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This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand

This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Or that 10% are black women? Or that 35% of women are in a leadership role? Like who cares? Are their roles assigned based on their gender and/or skin color? Jesus, even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things. Let people build their career based on how they work and not their ethnicity nor gender, otherwise you will be incentivizing more racism and more sexism.

jacalata 10y ago
If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.
- superpatosainz 10y ago
  Mapuches you mean? Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT: -There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties. -In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards". These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle. See also: mestizaje.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rco8786 10y ago
    Sounds like you're describing racism to me?
  - superpatosainz 10y ago
    To add (and replying to rco8786): I think this is not racism. Because ethnicity is not race, and almost everybody by now through mestizaje has native blood. The early colonial period might have a racist component with "sistema de castas" (Spaniard born in America = Criollo, Spaniard with Native = Mestizo, Spaniard with African slave = Mulato, so on). But now race doesn't even matter because we are all almost the same genetically (it just happens that at least in Chile, the fair-haired blue-eyed people are the richest, but hate here is about wealth and politics rather than race itself).
    - jshevek 10y ago
      Americans don't use the word "racism" literally. What would that even mean, unless we all walked around with DNA testing kits? Anything involving culture, ethnicity, national origin, any kind of xenophobia can be consider 'racism'.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      Genetically, "races" don't exist; discrimination based on what you want to call ethnicity is exactly the problem
      - superpatosainz 10y ago
        Different indigenous people can share almost the same blood but have vastly different ethnicities, because ethnicity is cultural. Check your history.
        mcguire 10y ago
        I'm a little unclear on what you are trying to say. Your first clause rephrases part of what I said. Is it ok to prejudicially discriminate against someone because of your opinion of their culture?
chickenfries 10y ago
There are literally countries that have laws mandating gender representation in government. Since you don't seem invested in the topic, why not assume that GitHub has benefitted in the way that they say they have in this post?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zyxley 10y ago
> The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country. Studies have shown[1] that, for example, people with "White-sounding" names get more responses from job applications than people with "Black-sounding" names, even when the resumes sent in are identical. [1]: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-ross/black-name-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
- said 10y ago
  Given the widespread use of pro-black affirmative-action (practiced by GitHub, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft; nearly every major university; many government contractors; and probably the majority of F500 companies), isn't it only logical to view black resumes with more suspicion? Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites. On a side note, affirmative action policies ultimately help middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites. The upper-class whites who push for affirmative action are not affected by it, and neither are their children. Helping middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites is a prime example of virtue signaling gone awry.
  - cgy1 10y ago
    Affirmative action, as commonly practiced for university admissions, don't hurt whites at all. They primarily hurt Asian-American applicants.
  - laughinghan 10y ago
    > Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites. The scientific consensus is that the opposite is true, that black people need to display higher competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites, which is precisely why affirmative action is hoped to be valuable. See "Social Justice for the Highly-Demanding of Rigor" for a meta-analysis of over a dozen separate scientific studies: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-...
deleted 10y ago
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walshemj 10y ago
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone - South Americas treatment of the aboriginal inhabitants is nothing to write home about.
- robomc 10y ago
  Didn't you hear though - there's no racism, sexism or homophobia in south amercia.
djtriptych 10y ago
It's a privileged viewpoint to even suggest there is zero bias in extant hiring practices. You think that's what we would find if we measured? We can test for this you know.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  >It's a privileged viewpoint That is a meaningless way to try to dismiss someone's opinion.
vertex-four 10y ago
> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. So the issue is: most companies are somewhat discriminatory by default. Left to their own devices, they'll hire people who are similar to the existing group. If you have a company made up of white men, you're going to wind up hiring more white men. And the worst bit - when they do eventually hire someone different, they're going to keep all the little bits of culture which, while they worked as long as you all had much the same background, are harmful and distressing to people coming from other backgrounds.[0] After all, if it's one person complaining, and everyone else is OK with it, it must be that one person's fault, right? The result of this is that once a member of a minority sees that a company is made up primarily of white men, well, it's probably not for them. Now, at some point between anti-discrimination laws being written and now, some people decided this is not a particularly good state to be in, and a whole bunch of people spent a whole lot of effort trying to persuade society that this isn't a good thing. And hence, eventually we get to a situation where HR paper pushers and high-level managers are explicitly thinking about people's race, gender, and so on and so forth while hiring - although the law says that you have to avoid doing so. The issue is that this really isn't what we want people to be doing, but as long as nobody's caught doing it, the law and society incentivises it. It's a better position than the one we were in - you can actually get employed in the sort of company I described above if you don't come from the same background, and you can complain if people misbehave in an egregious manner - but it's still not good enough. What we want is for companies to signal that they're open to changing their culture to fit the needs of their employees - which of course is flipping the power dynamic on its head, but there you have it. We need companies to signal that when their employees raise an issue with how the company works on a social level, they'll actually be listened to. And then we need companies to actually follow through with that. Until then, we'll have discrimination in hiring and in the workplace. [0] I've worked for a company which regularly had the majority of its employees take clients out to strip clubs, and had a porn-sharing Friday, and this was a normal and expected part of business. And that's the really blatantly obvious things. We had one female employee who was not an office manager - and my boss specifically mentioned to me that she was tough as nails to be in our industry.
geofft 10y ago
The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either. Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.
zjaffee 10y ago
Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there. The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.
- reader5000 10y ago
  But the flip side of that is that talent not in the coddled identity class of the day will feel that they should find companies with actual important shit to focus on to work for.
  - resu_nimda 10y ago
    I love the "too busy doing important things" argument for why nobody should spend any time thinking about diversity. Of course, deciding what is important in life is an entirely subjective matter. But just to aid in my understanding of this argument, I would be interested to hear some examples of which companies and activities constitute actual important shit.
    - reader5000 10y ago
      Important things: producing a good or service that is valuable to some market and that supports the livelihoods of employees/stakeholders in an equitable way. Not important things: disfavoring groups of people that it is currently stylish to consider as "oppressive", "problematic", or "triggering" in favor of other groups of people that are currently deemed to be "diverse", "oppressed", "modern". Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers.
      - resu_nimda 10y ago
        So obviously there is quite a lot of overlap between companies doing important things (by that incredibly broad definition) and companies that devote some of their resources to diversity. It's almost as if working on important things and caring about diversity are not mutually exclusive, that people/companies can care about multiple things... I don't get why it is so irksome to you that a company would make a diversity effort. It should be irrelevant to the question of whether they are working on important things. I would guess that you're straight, white, and male, and just don't care how achieving one's goals might be significantly more difficult for other people in the US, because you "don't have time" to consider things that don't affect your own life. Which is all well and good, really, I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I just don't understand what's so bothersome about people that do care about those things. The words you've chosen to put in quotes are telling...the diversity effort is not a personal crusade against you. It's not about "problematic" groups of people. It's about elevating groups of people who may actually have been systemically disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Do you assert that that doesn't happen? Or just that nobody should care about it? "Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers." I don't even know what that means. Where is the Code of Real Life written? If people want to hand out stickers, why does that upset you?
advantark 10y ago
I have never heard a good argument explaining how affirmative action is good for a company or society outside of college.
- nevir 10y ago
  It forces a company to try multiple approaches to hiring. E.g. having many criteria for what the company considers a good candidate. For example, a tech company that requires college degrees for all candidates might want to loosen that, and figure out other signals that indicate strong candidates without a degree. There's a strong tendency to hire what you know (e.g. people like you, and to interview how you've been interviewed).
- Thriptic 10y ago
  I personally question the legitimacy / usefulness of affirmative action, but the best argument in support of it which I have heard is that people bound their career prospects based on the individuals they observe to be occupying those roles in society. For example, if a person is female and all the software developers they see are male, perhaps they believe that software development is inherently a male job and not for them. This could then lead to a negative feedback loop where females are afraid to make the first step into the industry because no one has done it before them, and the industry misses out on people who could turn out to be very qualified workers. Affirmative seeks to break this loop.
- tbrownaw 10y ago
  It's not good as a general practice. It's probably a sensible imposition against companies that persistently get in relevant legal trouble.
- vacri 10y ago
  If South Africa hadn't mandated that companies have a certain percentage of blacks in senior positions, then the economic and political power still would have been heavily lopsided towards the white minority after apartheid ended. Things aren't golden and fantastic there now, but it's still more equitable than it would have been without that affirmative action.
whatever_dude 10y ago
> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. That is not true. Racism (and other forms of discrimination) exist in South/Latin America. It's just very well hidden. It does not exist in discourse, but profiling is blatant and in many ways even accepted. I'd argue that it's so culturally entrenched that even discussing it is crazy talk. People just like to assume it's not there, and even minorities seem to assume it's a given that they're mistreated. But it exists in very acute ways.
- almostApatriot1 10y ago
  It's complete BS. Even anti-semitism in South America is through the roof. "A 2011 poll conducted by the Gino Germani Research Institute of the University of Buenos Aires on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas showed that a majority of Argentines held anti-semitic sentiments or prejudices. Of the 1,510 Argentines surveyed, 82% agreed with statements "that Jews are preoccupied with making money," 49% said that they "talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", 68% said that they have "too much power in the business world", and 22% said that the Jews killed Jesus. The majority of people interviewed also expressed belief that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their country of birth"[0] [0] http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reveals-anti-Semitic-sentiment-in-Argentine-society http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reve...
calibraxis 10y ago
> even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things Are they not ashamed to ridicule those with some cultural advances? (Laugh about our backwardnesses, not innovations.) Do they also chuckle at those more advanced scientifically, economically and technologically? Rojava in many ways seems more advanced than cultures I've lived in. Not only do they do they mandate co-leaders at every level of their bottom-up democracy (1 woman & 1 man), but they do this while beating ISIS. If I laughed, the joke would be on me. And these "Europeans" you mention seem doubly backwards as even I am, so they must work twice as hard to catch up to civilization. > Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Maybe it's hard to make social media innovations while socially backwards?
tacone 10y ago
> This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". This. It's just ridiculous. Just as racist as negative discrimination.
dragonwriter 10y ago
I've known a number of people from various Latin American countries, and am married to one of them, and they've pretty consistently report that racism is a feature of society there, though the particular forms vary. Anti-black racism is apparently significant in many parts of Latin America, as is (though not separate in the same places) anti-indigenous racism.
- e40 10y ago
  Just the other day I read a comment on HN, I think, about how in Mexico there is racial stratification between light and dark-skinned people, and how they even have different ways of speaking. The point was that people can tell immediately which class you are in and act accordingly. So, yeah, I think this is a (bad) feature of humans everywhere, not just the US.
  - paloaltokid 10y ago
    An Indian colleague of mine told me that she felt it was the same in India with respect to the caste system (she was born a Brahmin). She said she could tell from the way people spoke what caste they were from. When I hear folks from India talk about the caste system, it sounds very similar to how people in the US talk about racism against blacks.
    - Ranebow6 10y ago
      Skin whitening products are sold in India and advertised on television. https://www.fairandlovely.in/ https://www.fairandlovely.in/
      - paloaltokid 10y ago
        Yep, just like in the US.
    - ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
      No, you cannot tell what caste a person is by the way they talk. There are 800+ languages and thousand of dialects in India. On an average the dialect changes every 7 kilometer is any direction. You cannot also visually tell the difference between high/low caste. The best indicator is last name and hence social strata (centuries of exploitation has left them 'backward'). There are plenty of 'backward caste' people in high position and extremely rich. Though racism and casteism have similar effects they are not the same
jshevek 10y ago
This probably plays a role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt
nijiko 10y ago
Pretty much. You get tax breaks for it though.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  I don't think you do.
danudey 10y ago
Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. For example: > Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use,⁴ and black males are often given longer sentences for crimes than their white peers.⁵ [ from https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff737196580 https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff73... ] Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases. So called 'affirmative action' movements and diversity pledges are a direct response to the acknowledgement of our unconscious biases. If you know that you're 20% more likely to judge a candidate as unfit just because of the colour of their skin or the sound of their name, then that means that, over time, you're losing out on a lot of talented candidates. Likewise, if you're less likely to fairly evaluate a woman's performance or contributions, then you're going to promote talent to positions of leadership or management less often, meaning you're not going to put your best people in those positions. Lastly, diversity is important. You don't get anywhere by looking at only one viewpoint. Look at the state of American media right now: you have tons of content on Fox News that repeats the same few lines as facts, and they've all convinced themselves that it's true because they hear it everywhere. With that environment, why would anyone consider a different fact? When you're surrounded by people who have the same experiences with you, the same viewpoints as you, the same background as you, the same friends as you, you're never going to learn anything. It's when we surround ourselves with people different to us that we grow and learn. We start to see things from other points of view, we learn about new experiences that we didn't have growing up. We create new collaborations that build on our different backgrounds to produce something that feels new, and not just a retreading of existing works. In other words, the reason for forcing diversity is to both counter our own (and others') conscious and subconscious biases, as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously), so that you have more resources to build from, which makes for a more robust environment.
- towlejunior 10y ago
  >Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. Who's throwing bananas at their black soccer players?
paloaltokid 10y ago
> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. Are you aware that Brazil, the largest South American country, imported more slaves than anyone else? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil I find it extremely hard to believe that racism does not exist in Latin or South America.
- jayroh 10y ago
  I'm an American born to a Brazilian father and American mother and I can confirm that racism is more than alive and well down there. At least where the paternal half of my family is from (the northeast)
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I am originally from Peru and yeah, people over there are very racist against the mountain/native people so much that people try to get away from their native heritage very often. A white skinned person with a European name and/or complexion has way more opportunities and an easier life. That said, GP may not feel this way because racism in those countries (well, mine at least) is not called out often like it's in the US, so it doesn't feel like it's a problem because no one gets in trouble or protests it.
rmc 10y ago
Plenty of non-USA countries are concerned with the amount of each group in other groups. Ireland gives political parties less money if there aren't at least 40% female candidates.

jacalata 10y ago

If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.

superpatosainz 10y ago
Mapuches you mean? Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT: -There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties. -In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards". These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle. See also: mestizaje.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rco8786 10y ago
  Sounds like you're describing racism to me?
- superpatosainz 10y ago
  To add (and replying to rco8786): I think this is not racism. Because ethnicity is not race, and almost everybody by now through mestizaje has native blood. The early colonial period might have a racist component with "sistema de castas" (Spaniard born in America = Criollo, Spaniard with Native = Mestizo, Spaniard with African slave = Mulato, so on). But now race doesn't even matter because we are all almost the same genetically (it just happens that at least in Chile, the fair-haired blue-eyed people are the richest, but hate here is about wealth and politics rather than race itself).
  - jshevek 10y ago
    Americans don't use the word "racism" literally. What would that even mean, unless we all walked around with DNA testing kits? Anything involving culture, ethnicity, national origin, any kind of xenophobia can be consider 'racism'.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Genetically, "races" don't exist; discrimination based on what you want to call ethnicity is exactly the problem
    - superpatosainz 10y ago
      Different indigenous people can share almost the same blood but have vastly different ethnicities, because ethnicity is cultural. Check your history.
      - mcguire 10y ago
        I'm a little unclear on what you are trying to say. Your first clause rephrases part of what I said. Is it ok to prejudicially discriminate against someone because of your opinion of their culture?

chickenfries 10y ago

There are literally countries that have laws mandating gender representation in government. Since you don't seem invested in the topic, why not assume that GitHub has benefitted in the way that they say they have in this post?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zyxley 10y ago

> The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country. Studies have shown[1] that, for example, people with "White-sounding" names get more responses from job applications than people with "Black-sounding" names, even when the resumes sent in are identical. [1]: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-ross/black-name-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...

said 10y ago
Given the widespread use of pro-black affirmative-action (practiced by GitHub, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft; nearly every major university; many government contractors; and probably the majority of F500 companies), isn't it only logical to view black resumes with more suspicion? Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites. On a side note, affirmative action policies ultimately help middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites. The upper-class whites who push for affirmative action are not affected by it, and neither are their children. Helping middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites is a prime example of virtue signaling gone awry.
- cgy1 10y ago
  Affirmative action, as commonly practiced for university admissions, don't hurt whites at all. They primarily hurt Asian-American applicants.
- laughinghan 10y ago
  > Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites. The scientific consensus is that the opposite is true, that black people need to display higher competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites, which is precisely why affirmative action is hoped to be valuable. See "Social Justice for the Highly-Demanding of Rigor" for a meta-analysis of over a dozen separate scientific studies: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

walshemj 10y ago

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone - South Americas treatment of the aboriginal inhabitants is nothing to write home about.

robomc 10y ago
Didn't you hear though - there's no racism, sexism or homophobia in south amercia.

djtriptych 10y ago

It's a privileged viewpoint to even suggest there is zero bias in extant hiring practices. You think that's what we would find if we measured? We can test for this you know.

MustardTiger 10y ago
>It's a privileged viewpoint That is a meaningless way to try to dismiss someone's opinion.

vertex-four 10y ago

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. So the issue is: most companies are somewhat discriminatory by default. Left to their own devices, they'll hire people who are similar to the existing group. If you have a company made up of white men, you're going to wind up hiring more white men. And the worst bit - when they do eventually hire someone different, they're going to keep all the little bits of culture which, while they worked as long as you all had much the same background, are harmful and distressing to people coming from other backgrounds.[0] After all, if it's one person complaining, and everyone else is OK with it, it must be that one person's fault, right? The result of this is that once a member of a minority sees that a company is made up primarily of white men, well, it's probably not for them. Now, at some point between anti-discrimination laws being written and now, some people decided this is not a particularly good state to be in, and a whole bunch of people spent a whole lot of effort trying to persuade society that this isn't a good thing. And hence, eventually we get to a situation where HR paper pushers and high-level managers are explicitly thinking about people's race, gender, and so on and so forth while hiring - although the law says that you have to avoid doing so. The issue is that this really isn't what we want people to be doing, but as long as nobody's caught doing it, the law and society incentivises it. It's a better position than the one we were in - you can actually get employed in the sort of company I described above if you don't come from the same background, and you can complain if people misbehave in an egregious manner - but it's still not good enough. What we want is for companies to signal that they're open to changing their culture to fit the needs of their employees - which of course is flipping the power dynamic on its head, but there you have it. We need companies to signal that when their employees raise an issue with how the company works on a social level, they'll actually be listened to. And then we need companies to actually follow through with that. Until then, we'll have discrimination in hiring and in the workplace. [0] I've worked for a company which regularly had the majority of its employees take clients out to strip clubs, and had a porn-sharing Friday, and this was a normal and expected part of business. And that's the really blatantly obvious things. We had one female employee who was not an office manager - and my boss specifically mentioned to me that she was tough as nails to be in our industry.

geofft 10y ago

The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either. Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.

zjaffee 10y ago

Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there. The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.

reader5000 10y ago
But the flip side of that is that talent not in the coddled identity class of the day will feel that they should find companies with actual important shit to focus on to work for.
- resu_nimda 10y ago
  I love the "too busy doing important things" argument for why nobody should spend any time thinking about diversity. Of course, deciding what is important in life is an entirely subjective matter. But just to aid in my understanding of this argument, I would be interested to hear some examples of which companies and activities constitute actual important shit.
  - reader5000 10y ago
    Important things: producing a good or service that is valuable to some market and that supports the livelihoods of employees/stakeholders in an equitable way. Not important things: disfavoring groups of people that it is currently stylish to consider as "oppressive", "problematic", or "triggering" in favor of other groups of people that are currently deemed to be "diverse", "oppressed", "modern". Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers.
    - resu_nimda 10y ago
      So obviously there is quite a lot of overlap between companies doing important things (by that incredibly broad definition) and companies that devote some of their resources to diversity. It's almost as if working on important things and caring about diversity are not mutually exclusive, that people/companies can care about multiple things... I don't get why it is so irksome to you that a company would make a diversity effort. It should be irrelevant to the question of whether they are working on important things. I would guess that you're straight, white, and male, and just don't care how achieving one's goals might be significantly more difficult for other people in the US, because you "don't have time" to consider things that don't affect your own life. Which is all well and good, really, I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I just don't understand what's so bothersome about people that do care about those things. The words you've chosen to put in quotes are telling...the diversity effort is not a personal crusade against you. It's not about "problematic" groups of people. It's about elevating groups of people who may actually have been systemically disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Do you assert that that doesn't happen? Or just that nobody should care about it? "Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers." I don't even know what that means. Where is the Code of Real Life written? If people want to hand out stickers, why does that upset you?

advantark 10y ago

I have never heard a good argument explaining how affirmative action is good for a company or society outside of college.

nevir 10y ago
It forces a company to try multiple approaches to hiring. E.g. having many criteria for what the company considers a good candidate. For example, a tech company that requires college degrees for all candidates might want to loosen that, and figure out other signals that indicate strong candidates without a degree. There's a strong tendency to hire what you know (e.g. people like you, and to interview how you've been interviewed).
Thriptic 10y ago
I personally question the legitimacy / usefulness of affirmative action, but the best argument in support of it which I have heard is that people bound their career prospects based on the individuals they observe to be occupying those roles in society. For example, if a person is female and all the software developers they see are male, perhaps they believe that software development is inherently a male job and not for them. This could then lead to a negative feedback loop where females are afraid to make the first step into the industry because no one has done it before them, and the industry misses out on people who could turn out to be very qualified workers. Affirmative seeks to break this loop.
tbrownaw 10y ago
It's not good as a general practice. It's probably a sensible imposition against companies that persistently get in relevant legal trouble.
vacri 10y ago
If South Africa hadn't mandated that companies have a certain percentage of blacks in senior positions, then the economic and political power still would have been heavily lopsided towards the white minority after apartheid ended. Things aren't golden and fantastic there now, but it's still more equitable than it would have been without that affirmative action.

whatever_dude 10y ago

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. That is not true. Racism (and other forms of discrimination) exist in South/Latin America. It's just very well hidden. It does not exist in discourse, but profiling is blatant and in many ways even accepted. I'd argue that it's so culturally entrenched that even discussing it is crazy talk. People just like to assume it's not there, and even minorities seem to assume it's a given that they're mistreated. But it exists in very acute ways.

almostApatriot1 10y ago
It's complete BS. Even anti-semitism in South America is through the roof. "A 2011 poll conducted by the Gino Germani Research Institute of the University of Buenos Aires on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas showed that a majority of Argentines held anti-semitic sentiments or prejudices. Of the 1,510 Argentines surveyed, 82% agreed with statements "that Jews are preoccupied with making money," 49% said that they "talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", 68% said that they have "too much power in the business world", and 22% said that the Jews killed Jesus. The majority of people interviewed also expressed belief that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their country of birth"[0] [0] http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reveals-anti-Semitic-sentiment-in-Argentine-society http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reve...

calibraxis 10y ago

> even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things Are they not ashamed to ridicule those with some cultural advances? (Laugh about our backwardnesses, not innovations.) Do they also chuckle at those more advanced scientifically, economically and technologically? Rojava in many ways seems more advanced than cultures I've lived in. Not only do they do they mandate co-leaders at every level of their bottom-up democracy (1 woman & 1 man), but they do this while beating ISIS. If I laughed, the joke would be on me. And these "Europeans" you mention seem doubly backwards as even I am, so they must work twice as hard to catch up to civilization. > Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Maybe it's hard to make social media innovations while socially backwards?

tacone 10y ago

> This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". This. It's just ridiculous. Just as racist as negative discrimination.

dragonwriter 10y ago

I've known a number of people from various Latin American countries, and am married to one of them, and they've pretty consistently report that racism is a feature of society there, though the particular forms vary. Anti-black racism is apparently significant in many parts of Latin America, as is (though not separate in the same places) anti-indigenous racism.

e40 10y ago
Just the other day I read a comment on HN, I think, about how in Mexico there is racial stratification between light and dark-skinned people, and how they even have different ways of speaking. The point was that people can tell immediately which class you are in and act accordingly. So, yeah, I think this is a (bad) feature of humans everywhere, not just the US.
- paloaltokid 10y ago
  An Indian colleague of mine told me that she felt it was the same in India with respect to the caste system (she was born a Brahmin). She said she could tell from the way people spoke what caste they were from. When I hear folks from India talk about the caste system, it sounds very similar to how people in the US talk about racism against blacks.
  - Ranebow6 10y ago
    Skin whitening products are sold in India and advertised on television. https://www.fairandlovely.in/ https://www.fairandlovely.in/
    - paloaltokid 10y ago
      Yep, just like in the US.
  - ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
    No, you cannot tell what caste a person is by the way they talk. There are 800+ languages and thousand of dialects in India. On an average the dialect changes every 7 kilometer is any direction. You cannot also visually tell the difference between high/low caste. The best indicator is last name and hence social strata (centuries of exploitation has left them 'backward'). There are plenty of 'backward caste' people in high position and extremely rich. Though racism and casteism have similar effects they are not the same

jshevek 10y ago

This probably plays a role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt

nijiko 10y ago

Pretty much. You get tax breaks for it though.

GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
I don't think you do.

danudey 10y ago

Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. For example: > Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use,⁴ and black males are often given longer sentences for crimes than their white peers.⁵ [ from https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff737196580 https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff73... ] Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases. So called 'affirmative action' movements and diversity pledges are a direct response to the acknowledgement of our unconscious biases. If you know that you're 20% more likely to judge a candidate as unfit just because of the colour of their skin or the sound of their name, then that means that, over time, you're losing out on a lot of talented candidates. Likewise, if you're less likely to fairly evaluate a woman's performance or contributions, then you're going to promote talent to positions of leadership or management less often, meaning you're not going to put your best people in those positions. Lastly, diversity is important. You don't get anywhere by looking at only one viewpoint. Look at the state of American media right now: you have tons of content on Fox News that repeats the same few lines as facts, and they've all convinced themselves that it's true because they hear it everywhere. With that environment, why would anyone consider a different fact? When you're surrounded by people who have the same experiences with you, the same viewpoints as you, the same background as you, the same friends as you, you're never going to learn anything. It's when we surround ourselves with people different to us that we grow and learn. We start to see things from other points of view, we learn about new experiences that we didn't have growing up. We create new collaborations that build on our different backgrounds to produce something that feels new, and not just a retreading of existing works. In other words, the reason for forcing diversity is to both counter our own (and others') conscious and subconscious biases, as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously), so that you have more resources to build from, which makes for a more robust environment.

towlejunior 10y ago
>Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. Who's throwing bananas at their black soccer players?

paloaltokid 10y ago

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. Are you aware that Brazil, the largest South American country, imported more slaves than anyone else? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil I find it extremely hard to believe that racism does not exist in Latin or South America.

jayroh 10y ago
I'm an American born to a Brazilian father and American mother and I can confirm that racism is more than alive and well down there. At least where the paternal half of my family is from (the northeast)
sotojuan 10y ago
I am originally from Peru and yeah, people over there are very racist against the mountain/native people so much that people try to get away from their native heritage very often. A white skinned person with a European name and/or complexion has way more opportunities and an easier life. That said, GP may not feel this way because racism in those countries (well, mine at least) is not called out often like it's in the US, so it doesn't feel like it's a problem because no one gets in trouble or protests it.

rmc 10y ago

Plenty of non-USA countries are concerned with the amount of each group in other groups. Ireland gives political parties less money if there aren't at least 40% female candidates.