7 ms·

I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them a

I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them attitude of hatred and victim versus oppressor, especially the following bullets: - "This is not work for white folks to lead" - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" This is blatantly racist language and policy.

mjbh7k 11y ago
- "This is not work for white folks to lead" Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society. - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.
- alexandercrohde 11y ago
  >>It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry). I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism. edit: typo
  - rhizome 11y ago
    Who is saying they can't have an opinion?
    - 1123581321 11y ago
      To be prevented from participating in a process is to be prevented from having a meaningful opinion about that process.
      - rhizome 11y ago
        I don't agree that if they can't lead the program, that means they are being prevented from having a meaningful opinion about it. That's all they're talking about, right? Who leads the program?
        1123581321 11y ago
        Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions. You may be saying that the non-white leadership is the kind of leadership that allows collaboration and influence from followers, which is what I would do, but the evidence in the Github case is to the contrary.
        rhizome 11y ago
        Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions. This sounds excessively harsh, do you really think that's how GitHub will run the program?
        malandrew 11y ago
        Considering that they are moving to a more enterprise-y management style where there are lots of middle managers, I would imagine that that is a very real possibility.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Who said anything about equality? When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized. IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
    - tajen 11y ago
      I'm sorry to move the discussion to politics, but such affairs trigger sentiments among White people which end up in favor of Trump, if I understand politics properly. So would it be clever for the Trump team to highlight and exaggerate such stories/Is this article the result of it?
    - alexandercrohde 11y ago
      I don't understand what you're arguing. Equal opportunity will lead to diversity. Equality is about removing processes that look at privilege (e.g. your rich father donated X dollars so welcome to our college). If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
      - AOsborn 11y ago
        > If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous. Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake of diversity.
    - FireBeyond 11y ago
      "In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged." Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero). For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    Race is a goofy power structure which puts certain people ("whites") on top of others. Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness. With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
- morgante 11y ago
  > but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female The US is 77.7% of the US population. I hardly think that a 2% imbalance is an issue to create divisiveness over. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...
  - mjbh7k 11y ago
    "The US is 77.7% of the US population" I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
    - MrPatan 11y ago
      So, to what number does the publishing industry "whiteness %" drop if you were to remove all those groups from it too?
      - igotratelimited 11y ago
        By none, they correctly had a separate category: http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/ http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...
    - Z0nok 11y ago
      Do you want to also take out the jewish % from the white group, and see how much of an 'imbalance' there is amongst top management / successful founders? This sort of thinking is stupid.
      - igotratelimited 11y ago
        Again, are you arguing that it's ok for the publishing industry to be 79% white and 78% female? Do you oppose diminishing white supremacy and racism? Because it sounds like you do.
- brighteyes 11y ago
  > - "This is not work for white folks to lead" > Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit. But on the other, 1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people. 2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example. 3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
  - malandrew 11y ago
    Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. But not relative to California. This is important to note because the base rates of the state in which a company is located or an industry is concentrated matter. Very very few people move farther than 500 miles from the place where they are born. This means that the overwhelming majority of the people in this country would never take a job in California. That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html
    - brighteyes 11y ago
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. 1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you. 2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
- dikdik 11y ago
  Diversity does not just mean skin color. You might as well try to empty the ocean with a spoon then pat yourself on the back for "doing your best."
toufka 11y ago
It's actually written into GitHub's Open Code of conduct. (The 'Open' Code has not accepted any changes for quite some time even though this particular issue was under discussion [1].) The Open Code expressly excuses discrimination against some races and genders, specifically by explicitly ignoring any critique which might fall under a 'reverse'-ism; 'reverse-racism' or 'reverse-sexism' [2]. This line in the Open Code was previously discussed here [3]. [1] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82 https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82 [2] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages/index.md https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043668
- hitekker 11y ago
  I wasn't aware of this history. One thing to note is the sentence that precedes 'reverse'-ism: >Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding: > ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’ Coded language for sanctioned discrimination.
  - Laaw 11y ago
    I'm okay with it, because I can get a job elsewhere. Some minorities can't. I don't need to be able to get a job at GitHub, because for some stupid reason, society has a general bias in favor of me. I can work anywhere, but the folks they're giving a shot are folks who don't have it as good as I do.
    - malandrew 11y ago
      If this continues to proliferate, instead of achieving a World where minorities have equal opportunity with non-minorities, we will instead end up with a mix of institutions where those in the majority have an advantage and other institutions where those who are minorities have an advantage. This doesn't look like equality, but a reversion to something looking like "separate but equal".
ben0x539 11y ago
solidarity with asian people is racism, you heard it here first
mariuolo 11y ago
Is this Sanchez a SJW? Is she trying to destroy the company?
rhizome 11y ago
"Racial" is not the same as "racist." I don't think it helps the conversation to conflate them, and it's anti-intellectual criticism that inhibits even speaking about race.
- malandrew 11y ago
  Please explain: - what you mean by racial? - how what I read on that slide is racial, not racist
skewart 11y ago
The really sad thing is that there actually is sexism and racism towards women and minorities in various subtle ways at lots of tech companies. I've seen it first-hand myself. But this antagonistic line of thinking isn't helping. It just makes things worse for everyone. The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.
eghad 11y ago
Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to limit all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.
- angersock 11y ago
  This is the brave new world we're living in. If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways. You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations? This is the future you chose. EDIT: Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?" The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs. We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences. EDIT2: Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects. The logic and principle is exactly the same.
eghad 11y ago
Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to prevent all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.
samps 11y ago
I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status? This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias. The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.
- colmvp 11y ago
  Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.
  - samps 11y ago
    Yes, that's worth celebrating! But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
    - malandrew 11y ago
      True, but we need to ask valid questions like "Why do we have a bunch of diversity in this vector, but not this other vector? If tech was fundamentally intolerant of diversity in general like many claim, wouldn't we lack diversity in all vectors? Why causes might contribute to the disparity between these two diversity vectors with different representations? Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success? I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process. Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time. https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-you-to-be-happy-3189413d8cd0#.wucoxhp7t https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-a...
joekim 11y ago
I want to reserve judgement for now, but the slide is very upsetting. Why is it OK to make these kinds of generalizations?
kelukelugames 11y ago
Women of color have always complained about being left out by mainstream feminism. This is not new. I don't understand it completely, but here is a related wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism
untog 11y ago
- "This is not work for white folks to lead" This one I actually don't think is so bad, in context. The title of the slide is "Diversity and Inclusion in Tech". It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job. It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know. The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.
- DanBC 11y ago
  A middle age white man could be gay. Or have one leg. Or have psychosis. Or be a Muslim.
  - untog 11y ago
    Yes, sorry, I just edited my comment to address that. I wonder whether the point was expanded upon in the actual presentation to address that or not - bullet points on slides are usually "launching off points".
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  I'm a white person. My family came from Cuba with the clothes on their backs 50 years ago. Everything they ever had was taken by the Communists. Like millions of other Cubans, they came here with nothing and had to rebuild their lives. I grew up in a very unique environment, the Cuban-American community in Miami. I'd say that's a pretty "diverse" background. But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this. I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
  - 11y ago

mjbh7k 11y ago

- "This is not work for white folks to lead" Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society. - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.

alexandercrohde 11y ago
>>It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry). I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism. edit: typo
- rhizome 11y ago
  Who is saying they can't have an opinion?
  - 1123581321 11y ago
    To be prevented from participating in a process is to be prevented from having a meaningful opinion about that process.
    - rhizome 11y ago
      I don't agree that if they can't lead the program, that means they are being prevented from having a meaningful opinion about it. That's all they're talking about, right? Who leads the program?
      - 1123581321 11y ago
        Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions. You may be saying that the non-white leadership is the kind of leadership that allows collaboration and influence from followers, which is what I would do, but the evidence in the Github case is to the contrary.
        rhizome 11y ago
        Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions. This sounds excessively harsh, do you really think that's how GitHub will run the program?
        malandrew 11y ago
        Considering that they are moving to a more enterprise-y management style where there are lots of middle managers, I would imagine that that is a very real possibility.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Who said anything about equality? When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized. IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
  - tajen 11y ago
    I'm sorry to move the discussion to politics, but such affairs trigger sentiments among White people which end up in favor of Trump, if I understand politics properly. So would it be clever for the Trump team to highlight and exaggerate such stories/Is this article the result of it?
  - alexandercrohde 11y ago
    I don't understand what you're arguing. Equal opportunity will lead to diversity. Equality is about removing processes that look at privilege (e.g. your rich father donated X dollars so welcome to our college). If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
    - AOsborn 11y ago
      > If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous. Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake of diversity.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    "In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged." Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero). For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
- calibraxis 11y ago
  Race is a goofy power structure which puts certain people ("whites") on top of others. Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness. With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
morgante 11y ago
> but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female The US is 77.7% of the US population. I hardly think that a 2% imbalance is an issue to create divisiveness over. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...
- mjbh7k 11y ago
  "The US is 77.7% of the US population" I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
  - MrPatan 11y ago
    So, to what number does the publishing industry "whiteness %" drop if you were to remove all those groups from it too?
    - igotratelimited 11y ago
      By none, they correctly had a separate category: http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/ http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...
  - Z0nok 11y ago
    Do you want to also take out the jewish % from the white group, and see how much of an 'imbalance' there is amongst top management / successful founders? This sort of thinking is stupid.
    - igotratelimited 11y ago
      Again, are you arguing that it's ok for the publishing industry to be 79% white and 78% female? Do you oppose diminishing white supremacy and racism? Because it sounds like you do.
brighteyes 11y ago
> - "This is not work for white folks to lead" > Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit. But on the other, 1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people. 2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example. 3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
- malandrew 11y ago
  Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. But not relative to California. This is important to note because the base rates of the state in which a company is located or an industry is concentrated matter. Very very few people move farther than 500 miles from the place where they are born. This means that the overwhelming majority of the people in this country would never take a job in California. That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html
  - brighteyes 11y ago
fweespeech 11y ago
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. 1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you. 2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
dikdik 11y ago
Diversity does not just mean skin color. You might as well try to empty the ocean with a spoon then pat yourself on the back for "doing your best."

toufka 11y ago

It's actually written into GitHub's Open Code of conduct. (The 'Open' Code has not accepted any changes for quite some time even though this particular issue was under discussion [1].) The Open Code expressly excuses discrimination against some races and genders, specifically by explicitly ignoring any critique which might fall under a 'reverse'-ism; 'reverse-racism' or 'reverse-sexism' [2]. This line in the Open Code was previously discussed here [3]. [1] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82 https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82 [2] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages/index.md https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043668

hitekker 11y ago
I wasn't aware of this history. One thing to note is the sentence that precedes 'reverse'-ism: >Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding: > ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’ Coded language for sanctioned discrimination.
- Laaw 11y ago
  I'm okay with it, because I can get a job elsewhere. Some minorities can't. I don't need to be able to get a job at GitHub, because for some stupid reason, society has a general bias in favor of me. I can work anywhere, but the folks they're giving a shot are folks who don't have it as good as I do.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    If this continues to proliferate, instead of achieving a World where minorities have equal opportunity with non-minorities, we will instead end up with a mix of institutions where those in the majority have an advantage and other institutions where those who are minorities have an advantage. This doesn't look like equality, but a reversion to something looking like "separate but equal".

ben0x539 11y ago

solidarity with asian people is racism, you heard it here first

mariuolo 11y ago

Is this Sanchez a SJW? Is she trying to destroy the company?

rhizome 11y ago

"Racial" is not the same as "racist." I don't think it helps the conversation to conflate them, and it's anti-intellectual criticism that inhibits even speaking about race.

malandrew 11y ago
Please explain: - what you mean by racial? - how what I read on that slide is racial, not racist

skewart 11y ago

The really sad thing is that there actually is sexism and racism towards women and minorities in various subtle ways at lots of tech companies. I've seen it first-hand myself. But this antagonistic line of thinking isn't helping. It just makes things worse for everyone. The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.

eghad 11y ago

Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to limit all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.

angersock 11y ago
This is the brave new world we're living in. If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways. You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations? This is the future you chose. EDIT: Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?" The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs. We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences. EDIT2: Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects. The logic and principle is exactly the same.

eghad 11y ago

Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to prevent all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.

samps 11y ago

I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status? This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias. The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.

colmvp 11y ago
Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.
- samps 11y ago
  Yes, that's worth celebrating! But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    True, but we need to ask valid questions like "Why do we have a bunch of diversity in this vector, but not this other vector? If tech was fundamentally intolerant of diversity in general like many claim, wouldn't we lack diversity in all vectors? Why causes might contribute to the disparity between these two diversity vectors with different representations? Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success? I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process. Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time. https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-you-to-be-happy-3189413d8cd0#.wucoxhp7t https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-a...

joekim 11y ago

I want to reserve judgement for now, but the slide is very upsetting. Why is it OK to make these kinds of generalizations?

kelukelugames 11y ago

Women of color have always complained about being left out by mainstream feminism. This is not new. I don't understand it completely, but here is a related wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism

untog 11y ago

- "This is not work for white folks to lead" This one I actually don't think is so bad, in context. The title of the slide is "Diversity and Inclusion in Tech". It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job. It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know. The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.

DanBC 11y ago
A middle age white man could be gay. Or have one leg. Or have psychosis. Or be a Muslim.
- untog 11y ago
  Yes, sorry, I just edited my comment to address that. I wonder whether the point was expanded upon in the actual presentation to address that or not - bullet points on slides are usually "launching off points".
marcoperaza 11y ago
I'm a white person. My family came from Cuba with the clothes on their backs 50 years ago. Everything they ever had was taken by the Communists. Like millions of other Cubans, they came here with nothing and had to rebuild their lives. I grew up in a very unique environment, the Cuban-American community in Miami. I'd say that's a pretty "diverse" background. But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this. I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
- 11y ago