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A little history-and-context-free, are we? First, this is the text of the tweet in question: "Any black or brown engineers wanna work at Code for America on c

A little history-and-context-free, are we? First, this is the text of the tweet in question: "Any black or brown engineers wanna work at Code for America on criminal justice? Come code to keep people out of jail, it's worth it." Your assumption that the poster is not OK with non black/brown engineers is an assumption. I'd add, your comment is context-free and somewhat disingenuous, considering that we live in a society which has had a high degree of (and still has a significant amount of) systemic/institutional racism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_St... If one wants to talk about racially targeted messages, well, there's plenty of good studies on portrayal of minorities in media (film/tv/news). I think you raise a valid topic of discussion, but don't seem to want to put all the facts on the table before drawing conclusions.

devrandomguy 9y ago
Thank you for explaining. That tweet would almost certainly be considered unacceptable within my own society, because it reinforces division by a highly visible, but ultimately misleading metric: skin tone. I get that there is a persistent segment of the population that needs help to achieve economic and educational parity. Surely, the group targeted by this tweet could have been identified by a label that is specific to the relevant issues, and supported by logically sound metrics? "underprivileged" is a term we use around here, and the social systems do seem to have a sensible set of filters for it: low household income, mental illness or physical disability, lack of formal education, refugee status, etc. The good thing about a label like "underprivileged", is that a person can truly overcome it and put it behind them. It does not have to be a part of their cultural identity, it is just an environmental problem to be solved.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
I am a huge supporter of affirmative action, and I'm glad you're trying to do it, but you're doing it the wrong way. Who follows you on Twitter? Do you have a big black/brown following there, or is it mostly white people? If it's mostly white people then you should just accept that's a white marketing channel, and don't go trying to find black folks there. Now ask yourself: what parts of the Code For America community are substantially black? Do you have teams that have better representation? Do you do events that have better representation? You can reach out there, without even mentioning race, and get a higher probability of black applicants. Just send an email "We're hiring programmers of all experience levels! Please forward this to friends/post on Facebook/etc!" You'll get some good white applicants in there too! Great! Hire them! But hopefully it's a better racial mix than whatever you're getting with your existing marketing channels. If you're a pretty white organization, you might have to look further. Look at your city. Where do black folks congregate? Where do latin american folks congregate? Go to those places, and again, just do regular marketing. Not "Any brown folks want to work for us on prison stuff?" but "Anyone want to work with us on the wide array of activities we do?" Maybe they don't even care about prison reform. Frankly, that is a little racist. Lots of black people don't. Maybe they like your mission, they care about voter turnout or something, but they're happy to apply for a job in the accounting department. Now you've got 1 more person of color on your team, that will make all of your future job marketing activities work better. Please be careful here, affirmative action is not a straightforward concept, and it's easy to alienate both white people AND people of color. There's a right way to do it and many very wrong ways to do it. Feel free to email me if you need someone to bounce ideas off of.
galkk 9y ago
This assumption (that only black/brown people need to apply) is very valid and now you try to bend words to make the statement valid for everybody. If I'll read statement that is completely equivalent "Any tall (over 6'5") for doing ABC" I would never assume that people not over 6'5" should bother to apply.
julianmarq 9y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_St... Jeez, that entry needs heavy rewrites. "Racism in the housing sector can be seen as early as the 1930s"? Really? Couldn't it be seen earlier? And that's not institutional racism anyways; there's no public institution enforcing racism in the US. There's plenty of racism at the societal level, but it hasn't been backed by law for a long time.

devrandomguy 9y ago

Thank you for explaining. That tweet would almost certainly be considered unacceptable within my own society, because it reinforces division by a highly visible, but ultimately misleading metric: skin tone. I get that there is a persistent segment of the population that needs help to achieve economic and educational parity. Surely, the group targeted by this tweet could have been identified by a label that is specific to the relevant issues, and supported by logically sound metrics? "underprivileged" is a term we use around here, and the social systems do seem to have a sensible set of filters for it: low household income, mental illness or physical disability, lack of formal education, refugee status, etc. The good thing about a label like "underprivileged", is that a person can truly overcome it and put it behind them. It does not have to be a part of their cultural identity, it is just an environmental problem to be solved.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

I am a huge supporter of affirmative action, and I'm glad you're trying to do it, but you're doing it the wrong way. Who follows you on Twitter? Do you have a big black/brown following there, or is it mostly white people? If it's mostly white people then you should just accept that's a white marketing channel, and don't go trying to find black folks there. Now ask yourself: what parts of the Code For America community are substantially black? Do you have teams that have better representation? Do you do events that have better representation? You can reach out there, without even mentioning race, and get a higher probability of black applicants. Just send an email "We're hiring programmers of all experience levels! Please forward this to friends/post on Facebook/etc!" You'll get some good white applicants in there too! Great! Hire them! But hopefully it's a better racial mix than whatever you're getting with your existing marketing channels. If you're a pretty white organization, you might have to look further. Look at your city. Where do black folks congregate? Where do latin american folks congregate? Go to those places, and again, just do regular marketing. Not "Any brown folks want to work for us on prison stuff?" but "Anyone want to work with us on the wide array of activities we do?" Maybe they don't even care about prison reform. Frankly, that is a little racist. Lots of black people don't. Maybe they like your mission, they care about voter turnout or something, but they're happy to apply for a job in the accounting department. Now you've got 1 more person of color on your team, that will make all of your future job marketing activities work better. Please be careful here, affirmative action is not a straightforward concept, and it's easy to alienate both white people AND people of color. There's a right way to do it and many very wrong ways to do it. Feel free to email me if you need someone to bounce ideas off of.

galkk 9y ago

This assumption (that only black/brown people need to apply) is very valid and now you try to bend words to make the statement valid for everybody. If I'll read statement that is completely equivalent "Any tall (over 6'5") for doing ABC" I would never assume that people not over 6'5" should bother to apply.

julianmarq 9y ago

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_St... Jeez, that entry needs heavy rewrites. "Racism in the housing sector can be seen as early as the 1930s"? Really? Couldn't it be seen earlier? And that's not institutional racism anyways; there's no public institution enforcing racism in the US. There's plenty of racism at the societal level, but it hasn't been backed by law for a long time.