[Veelox]

I strongly suspect that you would find the statement "If you want to increase productivity at Google fire all the lazy black people." racist because it implies that all black people are lazy.

If both statement seems fine fine to you than okay.

[iak8god]

OK, I kind of agree with you. Logically, it doesn't entail that, but it would be insane to treat natural language as pure logic. Pragmatically, taking context into account, I think the original statement is more likely meant to imply that "All (or a vast majority of) bigots at Google are white men" than "All white men at Google are bigots."

[Veelox]

It is kind of like the thread I have seen a few times that does something like

>Damore didn't say women are inferior

>> Quotes Damore "I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." >> See he clearly called them inferior.

>>> No he didn't he just said they were different.

Two people see the same sentence and draw very different conclusions. We can either adopt a norm of honoring what the writer intended or a norm of honoring what the reader observed. I think a lot of people who are most vocally pro-diversity use the later norm when determining if something is or isn't ????ist. If this is the norm I think it should be universally the norm. Thus if we are being charitable to the writer I agree with you that the interpretation should be "We should fire all of the bigots (who happen to be white men)" and not "We should fire all the white men (who are bigots)."

This is a really hard principle to apply consistently which is why I tried to highlight the same kind of statement that was racist instead of sexist. In hopes that people could understand why white men might take offense to the original comment.

Hope the explanation helps.

[iak8god]

> Hope the explanation helps.

Absolutely.

> We can either adopt a norm of honoring what the writer intended or a norm of honoring what the reader observed. I think a lot of people who are most vocally pro-diversity use the later norm when determining if something is or isn't ????ist. If this is the norm I think it should be universally the norm.

Gods, I hope this does not become the norm. "Everything can mean anything!"

[Veelox]

>Gods, I hope this does not become the norm. "Everything can mean anything!"

As a conservative it kind of feels like that is the case. The second named party in the Google suit got fired for an interpretation of his comments he didn't mean.