[philgoetz]

If you try to balance speakers racially, you'll run into the problem that we often deliberately discriminate against certain minorities (usually the Chinese) in order to raise the technical value of talks by making sure the speaker can speak English clearly. In nearly all colleges, teachers and TAs in college must prove proficiency in speaking English before they can be hired to teach a class. This deliberately discriminates against foreigners who don't speak English well enough, or whose accents are too thick, for the students to understand.

Discrimination is not always bad. Discrimination is the morally-neutral act of comparing things on some criteria. Additional context is required to determine whether it is a bad use of discrimination. We should not strive to be inclusive of people who speak the conference language poorly, or, say, people who are crazy. Kevin's blog expressed concern over how to be inclusive of the mentally ill when choosing speakers. Was he joking? I don't know anymore.