3 ms·

You started with asking what you can do to help, then went on to discount her experience as an outlier despite her clearly saying it wasn't, and then finished m

by soamv 12y ago

You started with asking what you can do to help, then went on to discount her experience as an outlier despite her clearly saying it wasn't, and then finished more or less by implying that _she's_ racist. So if you're asking what you should do, the answer is: the exact opposite of whatever you're doing now.

sosuke 12y ago
It isn't cool to point the racism finger anywhere, but how would you describe that? If I was to say that I was uncomfortable working in a group of opposite gendered difference raced folks who were already a clique before I joined in, then said it was hard to fake being a part of that group and how much stress that put on me, and how the industry needs to change to include everyone, diversity. In the same story I talk about how great it was when I joined a same raced same gendered group and how that was diversity, would you not say I had a warped sense of what diversity means? There is no definition for a diverse group, but her one sample isn't diverse. Google searched "Picture of Diverse People" http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jpg http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jp...
- bkirwi 12y ago
  If you do any reading on race and diversity, you'll come across the idea of racism as a systemic thing -- racism not as single instances of discrimination based, but a recurring pattern. This is why it's very hard to insult a white person with a racial slur. It's why 'girls who code' groups are common, but male-only versions feel pretty gross. It's why, in the context of our industry, a predominantly black dev team is really unusally diverse. (It's also a bit weird that people keep calling that example 'non-diverse', when entirely-white groups of developers are still the norm. Even a predominantly white group -- but with some people of colour -- is unusually diverse in this field, sadly.)
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    People are calling that example 'non-diverse' because they are using the dictionary definition of diversity: "the state of being diverse; variety" or "an instance of being composed of differing elements or qualities". By this definition, a team of white, south asian and east asian people is diverse. A team of black Americans is not. You seem to be using some alternate definition - I'm guessing diversity for you means "sufficient numbers of non-Asian minorities", but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
    - bkirwi 12y ago
      Sure! Let's take the immediately preceding example, where the author had a black woman as a supervisor. The author describes this as 'diversity lightning'. If you interpret this narrowly, this makes absolutely no sense: there's no way in which a single person can be considered diverse. On the other hand, if you think about it at an environmental or company level, things look different. Suppose we take a random US tech company's employees and dump them in a vase. (Let's ignore the ethical issues with this for a moment.) At this point, we'd expect the odds of a random draw to reflect the tech industry's demographics, which is to say, predominantly white and asian males. If you draw this 'predominantly black' development team from the vase, though, you need to update your priors. You probably shouldn't calculate your posterior as 'everyone at this company is black' -- but you'd still probably guess that you're looking at a tech company where there are more black people and women than average. Which is to say, you'd expect that the company as a whole was more diverse. I think this second reading is a lot more charitable to the author. I also think it's the more interesting reading; the demographic representation in a small group is subject to a huge amount of randomness, but the demographics of a entire organization are more telling, and can reveal more interesting things about policy and bias. As a community, software people are normally biased toward systems-level thinking; it's weird to me that in this particular issue people have this laser-focus on small groups and tokenism.
      - yummyfajitas 12y ago
        That is a more interesting interpretation. I think it's more of a steel man [1] than a charitable interpretation, but that's absolutely worth bringing up. [1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man - basically the opposite of a straw man.
- SCdF 12y ago
  I think it wasn't what the group was and more what it wasn't: she no longer had to deal with having to laugh along with sexist and racist jokes, and all the rest of the issues she wrote about in the post. That's how I interpreted it anyway.
  - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    If she had phrased it in a way that acknowledged that being in the majority was more comfortable, I would have had no problem with it. What bothered me was that she referred to the situation of being with a bunch of people like her as "diversity lightning" and similar. No, she didn't have to worry about how to conform, but that's because she was already naturally conformant. While possible, I somehow doubt that the black majority at that company spends a whole ton of time making sure that the non-blacks don't feel uncomfortable in the way that she did elsewhere. The reality is that yes, people are going to feel more comfortable with people who are like them. I don't see that changing any time soon, and I don't fault her for that feeling of relief. But it's disingenuous at best to say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with" is the solution, or even a solution, for how to deal with diversity. The average group of 10 Americans will have one black person and six non-Latino whites. It's understandable for that situation to make you uncomfortable, just as I'd probably be at least mildly uncomfortable on a team with six blacks, a Chinese person, an Indian, and a Hispanic. I'm open to suggestions to make it easier, but if the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes, I really don't know what to do.
    - shkkmo 12y ago
      "I could relate to my teammates without having to conform. I didn’t have to be anything different than who I was and I flourished there." No, she wasn't "naturally conformant", saying she was is a bit of racism on your part. In the very next paragraph: "After The Home Depot, I took a position at a lottery/parimutuel company. I returned to being the only black woman, but the team there wasn’t very close knit so everybody did their own thing, did their job, and went home." It makes it clear that the issue is not a lack of racial homogeneity, but racism, especially when combined with a cliquish work environment. With the above quote, the author directly refutes your claim that "the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes". The author does not say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with", but consistently says "My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted."
stcredzero 12y ago
So if you're asking what you should do, the answer is: the exact opposite of whatever you're doing now. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. If mistakes are being made because of clueless action, then having them "do the opposite" is still going result in clueless actions. The proper antidote is honest and open communication. The key takeaway is that her environments didn't foster this communication. I doubt that the majority of the environments she was in had enough capacity for self-awareness and introspection to make such a thing easy and apparent. I would also posit, that the very mechanical pattern-matching way we currently implement "political correctness" is counterproductive in this way. I wonder if the fear around issues of race and group inclusiveness didn't drive the HR response she described. Political correctness shouldn't be about enforcing superficial behavior. It should be about the epistemic health of a group. It should be about how well a group can discover and absorb cultural issues is isn't yet aware of.

by soamv 12y ago

sosuke 12y ago

It isn't cool to point the racism finger anywhere, but how would you describe that? If I was to say that I was uncomfortable working in a group of opposite gendered difference raced folks who were already a clique before I joined in, then said it was hard to fake being a part of that group and how much stress that put on me, and how the industry needs to change to include everyone, diversity. In the same story I talk about how great it was when I joined a same raced same gendered group and how that was diversity, would you not say I had a warped sense of what diversity means? There is no definition for a diverse group, but her one sample isn't diverse. Google searched "Picture of Diverse People" http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jpg http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jp...

bkirwi 12y ago
If you do any reading on race and diversity, you'll come across the idea of racism as a systemic thing -- racism not as single instances of discrimination based, but a recurring pattern. This is why it's very hard to insult a white person with a racial slur. It's why 'girls who code' groups are common, but male-only versions feel pretty gross. It's why, in the context of our industry, a predominantly black dev team is really unusally diverse. (It's also a bit weird that people keep calling that example 'non-diverse', when entirely-white groups of developers are still the norm. Even a predominantly white group -- but with some people of colour -- is unusually diverse in this field, sadly.)
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  People are calling that example 'non-diverse' because they are using the dictionary definition of diversity: "the state of being diverse; variety" or "an instance of being composed of differing elements or qualities". By this definition, a team of white, south asian and east asian people is diverse. A team of black Americans is not. You seem to be using some alternate definition - I'm guessing diversity for you means "sufficient numbers of non-Asian minorities", but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
  - bkirwi 12y ago
    Sure! Let's take the immediately preceding example, where the author had a black woman as a supervisor. The author describes this as 'diversity lightning'. If you interpret this narrowly, this makes absolutely no sense: there's no way in which a single person can be considered diverse. On the other hand, if you think about it at an environmental or company level, things look different. Suppose we take a random US tech company's employees and dump them in a vase. (Let's ignore the ethical issues with this for a moment.) At this point, we'd expect the odds of a random draw to reflect the tech industry's demographics, which is to say, predominantly white and asian males. If you draw this 'predominantly black' development team from the vase, though, you need to update your priors. You probably shouldn't calculate your posterior as 'everyone at this company is black' -- but you'd still probably guess that you're looking at a tech company where there are more black people and women than average. Which is to say, you'd expect that the company as a whole was more diverse. I think this second reading is a lot more charitable to the author. I also think it's the more interesting reading; the demographic representation in a small group is subject to a huge amount of randomness, but the demographics of a entire organization are more telling, and can reveal more interesting things about policy and bias. As a community, software people are normally biased toward systems-level thinking; it's weird to me that in this particular issue people have this laser-focus on small groups and tokenism.
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      That is a more interesting interpretation. I think it's more of a steel man [1] than a charitable interpretation, but that's absolutely worth bringing up. [1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man - basically the opposite of a straw man.
SCdF 12y ago
I think it wasn't what the group was and more what it wasn't: she no longer had to deal with having to laugh along with sexist and racist jokes, and all the rest of the issues she wrote about in the post. That's how I interpreted it anyway.
- GeneralMayhem 12y ago
  If she had phrased it in a way that acknowledged that being in the majority was more comfortable, I would have had no problem with it. What bothered me was that she referred to the situation of being with a bunch of people like her as "diversity lightning" and similar. No, she didn't have to worry about how to conform, but that's because she was already naturally conformant. While possible, I somehow doubt that the black majority at that company spends a whole ton of time making sure that the non-blacks don't feel uncomfortable in the way that she did elsewhere. The reality is that yes, people are going to feel more comfortable with people who are like them. I don't see that changing any time soon, and I don't fault her for that feeling of relief. But it's disingenuous at best to say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with" is the solution, or even a solution, for how to deal with diversity. The average group of 10 Americans will have one black person and six non-Latino whites. It's understandable for that situation to make you uncomfortable, just as I'd probably be at least mildly uncomfortable on a team with six blacks, a Chinese person, an Indian, and a Hispanic. I'm open to suggestions to make it easier, but if the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes, I really don't know what to do.
  - shkkmo 12y ago
    "I could relate to my teammates without having to conform. I didn’t have to be anything different than who I was and I flourished there." No, she wasn't "naturally conformant", saying she was is a bit of racism on your part. In the very next paragraph: "After The Home Depot, I took a position at a lottery/parimutuel company. I returned to being the only black woman, but the team there wasn’t very close knit so everybody did their own thing, did their job, and went home." It makes it clear that the issue is not a lack of racial homogeneity, but racism, especially when combined with a cliquish work environment. With the above quote, the author directly refutes your claim that "the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes". The author does not say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with", but consistently says "My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted."

stcredzero 12y ago

So if you're asking what you should do, the answer is: the exact opposite of whatever you're doing now. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. If mistakes are being made because of clueless action, then having them "do the opposite" is still going result in clueless actions. The proper antidote is honest and open communication. The key takeaway is that her environments didn't foster this communication. I doubt that the majority of the environments she was in had enough capacity for self-awareness and introspection to make such a thing easy and apparent. I would also posit, that the very mechanical pattern-matching way we currently implement "political correctness" is counterproductive in this way. I wonder if the fear around issues of race and group inclusiveness didn't drive the HR response she described. Political correctness shouldn't be about enforcing superficial behavior. It should be about the epistemic health of a group. It should be about how well a group can discover and absorb cultural issues is isn't yet aware of.