I see a different risk with DEI, and I’d sure love your perspective if you’re willing to give it. I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness. This includes changing away from “master” as a branch name, to creating an extensive list of taboo words such as “whitelist”, “blacklist”, and “subordinate”, to chiding colleagues for saying “brown bag lunch”*.
DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
So, all that being said, the justification is these changes help make black people in tech feel more included, a goal I support. In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
* For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.
> I see a different risk with DEI, and I’d sure love your perspective if you’re willing to give it. I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness.
Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.
> DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
This is not a problem with DEI. Look at the landgrab that is enterprise management.
> In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
Your premise is off, so I can't answer this.
> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.
This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.
> Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.
Woah this suddenly made the behavior of some people who gave me the creeps but were doing "all the right things" make sense. Thanks.
On the brownbag thing, I've had someone tell me we shouldn't say "picnic" because of a racist etymology. When I showed her this etymology wasn't real, she said it didn't matter. We still shouldn't say it because it might harm someone. This doesn't make anti-racism absurd. I think there are real heroes there. But that interaction sure felt absurd.
I think it makes it absurd indeed and even worse I think it has a overall negative impact. It completely disregard intent, a pretty extreme position to take for any form of communication. Now you are not using the definitions of racists, which opinion might be worth disregarding, you are also using fictitious ones.
You won't get through life without being hurt and learning to understand the meaning behind people using words is a skill you cannot skip to acquire. Misunderstanding happen and you need strategies to deal with them. It can but rarely results in conflict. You cannot expect everyone only using thoughts, associations and words you are content with. It is a false strategy without solution.
>This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.
What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was.
I appreciate your response. I think I have been so repeatedly told that the ridiculous elements of DEI (and anti-racism) are the core of those two… movements? by their (ostensible) advocates that I now strongly associate them with silliness, though maybe it is in fact a case of Nazis and the swastika.
> I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.
I sat in a meeting where two young, white colleagues informed another colleague that the term was racist and we should come up with a different one. I tried to push back gently, but I am a white man and as such have no standing in the DEI hierarchy. So it was decided in this meeting full of white people that we would no longer use the term as it might cause offense to someone, maybe. And the two young engineers were satisfied they had made the world a slightly better place. I found it disturbing but don’t know what to do.
Well, it (brown bag lunch) made the Stanford harmful language list. I agree there is enough moronic content on that list to give the impression that the writers were playing false-flag games. But I’m prepared to believe they were sincere.
Just to add some context for that infamous Stanford list, it was a proposed internal list within the IT department about language to use for the text on official Stanford websites. As far as I'm aware that's the only place it was intended to be applied by the authors and it was never implemented. I know your intent wasn't bad but I found a lot of the media coverage massively over the top for what was essentially an overzealous suggestion to modify a website style guide.
It gives us evidence (for the above discussion) that the term “brown bag lunch” has actually been documented as harmful by someone - and wasn’t just made up as a stick to beat diversity initiatives with.
I would argue it also gives an indication of how “mission creep” works.
(A well-used term like “tarball” now being deemed potentially offensive, presumably because it sounds like “tarbaby”, even though it’s obviously just referring to a bundle of files archived with the “tar” command.)
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this came to be written. Were there brainstorming sessions where people threw out random word associations to show willing, combined with a fear from the rest of the group of accusations of racism for calling it out as arrant nonsense?
> I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness.
A more compelling reason is because demonstrating "leadership" in DEI is a prerequisite to getting a promotion or getting a management job. It's baked into many job listings now and is part of the executive interview process. If you don't check the DEI box on some tangible dimension, you don't progress to the next round, especially if you are white.
The more conspiratorial believe it is deliberate, as it seems to draw parallels with the subterfuge Yuri Besmenov described and that the CCP is perhaps silently continuing.
There is power in victimhood now. If you can prove you're a victim or prove you're submitting to a certain group you've "victimized" then you are put at the top of the order. You become part of essentially a religious cult and given certain "powers" that you can bash the "sinners" over the head with.
I think you're exactly right here, the largest proponents of this stuff tend to be white and left wing (mostly women). In a way I find them extremely racist. To me, they're acting just like OP says. They don't think certain groups are intelligent enough to bring themselves out of squalor and everyone MUST believe like they do; that skin color is an impediment. So, they need the white savior to come rescue them.
Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "persecution" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural legacy of evangelical Christianity that was (and arguably still is) deeply engrained in US culture.
The argument is probably that Judaism was the first religion to introduce concern for the victim into its moral teachings, and therefore inevitably there would be people hijacking that to differentiate themselves, boost their status through claims to victimhood.
I do think DEI has many religious and dogmatic believes that mirror other religions. It is pretty weak on the absolution part though. That is what a church sells, DEI sells an inquisition, making it even worse in some parts.
It is a bit weird overall. It decries conservatism, but is very heavy on fundamentalism. It is far more conservative than other groups it indicts with sexism/racism. And mostly these accusation are also false.
I'm confused... are you endorsing acting this way or against it?
Kinda seems like you're justifying the current action of "woke" people by discussing past injustices? Isn't the whole idea of the "woke" DEI initiative to fix injustices in our society?
I think they're just saying this occurrence isn't unique and it doesn't look like they approve of it. Many of us identify with our own struggles in deep ways. If you create an opportunity for people to organize around those struggles then people will, because as was said, there is power there. That power is in representation. The problem is generally in the silo'ing of representation. This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address.
We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution that devolved in the ~200 years since it's founding to go on to oppress others. We can and should do better.
Ok, and my point is that doing the exact same thing as those people did in the past isn't doing better. You don't fix oppression by moving that oppression to a new group.
Simply pointing out that victimhood has always existed serves no purpose at all in response to my original comment.
"This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address."
How? All intersectionality does is create a competition for the most oppressed. You will never be enough of a victim. Nothing good comes of a society that focuses specifically on how oppressed they are and vies for the most oppressed group or person.
"We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution"
Name a country where this hasn't happened. There are many where this is still happening and to a further extent than anything in the US.
Ironically, you're right in weird roundabout way that I do not think you fully comprehend. EVERYONE has been a victim of some sort so it's irrelevant and we shouldn't spend one iota more of our short lives trying to discern who the highest victims of our society are. What a waste and it does nothing to improve the supposed oppressed.
Your description of intersectionality is the exact opposite of what it is. It's entire purpose is to show everyone that playing the operation Olympics is a pointless game that no one wins. It's too show that everyone's struggles don't fit into neat little boxes that define them, and show that social problems are multidimensional that don't have simple solutions, and shows that a lot of DEI initiatives are superficial, and likely won't make any real difference.
Could you link me to the source that describes intersectionality in a way even remotely approximating that? Or where this "victim hierarchy" is detailed? I'd love to calculate my victim score™.
AOC isnt exactly a shining light of intersectionalism. In fact, she kind of prides herself in tribalism. Consider this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/aoc/status/1103163478024601601 Rather than trying to share ground with others she's being reminded that she regularly drowns out other people's voices. She went on to do exactly that after this.
If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not all people who use intersectionalist words actually have the values, then I'd respond with, "duh".
Intersectionality isn't about telling one person's story or exemplifying one person's pain. It's about showing that these things are interconnected and effect people differently, and ways in which you probably wouldn't expect. It does the absolute opposite of a hierarchy.
Well thats just it. If you're a Muslim female your score is higher than a Muslim male. If you're a gay trans disabled Muslim you're higher than the Muslim woman. Thats how you figure out your victim score(tm).
(I could care less about AOC. She was like 1% of content of the article I posted.)
You keep insisting there's a score or hierarchy, but I've yet to see an example of what that looks like. To me, and clearly others in this thread, the point is that there is no victim hierarchy. Nobody's victimhood, trauma, problems, whatever are any more important than anyone else's.
What’s missing here is a notion of intersectionality, which explicitly is about how people are not just a singular identity, but an “intersection” of many - some of which may confer privilege, some of which may be discriminated against.
Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about some people at the exclusion of others?)
So to answer my question, no you can't provide a source.
Even if it hadn't been the case that the article you linked failed to mention the topic actually under discussion even a single time, a random right wing ("brexiter") blogger is not a "source" for corroborating claims that intersectional egalitarians have a clear "victim heirarchy".
(And to be explicit, identity politics and intersectionality aren't the same thing, despite the right's habit of using them as meaningless scare words)
Wait, what is "neo-Marxism"? When he's not busy "waging moral war on Disney", Rufo is full of weird stuff like this --- "neo-Marxism" is a turn of phrase most famous for its use in Jordan Peterson's nonsensical coinage "postmodern neo-Marxism".
Marxism is distinguished as an ideology by totalizing class consciousness. That's the opposite of wokeness, which ratifies identity politics. In fact, "wokeness" is a fault line in modern leftist Twitter thinking, between the populist "dirtbag left" that eschews DEI-speak and the university left. Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
Most "DEI wokesters" are the farthest thing from Marxists. They're jealous and enthusiastic beneficiaries of the mortgage interest tax deduction.
"Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain! Does being a Catholic draw me closer to or further away from "wokeism"? Because I have things to say about the intersection of DEI culture and Catholicism.
I think the parallel to Marxism that is being made here is more about epistemology and the rules of debate than about economic systems.
In Marxist terms, when your opponent disagrees with you, you don't engage with their argument on its merits, but look for deeper structural factors that have led them into such serious ideological error, factors that render your opponent incapable of understanding the truth of your correct argument. In Marxism, these center around the person's class background, their internalized class interest, petty bourgeois thinking, etc. They may be conscious or unconscious, but in all cases they are the ultimate motive force behind the person's wrong beliefs.
In modern elite ideology (whatever name we give it), the role of class background is replaced by the cross-product of various -isms and forms of oppression that prevent the privileged from being able to admit deep truths that are obvious to the marginalized.
In both cases, it's a kind of nihilistic structuralism which asserts that the only meaningful way to evaluate an argument is by examining the identity, circumstances, and background of the person making it, as those factors relate to societal networks of power and oppression. In this form of debate, you counter what someone is saying by pointing out who they are, and whose interests they represent.
I'm more inclined to take your word for it than Chris Rufo's, but I don't see what's distinctively Marxist about the rhetorical pathology you're talking about. That same nihilistic structuralism animated fascism, too, didn't it? If you're describing a thing and it's opposite at the same time...?
Critical Race Theory emerged from mid-20th century Black Power and Colonial Independence movements, which often either were literally Marxist movements in their own right, or intimately tied to them. There are countless examples of the close relationship, but one of the most pertinent embodiments would in be Frantz Fanon, who is one of the most important if not the most important ideological fathers of both Critical Race Theory (as well as other, older movements) and to a lesser extent several Marxist movements in post-colonial Africa.
A lot of anti-CRT rhetoric is clearly trying to use the Marxism link to discredit, out-of-hand, CRT. American politics has long been like that--guilt by association with Socialism. I understand the reflexive instinct to push back. But if you try to deny that the links exist, all you're doing is discrediting yourself and others, bolstering those pundits' credibility. The links absolutely exist and are substantial. The nuance is that they're not substantial in the ways that their rhetoric implies. (It's like if you took Christianity and replaced Jesus with Santa Claus. You couldn't plausibly claim the new religion wasn't an offshoot of Christianity, and much of it would be indecipherable without understanding historical Christianity and the figure of Jesus. But it would simultaneously be true that the new religion would in some of its most fundamental dimensions be entirely incompatible and incomparable to Christianity.)
If anybody wants to have an informed opinion on these debates, they could do much worse than reading Frantz Fanon. IMO, CRT begins and ends with Frantz Fanon. If you read one of his seminal works, "Black Skin, White Faces", you've read all you'll ever need to read regarding the ideological underpinnings of not only CRT but much of modern liberal American identity politics, either because it descends directly from Fanon, or because Fanon expertly articulates the experiences and reasoning. I found it a very powerful and enlightening book.[1] But Fanon takes (in the book, but especially in subsequent works and the arc of his entire public life) the ideology to its logical conclusion, which is permanent apartheid, and therefore lays bare the stark choice being made when one adopts the axioms shared between liberal identity politics and Fanon's philosophy. I can't refute Fanon's ultimate conclusion that black-skinned minorities will never be able to find equality among a white-skinned majority (or, presumably, vice-versa if the historical script were flipped), but I choose to believe that there must exist some way to get there; otherwise as Fanon persuasively argues, all identity politics can possibly do is mitigate some of the worst injustices, but ultimately never eradicate the fundamental inequities. And therein lies much of Fanon's motivation for his Marxism advocacy--he thought the only way forward was for black countries to go their own way, and that necessarily involved adopting Marxism as capitalist systems would ultimately benefit the white, colonial establishment at the expense of black countries and communities.
Also, FWIW, modern Marxist scholarship provides some of the most vehement and technical opposition to CRT for precisely the reason you hinted at--replacing class conflict with racial conflict is anathema to Marxism. But when you read that scholarship, it's also obvious that CRT and Marxism use nearly identical language. CRT is indisputably descended from the culture of Marxist scholarship. That's also why modern Marxists are so adept at counterarguments--they're familiar with many of the underlying modes of reasoning. (20th century Marxists weren't very interested in opposing these philosophies for geopolitical reasons.)
[1] I first read it 20 years ago, before CRT entered mainstream liberal discourse, and before I had any knowledge of CRT as a school of thought or movement. When I did learn of CRT, the parallels to Fanon's ideas were immediately obvious. Until then mainstream liberal identity politics hadn't moved much beyond, say, Cornel West's philosophy in "Race Matters". West has always been very careful to not cross the line into race essentializing territory, and it's for that reason that in the past several years West has been condemned by the identity politics movement as it continues to follow identity politics to its logical end.
Oh boy. Look, I just wanted to ding Rayiner for buying Rufo's schtick. In the Rufo cinematic universe, Gramsci is the most dangerous thinker of the 20th century.
Would Crenshaw agree that Fanon is the beginning and end of CRT? Race, Reform, and Retrenchment[1] contains an extended, detailed critique of Critical Legal Studies for instrumentalizing and superficializing Black struggle, and for the premise that in a conflict between avoiding legitimizing the dominant class (in the broader Gramscian sense) and advancing Black material interests, it's Black interests that need to give.
For that matter, you can go back to Crenshaw's Demarginalizing the Intersection[2] and see that (a) it is in the main a par-for-the-course case-by-case legal case study like lots of other law articles, and not an inscrutable blob of woke jargon, and (b) not especially Marxist? (Amusingly, this article was weaponized, with Crenshaw's approval, by Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders).
If CRT has anything to teach, it's that if you dismiss people's lived experience[1] you're only causing more trouble. When people see parallels between CRT and Marxism, you can either dismiss them or take them seriously. The fact that you disagree about the scope or meaning or implications of those parallels is a different matter. If you outright dismiss what seems patently obvious to people, that's where they'll stay stuck; and moreover, they'll take your dismissal as evidence of relative credibility.
I get that there are trolls out, including professional trolls, who weaponize innuendo and have zero interest in engaging in honest debate. But the reason for abstaining from quick dismissals is for the benefit of the people they're targeting, not the trolls. I guess what I should have written was: CRT absolutely has deep connections with Marxist thought. See, e.g. Frantz Fanon. So what?
I can't not point this out, even though it's about the orangest thing I can write here: Fanon died roughly 30 years before CRT was a thing, and, moreover, CRT is an offshoot of Critical Legal Studies (which in turn is an offshoot of critical theory), and Fanon wasn't a legal scholar. He's a race-oriented critical theorist (I can't believe I'm writing this), right, not a critical race theorist?
Again, just back to Crenshaw, who wrote at length about how Critical Legal Studies loses the plot about racism in its zeal to reconsider the entire liberal legal structure.
I promise I'm just writing this because, like many HN comments, it is a sort of rhetorical burp I just have to get out.
More seriously: it is somewhat frustrating that any serious analysis of oppressor/oppressed systems can be dismissed as "Marxist" because of Gramsci and hegemony, because oppression is obviously a real thing (ask any evangelical Christian) but neo-Marxism is principally trotted out when the oppressed are disfavored. But then, lots of academics who pretty clearly aren't Marxist are happy to use Gramscian neo-Marxism as a tool, so, sure, maybe you're just right about this.
> Look, I just wanted to ding Rayiner for buying Rufo's schtick
It’s so funny that criticism of Rufo always revolves into this esoteric academic debate. I’m a plebe and I’ve never heard of any of those people. Rufo came to my attention because he leaked material that was given at a teacher training in Loudoun County, right next to where I grew up. As far as I can tell the bulk of his journalism is just publishing these leaks.
Maybe a better comparison is to the imams in madrasas teaching young Muslim kids that they’re oppressed by the west? Who knows? Whatever you label it, these materials shouldn’t be in the same building as kids, and the people who green lighted that should be out of a job.
If you're not familiar with Rufo, a fun fact about him is that he ran for Seattle City Council on a pro-LGBT+ platform just a couple years ago. He's a professional troll.
I'd have to do a proper nerdout to give you a more intelligible answer. It's hard to talk about this stuff without slipping into boring political rants. The gist of the matter seems to come down to these bits:
1. A schema of the world as an unfair arrangement of oppression and coercion
2. The claim to a correct understanding of how this system operates and perpetuates istelf
3. The belief that contrary thoughts and beliefs, however sophisticated they sound, are a simple product of these more fundamental power relations, which must be unmasked
4. A plan for how to make everything better through transformative change, which includes a radical remodeling of the self to expunge wrong belief and wrong thinking
5. A totalizing belief that everything falls within this ideological universe of discourse. You can't go off and study butterflies or Taylor series and tap out of the battle.
This is the shape of the "thing" that makes people see a similarity between modern elite belief and Marxism. I'm not familiar enough with fascist ideology to answer your question, but consider that fascism was a pretty incoherent and fast-changing target, while the core beliefs of Marxism have shown remarkable staying power despite a body count that would have doomed lesser belief systems (like fascism!). Note also that, with small changes, the schema I gave above is a religious schema; part of the power of totalizing ideology is that it plugs into the mental and spiritual machinery of religious faith.
That's a real phenomenon! Obviously it is. I only dispute that you can:
(a) Trace it back to Gramsci, call it neo-Marxist, and then accuse anyone who ever bought an Robin DiAngelo book and performatively left it on their desk at work of being a neo-Marxist, and
(b) Seriously argue that the phenomenon is not only a religion, but is simultaneously the result and cause of the ordination of women in the Episcopalian church --- which is absolutely part of Rufo's subtext.
I do not want to get in the line of fire between anybody and Ibram X Kendi. I get that there's lots to criticize. It's not that I think there isn't a lot of frankly silly Marxist stuff happening in, like, the "institutional" Black Lives Matter movement. I just dispute that Chris Rufo knows what he's talking about, or cares, and that his summary of "wokeism", the one quoted above, makes sense.
Prepared to be wrong about all of this, but don't need to nerd out about it any more than you want to.
I confess that I do not know who Rufo is or his opinions on any topic, and only jumped in to this thread because you seemed honestly at a loss about why people were being accused of Marxism despite having comfortably bourgeois beliefs about who should own the means of production.
I endorse your not knowing who Rufo is. I am retreating from the bailey of my claim that there is no such thing as neo-Marxism (though I will go to the mattresses for the claim that Jordan Peterson doesn't know that it means) and retrenching in my motte of none of this having the slightest bit to do with the collapse of mainline protestantism.
> Marxism is distinguished as an ideology by totalizing class consciousness. That's the opposite of wokeness, which ratifies identity politics.
It's an ideology that replaces Marxism's "totalizing class consciousness" with a "totalizing race consciousness."
> Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
A lot, and the "Marxism" is doing very little. It's a clumsy construction. But the meaning is clear in context.
> "Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain!
It’s a religious revival, but without Jesus. They’re descendants of Puritans who don’t believe the theology anymore, but have the same religious zeal, sense of moral universalism, and faith that America's institutions belong to them. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbxQqKXUIk (warning: offensive period language). I’ve had several experiences with woke whites where, when I pointed out that the minorities they purport to speak for disagreed with them about this or that, they responded with the same sentiment as Matt Damon in the final line of that clip.
I don’t know anything about Catholicism. I will say that there’s something about America where every religion takes on elements of Protestantism—especially the reliance on the conscious of lay people rather than doctrines announced by learned religious authorities.
So it's... not Marxism at all. None of the rest of Marx makes sense if you replace "class" with "race". Who owns the means of production? Or is it the means of something else now? It's like calling capitalism "neo-fascism", or, for that matter, taking any ${BADTHING} and attaching neo- to it to craft a slur.
The meaning is clear in context because you know who he's talking about. But you just called this "the best description you've seen", and it's not a description in the least.
I don't care that you disagree with DEI types and with wokeism in general. I have my own qualms! But don't elevate hucksters like Rufo. And stop following him on Twitter. He's a clown.
Right, but the world is full of conflict perspectives, not least among right-wingers. They can't all be Marxists, just because Gramsci came up with an ultra-generalizable concept.
(I think we agree, just writing it down to clarify my thoughts).
It's interesting that calling CRT "Marxist" gives the Fox News watchers a familiar enemy to fulminate against, and it gives the CRT peddlers themselves unearned credibility as dangerous dissidents, so it's a misidentification that serves everyone but the dwindling number of actual Marxists, and pedants bent on accuracy.
Anyone who has worked in government in a high crime city is aware of this. So many nonprofits bank off crime and destruction of the black community by “studying”, “studying some more”, “evaluating the study”, “working with stakeholders”, “drafting a strategic plan” etc. it’s actually an easy way for white people that have mediocre prospects to advance. It’s a low rigor environment where buzzwords mean a lot and underachievers can profit off of black people
> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.
I think that's a inaccurate and misleading description. I think the correct term is "colorism" not "racism," and it sounds like those distinctions were more significant within the black community than outside of it. I don't think a stereotypical anti-black racist would accept a black person into a social club if his skin was as light as a paper bag.
> "The Brown Paper Bag Test" is a term in African-American oral history used to describe a colorist discriminatory practice within the African-American community in the 20th century, in which an individual's skin tone is compared to the color of a brown paper bag....
> The Brown Paper Bag Test was heavily documented and normalized with historically black fraternities and sororities (especially among sororities) and historically black social clubs founded before 1960, whose members selected others who resembled themselves, generally those reflecting partial European ancestry.[8][9] Some privileged multi-racial people of color who came from families freed before the American Civil War attempted to distinguish themselves from the mass of freedmen after the war, who appeared to be mostly of African descent and from less privileged families.
I think that in the DEI ideology, racism is not the sane, traditional definition, but rather that postmodern power + prejudice equation that is used to prop up the idea that only whites can be racist.
So in order to keep their ideology consistent in the face of clear and present racism throughout the non white communities as well, they had to invent the term "colorism".
It's an embarrassment to HN that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683200 got flagged to death. IIRC, the author of that comment is from Bangladesh and is a position to actually know something about colorism.
Colorism isn’t racism because racism isn’t about color. Color is merely an imperfect proxy for distinguishing different groups of people. (Many white people, especially Greeks or Italians, are darker than many East Asians, but that doesn’t change the racial categories.)
In some communities, colorism is a byproduct of racial categorization based on color. But in many places it’s just an aesthetic preference. Colorism in Asia and Africa long predates colonialism or contact with white people. An important thing to note is that in these societies, colorism doesn’t imply that white people are seen as the most beautiful. A person can be too light, just as they can be too tall or too skinny.
the brown bag thing was colorism, which while technically a subset of racism is not useful to investigate in the context of popular anti-racism as it pertains to DEI in the west, which would be better labeled as anti-white-supremacism
DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
So, all that being said, the justification is these changes help make black people in tech feel more included, a goal I support. In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
* For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.