6 ms·
There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" ca
by greenhatglack 6y ago
There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income.
I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.
- r0s 6y agoOn the contrary, there's not a lot of money to be made, and people constantly question it. Would-be spoilers get educated about their own unrealized bias, racism continues to be a huge problem in this country, activists are vindicated and the world moves on.
- solveit 6y agoCan someone get me an actual number so I know what to think?
- scruple 6y agoEstimated at $8 billion dollars a year [0]. I found this book review [1] to be spot-on with my reading of the DiAngelo book, and this is also where I learned of the above estimate from the Washington Post. > As a business journalist, however, I’ve chronicled the slow progress people of color have made in the corporate world, even as companies spend, by one measure, more than $8 billion a year on diversity initiatives. [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/despite-spending-billions-companies-cant-buy-diversity/2019/11/21/d8907b92-fb1a-11e9-ac8c-8eced29ca6ef_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/despite-spending-bill... [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-isnt-enough-pamela-newkirk-robin-diangelo-book-reviews https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-is...
- newen 6y agoFor comparison, US film industry revenue is around $11 billion a year.
- runako 6y agoNitpick: the $11B is US domestic ticket sales only. The US film industry is much bigger than US domestic ticket sales, however. (International ticket sales, cable licensing, etc.) This is more or less obvious given that the top 10 grossing movies in 2019 took in ~ $13B in global ticket sales and < $2B of that went to non-US studios. (Also nuts is the percentages of 2019 global ticket sales attributable to the Avengers franchise and Disney.) In 2017 US film industry revenues were ~$43B according to https://deadline.com/2018/07/film-industry-revenue-2017-ibisworld-report-gloomy-box-office-1202425692/ https://deadline.com/2018/07/film-industry-revenue-2017-ibis...
- MacsHeadroom 6y agoThe executive coaching industry is $16B/year. (And the film industry is in the hundreds of billions. That's just ticket sales, which are a tiny fraction of revenue.)
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoi don't think we're at the diversity training incorporated stage yet, so while there may be a lot of money to be made and more to come currently I assume what is being made is a lot of very comfortable livings. That said while I haven't read the DiAngelo book the scenario I imagine for situations like this is generally not someone waking up and saying I will write something to get some money out of these people but rather I will write something about this situation, later getting offers of more and more money and then behaviorism takes control of the journey. It is difficult to get someone to change what they're doing once they start getting paid for doing it. This is of course all separate from whether I might agree with the book if I read it. I can still agree 100% with someone and think that their perspective is constrained by how they have begun to profit from it.
- greenhatglack 6y agoKeep in mind when people give you examples of industry numbers like games and movies when they compare it to something funded by workers income tax.
- greenhatglack 6y agoWhat would convince you otherwise? Like what would suffice in order to convince someone like you that massive sums are spent on this? Should be in relative terms to other aspects, like health care or should it be in absolute values?
- MacsHeadroom 6y agoRevenue isn't profit. The executive coaching industry is far bigger and it's not remotely a cash cow.
- greenhatglack 6y agoRevenue and profit implies business, I am talking pure funds transferred from taxes. What does that fall under?
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoI'm skeptical of any American "Libertarian" especially when it comes to race. Sowell is a class-reductionist, which would make him a terrible pick for this topic.
- dgellow 6y agoWhat is a class reductionist?
- zerocrates 6y agoClass reductionism is basically saying that disparities that appear to be due to race, gender, orientation, etc. are really just economic differences, so if you can "fix" the economic bit the rest just solves itself. The term is, somewhat ironically, often applied in a reductionist manner.
- missedthecue 6y agoUh... I think that is more palatable viewpoint than blaming them on genetics
- MacsHeadroom 6y agoWho here blamed genetics? Robin DiAngelo explicitly said "Biologically, race isn't real. But socially, race is a very real set of socialized worldviews shaped by segregation and superficial anatomical features. The white experience of both the majority and systemically powerful is one which normalizes a rejection of the existence of our own bias and enables us to ignore the existence of radically different lived experiences." A bias towards normalizing whiteness and being blissfully ignorant of the lived experience of others is being blamed, not genetics.
- watwut 6y agoI think that the alternative is supposed to be official policy of pushing some groups away and unconscious racism/sexism.
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago> I'll be contrarian Why do right-leaning libertarians always have to pretend they're being contrarians? It would be clearer to just say something like "if you're interested in a conservative take on this issue, check out Thomas Sowell."
- greenhatglack 6y agoRelax, I was contrarian in contrast to the parent, why bring your political baggage into the mix? I doubt your definition of "right leaning libertarian", belongs to someone who adheres to pragmatism, meritocracy, multiracialism and Asian values or communitarianism, right?
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago> why bring your political baggage into the mix? That is my point. People were having a discussion with content and you dropped into a stock political response. Leave your baggage out of it with your claim that people espouse anti-racism for the money, your shots at high tax countries and your need to link to political dogma. I get that it's free karma on HN, but it lowers the quality of the discussion.
- seppin 6y ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt-BM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt-BM contrarian =/ smart. Sometimes you are objecting for the sake of objecting.
- greenhatglack 6y agoNot discussing the content, but you picked a 3 minute clip out of a 36 minute long videos as if the clip was pre-made to discredit him, I understand certain people fear a black man with a contrarian point of view as it disturbs their senses, but this is a bit too much.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoI didn't even watch the clip, but if a THREE MINUTE clip is discrediting, you're either discredited on your ideas or catastrophically bad at presenting them in the format.
- greenhatglack 6y agoRight, and nothing can be ever taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative in this day and age? Seriously, I have to argue that context is a thing?
- seppin 6y agoNothing about his political denial of science is out of context. If the video was 30 min of him denying climate change or 3, that doesn't change anything.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago> No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income. Questioning those things is basically mainstream conservative discourse. You’re questioning them right now.
- greenhatglack 6y agoRight, the last guy to do that, got fired from Google.
- tropdrop 6y agoDamore worked at Google, i.e. in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has a certain political bent (left), and running counter to it has real consequences. But other places in the country have a different political bent (right). Chick-fil-A's anti-LGBT stance actually increased its sales (for a time, anyway). [1] You can see this effect play out similarly when Trump says something that rankles the Twitters of Silicon Valley and New York, but which gets him even bigger approval ratings in the red states. All this to say - your points might feel like activism in the Bay Area, but that doesn't make the above poster's claim that it's mainstream conservative discourse false. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people
- raxxorrax 6y agoCriticism doesn't only come from conservatives. To think otherwise is fundamental to those people believing these "things".
- commandlinefan 6y ago> You’re questioning them right now. ... very cautiously, very anonymously.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoAh yes, the widely known and widely invested capital pursuit of opposing institutional bias. Definitely the big money
- jlawson 6y agoThe diversity industry is worth $8 billion per year these days. So... yeah. (Also FYI, it's not about opposing institutional bias, it's about signaling and corporate power games.)
- therealdrag0 6y agoWhere’d you get this number? First time hearing about it.
- jlawson 6y agoChapo Trap House episode about the White Fragility book.
- hef19898 6y agoAnd for some strange reason, for equal-rights activists it is abad thing to make a living and earn money fighting for these rights. The usual argument is always "they are paid to further an agenda", indirectly undermining the message, the messanger and the issue at hand. This doesn't seem to aplly for the otherside. People like Alex Jones make a load of money representing the opposite opinion. For him, making money all of a sudden isn#t a problem anymore.
- the_omegist 6y agoNo. It's perfectly fine (and even amazing) to make a living from a cause that is important to you. But it's disingenuous to believe that activists 1) will not see what "obsess" them everywhere (that's a common psychological bias) and 2) will not try to make their cause as important as they can by inflating the numbers.
- 6y ago
- Ar-Curunir 6y agolol are you kidding me? If "anti-racism" was actually accepted, then we would have much less racism. If gender-science were actually accepted, then we would have less discrimination against trans folks.
- greenhatglack 6y agoFirst of, what is ascribed of homophobia and racism today is a moving goal post. When transgendered Vietnamese Jane Doe got assaulted and robbed, racism and homophobia was at play But not when it happened to Andy Ngo. Certain animals are better than others and thus get to set the feeding time tables, ya?