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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

The author says that these organizations give the message that "These people are different from the majority so we need to treat them differently." Well, yes. What's wrong with that? The author doesn't explain.

I think it's pretty obvious - he thinks that those groups are reinforcing the idea that they're trying to dispel. From his POV, if you don't want people treated as different, it makes no sense for you to do the same.

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"The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -- Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

... which isn't to say that this measure (or, in the field of technology, an analogous one) is sufficient on its own, but that it is necessary.

But they ARE different, and trying to pretend they're not doesn't make sense? Off the top of my head, one clear difference I can think of between the minority groups who don't have a strong presence in the tech industry and white males who do is that the minority groups don't have a strong difference in the tech industry. So if that's a difference you want to resolve, I'm not sure how creating groups to help encourage the minority groups to enter the tech industry is bad.

In that case I think he's wrong. Being "different" and being "less than" are two different things, but it sounds like he's equating them, as if by going out of your way to help under-represented groups you're implying that they're under-represented because they're inferior.

To clarify what I meant in my earlier post: Yes, they are different, by definition - one group is the majority, the others are minorities. That doesn't mean that they're different in terms of intelligence, ability, or worth. Treating minorities "differently", otherwise known as "helping", is logical. It recognizes that the majority already gets "special treatment", because those in the majority are already looking after each others' interests.

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