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I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or eve

• ruined 2y ago
  the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery-link-daniel-smith-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
  • dkga 2y ago
    Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
    • wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years 2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA 50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
      • gizmo686 2y ago
        The 13th amendment allows for slavery as a punishment for crimes. It does not require that everyone in prison be a slave.
        • wahnfrieden 2y ago
          Ok?
          • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
            Are you actually claiming that everyone in a US prison is a slave?
            • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
              The constitution allows that they be used for slave labor, and many are.
              • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
                But are they slaves by virtue of being in prison?
                • ponow 2y ago
                  Don't commit the crime if you can't handle it. It's a punishment.
                  • lesuorac 2y ago
                    I think you mean, don't be poor. It's not like people in prison are actually all guilty of their convicted crime. You'll see this double-standard a lot for minor offenses as well. How many times has MKHB been caught excessively speeding (including 90? in a school zone) and still have a license.
                  • 2y ago
  • JohnMakin 2y ago
    You only need to go back 3 generations in my family to find someone born a slave. And I am not even middle aged. People don’t understand that hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations, it carries over in really strange and insidious ways.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      > hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery. If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow. That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        > If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics. Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066. It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
        • davidgay 2y ago
          > Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066. I feel that's overstating it a bit. But my mother (English) was definitely brought up in a context that had not forgotten about Napoleon - Napoleon was viewed/presented as comparable to Hitler.
          • scott_w 2y ago
            Not really: the descendants of the Norman conquest remain some of the wealthiest landowners in England. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-house-prices-inequality-normans https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-h...
  • thatcat 2y ago
    plenty of forms of slavery still exist, perhaps we should focus on that
  • sethammons 2y ago
    The grandson of the 10th US president is alive and well. That president was alive when George Washington was. This is a young country.
• deleted 2y ago
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• pixxel 2y ago
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  • sanktanglia 2y ago
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    • xwolfi 2y ago
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    • dgfitz 2y ago
      I must be the only idiot to think that education and money aren’t the issue in the black community. Two-parent households and stability would sort a lot of things out in a generation. Dreams, goals, ambitions, and opportunities follow from stability. Money doesn’t fix emotional vacuums. This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
      • skulk 2y ago
        It's true that having a two-parent household helps children's outcomes, but it's somewhat inflammatory to ignore the impact that targeted violence has had on black communities, or that simply pretending that didn't happen and that "they should just get their shit together" is a remotely compassionate stance. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-of-america-racism/ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-...
        • dgfitz 2y ago
          It’s inflammatory to assume I intentionally ignore something and accused me of ignoring it. Anything else I missed? Probably a lot, huh.
• lolinder 2y ago
  > I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick. I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started. Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
• xwolfi 2y ago
  But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people. What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society. But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ? For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
  • yantramanav 2y ago
    Disenfranchising Indians must be the new racist trend here. Please try to have some empathy. Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc. They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well. Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
    • pfannkuchen 2y ago
      Coolies have nothing to do with America though. If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though. I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
    • lmz 2y ago
      How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
    • xwolfi 2y ago
      I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country. Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
• Marazan 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
  • o0-0o 2y ago
    So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
    • Drew_ 2y ago
      Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
      • kridsdale1 2y ago
        Which population? FB hires from everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
        • Dylan16807 2y ago
          To start with, you can sort the employee records into a visa pile and a not-visa pile.
      • Dalewyn 2y ago
        You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
        • Dylan16807 2y ago
          Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
          • cindycindy 2y ago
• anon373839 2y ago
  > My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
  • goatlover 2y ago
    Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
    • treyd 2y ago
      This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today. It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
      • marcusverus 2y ago
        > This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place". https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154 https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154
        • jonathanlb 2y ago
          I think the voters already informed her about that. The campaign was shut down a few months ago.
• paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    ^mitigated, not motivated
• rayiner 2y ago
  America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium. There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them. Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
  • KPGv2 2y ago
    > America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on. DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression. So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US). I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
    • jazzyjackson 2y ago
• chii 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
  • KPGv2 2y ago
    > why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
    • chii 2y ago
      > a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently. So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
    • gottorf 2y ago
      > do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
• deanishe 2y ago
  > According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
  • Over2Chars 2y ago
    According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject. So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...? https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
• 4dregress 2y ago
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  • 4dregress 2y ago
    I don’t know why I’ve been down voted. Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces. The same also applies to people of colour. If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
• KPGv2 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. That's a 50% increase.
• lazide 2y ago
  The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks. And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do. Especially historically under represented groups. It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well. But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time. Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc. If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever. Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path. But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it. So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons. One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try. East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs. If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
• torginus 2y ago
  >FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That sounds proportional? I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• jsnell 2y ago
  > the first time having two black senators is now This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_United_States_senators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
• justmy2centz 2y ago
  Abysmal? You think that Meta is going to compromise its quality of work to meet a statistic they knew would only be temporary? If they had changed the demographic to 30%+ they would have had to hire subpar people and bypassed people in the top of their field who truly deserved and had the experience to qualify for the job. This whole DEI bs never should have been started. What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
• nothercastle 2y ago
  Why is that terrible? 14% of the US is black that seems reasonable considering other economical and educational disadvantages black Americas face.