What's even more insane is when they ask for your race. I've been asked that by US based entities and I literally don't know what to answer because I've never been asked that in my country and don't actually know what "race" I am.
For US employment, collection of gender and race information is implied necessary by the Civil Rights Act (because if someone files a discrimination / wrongful termination suit, one of the first questions that will come up is "Well, what are the demographics of the organization in the first place" and if the organization doesn't know, that's an automatic bad sign.)
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
No, the Civil Rights Act does not compel collection of this data. It's not an "automatic bad sign" if a company doesn't collect it. In fact, it can work against you in the case of a lawsuit.
You are correct that the government has started asking contractors and large employers for some of this data. But it is only a requirement for the business itself, not for their customers.
Compel, no [edit: correction: compel yes for over 100 employees]. Heavily incentivize, yes.
"Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
"Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
"Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
> "Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
> "Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
No. It should be more along the lines of "Prove it".
To come forth with such a claim carries with it the implication that one actually has /evidence/ for it, however (in)substantial. The response is NOT to automatically deflect to the defense in order to prove innocence.
> "Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
Nothing wrong with that. Evidence can be procured on demand by court order. And even if it were discovered that this one individual female client were paid less than her male counterparts, you'd have to prove that it was because she was female. That means gathering evidence on what her female peers were paid, as well. This particular client could have been an anomaly (e.g. less hours worked, less responsibility, not exactly a peer to her counterparts, the lower pay was only temporary and/or due to some previous agreement, etc.) leading the courts to find nothing systemically wrong with this employer. Don't be so quick to judge, without evidence or context.
Except your own comment highlighted exactly what’s wrong with that: without the data the court won’t know how to rule. If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure. Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees—evidence that the employees themselves may never be able to produce.
> Except your own comment highlighted exactly what’s wrong with that: without the data the court won’t know how to rule.
And the burden of proof is on the accuser. The court doesn't just say "we don't have the data, so we must assume it's what the accuser says".
> If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure.
Yes! And that's exactly how the court works: the burden of proof is on the accuser.
> Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees
And why on earth would the company want to do this, when it could potentially harm them?
Civil litigation places less burden of proof in the accuser than legal litigation. They don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable amount of doubt, so all they have to do is get the jury/judge to believe the violation is likely.
They don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt like in a criminal trial, but the burden of proof is still on the accuser. The accuser has to convince the jury that discrimination occurred, it's not a default assumption that companies are biased and they have to have the data to prove they are not.
Yea I like it when criminals post their criminal activity online. It's funny cos it shows the low IQ of the criminal and when they are charged for the crime it's also funny.
Collecting employee EEO data is pretty standard, practically universal, esp. since there are things like veteran status or disabilities that have very real implications. You basically just add a checkbox. Pretty much SOP for any org over a certain size.
You could link to a government site that Clarks it is required. https://www.eeoc.gov/data/eeo-data-collections
But you as an individual are not required to give that information to your employer
The counterargument is to ask the plaintiff to explain why she thinks her gender was used as a factor in setting pay. There are all kinds of reasons why a disparity between two employees would exist: a more in demand subfield, different hours, better negotiating, etc. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
A really good defense would be to build a totally race and gender anonymized system of hiring. How could we have discriminated against your race and gender when your name was obfuscated, your voice was modulated, and we took very strict precautions to ensure nobody involved in interviewing or setting compensation even knew your gender? This was not feasible before remote interviewing became normalized during COVID, but I'm interested in seeing if it gains traction.
> The counterargument is to ask the plaintiff to explain why she thinks her gender was used as a factor in setting pay
The evidence the plaintiff brings can be as simple as "I polled ten people with my job title in the company." If the company hasn't tracked this data at all and can't produce it in its defense, then in a civil case the plaintiff would have the preponderance of evidence on their side and the resulting resolution to make them whole could be all the back-pay they are owed between what they made and what their peers made.
So even outside of the need to file EEOC-1, companies are heavily incentivized to track this data (as any competent employment lawyer would indicate); you don't want to be scrambling to satisfy evidentiary burden in a lawsuit.
The company wouldn't just say "we don't have this data." The company would point to the systems in place that ensure that protected class is never revealed to interviewers or hiring managers. "Ms. Plaintiff, how could the interviewers have been biased against or discriminated against you on the basis of your gender, if they did not know and could not know your gender when setting your compensation figures?" Unless the plaintiff has evidence that someone leaked her gender to the interviewers, it's incredibly hard to even approach a preponderance of evidence that there was gender discrimination. In order to perpetrate discrimination, you must have some means of discriminating between applicants.
If someone complains about an orchestra that doesn't have the racial or gender makeup they want, but the orchestra points out they have blind auditions and robust systems to ensure that the identities of musicians aren't leaked to evaluators then it's tough to provide a preponderance of evidence of discrimination.
I am unaware of any companies trying the hard-anonymization strategy you're suggesting (apart from, possibly, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is not technically doing hiring in the sense that no employer-employee relationships are created). I think it would be an interesting case because there are a lot of "leaky signals" that can lead to systemic discrimination even if the company took no active measures one way or the other (for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions). Whether the CRA or subsequent law implies an obligation on a company to close such gaps is, perhaps, unclear.
We'd have to wait to see what happens if someone tries it. Point is: in the average case, it's setting oneself up to spend time in court, and most companies optimize for staying out of court, not becoming a test subject on the path-dependency of novel caselaw.
"Systemic" discrimination is rarely actual discrimination in the sense of illegal hiring practices. Women enter and graduate from college at higher rates than men. Thus it's "systemic discrimination" against men to require a college degree. But since it is valid to require education credentials to perform related jobs, nobody can sue for this. Almost every hiring practice is systemically discriminating at some level. If I'm hiring a Spanish to English translator, surely it's legal to ask applicants to translate a piece of text, right? But that's going to be heavily biased in favor of Latin Americans. Even the audition-behind-a-veil example is surely systemically biased in favor of people who had disposable income to hire musical instructors at a young age, and lots of free time to practice correct?
The requirements to prove a discrimination suit are far more direct: you need to prove that the company directly used protected class to make hiring or compensation decisions. And if the people making these decisions were never even informed of the candidate's protected class status it's exceptionally difficult to make the case that this was affecting this decision making.
> for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions
Actually, this is a perfect example of something that isn't going to get the company into legal trouble. They didn't make this decision on the basis of race, gender or another protected class. They made this decision based on something entirely objective: the candidate's previous pay. If that employee's previous employer was engaging in racial discrimination, then that's the company that vulnerable to a lawsuit.
I'm interested in this notion that you can sue your current employer, because a co-worker's past employer potentially engaged in gender discrimination that bumped their salary, which in turn was used in negotiations with the current employer. Do you have an example of any such lawsuit succeeding?
... but more importantly, this case has entangled the Fresno County public school system for over a decade. That's expensive relative to the alternative of... Not doing that.
Note that this 9th circuit ruling merely stated that pointing to the use of prior pay isn't an automatic win for the defense - this just let the plaintiff go back to lower court and try the case. The case is still ongoing, the plaintiff has not won the case.
How will promotion decisions be made? At some point I think information from people who’ve worked with the employee (co-workers, managers) will be relevant to their promotion, right?
Promotions would be harder - probably impossible - to anonymize, but at least you're working with a much, much smaller set of potential plaintiffs as compared to everyone who applied to the company. Anonymizing interviews is more feasible than ever, and it provides a very resilient defense claims of hiring discrimination. A straightforward way eliminate bias in orchestra auditions non-biased is to put a veil between the performer and evaluator. It's interesting to see proposals to do the same in tech getting downvoted.
Another great government regulation that has a great intent (stop discrimination) but leads this terrible unintended outcome: all applicants asked for this highly sensitive information.
It is so ridiculous that it gives the information to allow the company, manager, HR to discriminate (even unconsciously), exactly the opposite of what the legislation is trying to achieve.
What is worse from a cyber security perspective is that this information is now proliferated increasing the chances that it will be breached.
None of those concerns were relevant in the era when the Civil Rights Act was passed and people were hired via face-to-face interviews. It's real hard to hide your demographics when you're talking to the interviewer, which is a much larger concern than whatever you put down on a piece of paper.
For all the talk about it in this thread, we aren't moving to some kind of double-blind anonymous voice muffled 60 Minutes interview screening processes anytime soon. It's a goofy idea because once you hire somebody, people are going to work face-to-face with them anyway.
I always feel ridiculous being called caucasian. I understand somehow it's come to mean some version of white. But it just makes me think of the Caucuses mountains and how little I can identify with Georgia or wherever.
Apparently it's something people believed at one point in history; that the Caucuses region is where Noah's arc landed and is thus the region where white people originated. As a non-Christian, the term is absolutely ridiculous.
It’s a skin color, and in the US all these questions are really trying to ask that.
If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color. If your father is Kenyan and you are light skinned, you will smoothly fit in with the “white majority” without anyone digging into your history.
The context of US race questions is to counter US racism. Logical etymology doesn’t really apply.
It goes beyond simply color. For example, there are people who are racist against East Asians, and if you only showed them the color on a palette, that wouldn't be enough for them to think anything of it. They'd have to see other features, and suddenly this data field has gone from text to imagery.
> If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color.
If your ancestors came to America and were Irish, they faced discrimination just as much as other groups, if not more than most, even if they had a similar color tone as other Europeans.
For one, while the Irish faced discrimination, it was significantly less than that of non-Europeans. More importantly though, how does this have any bearing on why the question is relevant today? Are you somehow under the impression that the Irish are currently subject to extensive prejudice, or that no racialized group is?
What's more confusing for immigrants from ex-USSR (where the Caucasus mountains were located) the word "Caucasian" there is often associated (in a racist way) with "black" instead "white" because of their darker complexion (darker hair)
I haven't thought about the origin of that word before, so just checked wiki and... Yeah, it's a terrible idea, I'll make sure not to use that. White is just fine for what people mean by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
I always check "other" if "Caucasian" is the closest choice to my race. Then I put "American". I'm certainly not Irish like my paternal grandmother, nor Italian like my paternal grandfather, nor a Polish Jew like my maternal grandparents, and none of those are "Caucasian". I'd probably qualify for "White" but most of the racists who care don't traditionally consider any of the groups that my heritage is from "White". I'm an American by race, from European settler descent, and a United States citizen by nationality.
Are Iranian Persians considered Caucasian in the US or not? My Armenian friends have darker skin tones than Persian ones, so this doesn't make any sense.
I don’t understand this measure as well. Half of Caucasus mountains are in Russia, and I’m sure most USAmericans won’t like to be identified as Russians.
curiously, in Russia, Caucasians is the collective term for the nations of the Caucasus, and it is often used to express Chauvinist opinions about them. Russians are usually confused when they are referred to as "Caucasian" in american paperwork
People have downvoted me for saying the same thing. Perhaps they were offended by the term "US Americans"? It is a standard term used here in Germany and is not offensive.
The US requires employers provide "Equal Opportunity" across races. Legal departments have interpreted this to mean "we will ask everyone about their race to collect data to prove we aren't racist"
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
It's better now, but it was quite common for forms to permit only one selection and have no "Other". Having to repeated explain the existence of multiracial people to admins and H.R. types was...tiresome.
Mainly, it lets you measure how racist/sexist/etc one's system is.
For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf
A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses.
I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
If you collect demographics of employees, it tells one story.
If you also collect demographics of applicants, it may tell a different story.
If your employee demographics look skewed, but they're consistent with applicant demographics, you have an easy out when accused of ism.
Of course, if you collect the information, you might also use it for ism purposes. Or you might just lose or discourage applications from non-favored people. It's hard to show.
(It also doesn't help that the federal categories feel poorly chosen and ill-defined)
Sure, 50/50 is probably not where a lot of professions should be. But it's pretty unrealistic to assume the percentage we are at is exactly where it should be. Especially considering how many women in professions like programming have so many stories about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field.
Stories about how difficult it is to get into the field and actually having difficulty getting into the field are two very different things. 2 out of the 3 employers I've worked for had explicitly discriminatory policies favoring women. And they weren't subtle, we straight up reserved slots for women despite this being blatantly illegal.
In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.
Except if you know that for some hypothetical demographic A and demographic B where all applicants are equally qualified you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics.
If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure.
E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.
>you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics
No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.
Thus the "assuming equally qualified candidates" in my original post.
That can be measured (imperfectly, but well enough), by filtering only for qualified candidates and then comparing the rate at which both A and B are hired and the rate at which they appear in the filtered list. E: This of course requires the filtering to be done _only_ with knowledge of a candidates skills/accomplishments, and association with demographics (including name, location, etc.) to be done only after the sorting.
> I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
Maybe institutions can afford to leave sexual orientation out of it until you’re talking about a body of people that is firmly within the age of consent threshold or has at least hit puberty. A lawyer might disagree but for him the remedy is to bend him over and remove the stick from his ass.
Some people think that affirmative action isn't racist.
But tell me what it is when you think like: "hey we have enough asians, exclude that person, let's find a black to get our quota"
Some people will defend it like a user said below:
"By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism."
But what is "anti-racism"? It's being racist in the opposite direction. You think Y group is being oppressed "subconciously" so you oppress X group as much as you think you need to, to "even" it out.
We should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
> Racism is a societal system where one race is systemically (and often systematically) elevated over others.
This is a definition of racism, and the one currently in vogue, but just want to point out that it's not the only one. Racism can also denote individually held prejudices, or isolated discrimination based on race.
> Anti-racism seeks to end that system.
This is indeed the stated goal, but (at least to me) seems to be self-defeatist. For instance, when reading through Ibram X Kendi's work, a number of ideas that seem flat-out wrong popped out:
* Racism against a group in power can't exist (because the redefined version of racism requires group power), as if racial power exists in a monolith.
* The only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination. (!)
* Thedesire for race neutrality is racist (not just its flawed applications)
* The idea that biology influences behavior is racist (not just the standard racist claims that some groups are inferior biologically)
I realize that these terms can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but the above ideas of "anti-racism" definitely lead to more stifling of discussion and outright acceptance of discrimination than I've otherwise experienced.
It is the one anti-racists are using, so if one is trying to understand the term, that's the right place to start.
I get that people disagree both on whether it should be ended and if so, what the right tactics are. My goal here is not to have that incredibly deep and nuanced conversation, but just to clear up this particular point.
> It is the one anti-racists are using, so if one is trying to understand the term, that's the right place to start.
Yeah totally agreed, it's important to call out the definitions of terms used in any context.
The main thrust of my post was similarly to point out that if you're using definition X, you may justify some action which doesn't conform to definition Y.
In the same vein as "Patriot Act" or "People's Republic", good branding on the part of "anti-racism" can help nip naysayers in the bud. (Are you anti-patriot? Are you against the people or democracy? Are you pro-racist?)
Knowing who means what when they use terms, and being willing to differ from someone else's definition clearly, is pretty much the only way I know of to have these deep conversations with civility.
For sure. And I think it's important to note that some of those definitions of racism are from people who others would see as beneficiaries of the system that the latter group sees as racist. That is to say, it shouldn't be surprising that as the power of whites declines, the definitions of racism they might prefer are coming under challenge.
Or in your terms of branding, it shouldn't be a shock that the dominant racial group would have established a definition of "racism" that is one more convenient to them than to the dominated groups, because that branding serves to prevent challenges to their power.
Explain how you apply "anti-racism" please. If you're excluding people based on their skin color or origins, that is racism, even if they are white or asian.
> Everybody agrees that the US was hugely racist to start out and for centuries thereafter.
Speak for yourself, not everybody. If anything we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
It's kind of a slap in the face for all those people who fought to end it.
Your theory is that, for example, turning people into property based on race was not racist? If so, I don't think there's much point in a discussion here.
For those more reasonable who want to know about what anti-racism is opposed to, I'd suggest reading Loewen's Sundown Towns, Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, and Mills's The Racial Contract as beginner-friendly looks at the system of racism, its historical and intellectual roots, and how it all played out historically.
Did I say that? Reply to what I say, not words you create. The system was created long before the US.
Many people were involved in this system, from the warring tribes in Africa selling prisoners, to countries like the UK setting up colonies with slaves for cotton, tobacco, etc.
We were the colony that finally stopped the system. It took a long time and a lot of blood because it was the system, but it was ended.
If your point is that the US didn't invent racism, I agree. Again, read Kendi, who traces its roots back pretty well. But that doesn't mean the US wasn't hugely racist both during its colonial period and long after. And again, if that's something that you can't see, I'm not sure what the point of further discussion is.
> Your theory is that, for example, turning people into property based on race was not racist? If so, I don't think there's much point in a discussion here.
Given that the enslaved had been so subjugated by others of the very same race, how could the institution itself possibly be called essentially racist?
I can only hope you're trolling here. But on the off chance that is a sincere question, maybe read the books I recommended.
Or if you'd like a quick answer from the Confederacy's Vice President, you might read the Cornerstone Speech, which includes these words: "Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
If you're having trouble seeing the racism there, I'm not sure how else I could help.
You quote the Cornerstone Speech correctly, which was a post-hoc rationalization, a propaganda effort to encourage millions of fighting age men to lay down their lives for an economic system that was based on slavery which, I've already proven, was not an essentially racist institution.
Remind me again, in the US, how many white people were sold in to chattel slavery?
If even you could somehow make a convincing argument that the pre-war system was not inherently racist (which you cannot), the post-war system of neoslavery would put the final nail in that coffin.
> Remind me again, in the US, how many white people were sold in to chattel slavery?
Even an answer of zero doesn't address or contradict my original point.
There's no such thing as "neoslavery". Racism was certainly used after the war to reduce labor solidarity between the white working class and the newly-freed black laborers, however, that fact also doesn't address or contradict my original point.
You have proven no such thing, unless you're using some sort of definition of racism so outside the norm that either way it looks like a poor use of my time to try to explain your mistake to you.
Now this is the second time you're ignoring the context of the supply of the very slaves being discussed, so I determine that you are not discussing honestly.
> Speak for yourself, not everybody. If anything we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
USA was very late ending slavery, most European countries had already outlawed it long before the American civil war. USA was the colony that required a war to stop treating people like cattle, that is its history.
> we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
That is blatantly false. That was my point. You are right the Europeans weren't angels, but you were absolutely wrong there, America was the colony that was dragged kicking and screaming to abolish slavery long after everyone else had already done so, it absolutely wasn't the colony that finally collapsed the system of slavery it was pushed by everyone else to end it and then still had to go through a civil war doing it.
The American colonies supplied the Brits with cotton. The system was setup to do so by UK. UK was buying the slave picked cotton well after they abolished/outsourced slavery.
The UK even continued slavery in Indian colonies until 1843. They only abolished sugar plantations because it was not profitable anymore.
If the American colonies didn't rebel from the UK, they may have not abolished the cotton plantations themselves because they highly depended on it.
The US didn't "actually" abolish slavery until the 1940s. This is only partially your fault for not knowing, the US school system turns a blind eye to neoslavery in the post war era with the technicality that slavery is still legal for prisoners and that pretty much any crime could lead you to be enslaved in the south if you were the incorrect race.
Unless it's 100% remote without any video conferencing, it would be a little hard not know race. The point is being forced to track it by self reporting they can't hide their racism. In this case they're asking about education status, marital status, whether you have kids and a zillion other (mostly protected) statuses. Protected ones you're not allowed to discriminate... now if you have a weird accent or bad fashion sense, likely allowed to discriminate.
> So which report makes an organization less racist:
> Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired. You're probably thinking this is a "good stat" and therefore a "good employer". But what if the rest of that company's stats were "90% of applicants are white, 80% of hires are white." Is that still a "good stat/good company"? According to you, it should be (and I would tend to agree.) In both cases, we're pretty much showing "If you apply for a job here, you have a ~90% chance of getting in, regardless of skin color." Not bad!!
But wait. What if the demographic of applicants is more like 50% white and 50% brown. (Assume a non-remote workplace). Now, one has to wonder why, in a demographic where half the population is brown, why only 10% are applying to this organization? Could be many reasons. Culturally, maybe the brown folds simply choose not to apply here. Or maybe the organization has a history of mistreating brown folks, abusing them, paying them less, etc. That could explain the low rate of applicants here. Your good example of a "less racist" org doesn't look so good anymore. Many factors could be a play; some less intentionally-evil than others. Hard to draw conclusions simply by reporting on one stat in isolation.
> Hard to fix what you don't measure.
Yes, but harder to think critically about the data you do gather.
> That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired.
Nope, the denominator is different. If you select the same percentage from each category the proportions stay the same.
If there are 100 fruits where 10 are apples and 90 are pears and each fruit has 10% chance to be selected then you get on average 1 apple and 9 pears => 10% of the selected fruits are apples.
"So which report makes an organization less racist"
So that implies that org B is more racist(because it hired zero brown people) - is that not the conclusion the author of the comment wants us to reach?
If your company takes a pile of CVs and randomly picks a bunch of people to hire, then yes, you are absolutely correct, there is something very very wrong with company B if a truly random process results in an unequal distribution of hires.
But hiring isn't random. Maybe all the "brown" candidates lacked necessary qualifications. Or needed visas which they couldn't get. Or a million other reasons other than "org B is racist".
My point is: you need further context. To look at that one stat as given above and conclude org B is racist is....unwise.
If they get inspected, accused in media, or sued, they can readily show that they actually employ some percentage of whatever minorities. I think there's no other practical reason.
There is a lot of secondary information that could allow unconscious or conscious bias to slip into the hiring process, e.g. Name discrimination [1]
Ideally the race information you input would only be given to HR and not shown to anyone involved in the hiring process. It would then be used to identify anomalies indicative of bias occurring.
There is an extremely long and brutal history of systemic bias against groups people who look a certain way. Pretending it must have stopped and is now no more worthy of societal introspection than blondes vs. brunettes is laughable to me.
It's not "pretending it must have stopped" it's "stopping it by making it impolite to mention". It used to be OK to make dumb blonde jokes, or (more severely) to be openly antisemitic, or to discriminate against redheads due to perceived Irish ancestry. Yet these are considered in poor taste today. No affirmative action was undertaken on behalf of blondes or Jews or Irish people. We just realized it's in poor taste to make distinctions about people with regards to their superficial characteristics and a few generations passed.
I'm just suggesting we let this same process unfold naturally. And that affirmative action, by placing emphasis on superficial differences between people, takes us in the wrong direction.
Detecting/combatting instances of racial bias and affirmative action are not the same thing, in fact it's basically the opposite in that's it's eliminating actions that disproportionately benefit one racial group over another.
I don't doubt that some companies use this data to drive quotas but that isn't something inherent to collecting and analyzing race/gender info in hiring.
On top of that, something being impolite to mention doesn't mean it's not driving discrimination.
Right but we didn't have to do any of this measuring for Jewish, Chinese, Italian, or Irish people. Yet discrimination against these groups has markedly improved over time. This happens naturally as people mix together and realize they're not so different, and as older generations die. This integration process naturally deemphasizes superficial differences.
You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring. Furthermore, DEI initiatives are clearly harmful to organizational goals[1] and clearly disenfranchise people who are just interested in colour-blindly carrying on with their work. Why do we need them?
PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI. The example below was undertaken at a major corporation with the world-class consultants.
> You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring.
Across what time scale? Exactly how long is acceptable to you to wait as things work themselves out? Surely 400 years would have been enough time for this to really kick in.
> PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI
I'm not defending DEI as practiced, I'm merely defending the idea that 1) racial discrimination in hiring happens, and 2) it's possible to do stuff about it faster than letting this work out "naturally".
I'd say ~80 years is about an appropriate amount of time. It's about how long it took antisemitism, anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiment to die out. No amount of metrics will change the minds of adults who grew up in "a different time". Your only option is to wait for them to die.
> it's possible to do stuff about it faster
My point is that by attempting to address the concern faster than "naturally" you are almost certainly prolonging the "natural" time actual integration takes.
There's all sorts of regulation around this as well. If a person walks into a bank to apply for a home loan and they do not wish to provide their race, the banking associate has to make a guess.
Inquiry - how having this data proves that they do such a thing? Maybe none of the black applicants had necessary qualifications?
To answer your question - if there is such a complaint made, I'd appoint another qualified hiring manager(or HR person) to sit in on any future interviews with this person and give me their report on the situation.
....the same way any other complaint is made? If you think you have been discriminated against when interviewing you'd complain to your local department of labour or equivalent, they would then bring it up with the company and it would have to be investigated.
Because those numbers are reported to the government. And if the government sees that your company of 1000 people located in Texas has 1 hispanic person and 999 white people (among which are only 2 women), the government is going to start asking some questions.
Tl;dr: it is less about the company being less racist on their own by knowing the race, it is more about the company having to report those numbers so that others could hold them accountable (in case there are any arising concerns about racism).
The US federal government doesn't proactively start asking such questions of employers. They only act on potential civil rights violations in response to a credible formal complaint.
Thanks for clarifying, makes sense. Ultimately that demographic data gathered from employees helps the federal government with legitimizing those formal complaints, acting as potential supporting evidence.
A lot of it has to do with population statistics, for better or for worse the USA is fixated on having available data on all racial discrimination (make sense given the history of the country). I do agree that the categories them selves need some revision, however, unlike the forms here at genders.wtf, you can usually opt out of answering the racial category, which makes it infinitely better.
Most of the time it does NOT mean skin color. Otherwise 'caucasian' wouldn't be there, a lot of latinos (or at least Brazilians) would be 'white' too, my wife (who basically reflects light) and myself included.
By the US federal definition, a lot of latinos are white. Hispanic/Latino is classified as an "ethnicity" not a "race" so you can be e.g. white/latino or native-american/latino
> Hispanic/Latino is classified as an “ethnicity” not a “race”
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
Don't they call you "white hispanic"? As far as I know they just have white, black, native american and asian in the main race categories, then you might add "hispanic black" or "hispanic white" to those two, but hispanic isn't a separate category.
Brazilians don't really associate themselves with the term "hispanic" given the country was colonized by Portugal, not Spain... and it's hard to argue the term is a drop-in replacement for "Latin American" when Brazil represents ~50% of LatAm population
I'm talking about how USA sees race and the forms you fill in there, not reality of human ancestry. USA has a very antiquated view on race, but that is the legal definition so that is what we talk about when we are talking about race with respect to US employment laws.
Hard to be hispanic when I'm 50% German, 25% Italian, 25% Portuguese (in terms of my grandparents/grand-grandparents). Where I'm from in Brazil, it's very common for people to be eligible for getting Italian and German citizenships (wife and myself included)
I'm in Canada, which I think it's similar. I'm not sure, but I would guess yes, because Latinos are considered PoC, independently of actual skin colour, AFAIK. If I say to anyone that I'm white, they'll think I'm wrong, because of accent+name
It sounds more and more like in the US (and, perhaps, in Canada too) people are being divided into essentially 2 categories: white and non-white. But to complicate things, people with identical ancestry and of identical skin color can be considered white or non-white based on the country of their birth.
Meanwhile, us Slavs, who were genocided 80 years ago for not being ‘Aryan’ enough, and not even considered ‘white’ 100 years ago are lumped in with WASPs…
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
You should know that anti-racism means a specific thing, it's been co opted by a certain ideology. The rest of your comment attests that you do not ascribe to that ideology so you may want to update your nonclem to just "against racism"
Technically there are more options, I agree. Practically very often these options are divided into whites (includes Asians) and people of color (includes Latinos but blacks have priority).
> Most of the time in the US race means skin color.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.
I don't mean to be rude, but I suspect by "MLK's values" you mean the sentence "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." as interpreted to mean support for racial neutrality and opposition to the use of racial categories in programmatic decision making.
It's fine for that to be the thing you believe in, but that is not a reasonable interpretation of "MLK's values". MLK scholars, his contemporaries he worked with, and his successors within his organizations would nearly categorically reject your characterization of that being his values. Like this is an entire area of academic study: what MLK said, thought, and wanted done.
Again, it's fine to conclude that MLK has it wrong and the left is wrong about race and social justice warriors etc. etc. etc. I don't think you should be made to care about what MLK thought or to study him. I am not interested in telling you you are right or wrong about any policy issue. It's just incredibly flip to engage so superficially with a guy who left such a voluminous archive of writing and thought and use him as a prop in the argument. I think if you are going to assert yourself as understanding what his values were, you owe it to him to spend a lot more time and effort trying to understand what they were.
This is sort of the equivalent of thinking you understand Nietzsche to be anti-religious because you half-remember the quote "God is dead" and although you've never read him you feel confident you know what it means.
You apparently have never read or listened to more than the "I have a dream" speech. King was very much about anti-racism, which is best termed "anti-racism". It's not sufficient to not add racism to the world, you should seek to counter it. And no, that's not the same thing as being racist in another direction. If you can't tell the difference, maybe you should go study what MLK actually said.
On the other hand, King's notorious speech sounds absolutely nothing like Kendi or other current anti-racists, so evidently there's quite a gap between the two stances, and it's dishonest to deny it.
That speech is just one of many. But anyway, MLK was at the forefront of anti-racism 60 years ago; it would be more alarming if there weren't a gap between him and the current vanguard.
Curious why you described the speech as “notorious” rather than “famous”?
Why are you conflating interpersonal racism with systemic? Both exist. If a white person is racist towards a black person do you call that racial bias? If you do, you are just replacing the established definition of racism, not addressing the phenomenon itself.
Because the suffix "ism" doesn't really refer to interpersonal things. It connotes a system.
Some may not agree with the distinction, but the reality that racial bias without power and a system behind it is not really the same thing. Which is why there is not equivalent to things like the "n" word for white people.
I don't know that I agree with everything you're trying to get at, but shouldn't it just be called "racism". The term reverse-racism seems nonsensical. The term itself seems racist, implying that you can't be racist toward certain races. You can only be "reverse-racist".
"Racism" can mean interpersonal ("I don't like black people") or it can mean systemic ("society disadvantages black people"), and lots of people in social studies focus on the latter. Because there's not really any systemic disadvantage to being white, that focus on the latter effectively defines racism against white people as non-existent (there's not systemic racism against white people, so there's not "racism" against white people). Given that, "racism against white people" is definitionally not "racism", hence "reverse racism".
Of course there are multiple steps in there which can be criticized, but within the set of terms they've defined, it makes the language less ambiguous. It's like how astronomy often defines "metals" as "anything bigger than helium". The terms have a useful meaning in the proper context.
Racism by default means interpersonal racism. That’s why when we talk about systemic racism we add this qualifier.
There might not be systemic anti-white racism in the US but there is certainly interpersonal racism against whites in the US. Insisting on dismissing that is not helpful to literally anyone: whites or people of color.
Which of MLK's values did we once hold that we've now abandoned?
Anti capitalism and pro economic redistribution?
> The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. [1]
That white people should radically support racial justice?
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice. [2]
That riots are understandable in the face of oppression?
> But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?...It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. [3]
The fact is that MLK was a radical who was opposed by most white people. When he died, 75% of the American public disliked him. It's only in retrospect that conservatives have tried to whitewash his legacy, pretending to support racial progress while opposing the very things he stood for.
“I have a Dream” was delivered to an audience of a quarter million and televised to millions more and has continued to be a cornerstone of public school education at least where I grew up where we would listen to the audio and later stream the video. That’s the breakthrough hit.
We don’t treasure everything even about the people we like. MLK was a man, and therefore it is safe to assume a complicated person who developed and changed his beliefs a lot throughout his life. When he seized the opportunity to deliver a speech to the nation, it wasn’t “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and it wasn’t sympathy for rioters, it was “I Have a Dream”.
Do you see the implications of what you’re saying? The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live. It’s seen as representative not because he thought it was a unique opportunity to make an impact, but because it’s what people chose to highlight once he was gone.
> Do you see the implications of what you’re saying?
Yes.
> The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
We don’t carry forward every message by every person, and we don’t carry forward every message for every person we do carry messages forward for. This was what he had to say that we valued the most.
> This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live.
It’s not just survivorship bias though. This was the culmination of the March on Washington. It was kind of a big deal. You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess? Nowadays we can post on YouTube and get tens of thousands of hits every day as long as we’re better than mediocre. Limited opportunities for engagement force you to focus on what you think is most important to say at that moment.
> Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because people actually want or care about racial equality.
> You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess?
I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
> I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I can think of several reasons:
1. It was sincere.
2. It was likely the only speech anyone had ever seen from MLK, statistically speaking. It’s not like they were serialized.
3. It was correct. If we are to judge people at all, we should do so on the basis of their character, not the color of the skin. One takes consideration and trust in one’s own judgment, the other you only need at least one working eye for.
4. It was non-confrontational: “I have a Dream” not “I have a Problem”.
5. It was the culmination of the 1963 March on Washington. Marching on Washington wasn’t exactly a common affair back then: it drew attention, as it was designed to.
6. It was the speech he chose to deliver to the largest audience he had ever had in his life and was likely to ever have as far as he knew. Basically in effect “do or die” for at least that set of participants. If it had been a failure, there were no take-backsies, no second chances, no just trying again next year. So the right message, at the right time, delivered to everyone he could to try and compel them to at least meet in the middle.
I mean, he could have said something else, but he also probably wouldn’t have been as effective and I probably wouldn’t have learned about him in school. Maybe you have a case to make that it would have been better that way.
> I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
Best line in the speech and you would want him to gut it! Who knows, maybe with foresight that matched your hindsight he would have. The problem isn’t that he said it, the problem you have is that people are citing that specific passage to make an argument about what his position would be.
He’s dead, and has been for a long time. He doesn’t have any arguments to make anymore, not against capitalism and not for affirmative action and not about how the moderate whites in his opinion just might on a bad day need some non-non-violent direct action shaped suspiciously like the good Reverend’s boot. The tradeoff against people misrepresenting his words to argue against something he probably would support decades into the future is that he got to be persuasive when he needed to be persuasive, but feel free to hop in the TARDIS and tell him that his needs at the time are less significant than your needs in the potential future. Only the living get to keep arguing, for everyone else the case is submitted.
I have a dream in which we are all marathon winners. We are done running. We have medals and confetti and cake. It’s a joyous time, and whether we finished the race in four hours or fourteen hours doesn’t matter, because we have all finished it. That’s my dream!
Right now, though, right now some of us are moving at a good pace, while others aren’t even moving in the right direction. Some of us are incapable of moving on our own. Others are being held back. Helping those who are struggling most right now makes sense, right?
You wouldn’t interrupt a marathon to object that encouraging the slowest runner isn’t fair, since the dream is for everybody to have a medal and cake.
Agreed. The dream is for everyone to have a medal and cake. Even for disadvantaged while people in the US, who are not “colonizers” or some lucky “white privilege” beneficiaries.
We need to track it in the US now because we _used_ to track it. If you spend 400 years tracking ethnicity to use for systematized oppression, you have to continue to record it for at least the next few generations just to measure your progress away from that system.
It's in part due to the diversity of people in the US, which has historically had 30% of the population who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given everyone is at least a little racist at some point, the US encounters issues more often than the more homogeneous demographic countries.
Not the US. Just the far left of the spectrum that bought into Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi's brand of racism. There is a large majority of the US that would like for nothing better than to stop talking about it but the left is really loud.
This is very strange to me too. Election exit polls are broken up by race, as well as most other statistics. It's such a ubiquitous case of institutional racism no one in the US even thinks of it as such, apparently.
The US has a fairly recent and abhorrent collection of very undeniable racist policies including outright slavery, Jim Crow laws, and redlining. There are ongoing repercussions from just these issues, ignoring any other institutional racist laws/policies that may or may not still exist.
No doubt the US has more of a history with deep racial division than most other western democracies.
But is the race of someone voting really useful, or is it just a fairly good proxy for other demographics. And at what point does this use of race as a demographic in itself become a societal pressure for blacks, latinos, asians etc to fit into certain stereotypes?
In my circles there was a lot of reaction, as it seemed to be a Freudian slip as to how racist the man is. It's seemed instead the media rather wanted to protect him for some post-trumpian political reason.
Trying to interpret a word transposition from a senile old man in any direction at all is just kind of sad, in my view.
But of course, some people are so coddled by modernity and their social media bubbles that they implicitly think racism is all about choice of vocabulary or other completely superficial things.
Well, it's interesting that this is such a ubiquitous thing in the US, and so uncommon elsewhere. It's not an uncommon view in sociology that this can be self-perpetuating, though I could go both ways on this myself.
This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You want to change race, that's why you track it? Or you want to change how racial "groups" vote? The logic makes sense in some contexts, but not all, and not the one I was referring to anyway.
It just seems like a horrible practice to me because the fact that 1930s Germany tracked Jewish people and allowed them to kill so many.
If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.
