, I am promoting white supremacy and sexism.

- That girl who wants to dance in the background because she thinks it's fun and doesn't like singing/doesn't want too much exposure? She can't. Feminists decided (for her own good) thatshe should be on the front row, having 1/4 of the verses.

Anything I missed before I rent the GoPro and call down my friends?

This callout strikes me as ridiculous. The video could have been shot on an iPhone and probably had a budget of $50 (for coffee and cheap plastic sunglasses). As for the participation angle, unless there's any evidence that other students wanted to participate but were excluded then I don't see a problem. It's entirely likely that other students simply weren't interested in participating.

I am a current student at Purdue, and here is the video that the commentary is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFbWXuR_2Ow

Calling out racism and diversity might be a problem worth talking about, but it's a shame to me that this community seems more interested in having that discussion versus reflecting on why it continues to be called out in the first place. It seems like we're all about solving the worlds most difficult problems until it comes to the ones that hit closest to home.

Isn't it more offensive that the authors of this article assume the females involved couldn't possibly be engineers? Why? because they aren't white, male, and look like they are having too much fun? Seriously?

Using the term "white supremacy" in this context is offensive.

This is whats wrong with everything. You can't make a shitty rap video (and yes its shitty) without being accused of racism.

The HN title is a much more interesting conversation than the articles

> [...] and produce a video of equal budget written and directed by women and people of color

Great. Then we'll get people from Contemporary Geriatric Studies complaining about ageism.

two thumbs up. Next time these Purdue kids dare make a stupid video, they better hit the right counts for all the demographic tokens. Also, from now on the assistant dean for diversity should review all student videos and other publications and censor those with the wrong percentages, stereotypes, feelings etc.