4 ms·

Back in my time, we called "treating people differently, based on their race" racism.

forgingahead 4y ago
Yes, quite an interesting magic trick that has been performed by people from certain political persuasions about how they now make everything about race, yet claim while patting us minorities on the head about how "they're not racist". It's barking mad.
- nervlord 4y ago
taeric 4y ago
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  I agree with this in the abstract. I think it's just, uhh, a little weird to pair this kind of message with a "we're removing tons of jobs that people relied on" kind of message.
  - taeric 4y ago
    I agree that this was poor messaging. If they had instead worded it in a "we are making active efforts to make sure we are not disproportionately hitting any demographic", that would have been better. Would ultimately be the same message, of course, but the idea is to find ways to battle default behaviors/prejudices, not just to be "anti-racist."
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Why would they hit minorities harder? What does race have to do with that?
  - crackercrews 4y ago
    This is not always the case. Didn't some company just shutter their German office? Probably that hit whites harder. But it's plausible that layoffs would hit certain groups harder right now. If your company had a big affirmative action push after the summer of 2020, you might have a bunch of junior minority employees. Perhaps they would be let go sooner than more senior employees or employees who not hired via an affirmative action program.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      If they shut down their german office, the people working there will get fired. If they're firing junior (developers,...), they're firing junior developers.. probably starting with least performing ones or whatever metric they use for firings. Using race as any metric is in my eyes totally racist. This is also true for hiring and "affirmative action".
  - taeric 4y ago
    In large, because minorities are likely under represented in management. And it is well established that, if there are not minorities in the selecting process, than you can expect them to be selected more for stuff like this. Even if, objectively, they are no worse than the majority. So, again, the wording is poor. And if they are just choosing who to let go based on race, that is bad. However, it makes sense to take an active oversight to make sure you don't have white managers, for example, just letting go all of their black reports. (And the reverse is also true. Though, again, likely not as prevalent. Not because minority people can't have prejudices; but because they are likely underrepresented in the roles. )
yojo 4y ago
People are treated unequally because of their race everyday. My wife’s former boss (CEO of an education non-profit) was a black man. He was walking in downtown Paulo Alto, wearing a suit, on a way to a business meeting. A cop stopped him at gunpoint and had him lie face-down on the ground and frisked him. Eventually, finding nothing, he let him go. “Mistaken identity.” This is the kind of shit black people have to live with. None of my white bosses have ever had interaction with law enforcement - other than the time a cop helped one find his keys to his BMW after he’d accidentally tossed them in the bushes. Our country is getting better. Most people don’t want to be racist. But this stuff still happens in the modern era. Acknowledging the problem and taking reasonable steps to try and improve it is not racist. Now, as the GP pointed out, this particular incidence probably did more harm than good/looks like a PR stunt.
- choko 4y ago
  What evidence do you have that it was because your boss was black? X happened and the target was black doesn't mean X happened BECAUSE the target was black. Did the cop use any sort of racial insult? I can share all kinds of negative interactions I've had and other white friends and family members have had with police for reasons unknown - including with black officers.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    I used to think like you - Wheres the evidence? They don't have a swastika tatooed on their face and didn't call you a slur, how can you know they were racist? But here's the thing, not all racism is overt. There's more subtle ways it plays out too - patterns of behavior and the like. When I was in my early 20s I worked at a bar owned by a black man, and I'm a white man. His role was basically manager, and I was basically assistant manager - and in the small bar world that meant we both were jacks of all trades. We did janitorial work and bookeeping and serving and really all the jobs of a bar. Depending on what each of us was doing that day, we could be dressed down and dirty, or dressed up and looking like a million bucks. Some days i would look basically homeless and he would look like a well of guy, and some days it would be the opposite. Some days we'd both look the same in that respect. Over time I noticed a pattern - independent of what task we were doing or how we were dressed, I would be approached by people wanting to do business first. Distributors, musical acts, promoters, maintenance workers, and even cops would approach me for manager intereactions more often than they would approach the owner. No matter what the outward appearances were, I was the first person approached 2/3-3/4 of the time. Any one of those instances could easily be rationalized away - Oh the well dressed guy was approached as manager, or they didn't want to bother the manager to begin with so they approached the worker first, or they approached who they saw first, or ..., or... But after a couple years of this, there really was only one pattern that was consistent: they approached the white guy first more often than anything else. Most of the people who came in to do business never said or did anything overtly racist. I suspect most of them wouldn't consider themselves racist and they likely have black friends and think the concept of racism is irrational. Yet the fact remains - in a 50-50 situation, the white guy was selected as likely to be the boss a lot more than 50% of the time. Yes this wasn't real science and theres a multi-variable statistical analysis that would be needed and all that jazz, but it was enough for me to become aware of the pattern - as i said any one of those situations can be rationalized away, but the fact that each situation needed a different rationalization and the racial bias explanation was much more consistent throughout was enough for me to believe that maybe there's more to racism than wearing a hood. Relating this back to the cop story above - sure you can rationalize this one incident however you want. But over time, pay attention - you'll find disproportionately more stories about such cases of 'mistaken identity' being applied to minorities than white folks in the US. This is what people are talking about with institutional racism or societal racism, the fact that it's assumed that a person is a criminal or a boss or whatever based on thier race (not the race of the assumer, that in and of itself is a racist notion - "oh the black cop assumed the black person was a criminal disproves racism because all black people are a single group and represent a single viewpoint"). Try it on yourself - walk into a high end or middle class establishment where most of the people are a different race than you and pay attention to your comfort level. Compare it to your comfort level in a similar establishment where most of the people are the same race. When you meet a person, pay attention to how surprised you are that they have some role, or some power level and if that matches what you expected first looking at them. Racial bias comes in part from how our society is set up wrt race - you probably aren't racist, but I bet you have racial biases anyway. I do - most people do, a lot of it is taught long before any experiences. The best we can do is acknowledge to ourselves the times we made stupid assumptions that had no merit, and update our priors - this can be upsetting sometimes, I know I would love to say I got where I am on my own, but my observed reality is: there's a lot of racism in the world, and I'm in the "easy mode" group.
pastor_bob 4y ago
Coincidentally, back then everyone in an important role was white, so one didn't even really have to think about race!
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. It's against the site guidelines and your comment was a big step in that direction. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754.

Yes, quite an interesting magic trick that has been performed by people from certain political persuasions about how they now make everything about race, yet claim while patting us minorities on the head about how "they're not racist". It's barking mad.

nervlord 4y ago

taeric 4y ago

phillipcarter 4y ago
I agree with this in the abstract. I think it's just, uhh, a little weird to pair this kind of message with a "we're removing tons of jobs that people relied on" kind of message.
- taeric 4y ago
  I agree that this was poor messaging. If they had instead worded it in a "we are making active efforts to make sure we are not disproportionately hitting any demographic", that would have been better. Would ultimately be the same message, of course, but the idea is to find ways to battle default behaviors/prejudices, not just to be "anti-racist."
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Why would they hit minorities harder? What does race have to do with that?
- crackercrews 4y ago
  This is not always the case. Didn't some company just shutter their German office? Probably that hit whites harder. But it's plausible that layoffs would hit certain groups harder right now. If your company had a big affirmative action push after the summer of 2020, you might have a bunch of junior minority employees. Perhaps they would be let go sooner than more senior employees or employees who not hired via an affirmative action program.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    If they shut down their german office, the people working there will get fired. If they're firing junior (developers,...), they're firing junior developers.. probably starting with least performing ones or whatever metric they use for firings. Using race as any metric is in my eyes totally racist. This is also true for hiring and "affirmative action".
- taeric 4y ago
  In large, because minorities are likely under represented in management. And it is well established that, if there are not minorities in the selecting process, than you can expect them to be selected more for stuff like this. Even if, objectively, they are no worse than the majority. So, again, the wording is poor. And if they are just choosing who to let go based on race, that is bad. However, it makes sense to take an active oversight to make sure you don't have white managers, for example, just letting go all of their black reports. (And the reverse is also true. Though, again, likely not as prevalent. Not because minority people can't have prejudices; but because they are likely underrepresented in the roles. )

yojo 4y ago

People are treated unequally because of their race everyday. My wife’s former boss (CEO of an education non-profit) was a black man. He was walking in downtown Paulo Alto, wearing a suit, on a way to a business meeting. A cop stopped him at gunpoint and had him lie face-down on the ground and frisked him. Eventually, finding nothing, he let him go. “Mistaken identity.” This is the kind of shit black people have to live with. None of my white bosses have ever had interaction with law enforcement - other than the time a cop helped one find his keys to his BMW after he’d accidentally tossed them in the bushes. Our country is getting better. Most people don’t want to be racist. But this stuff still happens in the modern era. Acknowledging the problem and taking reasonable steps to try and improve it is not racist. Now, as the GP pointed out, this particular incidence probably did more harm than good/looks like a PR stunt.

choko 4y ago
What evidence do you have that it was because your boss was black? X happened and the target was black doesn't mean X happened BECAUSE the target was black. Did the cop use any sort of racial insult? I can share all kinds of negative interactions I've had and other white friends and family members have had with police for reasons unknown - including with black officers.
- sophacles 4y ago
  I used to think like you - Wheres the evidence? They don't have a swastika tatooed on their face and didn't call you a slur, how can you know they were racist? But here's the thing, not all racism is overt. There's more subtle ways it plays out too - patterns of behavior and the like. When I was in my early 20s I worked at a bar owned by a black man, and I'm a white man. His role was basically manager, and I was basically assistant manager - and in the small bar world that meant we both were jacks of all trades. We did janitorial work and bookeeping and serving and really all the jobs of a bar. Depending on what each of us was doing that day, we could be dressed down and dirty, or dressed up and looking like a million bucks. Some days i would look basically homeless and he would look like a well of guy, and some days it would be the opposite. Some days we'd both look the same in that respect. Over time I noticed a pattern - independent of what task we were doing or how we were dressed, I would be approached by people wanting to do business first. Distributors, musical acts, promoters, maintenance workers, and even cops would approach me for manager intereactions more often than they would approach the owner. No matter what the outward appearances were, I was the first person approached 2/3-3/4 of the time. Any one of those instances could easily be rationalized away - Oh the well dressed guy was approached as manager, or they didn't want to bother the manager to begin with so they approached the worker first, or they approached who they saw first, or ..., or... But after a couple years of this, there really was only one pattern that was consistent: they approached the white guy first more often than anything else. Most of the people who came in to do business never said or did anything overtly racist. I suspect most of them wouldn't consider themselves racist and they likely have black friends and think the concept of racism is irrational. Yet the fact remains - in a 50-50 situation, the white guy was selected as likely to be the boss a lot more than 50% of the time. Yes this wasn't real science and theres a multi-variable statistical analysis that would be needed and all that jazz, but it was enough for me to become aware of the pattern - as i said any one of those situations can be rationalized away, but the fact that each situation needed a different rationalization and the racial bias explanation was much more consistent throughout was enough for me to believe that maybe there's more to racism than wearing a hood. Relating this back to the cop story above - sure you can rationalize this one incident however you want. But over time, pay attention - you'll find disproportionately more stories about such cases of 'mistaken identity' being applied to minorities than white folks in the US. This is what people are talking about with institutional racism or societal racism, the fact that it's assumed that a person is a criminal or a boss or whatever based on thier race (not the race of the assumer, that in and of itself is a racist notion - "oh the black cop assumed the black person was a criminal disproves racism because all black people are a single group and represent a single viewpoint"). Try it on yourself - walk into a high end or middle class establishment where most of the people are a different race than you and pay attention to your comfort level. Compare it to your comfort level in a similar establishment where most of the people are the same race. When you meet a person, pay attention to how surprised you are that they have some role, or some power level and if that matches what you expected first looking at them. Racial bias comes in part from how our society is set up wrt race - you probably aren't racist, but I bet you have racial biases anyway. I do - most people do, a lot of it is taught long before any experiences. The best we can do is acknowledge to ourselves the times we made stupid assumptions that had no merit, and update our priors - this can be upsetting sometimes, I know I would love to say I got where I am on my own, but my observed reality is: there's a lot of racism in the world, and I'm in the "easy mode" group.

pastor_bob 4y ago

Coincidentally, back then everyone in an important role was white, so one didn't even really have to think about race!

dang 4y ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. It's against the site guidelines and your comment was a big step in that direction. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754.