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This story is so strange. First of all, it has been considered unprofessional to talk about politics at work for as long as I can remember. It's odd how you wou

This story is so strange. First of all, it has been considered unprofessional to talk about politics at work for as long as I can remember. It's odd how you would need a rule implemented about that. Is this just a generational thing? On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative. What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.

fooey 5y ago
I mean, racial equality has always been political. It became more so when a major segment of the USA decided they didn't care to hide being racist anymore after the 2008 elections.
Barrin92 5y ago
>Is this just a generational thing? No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off. Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
- foobarthrowaway 5y ago
  Maybe, but don't kid yourself that you (or, the average HN'er) are the working blue collar everyman or share much of their politics. A lot of you would brand a lot of them "nazis" for their opinions.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  Now that is one of the more interesting perspectives on the situation that I've read, out of all these threads. Thanks.
- evrydayhustling 5y ago
  100% this. Basecamp leadership just discovered that "stakeholder capitalism" isn't a choice made by management, it's something that happens to management because stakeholders are getting more empowered and organized.
- futuretaint 5y ago
  upper middle class people unite !
ashtonkem 5y ago
I think this is badly missing the point. I think two very specific things happened here: First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior. Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that. Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
- mfer 5y ago
  > First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that. > Second, they did an end run around the employees. This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
  - vore 5y ago
    I think the "Pyramid of Hate" illustration is really quite immaterial to it all, and overly focusing on it ignores the fact that the founders completely failed to understand their employees' subsequent concerns. You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
tha0xa1 5y ago
>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When acronyms became "white supremacy culture"[1], public magnet schools became "systemic racism"[2], showing up to work on time and objective thinking became "whiteness"[3], etc. "racial equality" became just another Motte and Bailey in the hyper-polarized toxic political world we live in. No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal. What many do oppose is the entryist toxic leftism that's making it's headway into every facet of society. That's the "politics at work" that many are opposed to. Leftism became a religion, and "wokeism" is its proselytization. >What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions. That's exactly what's happening. As an example, this is the (former) head data analyst at Basecamp: From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ > If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free. [1]https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-san-francisco-school-sf/10229093/ https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-sa... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Fran... [3]https://tri-statedefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/whiteness-1_0.png https://tri-statedefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/whi...
- cozuya 5y ago
  Its so, so rich to see criticism of "leftism" as "becoming a religion", when the right in this country literally worship a golden idol of The Former Guy at their politics conventions. "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"? He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism. Are you an anti-racist?
mfer 5y ago
> Is this just a generational thing? I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
jariel 5y ago
People are constantly confusing the issue with 'politics'. This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided: They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege. "“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”" The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory. The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that. The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'. This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc. It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil. It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
klyrs 5y ago
> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Also a massive lie of omission, seeing as how slavery was legal when that was written and would remain so until the Civil War.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I just re-read that particular bit of history... apparently Jefferson wrote that with aspiration to abolish slavery, despite being a slaveholder himself. And of course, gender equality didn't even get that much consideration
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    Slavery is still legal if you're incarcerated, and last I checked, we led the world in absolute and proportional numbers of people incarcerated.
kbenson 5y ago
> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were. I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences. The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations. Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy. Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
- sagichmal 5y ago
  (laughs) "Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion. It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dools 5y ago
"On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic?" What other category would you put it in?
xenophonB 5y ago
>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.
kisstheblade 5y ago
"On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace." When you have "Black employees" who are racist, that's when. You know, "bend the knee" etc. Everybody white "does X" and are white supremacists.
- dang 5y ago
  Even in a flamewar thread on a flamewar topic, this comment stands out as particularly hellish. We ban accounts that do this on HN. No more of this, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046293, please. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." All: HN's guidelines apply irrespective of whether other people are following them or not. When commenting here, please consider your own behavior first, and make sure it's in the intended spirit.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 5y ago
> when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Since literally forever. Like when wasn't it?

fooey 5y ago

I mean, racial equality has always been political. It became more so when a major segment of the USA decided they didn't care to hide being racist anymore after the 2008 elections.

Barrin92 5y ago

>Is this just a generational thing? No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off. Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.

foobarthrowaway 5y ago
Maybe, but don't kid yourself that you (or, the average HN'er) are the working blue collar everyman or share much of their politics. A lot of you would brand a lot of them "nazis" for their opinions.
intergalplan 5y ago
Now that is one of the more interesting perspectives on the situation that I've read, out of all these threads. Thanks.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
100% this. Basecamp leadership just discovered that "stakeholder capitalism" isn't a choice made by management, it's something that happens to management because stakeholders are getting more empowered and organized.
futuretaint 5y ago
upper middle class people unite !

ashtonkem 5y ago

I think this is badly missing the point. I think two very specific things happened here: First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior. Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that. Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.

mfer 5y ago
> First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that. > Second, they did an end run around the employees. This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
- vore 5y ago
  I think the "Pyramid of Hate" illustration is really quite immaterial to it all, and overly focusing on it ignores the fact that the founders completely failed to understand their employees' subsequent concerns. You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
- darkwizard42 5y ago

tha0xa1 5y ago

>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When acronyms became "white supremacy culture"[1], public magnet schools became "systemic racism"[2], showing up to work on time and objective thinking became "whiteness"[3], etc. "racial equality" became just another Motte and Bailey in the hyper-polarized toxic political world we live in. No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal. What many do oppose is the entryist toxic leftism that's making it's headway into every facet of society. That's the "politics at work" that many are opposed to. Leftism became a religion, and "wokeism" is its proselytization. >What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions. That's exactly what's happening. As an example, this is the (former) head data analyst at Basecamp: From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ > If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free. [1]https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-san-francisco-school-sf/10229093/ https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-sa... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Fran... [3]https://tri-statedefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/whiteness-1_0.png https://tri-statedefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/whi...

cozuya 5y ago
Its so, so rich to see criticism of "leftism" as "becoming a religion", when the right in this country literally worship a golden idol of The Former Guy at their politics conventions. "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"? He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism. Are you an anti-racist?

mfer 5y ago

> Is this just a generational thing? I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.

jariel 5y ago

People are constantly confusing the issue with 'politics'. This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided: They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege. "“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”" The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory. The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that. The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'. This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc. It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil. It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..

klyrs 5y ago

> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.

XorNot 5y ago
Also a massive lie of omission, seeing as how slavery was legal when that was written and would remain so until the Civil War.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I just re-read that particular bit of history... apparently Jefferson wrote that with aspiration to abolish slavery, despite being a slaveholder himself. And of course, gender equality didn't even get that much consideration
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  Slavery is still legal if you're incarcerated, and last I checked, we led the world in absolute and proportional numbers of people incarcerated.

kbenson 5y ago

> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were. I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences. The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations. Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy. Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).

sagichmal 5y ago
(laughs) "Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion. It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dools 5y ago

"On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic?" What other category would you put it in?

xenophonB 5y ago

>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.

kisstheblade 5y ago

"On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace." When you have "Black employees" who are racist, that's when. You know, "bend the knee" etc. Everybody white "does X" and are white supremacists.

dang 5y ago
Even in a flamewar thread on a flamewar topic, this comment stands out as particularly hellish. We ban accounts that do this on HN. No more of this, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046293, please. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." All: HN's guidelines apply irrespective of whether other people are following them or not. When commenting here, please consider your own behavior first, and make sure it's in the intended spirit.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paulddraper 5y ago

> when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Since literally forever. Like when wasn't it?