4 ms·

What can we do to battle such grotesque systemic racism in the valley? Mandatory class on critical race theory? Fine of $10B+ per company for racial equity fund

What can we do to battle such grotesque systemic racism in the valley? Mandatory class on critical race theory? Fine of $10B+ per company for racial equity fund? Mandatory firing of over-represented groups? There’s so much we can do yet we chose not to. Such a disgraceful racist country.

dave_4_bagels 6y ago
Being a white colonialist in any form should be illegal!
epistasis 6y ago
Funny, the only people I hear talking about "critical race theory" are people who denigrate those who try to understand it. And with suggestions like "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants and would achieve no good, I'm guess that you also wish to denigrate those who work to understand racial disparities in the US. But usually such sort of odd sarcasm isn't found on HN.
- hintymad 6y ago
  Funny. Have you read CRT? At least you must have read numerous criticisms on that the representations of employees, leadership, or students in colleges do not reflect our population? Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Please, to battle racisms, we also need to use logic and reasoning.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    > Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Most of your comment doesn't make sense to me, but for this one at least, I can point out your mistake. Even if Google is maintaining a mostly constant head count, people change jobs all the time, and to account for this Google is continuously hiring. This is part of the process, where tech companies have already focused on fixing problems. The other part of the problem is that tech companies can be quite hostile to underrepresented minorities, and the comments on this post are a perfect example, especially all the trolling dead comments. In real life, URM experience those comments and they don't get deleted from their memories. So making the work environment less hostile is essential to, in addition to the hiring practices.
    - hintymad 6y ago
      You got me. It makes sense.
  - MikeUt 6y ago
    You're right, colleges don't reflect our population. Compare for example Harvard to the overall US (degree of overrepresentation in parenthesis): Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.15% (6.51x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) White: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) Or Princeton: Asian: 20.9% vs 5.3% (3.94x) Jewish: 8.0% vs 2.15% (3.72x) Black: 7.7% vs 12.7% (0.61x) White: 34.7% vs 59.4% (0.58x) Latino: 9.5% vs 17.6% (0.54x) Sources: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty... https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-university https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-unive... https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university/student-life/diversity/#secEthnic https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university...
- HexagonalKitten 6y ago
  Do you go out of your way to listen to the internal communication and writing of all the groups? Because otherwise what you've heard only indicates who you pay attention to. For a quick intro, google Rachel Dolezal and skip the news articles and look for forums. You'll find everything you need, and you can then follow those people to see what else they discuss through the lens of CRT. > "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants Poe's law strikes again then because if you follow Gebru's crowd on Twitter you'll see a lot of talk of cleaning up and making room for new hires. That's a coded racist dogwhistle for exactly what Hintymad was joking about. This is the problem with platforming extremists.
  - geofft 6y ago
    There's a distinction between "It stands to reason that, if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it, and we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner, which will necessarily cause unqualified people who have benefited from racial biases to leave" (which is a claim I have heard "Gebru's crowd on Twitter" make) and "We should re-evaluate people in a non-race-neutral manner and cause people to leave because of their race, regardless of qualification" (which is not). But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills. In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
    - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
      > "we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner" Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority. > if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies. Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances. We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.
leoh 6y ago
Mere curiosity from those who are reading and commenting about this situation, as opposed to outright skepticism or anger would, and I mean this sincerely, be a good start.

dave_4_bagels 6y ago

Being a white colonialist in any form should be illegal!

epistasis 6y ago

Funny, the only people I hear talking about "critical race theory" are people who denigrate those who try to understand it. And with suggestions like "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants and would achieve no good, I'm guess that you also wish to denigrate those who work to understand racial disparities in the US. But usually such sort of odd sarcasm isn't found on HN.

hintymad 6y ago
Funny. Have you read CRT? At least you must have read numerous criticisms on that the representations of employees, leadership, or students in colleges do not reflect our population? Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Please, to battle racisms, we also need to use logic and reasoning.
- epistasis 6y ago
  > Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Most of your comment doesn't make sense to me, but for this one at least, I can point out your mistake. Even if Google is maintaining a mostly constant head count, people change jobs all the time, and to account for this Google is continuously hiring. This is part of the process, where tech companies have already focused on fixing problems. The other part of the problem is that tech companies can be quite hostile to underrepresented minorities, and the comments on this post are a perfect example, especially all the trolling dead comments. In real life, URM experience those comments and they don't get deleted from their memories. So making the work environment less hostile is essential to, in addition to the hiring practices.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    You got me. It makes sense.
- MikeUt 6y ago
  You're right, colleges don't reflect our population. Compare for example Harvard to the overall US (degree of overrepresentation in parenthesis): Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.15% (6.51x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) White: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) Or Princeton: Asian: 20.9% vs 5.3% (3.94x) Jewish: 8.0% vs 2.15% (3.72x) Black: 7.7% vs 12.7% (0.61x) White: 34.7% vs 59.4% (0.58x) Latino: 9.5% vs 17.6% (0.54x) Sources: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty... https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-university https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-unive... https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university/student-life/diversity/#secEthnic https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university...
HexagonalKitten 6y ago
Do you go out of your way to listen to the internal communication and writing of all the groups? Because otherwise what you've heard only indicates who you pay attention to. For a quick intro, google Rachel Dolezal and skip the news articles and look for forums. You'll find everything you need, and you can then follow those people to see what else they discuss through the lens of CRT. > "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants Poe's law strikes again then because if you follow Gebru's crowd on Twitter you'll see a lot of talk of cleaning up and making room for new hires. That's a coded racist dogwhistle for exactly what Hintymad was joking about. This is the problem with platforming extremists.
- geofft 6y ago
  There's a distinction between "It stands to reason that, if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it, and we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner, which will necessarily cause unqualified people who have benefited from racial biases to leave" (which is a claim I have heard "Gebru's crowd on Twitter" make) and "We should re-evaluate people in a non-race-neutral manner and cause people to leave because of their race, regardless of qualification" (which is not). But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills. In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
  - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
    > "we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner" Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority. > if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies. Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances. We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.

leoh 6y ago

Mere curiosity from those who are reading and commenting about this situation, as opposed to outright skepticism or anger would, and I mean this sincerely, be a good start.