The current dominant themes in certain feminism & diversity cliques in our community are openly hostile towards me. I'm a male. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm heterosexual.
I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage.
For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back.
There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again.
The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion.
You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes.
Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry.
You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.
I don't understand how people can seriously claim that these are "current dominant themes". I studied at UC Berkeley, one of the liberal capitals of California. Most of my friends are Berkeley students. Most of my friends are feminists.
There's practically no hostility (as you put it) towards white, heterosexual males in these circles. I have never been personally attacked or felt uncomfortable. Most of the discussion is aimed at systemic issues, not individuals. It's been pretty eye-opening, actually.
Based on my experience, I'm fairly certain that stories involving militant feminist/diversity people have been vastly overblown by places like Reddit.
Your Berkeley friends may simply be more educated. In any case, before you pass judgment, try expressing a differing opinion.
Most of the feminists that are my friends aren't 'militant'. I can disagree with them and point out where their little bits of dogma differ with reality. We can usually have a discussion and learn from each other.
But trying to do that with any self-proclaimed feminist who doesn't already know me and it's I don't get it because of male privilege, or I'm ignorant on the subject (even if I cite sources and they don't), or I'm a rapist or rape sympathizer. They give me appeals to (their own) authority, fabricated statistics* , specious arguments about female fear, and I get shouted down if I want to discuss where males have similar struggles to females.
I once pointed out that the term feminism does not espouse the equality the feminist movement is trying to achieve. I said that is a disservice to the movement because it excludes some would-be allies while at the same time encouraging the "bad" type of feminist. I also pointed out that if someone self-identifies as a feminist, I don't really know what that person means. For some, like your friends apparently, it means what I think it means. But for others it means "white males are the devil."
I was immediately attacked. My attacker stated that she had read all the literature and (a million non sequiturs). My feminist friends just bowed out of the conversation, which irked me. The only person who stood up and was like "Uh, this is crazy. You're not even talking about what he said," was another male.
*Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?
> *Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?
I've been hearing that myth a lot recently too. I checked the CDC to see the real numbers. Cancer (disturbingly all ages groups), and (traffic) accidents, and heart disease make up the lion's share. Even suicide is larger than murders.
I feel like their general counsel should not have allowed any of this to happen.
Under the Civil Rights Act / Equal Opportunity law, race and gender are protected classes. So having your executives on record saying that "white women" are "some of the biggest barriers to progress" seems dangerous.
I'm not a lawyer, but when your employee tells Business Week that "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'", that seems like a legal disaster.
Replace "white" with any other color and notice how flagrantly racist and illegal that sounds. The law does not distinguish.
They need to fix this quickly.
They should assure people both internally and externally that hiring and promotion will be meritocratic, without regard to gender or race, and then ensure it actually happens that way.
As someone else here pointed out, that tweet is out of context. It was part of a 10+ tweet rant about politics and social medicine. (It still is a bit offensive, but less so than the article makes it out to be)
I think it's still offensive and racist. It's also scary to see that he basically has a university freshmen's outlook on the world but for some reason has a position to execute these ideas from within Github.
The larger context goes beyond a 10+ tweet rant. The larger context is @_danilo's general attitude in many other tweets and even HN comments. This isn't a first or even isolated example of racism and bigotry from him.
Well I know this may be off topic but Mr Danilo's rant against US military seems narrow minded. It's BECAUSE we have US military that US citizens are not exposed to exposure, hunger, fear, rape.
If "white privilege" or "white supremacy" were actually a thing, then a person who said something like that would be summarily fired. The fact that he's not means that their hated white boogeyman is an illusion. The SJW agenda is the agenda in power at the company.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was reading about "PIV is Rape". I had never heard of it before but wow it blew my mind of how different and extremist can some people's view be.
Had that as required reading in a religious studies class. Got yelled at for complaining that if taken serious it was advocating for the extinction of the species.
So, what measures are they taking to match Berkeley undergraduate sex ratio (52.1% female 47.9% male [1]) with the sex ratio of the entire US in the same age range (51% male 49% female [2]). A woman is roughly 1.13 (13%) times more likely to be an undergraduate at Berkeley than a man. Or is this a topic best avoided?
...and they showed photos of Powerpoint slides that were pretty damning as well. Sure, those slides could also be faked, but I think that's well past the believable threshold for giving the benefit of a doubt.
There is no proof that white candidates are hard to interview there.
That quote sounds like the kind of thing that could easily be an immature employee who doesn't like the idea of a "VP of diversity", or doesn't like the tone of the VP's slides, taking something small and blowing it out of proportion.
Like, they tried to recommend a friend of theirs for an open position and the friend didn't get an interview and suddenly that n=1 case becomes "OMG! They won't let us interview white candidates!!"
I am an academic who is a straight white man and who researches things related to race and gender and I don't think I have ever met a militant feminist. If the internet is to believe they are everywhere but somehow I haven't ran into them.
When white men with great credentials, skills and experience have their résumé thrown in the waste bin because a company has to meet "diversity quotas", then yes there is a problem. Discrimination is being battled with discrimination, with the exclusion of qualified people based on their race and gender - which is the original problem to begin with, just turned on its face.
A few days after it passed, I complained about the abuses to liberty in the Patriot Act to an older, and very-wise friend. He talked about a sociological pendulum as well, and predicted those over-reaches of power would be righted in time. Given how often and completely he has been right, before, I started watching and waiting. Except, I've been waiting for fifteen years now, and that pendulum seems to only be going further away from liberty, privacy, and (real) security.
I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point where sociological constructs that would have flamed out, even just 20 years ago, can be sustained, because the people in power to sustain them now have an echo chamber where the message never quite falls below the point of being lost. It's almost as if improvements in communication have now backfired in raising the noise above the signal.
I hope you turn out to be right. As a white, male, heterosexual programmer who's reached his late 40's, I don't need any extra pressure working against me in my career prospects. I'm already starting to hate the H1-B visa program, but that's a rant for another post.
It will swing back in thirty years. In thirty years I plan to be retired. Or have died of my unhealthy lifestyle. Or at the most optimistic become too old to code competitively.
My point is, far as I'm concerned I can't afford to just sit tight and wait for it to blow over. And neither can the rest of you.
Agreed. I follow this topic for quite some time already, but I cannot understand few fundamental things.
I understand that indeed people could have "issues" because of their gender, race or some other quality. I support they in their effort to make things better.
However, I do not understand this categorization. By categorizing people this way one actually splits a group of people into smaller groups based on given categorization. Those groups have conflicting interests and different level of privileges, and each of the groups tries to change that.
But why, instead of working within this artificial categorized groups, just get away from this categorization completely?
PS It's a sensitive topic and I hope I didn't offend anyone; sorry if I somehow did it, however.
PPS I'm wondering what are the job duties of diversity consultants...
This is just misguided, plain and simple. I am white, male, heterosexual, and from a middle class family, and I absolutely know that my background gives me privilege. It doesn't matter if I earned it or not; I had and still have an advantage over other classes of people, and that is where the hostility is directed.
Instead of taking it personally, use this advantage to eliminate as much privilege as possible. Don't shy away from "leadership," but instead embrace it and make diversity a major focus of your leadership style.
Calling out the underrepresented as "bigots" for being upset is just plain cowardice.
Yes, as a life long White Man who likes football and hot dogs, and it somewhat fat I agree with you 100%.
Radical anti Male Feminism and Euro phobic racism are wonderful things for everyone. And there good for the economy. Just like you, I will continue to watch the glorious Television programming.
Do you seriously think most of this is based in straight-up hatred of white males? Every time I read something like was in the article, I view it as representative of what the author feels every day. God forbid we feel that way for 5 seconds before we throw it away.
Perceived grievances with the unfairness of the world do not entitle you to scapegoat other people or groups. This language is strikingly similar to to the dehumanisation of the Jews (as a race) in the public sphere in the 1920's and 30's after economic collapse and people were looking for a villein. Once you demonize a group as pure unredeemable evil its a short step to advocating physical violence as moral good to eliminate such evil form the world.
These are very dangerous ideas that are being thrown around.
Driving the adoption of identity politics seems to be a synergy between the Western ruling class's interests and those of a subset of leftists. My guess is the ruling class likes the ideology, and supports it, because it provides a moral pretext for weakening historically dominant demographics. Once these demographics are sufficiently cowed, they will be more willing to let go of self-determination and accept supernational rule (rule imposed by the EU on European nations, for example).
This kind of racist "gender politics", along with a level of self-hatred and loathing for certain classes of people is a wider problem with GitHub employees and has been manifesting for a while, for example: https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/pull/17
Right, I disagree with pretty much every point you're making, but maybe your anti-PC screed makes you feel better. I do question what this has to do with the core message of the article: GitHub has growing pains, long-time employees are unhappy because the Investors are bringing in the Suits and making them follow all kinds of corporate oversight stuff. Some unhappy employees also dislike the diversity hiring team, but I would assume the Investors and Suits like it (for lawsuit avoidance if nothing else).
Bottom line: all of these pains are probably inevitable if you want to go from 50 to 500 employees with revenue in the $100-$500 millions. Hopefully they get it right, and manage to keep most of their long term employees happy. If not, hopefully they take care of them, and find people to replace them who know how to keep Github working well.
Perhaps the notion that people are actively discriminating against white guys, and that it's some kind of problem that people should just ignore because eventually it'll go away.
There's about 5 things in there you could disagree with.
(are they actively discriminating? is it just against white guys? is it actually a problem? should people just ignore it? will it eventually go away?)
I'm not saying yes or no to any of these, but I think its pretty obvious people could disagree with any number of things that you've said.
...that said, broadly speaking, I agree with the idea that people should just chill out...but also, that github's growing pains are probably about more than this particular issue you raise.
I think you're making too blanket a statement about culture and bigotry from this one story. This is about something at Github. Specifically, the Github "diversity initiative" appears to have dispensed with the notion of diversity training for certain segments in favor of adopting a bias against members of traditionally privileged class. I can't imagine this will go well for them. It's a pretty clear conflict of mission.
Completely agree with the pendulum hypothesis (a theory indeed already) and not letting any offense make us fall into rage and the other side of the pendulum they are claiming us to be.
Agree also in the big problem with the word 'feminism'. It seems the opposite of 'machism', and machism is bad, to claim supperiority of men over women, so many people still think feminism is claiming supperiority of women over men.
And as you say, there are soooo many variants of feminism that indeed claim that, and so many feminists (men and women) that claim it, that when I say 'of course I'm feminist' I always have to inmediately explain what I mean in case someone doesn't really know it's real meaning, coming from the context of its birth, as an oposition to machism.
And almost always, personal feelings, traumas, etc get into every discussion, deforming reason incredibly. Also prejudices about what you are trying to say (filling everything non explicitly stated with what they want to hear, you being the monster they're desiring to crunch). So you have to loose so much time stating everything about the context of what you are refering to, it's better not to even begin, as if they read you, either wouldn't understand anyway, feelings and lack of practice in logic would make them not to reason properly, or would just be the kind that doesn't really want to listen and be open to change in front of new verified data and reasonings, as all of us should, and will attack you using the lowest use a human can give to its brain, a use we have used over centuries to destroy and kill innocents (evil plots, rumours, false accusations, deformation of claims, lies, ...).
All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. The reason why this narrative is doing so well is because they've scared everyone else into ducking for cover instead of speaking up. If we don't fight back, we are surrendering to this tyranny.
History doesn't have to play out in any one way. Our culture of individualism and freedom is not guaranteed to survive. It is on each generation to preserve it for the next. When they asked Benjamin Franklin what type of government the Constitution would create, he said "a republic, if you can keep it." We can't win every battle, and we can't win the war if we don't choose our fights, but we must fight to win.
I agree, a common diversion tactic of these activists is to try and tell you to just ignore the bad people and they will go away, eventually...
Usually with some self confirming story like the OP... I'm white just like you! Just ignore these radical racist people. go back to watching the ball game dude!
Its a tactic. The last thing they want is an actual debate because there ideas do not hold merit under scrutiny. If they can't get you to sit down and shut up then they will try to attack attack you.
So yes, everyone needs to stand up and stand firm against these people or they will continue and only get more irrational and nasty.
I think this is one of the core questions that those playing identity politics games completely ignore. The very nature of their own efforts is, itself, something-ism. As you illustrate, they're categorizing a whole group, and assuming that every member of it fits its stereotypical mold.
So in one respect, sure, as a white male I had some advantages, but there are plenty of other ways to look at it. As a "nerd" I was bullied; I suffer from an incurable disease; I'm not a particularly attractive person; I'm notably uncoordinated and bad at sports. And on the other hand, I've got a fairly sharp mind, and have some talents and a supportive network around me. A lot of these things apply to other people in and out of my demographic cohort, to such a degree of ... let's say "diversity" ... that it makes no sense to focus on those demographics when thinking about who has privileges or disadvantages.
Privilege, favor and advantage is completely useless single-dimension concepts when talking about demographics. Statistics can show that men dominate the highest and lowest ranks in society, but every only focus on the few top who succeed and turn a blind eye to everyone else. It as if we would argue that people who gamble are "favored" since they have a slightly higher chance to become millionaires compared to everyone else.
White males has comparably poorer supportive network than most other demographics. Culture assume that all white men are healthy and strong, and society carry a discrimination when reality crash with that imagine. Is that privilege? Privilege for whom and compared to what?
Perhaps, perhaps not -- but your examples do nothing to counteract the idea that it is, as every single one of the groups you've mentioned is, in the US, significantly advantaged over the broader, corresponding group that is identically described without the "white men" or "white male" limitation.
Now, in many case, the system is also stacked against the class described in the other part of the descriptor, such that the intersection of that class with the "white men" restriction is disadvantaged compared to "white men" more generally.
But that doesn't, in any way, change the fact that the system (in the US) is stacked in favor of white men.
> Why is it OK to assume the system is stacked in someone's favor?
There is a difference between "conclude" and "assume".
> How is that not prejudice?
If you assume in the absence of evidence, it is prejudice. If you conclude on the basis of evidence, it isn't prejudice (because there is no "pre".)
Depends on what metric you choose. If your metric is "likelihood to study a technical subject and get a high paying job in the tech industry", maybe. That's pretty meaningless, though, and narrow - there are lots of other ways to have a good, often even better life.
I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage.
For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back.
There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again.
The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion.
You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes.
Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry.
You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.