7 ms·

I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the

I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to treat me like some kind of a hero for being non-white / minority. I want fairness and it is frankly offensive. I am not pleased with the way we're treating each other. It's supposed to be equal opportunity. I also want us to have scientific discussion about gender differences (backed by research) and other difficult conversations. Nature doesn't give a fuck about any of this - if our goal is to uncover the way mother nature works, we're going to have to meet difficult truths and not be afraid of it.

csnover 6y ago
You’re going to be downvoted, not because of your questions, but because you decided to put “please bring the downvotes” at the end of your comment. Why would you undermine yourself by sticking such an antagonistic comment at the end of your post?
- machinelabo 6y ago
  I removed it. I know its going to be downvoted though. Because it is going against the grain on HN. But, I am being respectful. We've created an atmosphere of fear. I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinions even after being anonymous on the internet. That's pretty fucked up.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    Considering a Pennsylvania law maker made fake Twitter accounts to write "as a gay person", when you start saying you're a non PoC and conflating what happened with Timnit to "firing badly performing PoC"s you do not at all sound genuine. There is no way to prove you are actually PoC. And even if you did, it's incredibly unrelated to the matter at hand. No one has even claimed she was fired for bad performance and dozens of Google employees have said in no part of their process was academic rigor taken into account. What you're doing is the literal definition of concern trolling.
    - machinelabo 6y ago
      That's an insane accusation. You can check my comment history perhaps that will reveal some aspects of it. Also, I am kind of shocked you would accuse of me something like this. WTF. I am not trolling. I am asking a difficult question that needs to be discussed because no one is discussing it.
      - aaomidi 6y ago
        It needs to be discussed? Why on this article then? Why not make a new HN post and discuss this? How is that discussion point related to this article? What part of this article or the events surrounding it suggested there is a fear of firing PoC? There is absolutely no reason to bring this up on this article other than to derail the conversation into FUD.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - seraphsf 6y ago
      She was fired after sending a mass email, to hundreds of colleagues, criticizing her employer in very strong terms. What company wouldn’t fire an exec who sends a “f* this place” email to the company mailing list?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Google, usually. People are highly critical of executives and (relevantly) Google's efforts on diversity and inclusion work all the time.
    - elefanten 6y ago
      You seem to have rigid ideas of what it's possible to experience, believe and be genuine about on the basis of the color of one's skins. Maybe that should be a signal to step back and rethink. You also illustrate beautifully the vapidness of this fad notion of "concern trolling". Because they have not conformed with your view of the issues and used your preferred language, they can only be conceived of as trolling. The other poster seems to be making a genuine effort to express their thoughts and edited their post to be less combative. Yet you can ONLY see them as being dishonest and disingenuous.
  - pvg 6y ago
    Downvote goading, things like 'the entire world playing the race card on you' are basically trolling, they don't sound like asking a question in good faith. This particular case is also not about someone being fired for 'not performing' - nobody has claimed that. So if trolling is not your intent, you should edit it down to whatever it is you are actually asking.
    - machinelabo 6y ago
      That's why I removed it. I am asking the questions in good faith. I want to know how the society will avoid having chilling effect of not being able to fire underperformers and making difficult choices when they need to be made. If we cannot sit down and have a peaceful conversation, calling trolls and other non-sense, please don't divulge in this thread.
      - pvg 6y ago
        'playing the race card' and asking about firing for non-performance in the context of a story that does not involve someone being fired for that are not invitations to 'peaceful conversation'. They come off as deliberate provocation. Again, if that's not what you have in mind, just edit it out and focus on whatever it is you want to ask.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        No, I'm sorry, the high horse you're trying to ride here just isn't going to hold the weight of the ideological argument you tried to make. Timnit Gebru was severed from Google because of a conflict between her and the research practices at Google. Moreover, the story begins with her offering an ultimatum and Google preemptively accepting her resignation. No part of this story reasonably involves the "gender differences" and "difficult truths" you're invoking. Dropping boilerplate ideological provocations onto unrelated threads isn't good-faith conversation. Whether you mean it to be or not, it has the effect of trolling, and on HN, trolling is a strict-liability offense; your mens rea matters less than the outcome. Please don't do things like this on HN.
        6y ago
  - csnover 6y ago
    Sorry, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I feel like it is important to engage on a human level for a minute. I’m genuinely sorry to hear that you feel uncomfortable voicing your opinions. I know from personal experience how hard it is to feel like you have to keep yourself closed off to the world. As a species generally, and as technologists specifically, we have some way to go to create non-toxic spaces for people to share ideas. Still, you are engaging in fortune telling[0]—you really can’t know that your comments will be downvoted before you make them. Feeling compelled to add notes to the end of your posts encouraging others to downvote is your brain tricking you into tilting the scales to “confirm” what you “knew” to be true. It may feel like a helpful strategy to blunt the emotional pain of discovering that people don’t agree with you all the time, but from what little you’ve said, it sure seems like it’s just reinforcing your negative outlook. I don’t want you to feel bad all the time, and I suspect it is not actually true that most people here are going to disagree and downvote you to oblivion all the time so long as you avoid self-sabotaging. I know it can be incredibly hard not to take downvotes personally, and, I hope you are able to try to reframe them as what they are: some random people, some of whom are thoughtful and some of whom are not, pushing a button. It’s not a personal attack, even though our brains can make it feel very much like it is. If you truly are getting downvoted a lot, it may be a signal that some of your opinions aren’t fully thought through and need to be re-evaluated, or perhaps that you just didn’t present your ideas well. On the other hand, your brain can and will exaggerate the negative experiences, make them seem like they are happening a lot more than they are, and make you feel bad even though you’re actually doing just fine. Anyway, while I’m sure it happens (I don’t think there’s any space that is totally immune to bandwagons), I don’t get the sense that genuine and thoughtful comments regularly get downvoted to oblivion here. It’s trickier than ever these days since there is a lot of bad-faith argumentation going on everywhere online under the guise of innocently “just asking questions”[1], and I think it’s fair to say that there is an growing immune-like reaction which is sometimes attacking genuine posters because it’s just impossible to tell who’s being honest and who’s being a shitty troll. So just keep doing your best, anonymous internet commenter. :-) If you feel like you can’t, I hope you can find a counsellor or friend who will listen and help you into a more positive head space. At the least, your post has generated some reasonable and civil discussion, and that’s what we’re here for, right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Your comment is the top comment.
aaomidi 6y ago
Yes because this happens everytime a PoC is fired. Every single PoC who is fired gets this media attention.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  I think it is causing a reverse effect. It's going to create more racist behavior from employers - "If we cannot fire a PoC or some minority, let's not even bother hiring them in the first place." This is not good.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    That is also, in fact, illegal. And it's not very hard to realize someone is doing that.
    - machinelabo 6y ago
      No one is questioning its legality. That's obvious and I agree, it is illegal. There are a lot of things that are illegal but people do it anyways.
    - xenihn 6y ago
      Sure, but how hard is it to prove it in a court of law?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Every single PoC who is fired gets this media attention. No, they don't.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    I think you're agreeing with someone being sarcastic. But it is text, so one can't be sure.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
flipactual 6y ago
> what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? A workplace that isn't hostile to people of color and evidence of the cause of dismissal
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Should companies publicly present their side of the story for every firing?
  - arvindamirtaa 6y ago
    When they want to publicly claim credit for being a certain way but their actions point to another, it's up to them to clarify their position, and use whatever evidence to support their claim.
  - flipactual 6y ago
    This seems an extreme solution to media investigation of a small number of people losing their jobs Perhaps instead, in these situations, employers could provide, at the discretion of the dismissed, information gathered while performing due diligence leading up to the dismissal
    - strictnein 6y ago
      We all know there's a zero percent chance of that happening. For many, many reasons.
- mike_d 6y ago
  .
  - flipactual 6y ago
    No, I am not, and I don't see how you came to believe that I might be
    - deleted 6y ago
Spooky23 6y ago
It doesn’t matter because aggrieved employees with a compelling story will always have going public with real or imagined grievances as an option. The persons protected class is just another attribute — this is a story because the subjects are notable. If a company is responsible in how they manage, follows policies, etc they are fine. If executives or others are allowed to misbehave and the company is too cheap to buy silence, things may not be fine. What’s the real story here? I don’t see evidence of incompetence. But you can be fired for any legal reason in absence of a contract. Maybe there’s some unknown political or other issue. Maybe some conduct crossed a line. Who knows.
- lsiebert 6y ago
  I think the real story is that Google wanted to muzzle a researcher.
root_axis 6y ago
This is just your perception based on media speculation, not something actually backed up by numbers. Just because people on the internet are talking about race doesn't mean a firing has anything to do with race.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
unishark 6y ago
The common "nice" way to remove non-performers is a "Reduction in force", also known as "layoff" where they let multiple people go ritualistically, though I've seen it for as few as two people. Then they can argue it was about finances, not personal. They offer a decent severance that requires the employee to sign an agreement that requires, in part, they don't sue. The word "fired" often is reserved for terminating someone for cause, where you really broke the rules and get no severance, not even the two weeks minimum that is customary. Non-performers usually aren't treated this way. I'm not sure this is really what happened in this story.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  Employers need solid documented reasons for firing someone. Fired person needs proper recourse for appealing it if they felt it was unfair. Going to NYTimes is OK if there is solid proof of racism, the company needs to face the consequences - both legal and public image / media perception. If the fired person goes out to media and brings down the company without proof - we need to have mechanisms for that as well - I don't see us addressing that.
  - unishark 6y ago
    In an at-will employment state (i.e. most of them) companies do not need reasons. Maybe you mean to help their chances in a lawsuit or something?
mlyle 6y ago
Here we're talking about something different: suppressing the speech of a person of color raising some well-thought out arguments about racism that are problematic to the employer's core business. Google has set up a research organization that ostensibly is empowered to ask and ultimately work to openly resolve difficult questions like these... but when the rubber hits the road, they instead throw the researcher under the bus.
- ioctrl 6y ago
  What are the arguments about racism that were suppressed? The paper that didn't pass internal review was about the external costs of training large models (correction: the paper also discussed language models not adhering to anti-racist language standards).
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Race comes up several times in the article. Did you miss it?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
actuator 6y ago
> If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? I think it is going to be extremely hard. From the same article, I opened a tweet and look at what a high voted reply is: https://twitter.com/PocketNihilist/status/1334954129815289857?s=20 https://twitter.com/PocketNihilist/status/133495412981528985... This line of reasoning means, you can't be pro diversity and fire someone from the underrepresented groups at the same time for their behaviour. People are conveniently choosing to forget this is the same company which not long ago fired a person when he complained about the company being too pro diversity in their hiring. I really hate Twitter and its mob culture.
tptacek 6y ago
None of this comment has anything directly to do with the article; the article is just a coat rack these arguments are being hung on.
- elefanten 6y ago
  Unless I missed something (and I just rechecked) there's nothing in the guidelines about comments having to be on the topic of the submission. IMO it enriches HN comment sections to allow for people to bring up adjacent topics, things that came to mind or funky little "this reminds me of..." anecdotes.
joe_the_user 6y ago
If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? For them to be one of 99.9% of the world who can't mobilize a following to create a complaint about this? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color We so far from such a situation like that that your complaint is absurd. A few places with a history of discrimination may have trouble firing the few people of color they might hire. That's about it. In the real world, incompetent people get fired and often competent people as well. A few people may make a career of playing the race card but that's a limited number of people. Both racism and opportunists "playing the race card" can be real at the same time.
zkg 6y ago
Wow, let me get this straight: Are you claiming that she got fired because she couldn't perform and she used her race as the cause for that?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kenjackson 6y ago
> I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Great question. Part of the reason why the black unemployment rate is so low is that it's virtually impossible to fire them.

csnover 6y ago

You’re going to be downvoted, not because of your questions, but because you decided to put “please bring the downvotes” at the end of your comment. Why would you undermine yourself by sticking such an antagonistic comment at the end of your post?

machinelabo 6y ago
I removed it. I know its going to be downvoted though. Because it is going against the grain on HN. But, I am being respectful. We've created an atmosphere of fear. I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinions even after being anonymous on the internet. That's pretty fucked up.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Considering a Pennsylvania law maker made fake Twitter accounts to write "as a gay person", when you start saying you're a non PoC and conflating what happened with Timnit to "firing badly performing PoC"s you do not at all sound genuine. There is no way to prove you are actually PoC. And even if you did, it's incredibly unrelated to the matter at hand. No one has even claimed she was fired for bad performance and dozens of Google employees have said in no part of their process was academic rigor taken into account. What you're doing is the literal definition of concern trolling.
  - machinelabo 6y ago
    That's an insane accusation. You can check my comment history perhaps that will reveal some aspects of it. Also, I am kind of shocked you would accuse of me something like this. WTF. I am not trolling. I am asking a difficult question that needs to be discussed because no one is discussing it.
    - aaomidi 6y ago
      It needs to be discussed? Why on this article then? Why not make a new HN post and discuss this? How is that discussion point related to this article? What part of this article or the events surrounding it suggested there is a fear of firing PoC? There is absolutely no reason to bring this up on this article other than to derail the conversation into FUD.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - seraphsf 6y ago
    She was fired after sending a mass email, to hundreds of colleagues, criticizing her employer in very strong terms. What company wouldn’t fire an exec who sends a “f* this place” email to the company mailing list?
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Google, usually. People are highly critical of executives and (relevantly) Google's efforts on diversity and inclusion work all the time.
  - elefanten 6y ago
    You seem to have rigid ideas of what it's possible to experience, believe and be genuine about on the basis of the color of one's skins. Maybe that should be a signal to step back and rethink. You also illustrate beautifully the vapidness of this fad notion of "concern trolling". Because they have not conformed with your view of the issues and used your preferred language, they can only be conceived of as trolling. The other poster seems to be making a genuine effort to express their thoughts and edited their post to be less combative. Yet you can ONLY see them as being dishonest and disingenuous.
- pvg 6y ago
  Downvote goading, things like 'the entire world playing the race card on you' are basically trolling, they don't sound like asking a question in good faith. This particular case is also not about someone being fired for 'not performing' - nobody has claimed that. So if trolling is not your intent, you should edit it down to whatever it is you are actually asking.
  - machinelabo 6y ago
    That's why I removed it. I am asking the questions in good faith. I want to know how the society will avoid having chilling effect of not being able to fire underperformers and making difficult choices when they need to be made. If we cannot sit down and have a peaceful conversation, calling trolls and other non-sense, please don't divulge in this thread.
    - pvg 6y ago
      'playing the race card' and asking about firing for non-performance in the context of a story that does not involve someone being fired for that are not invitations to 'peaceful conversation'. They come off as deliberate provocation. Again, if that's not what you have in mind, just edit it out and focus on whatever it is you want to ask.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      No, I'm sorry, the high horse you're trying to ride here just isn't going to hold the weight of the ideological argument you tried to make. Timnit Gebru was severed from Google because of a conflict between her and the research practices at Google. Moreover, the story begins with her offering an ultimatum and Google preemptively accepting her resignation. No part of this story reasonably involves the "gender differences" and "difficult truths" you're invoking. Dropping boilerplate ideological provocations onto unrelated threads isn't good-faith conversation. Whether you mean it to be or not, it has the effect of trolling, and on HN, trolling is a strict-liability offense; your mens rea matters less than the outcome. Please don't do things like this on HN.
      - 6y ago
- csnover 6y ago
  Sorry, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I feel like it is important to engage on a human level for a minute. I’m genuinely sorry to hear that you feel uncomfortable voicing your opinions. I know from personal experience how hard it is to feel like you have to keep yourself closed off to the world. As a species generally, and as technologists specifically, we have some way to go to create non-toxic spaces for people to share ideas. Still, you are engaging in fortune telling[0]—you really can’t know that your comments will be downvoted before you make them. Feeling compelled to add notes to the end of your posts encouraging others to downvote is your brain tricking you into tilting the scales to “confirm” what you “knew” to be true. It may feel like a helpful strategy to blunt the emotional pain of discovering that people don’t agree with you all the time, but from what little you’ve said, it sure seems like it’s just reinforcing your negative outlook. I don’t want you to feel bad all the time, and I suspect it is not actually true that most people here are going to disagree and downvote you to oblivion all the time so long as you avoid self-sabotaging. I know it can be incredibly hard not to take downvotes personally, and, I hope you are able to try to reframe them as what they are: some random people, some of whom are thoughtful and some of whom are not, pushing a button. It’s not a personal attack, even though our brains can make it feel very much like it is. If you truly are getting downvoted a lot, it may be a signal that some of your opinions aren’t fully thought through and need to be re-evaluated, or perhaps that you just didn’t present your ideas well. On the other hand, your brain can and will exaggerate the negative experiences, make them seem like they are happening a lot more than they are, and make you feel bad even though you’re actually doing just fine. Anyway, while I’m sure it happens (I don’t think there’s any space that is totally immune to bandwagons), I don’t get the sense that genuine and thoughtful comments regularly get downvoted to oblivion here. It’s trickier than ever these days since there is a lot of bad-faith argumentation going on everywhere online under the guise of innocently “just asking questions”[1], and I think it’s fair to say that there is an growing immune-like reaction which is sometimes attacking genuine posters because it’s just impossible to tell who’s being honest and who’s being a shitty troll. So just keep doing your best, anonymous internet commenter. :-) If you feel like you can’t, I hope you can find a counsellor or friend who will listen and help you into a more positive head space. At the least, your post has generated some reasonable and civil discussion, and that’s what we’re here for, right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Your comment is the top comment.

aaomidi 6y ago

Yes because this happens everytime a PoC is fired. Every single PoC who is fired gets this media attention.

machinelabo 6y ago
I think it is causing a reverse effect. It's going to create more racist behavior from employers - "If we cannot fire a PoC or some minority, let's not even bother hiring them in the first place." This is not good.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  That is also, in fact, illegal. And it's not very hard to realize someone is doing that.
  - machinelabo 6y ago
    No one is questioning its legality. That's obvious and I agree, it is illegal. There are a lot of things that are illegal but people do it anyways.
  - xenihn 6y ago
    Sure, but how hard is it to prove it in a court of law?
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Every single PoC who is fired gets this media attention. No, they don't.
- mlyle 6y ago
  I think you're agreeing with someone being sarcastic. But it is text, so one can't be sure.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago

flipactual 6y ago

> what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? A workplace that isn't hostile to people of color and evidence of the cause of dismissal

Rebelgecko 6y ago
Should companies publicly present their side of the story for every firing?
- arvindamirtaa 6y ago
  When they want to publicly claim credit for being a certain way but their actions point to another, it's up to them to clarify their position, and use whatever evidence to support their claim.
- flipactual 6y ago
  This seems an extreme solution to media investigation of a small number of people losing their jobs Perhaps instead, in these situations, employers could provide, at the discretion of the dismissed, information gathered while performing due diligence leading up to the dismissal
  - strictnein 6y ago
    We all know there's a zero percent chance of that happening. For many, many reasons.
mike_d 6y ago
.
- flipactual 6y ago
  No, I am not, and I don't see how you came to believe that I might be
  - deleted 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago

It doesn’t matter because aggrieved employees with a compelling story will always have going public with real or imagined grievances as an option. The persons protected class is just another attribute — this is a story because the subjects are notable. If a company is responsible in how they manage, follows policies, etc they are fine. If executives or others are allowed to misbehave and the company is too cheap to buy silence, things may not be fine. What’s the real story here? I don’t see evidence of incompetence. But you can be fired for any legal reason in absence of a contract. Maybe there’s some unknown political or other issue. Maybe some conduct crossed a line. Who knows.

lsiebert 6y ago
I think the real story is that Google wanted to muzzle a researcher.

root_axis 6y ago

This is just your perception based on media speculation, not something actually backed up by numbers. Just because people on the internet are talking about race doesn't mean a firing has anything to do with race.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

unishark 6y ago

The common "nice" way to remove non-performers is a "Reduction in force", also known as "layoff" where they let multiple people go ritualistically, though I've seen it for as few as two people. Then they can argue it was about finances, not personal. They offer a decent severance that requires the employee to sign an agreement that requires, in part, they don't sue. The word "fired" often is reserved for terminating someone for cause, where you really broke the rules and get no severance, not even the two weeks minimum that is customary. Non-performers usually aren't treated this way. I'm not sure this is really what happened in this story.

machinelabo 6y ago
Employers need solid documented reasons for firing someone. Fired person needs proper recourse for appealing it if they felt it was unfair. Going to NYTimes is OK if there is solid proof of racism, the company needs to face the consequences - both legal and public image / media perception. If the fired person goes out to media and brings down the company without proof - we need to have mechanisms for that as well - I don't see us addressing that.
- unishark 6y ago
  In an at-will employment state (i.e. most of them) companies do not need reasons. Maybe you mean to help their chances in a lawsuit or something?

mlyle 6y ago

Here we're talking about something different: suppressing the speech of a person of color raising some well-thought out arguments about racism that are problematic to the employer's core business. Google has set up a research organization that ostensibly is empowered to ask and ultimately work to openly resolve difficult questions like these... but when the rubber hits the road, they instead throw the researcher under the bus.

ioctrl 6y ago
What are the arguments about racism that were suppressed? The paper that didn't pass internal review was about the external costs of training large models (correction: the paper also discussed language models not adhering to anti-racist language standards).
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Race comes up several times in the article. Did you miss it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

actuator 6y ago

> If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? I think it is going to be extremely hard. From the same article, I opened a tweet and look at what a high voted reply is: https://twitter.com/PocketNihilist/status/1334954129815289857?s=20 https://twitter.com/PocketNihilist/status/133495412981528985... This line of reasoning means, you can't be pro diversity and fire someone from the underrepresented groups at the same time for their behaviour. People are conveniently choosing to forget this is the same company which not long ago fired a person when he complained about the company being too pro diversity in their hiring. I really hate Twitter and its mob culture.

tptacek 6y ago

None of this comment has anything directly to do with the article; the article is just a coat rack these arguments are being hung on.

elefanten 6y ago
Unless I missed something (and I just rechecked) there's nothing in the guidelines about comments having to be on the topic of the submission. IMO it enriches HN comment sections to allow for people to bring up adjacent topics, things that came to mind or funky little "this reminds me of..." anecdotes.

joe_the_user 6y ago

If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? For them to be one of 99.9% of the world who can't mobilize a following to create a complaint about this? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color We so far from such a situation like that that your complaint is absurd. A few places with a history of discrimination may have trouble firing the few people of color they might hire. That's about it. In the real world, incompetent people get fired and often competent people as well. A few people may make a career of playing the race card but that's a limited number of people. Both racism and opportunists "playing the race card" can be real at the same time.

zkg 6y ago

Wow, let me get this straight: Are you claiming that she got fired because she couldn't perform and she used her race as the cause for that?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kenjackson 6y ago

> I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Great question. Part of the reason why the black unemployment rate is so low is that it's virtually impossible to fire them.