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Sigh. I knew this was coming. I almost ended my message with "Inb4, WellActually, this is what corporations have always done" but thought would be TOO cynical.

Sigh. I knew this was coming. I almost ended my message with "Inb4, WellActually, this is what corporations have always done" but thought would be TOO cynical. Look. I led with a very high level summary of my other perspectives to signal that someone can hold all the above thoughts and still believe that the re-editing of existing books without the consent of their author is blatantly not OK. That it is not a contradiction or a "Woke SJW vs Free Speech Patriot" issue. I am not interested in a debate on the rest of the positions. Rest assured, I do not agree with you. Pride is important. Corporations showing that they support pride and LGBTQ customers and employees is important. Especially in reference to the corporations that deliberately show that they do NOT care about those things. Diversity is important. And while tokenism is bad, highlighting your commitments to diversity is also important. Now, if your corporation's response at the first sign of a tech downturn is to go "DEI was a zero interest rate phenomenon" (as many have), sure, it's hypocritical. But DEI, Pride, and LGBTQ support make financial sense because most people are supportive of these concepts. Most people are NOT supportive of Roald Dahl and R.L. Stein being re-edited.

rayiner 4y ago
> Diversity is important. And while tokenism is bad Sorry but the current DEI wave is built on tokenism. Intersectionality indeed virtually demands it. E.g. our vice president who was appointed to represent black people and Asians, despite having little support in either community, because she appealed to white people. She’s a manifestation of modern Macaulayism: > We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
- tptacek 4y ago
  How specifically does intersectionality demand tokenism? You've convincingly argued that tokenism is a thing, and you've used the term "intersectionality" in your argument, but you haven't connected the notions.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Because it insists on highlighting minorities within minority groups. Within a minority group, further minority identities are subtractive. A racial minority, for example, left to its own devices is unlikely to select a religious minority within their group to represent them. It’s mainly among certain white people where multiple minority identities are additive. Kamala Harris is an excellent example of this. Her intersecting identities means that neither black people nor Indian people embraced her. She would’ve been a political non-entity if a white person hadn’t put her in a position of representing both black people and Indians.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      It seems to me like you're describing exactly the problem intersectionality describes; if you go back to Crenshaw's paper, it's just a series of cases where Black women were excluded as class representatives because the fact of their belonging in two separate disfavored categories meant that they wouldn't be accepted in either: they couldn't represent Black people because they were women and there was a male-female pay disparity, for instance, and they couldn't represent women because white women made more than Black men. What you're saying seems to reinforce that case, not rebut it.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        But if you respond to that by having a white man exercise his privilege contrary to what black people as a group would do and what women as a group would do, then you’re engaged in tokenism and reinforcing white male supremacy. Put differently, the dominant group asserting its power to address perceived problems within those groups—according to the dominant group’s view of justice and order—necessarily disempowers those groups. And it does so in a particularly gross way, by co-opting those groups’ identities and installing representatives those groups wouldn’t have selected for themselves. You can’t meaningfully empower minority groups as groups if white post-Christians retain overarching authority to enforce their view of how those groups should operate. As an aside, while I love to rag on Kamala Harris, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley have the nearly identical problem—their conversion to Christianity. The difference is that conservatives don’t play identity politics so neither Haley nor Jindal purport to “represent” anyone.

rayiner 4y ago

> Diversity is important. And while tokenism is bad Sorry but the current DEI wave is built on tokenism. Intersectionality indeed virtually demands it. E.g. our vice president who was appointed to represent black people and Asians, despite having little support in either community, because she appealed to white people. She’s a manifestation of modern Macaulayism: > We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

tptacek 4y ago
How specifically does intersectionality demand tokenism? You've convincingly argued that tokenism is a thing, and you've used the term "intersectionality" in your argument, but you haven't connected the notions.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Because it insists on highlighting minorities within minority groups. Within a minority group, further minority identities are subtractive. A racial minority, for example, left to its own devices is unlikely to select a religious minority within their group to represent them. It’s mainly among certain white people where multiple minority identities are additive. Kamala Harris is an excellent example of this. Her intersecting identities means that neither black people nor Indian people embraced her. She would’ve been a political non-entity if a white person hadn’t put her in a position of representing both black people and Indians.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    It seems to me like you're describing exactly the problem intersectionality describes; if you go back to Crenshaw's paper, it's just a series of cases where Black women were excluded as class representatives because the fact of their belonging in two separate disfavored categories meant that they wouldn't be accepted in either: they couldn't represent Black people because they were women and there was a male-female pay disparity, for instance, and they couldn't represent women because white women made more than Black men. What you're saying seems to reinforce that case, not rebut it.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      But if you respond to that by having a white man exercise his privilege contrary to what black people as a group would do and what women as a group would do, then you’re engaged in tokenism and reinforcing white male supremacy. Put differently, the dominant group asserting its power to address perceived problems within those groups—according to the dominant group’s view of justice and order—necessarily disempowers those groups. And it does so in a particularly gross way, by co-opting those groups’ identities and installing representatives those groups wouldn’t have selected for themselves. You can’t meaningfully empower minority groups as groups if white post-Christians retain overarching authority to enforce their view of how those groups should operate. As an aside, while I love to rag on Kamala Harris, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley have the nearly identical problem—their conversion to Christianity. The difference is that conservatives don’t play identity politics so neither Haley nor Jindal purport to “represent” anyone.