Software has to be developed entirely (or practically so. European descendant people are ~15% of the global population so representation above that size is clear systemic/latent racism) by Africans or you're a Nazi. No compromise is possible or moral.
Each of these networks is open to everyone. You can be straight and a member of the LGBTQ+ network just fine. You can be white and join the Black network too.
The networks exist because people have (and are) the targets of persecution. It's nice to find other people who will understand what that feels like and make connections and advocate for less systematic persecution.
I’m worried that the pendulum will swing far past center and back to biases though.
I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Examples?
> We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But in the meantime, while we wait for the racists and sexists to become enlightened, should we not have initiatives, laws, education, to protect those who have historically been underrepresented and/or discriminated against?
We should, though you've phrased it very generically. Obviously there is a line, and actively disadvantaging those who are systemically/historically advantaged is chaos - I'm even comfortable calling it immoral. "Treating the symptom", or "brute-forcing" it, is a catastrophe in culture-sized problems.
Ideally, via cultural development, one day we can look at statistics and see that no race or gender gets more/better jobs than another. Legally demanding that it simply be the case is insane.
Apple VP stated officially as their hiring policy:
>We’ve made some changes to the way we do manager hiring … There’s two questions at the top of an offer when it goes to approval. One is that a female was interviewed and that a URE [underrepresented employee] was interviewed. And … for management positions, I have said that I won’t approve an offer unless there’s a yes next to one of those.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UfuYjAj1jZM
https://aflegal.org/press-release/america-first-legal-demand...
This is illegal, it clearly violates the civil rights act.
We are moving away from a cultural Marxist leftwing ideology ("equity"), which meant discriminatory hiring as a kind of "eye-for-an-eye" collective punishment against a mostly innocent group of people based on their immutable birth characteristics. Retaliatory justice against a population for perceived historic unfairness. That is an extremist policy.
It's only because the Overton Window shifted to the left that some people don't consider "equity" policies as extreme.
We are moving from the extreme left towards the centre.
Yeah, let's "return" to that. Let's "go back" to the good old pre-racism days that we all remember that totally happened.
Please enlighten me as to when this period occurred in American history. Forget America, give me an example in any ethnically diverse society.
People often point at the 1980s but culture was extremely aware back then of the need to re-balance, but it did so in a kind of crass way at every level of the media. Token hiring was rampant, and used as a way to wash society's hands of the problem by laundering seemingly diverse figures into the unmodified culture, as long as they didn't question it too much.
I would echo your point. Anyone here: when was it better, genuinely, for everyone, than it is now? When was it less complicated?
From my vantage point the US has never in my lifetime been remotely left of centre, they are moving from right to slightly further right.
DEI hiring is of course an easy target. It's a weak policy to tackle a complicated problem with obvious flaws and no track record of success. I think a truly left wing society would have quickly replaced it with more direct policies to hit generational poverty - EU style public education comes to mind.
We can't return to a state we've never been in.
Meritocracy has never existed - wealth, status, privilege and connections have always mattered. Colorblind hiring has never existed - race has always been a factor, and all employees have never been equally valuable to all others.
So let's be honest about where we're going - back to the status quo under which there was nothing in place, even in theory, to counteract the systemic effects of racial bias in hiring.
I’m actually somewhat surprised that people see this as good. Like I said, maybe DEI wasn’t a good solution but seeing this as anything but a step back is just weird.
Do you consider the countless examples where a small startup grows and becomes more diverse while the product becomes shit as counterexamples?
Let's not. This snideness should be indefensible, in an ideal world.
what else could you possibly need to show that racism is bad business? that racists get what’s coming to them in the long term?
The history of the US is littered with riots that not only targeted individuals and families, but businesses and other sources of minority wealth.
Turns out that you don't need to be better at business if you can prescribe the competition with impunity.
There's theory, and then there's practice.
If practice is directly contradicting your theory, that doesn't mean you should double down on your theory and hopefully it comes true. It means your theory is bullshit, and you should burn it and start over.
Merit based hiring and rewards are fair, and actually build trust.
The ends of the pipeline (the private companies) should never have tried to evaluate the opportunitys someone had received.
It doesn't seem to be as impactful as who you know, where you were born, who your parents are, where you live, where you go to school, what university you went to, etc. Sure, hard work is important, absolutely, but it's not the only marker.
I would have more empathy for programs that attempt to seperate things like who you know and institutional clout from a hiring process, anonymised candidates seems ideal. But this has been tried with the result of less diversity in hiring than suited the agenda of the day.