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throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at Square, and there was an interesting presentation in front of the company about diversity efforts. Someone asked our h

throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at Square, and there was an interesting presentation in front of the company about diversity efforts. Someone asked our head of diversity (who has since left) what "diverse" means, to which she responded pretty casually "non Asian and non White". As an Asian male I guess I feel privileged to be lumped in with the White males? I came here with my parents at age 10 with not much, and lived in an attic above a car rental company for a year because it was the cheapest rent we could find. Both parents worked labor jobs for years (i.e. inside a dry cleaner, and inside a factory assembling CD cases). Thanks to their efforts, I got in a good CS program (my parents couldn't pay for shit, were still poor), and then got a job at Square. It's just kind of weird to hear your entire people get lumped in with the "privileged white males" in front of the whole company like that. It's always really weird that "Asians" get treated as one homogeneous group in the name of diversity. It's weird because if you are say Hmong, or Cambodian, or from Laos, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or various parts of Southeast Asia, or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, statistically you are far more disadvantaged than your "traditional" Asians, like Indians or Chinese or Koreans or whatever. Yet these individuals often become disadvantaged in the name of diversity. Also for anyone working at Square, can we please stop referring to a candidate as "diverse"? I really hate that term, to describe one candidate as diverse, when it just means non White/Asian/Male.

beaconstudios 9y ago
it also doesn't make much sense for white people. There's rich and poor, educated and uneducated, privileged and unprivileged in any arbitrary grouping of people. The idea of lumping a trust fund Ivy League kid in with a working class Ukrainian because of skin colour is just blatantly nonsense, and you can map that nonsensicality onto any designation of group privilege. Hence the idea of individualism, or treating people with respect to their actual circumstances rather than what one assumes to be their circumstances based on correlative but not absolute indicators like race.
0x00000000 9y ago
When I was applying to universities I came to realize all they actually care about is how you will look in a slide or pamphlet about diversity. They don't care about your story or experience or upbringing. Diversity as they use it only means physical appearance A side note I also had a real existential crisis as a half white half asian male. What do you put down in order to be fucked over the least? Asian? White? Both if they let you or would that make you twice as screwed? Why should I have to make that decision at all?

beaconstudios 9y ago

it also doesn't make much sense for white people. There's rich and poor, educated and uneducated, privileged and unprivileged in any arbitrary grouping of people. The idea of lumping a trust fund Ivy League kid in with a working class Ukrainian because of skin colour is just blatantly nonsense, and you can map that nonsensicality onto any designation of group privilege. Hence the idea of individualism, or treating people with respect to their actual circumstances rather than what one assumes to be their circumstances based on correlative but not absolute indicators like race.

0x00000000 9y ago

When I was applying to universities I came to realize all they actually care about is how you will look in a slide or pamphlet about diversity. They don't care about your story or experience or upbringing. Diversity as they use it only means physical appearance A side note I also had a real existential crisis as a half white half asian male. What do you put down in order to be fucked over the least? Asian? White? Both if they let you or would that make you twice as screwed? Why should I have to make that decision at all?