[zxxon]

If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their gender and/or race, then they aren't there by merit. That's exactly what some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely warranted.

The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some statistic?

[Caveman_Coder]

That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-inclined and less sexist team before leaving the tech industry for good. She always said the "women-in-tech" groups did more harm than good and thinks its just one big "women/POC-in-tech industry" that unfortunately won't be going away anytime soon since there is now so much money involved.

[rvo]

Yea, I saw the women in machine learning group at NIPS and was really wondering if this is a good thing or not.

Now they are considering Black in Machine Learning too (or something like that).

This all just seems sexist and racist. Mathematics and statistics shouldn't be conditioned on race and gender! What's next, there are too many Jews who win the Nobel prize?? Doesn't this type of thinking remind people of the horrible past?

[door2]

White men get advantaged over nonwhite nonmen in pretty much all aspects of society. “Preferential” treatment towards people other than white men is really just a tiny little correction against the massive social and economic advantages white men experience. How many white men have you ever heard feeling bad because they were only hired for their white maleness (“Culture fit”)? And yet that is the dominant status quo hiring practice.

[rvo]

So correct racism with more racism ...

"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."

I guess that means nothing these days.

It scares me when people start talking racially, especially like you. You call me a person of color (basically a new version of colored people). You see race first, content second.

This scares me because it wasn't too long ago that Jews were being thrown under the bus. And it scares me because now you might hate white people, but what if you start hating brown Indians like me (who have the highest family income in America), Asians, or Jews (you probably consider them to be white anyway).

This is just scary stuff man. I wonder how many of my liberals friends view race first.

[door2]

I guess I’m the real racist for pointing out that racism exists?

Racism is the systematic disenfranchisement of a group of people based on their race. Correcting that disenfranchisement, empowering people who systematically don’t have power is literally the opposite of racism...

Pointing out that white people face massive advantages in the United States isn’t “hating white people”, it’s an obvious and undeniable fact. My ideal world is one where everyone is treated equally, and the road to that world isn’t just imagining everyone is treated equally and everyone enters the world with the same advantages, it is through acknowledging and correcting socioeconomic disparities.

[rvo]

I am just extremely wary of people who call me a person of color and who view things firstly through the lens of race. Of course there is racism in the west but correcting that shouldn't mean more racism.

Do you also believe Indians and Asians face a massive advantage in America? They are some of the most successful racial groups in America. Should their advantage be "corrected"? I guess it already happens via college acceptances...

How about Jews? Should we correct their advantage as well?

There is nothing wrong in addressing socioeconomic disparities. The lowest of our societies should be helped to a point of self sustanence and leadership. But it's just so offensive to call us all colored people, I mean people of color. Can I suggest not labeling people with higher melanin with that phrase? It reduces me down to a racial label and it makes me super uncomfortable. No kidding, it kinda reminds me of when I used to hear "Arab" or "terrorist" by right wing nut jobs as that label was also based on my race...