There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this:
First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure you can name some other examples.
Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some momentum.
Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially related to DEI for example.
The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel for further bad-faith arguments.
In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the initiative are often left standing around watching their value as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around as an abstract subject of ideological argument.
Without any better options, people double down on the original idea because it was at least made in good faith.
It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that doesn't necessarily need to be bad.
I am very interested in increasing diversity but I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.
Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.
Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn’t go anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else too.
As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional. You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.
Anyone with a brain and sense of dignity will feel like racism is bad and unfair. Experiencing negative racism is enraging and depressing. Experiencing positive racism instantly gives you impostor syndrome and a sense of dehumanization.
The only systems that aren't racist are those that strive to be colorblind (in the sense that we're colorblind to eye or hair color).
> Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity.
Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse team since they would not be willing or able to hire the best candidates.
> As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional.
I don't think this is the right angle to look at it. Everyone has a unique combination of experiences that they bring, and what groups someone belongs to are one part of the set of experiences that make up how they experience the world. DEI programs aren't inventing this, it's just a part of the human condition that we're shaped by the unique combination of our experiences.
Focusing on specific unique aspects of individual people's backgrounds isn't the only shape DEI can take though. Done well, I think they instead look at the shape of systems and processes in place and try broadly to consider how to remove artificial barriers so that people have an equal chance to contribute.
> You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.
I think this does happen a lot. Tokenism and only being seen as a particular part of your identity are problems. I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team. It sucks to be told that I'm wrong to suggest take-home exercises in interviews are a good option because women have caregiver duties and can't make time for them when I, a woman, prefer them because I feel like they offer a better opportunity for me to think deeply about a problem.
I don't think this is a reason to ignore DEI programs though, it's simply a failure case to be aware of.
I agree with the “eliminate artificial barriers” version of DEI. I’m a huge beneficiary of the push in the 1990s to “not see race.” But I don’t think that’s the dominant version of DEI today. I think the notion that “diverse teams are better” actually erects barriers, because it socializes people to think that the races are different.
I think the situation is different for sex diversity because men and women are different in ways that require accommodation.
It seems to me like we’re probably not too far apart in our opinions- and perhaps each of us bringing a separate set of experiences is letting us come to a better and more nuanced view.
I still do personally think that at a high level diverse teams and companies do tend to be better than non-diverse ones, especially when you have many axes of diversity. I imagine that some of that is direct benefit when someone is able to pull on their experiences to directly benefit a project, and some of it is simply that teams who hire the best people without artificial barriers will both be better and tend to be more diverse.
That’s observational rather than prescriptive though. When it comes to individual teams and individual hiring decisions I’d never advocate for anything other than hiring the best available candidate. Similarly, while you can say that across the population having diversity is good, you shouldn’t assume any specific part of an individual’s background or experience should manifest in any particular way.
All that said, I do think understanding the general ways that different aspects of a persons background impacts their work experience is a necessary part of building an effective workforce. How can you remove artificial barriers without taking time to understand what those barriers are?
Although I’ve had my own negative experiences at times, my experience overall is that most DEI initiatives I’ve been involved with have not been unaware of the risks and nuance, and people involved are usually trying to do the right things. I don’t think modern DEI approaches are overall worse- just more controversial because of broader social, cultural, and political tensions.
> I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team.
But this is the dominant strain of DEI thinking today, and why it's seeing such a backlash.
The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.
A moment's thought reveals why this is impractical to impossible, especially in the short to medium term. But this is how everything is evaluated through a DEI lens. Every discussion devolves just to counting how many people of each kind of group are represented in whichever topic is under discussion.
All the stuff about eliminating barriers is just the motte for this Bailey.
> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.
I’ve simply never seen this happen, although I’ve seen a lot of accusations of it. In a very large organization you might look at how your organizations demographics compare to industry demographics in different ways, but that’s always been at most an individual data point that elicits further investigation.
you've contradicted yourself, that's all the parent was saying, that comparing your demographics with national demographics is used to identify the degree to which your organization needs to institute race quotas
Nuh uh. jimbokun intensified it by a huge amount with those "every" terms and saying "must" and "exactly", describing a mandate that is very stupid and ignorant of statistics in a way that rebeccaskinner's description is not very stupid and ignorant of statistics. Also,
> race quotas
The post you're replying to says "further investigation", not "race quotas".
> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.
No it's not. That's a dumb strawman. "The over riding DEI principle" is not some guy that doesn't understand statistical variance, and doesn't accept any reason at all for fields to differ.
But we should have a starting position of being extremely skeptical of any big group that has a significantly different breakdown, especially if it's different in the specific ways that fit common discrimination.
> As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn’t go anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else too.
In various threads you've repeatedly argued (paraphrasing here) that you have a different set of values — e.g., giving higher priority to the family and community, vice individual choice, than in contemporary American mass culture. You've correlated this with your Bangladeshi heritage and upbringing, and you've said (again paraphrasing) that you adamantly seek to instill the same values in your own kids.
Perhaps some teams would find your values a useful addition to their mix. For those teams, your Bangladeshi name, skin tone, etc., could be instances of what the late (Black) free-market economist Walter Williams [0] referred to as "cheap-to-observe information."[1] I can't find the piece I read years ago in which Williams said that if you were choosing up sides for a pickup basketball game at a city park, and didn't know any of the other players, you'd choose the Black guys because the odds — not a certainty by any means, but the odds — were that the Black guys had played more basketball growing up than the white guys.
A related anecdote about cheap-to-observe information and its possible correlations: Years ago at my then-law firm, I was called into the office of the chair of the recruiting committee. The chair wanted me to meet a third-year law student who was at the firm for interviews. The recruiting chair said that the law student, like me, was a former Navy "nuke" officer. We shook hands; I asked, "[chief] engineer-qualified?" He smiled and nodded. "Surface-warfare qualified?" The same. I turned to the recruiting chair and said "that's all I need to know; I'm good." I had both quals myself, so I immediately concluded — provisionally — that the student was very likely to have personal qualities (work ethic, leadership, etc.) that I knew law firms found to be valuable. (I did stick around to chat for a while longer, and I knew the student wouldn't even have been invited for an interview if he wasn't already a good candidate.) We hired the student, who turned out to be a fine lawyer.
You’ve accurately described the differences, but none of those things are relevant to the workplace. All the ways I’m actually different from Americans are just a source of consternation where I have to bite my tongue and remind myself that it’s their country and I have to put up with the dog in the office, etc.
As to “cheap to observe” information: you might observe that Asian and Mormon communities socialize people to work without complaining or making demands. That seems profitable in the workplace. Is that the kind of cheap to observe information you can rely on? (It’s not—it’s illegal!)
A company I worked for long ago decided that it was ok for employees to bring their dogs to work. This worked for a time until one of the dogs pooped in the executive's office.
That was the end of that.
My dad lived in a small town for a few years. He was friendly with the mayor, and asked him what was his biggest problem. The mayor said the town was equally divided between dog lovers and dog haters. It was simply impossible for him to please both.
To be clear, Bangladeshis (and I think most Muslims) don’t “hate” dogs. There are dogs—my dad had them in the village and we had one when I was young. It’s a hygiene taboo. They’re viewed as unclean. They live outside—you don’t snuggle them or put your face up to them. It’s similar to their view of using toilet paper instead of washing after going to the bathroom. Or how North Americans view the Latin American practice of disposing of toilet paper in the trash bin rather than flushing it.
I don’t subscribe to that view of nationhood. It’s a constant source of discomfort (not just at the office, but visiting people’s houses or visiting my in laws) but it’s not my place to impose on the people whose ancestors built this country. I feel bad enough that I won’t let my wife have a dog, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
On behalf of the group of slightly-longer-ago immigrants to the country that you're classifying as having "built this country": I'm not sure why my ancestors coming here a while back means you can't say "I don't want a dog next to my desk at work".
If you're a person who lives here and works here, you get to participate in defining what the society and workplace look like, respectively. Having to type it out actually feels weird, because it's pretty self-evident. You're here, the things you do impact the culture.
If it’s just cultural have you thought of “getting the fuck over it” and letting your wife get a dog? You seem like a logical person, unless you specifically have an issue with them that isn’t cultural baggage, just embrace the ability to have dogs.
Culture includes some of our most deep-down disgust responses. I have trouble even being at people’s houses if there’s dog hair on the couch or I can smell them. It’s coded to me as a dirty environment.
As the owner of a bulldog that is essentially a furry, shedding alimentary canal with feet, I assure you there are perfectly legitimate reasons to find dogs unclean.
A few years ago I worked at a company that let people bring in dogs and I hated it. I actually like dogs and have had some myself (although not at that time), but one of my team members always brought in his huge rescue pitbull. It was always under control, never barked or lunged, but it liked to sit perfectly still, alert and upright giving me a death stare for hours at a time. All I could think was "this dog is probably not going to do anything, but if it snaps it could probably maim me in an instant."
How can I focus on work under circumstances like that? But how can I complain when it hasn't actually done anything yet? I would be "that guy." Now dog policy is something I pay attention to when choosing jobs.
> I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.
My point isn't that anyone disagreeing with a particular suggestion is arguing in bad faith, it's that there are enough bad faith arguments that it becomes effectively impossible to have a productive discussion.
> Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage. For that matter, am I an exhausted person who is simply tired of accusations of "wokeism" being thrown at me when I advocate for basic respect and decency, or am I a bad faith actor who tried to sneak an outrageous claim into a reasonable sounding post in order to undermine people who are in favor of DEI programs by making them all sound unreasonable? I may know that I'm simply exhausted, cynical, and seeing a steadily increasing amount of anti-DEI rhetoric here, but such is the state of discourse that there's no way for you to know for sure one way or another.
> Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage.
Or perhaps your experiences on DEI run contrary to the typical experiences of other people? You seem awfully eager to call other commenters bad faith or misinformed, but do little in the way of introspection. It reminds me of an old joke:
Someone sees on the news live coverage of a car driving the wrong way down the freeway their spouse uses to commute. Worried, they call their spouse to warn them, "honey there's a car driving down the freeway, be careful!"
"It's not one, there's hundreds of them!"
As for myself, "DEI" has been a thinly veiled dogwhistle for illegal hiring policies at 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at for the last 10 years. Examples in include: explicitly designating segment of headcount as exclusive to certain races and genders, setting specific percentage quotas on the basis of protected class (and these quotas were well above industry-wide representation of these groups), and constructing separate hiring pipelines depending on race and gender.
However, I'm not going to accuse people who have different or opposing views on DEI as acting in bad faith. 75% of the companies I've worked at used DEI as a dogwhistle for illegal policies, but that's still a very narrow slice of the world at large. I'm not going to allege that people are being disingenuous or acting in bad faith because I recognize that people have different experiences with DEI and can arrive at vastly different opinions on the acronym while acting entirely in good faith. I suggest you do the same.
Try using those words instead of the woke buzzwords. Everyone else is having the same reaction to "DEI"/etc that you're having to their common arguments.
> Anyone still using the term "woke" in a serious discussion at this point is using a thought terminating cliche.
In December 2020, New Republic published an essay by the African-American Marxist Adolph Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania), entitled "Beyond the Great Awokening: Reassessing the legacies of past black organizing" [0] in which he criticises "the Woke".
Now, you may or may not agree with his criticisms, but he is not using "a thought terminating cliche". On the contrary, he means something quite specific by it: a contemporary form of progressive politics which prioritises race over class, as opposed to Reed's own classic Marxism which prioritises class over race.
I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it.
But, on the other hand, I think the phenomenon which Reed labels as "Woke" is a real thing, and if we aren't to call it "Woke", what then should we call it? I get the impression that some people don't want to let people call it anything, as part of a strategy to put it beyond criticism.
> I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it.
I agree with you that it is best avoided whenever possible.
However, I think the other points I made, that (a) some invocations of it are legitimate, and (b) it serves a useful purpose in labelling a real phenomenon, for which we don't have any widely accepted alternative label – still stand.
> Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith.
How can you possibly have a good faith argument if you've already made your mind up that most or everyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith? That in itself is not a good faith position.
You sound like you've basically constructed a closed system of thought for yourself, in which anyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith.
I know one person here who frequently posts in disagreement to DEI initiatives is rayiner. He might be wrong, but I don't believe for a minute he is a bigot or acting in bad faith.
DEI is a lot like a headless religion that nobody's asked for. It's headless because instead of talking about spirit or similar high matters, it says "you are your body" and proceeds to divide people based on a few visible traits such as skin color. This quasi-religion doesn't talk about what we have in common. Instead it's fixated on superficial traits that make us different. When DEI got support among the rich and they pushed it down to the people, it obviously created resentment. Nobody likes when you're forced to say things you don't believe in and find disgusting.
I do admit that DEI has some goodwill in it, in particular the idea that our society doesn't have to be a wolf-eats-wolf "meritocracy", but I'm afraid that the goodwill has been skillfully perverted.
As a moderate, I do suspect that a lot of conservatives like to concern troll, but on the other hand, the far left really seems to like to double down on defending wild takes, like the university presidents refusing to answer whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates the code of conduct of their universities, which makes this line of questioning relevant.
> Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility.
In other words, their arguments aren't intrinsically bigoted and you can't prove bigotry is their motivation because they have a "veneer" of respectability and plausibility, but because they oppose the thing you believe and feel they are secretly bigots.
> it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not,
Because anybody that tries to gets judged to be a cryptobigot.
Lacking concrete information on who the commenters are, maybe you should judge the arguments themselves rather than trying to "read between the lines" to divine secret motives that conveniently free you from the burden of considering other points of view.
> Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it.
When you assume it’s bigots who are the ones who show up with concerns, do you see how fucked up that is?
“Whenever we propose X, the bigots get wind of it and spread FUD. All of their arguments sound fine, but I know they are in bad faith because they are exhausting.”
Have you ever considered that maybe they aren’t bigots and ironically you’re the bigot here just calling everyone who disagrees with respectability and plausibility a bigot?
(P.S. I tried to not be respectable so I don’t get lumped in with “the bigots” and have my ideas rejected out of hand.)
First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure you can name some other examples.
Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some momentum.
Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially related to DEI for example.
The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel for further bad-faith arguments.
In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the initiative are often left standing around watching their value as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around as an abstract subject of ideological argument.
Without any better options, people double down on the original idea because it was at least made in good faith.
It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that doesn't necessarily need to be bad.