[cdsmith]

Thanks for the question. I'm the author of the article, and I can talk about why I included that paragraph. It's not because everything has to be about racial diversity. Rather, it's because I was already writing about some kinds of diversity, and when I reflected on people I know in the Haskell community, I realized that we've got some pretty interesting characters, and that this is due to communities like Tidal Cycles. Tidal Cycles is a great example of why something that's not at all important to corporate sponsors is nevertheless a cornerstone of the language community. I've had the chance to meet some really interesting people with interesting stories who I wouldn't have met if Haskell were just a language for writing web services.

[4bpp]

Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with.

It seems to me that according to present-day American norms, including a remark such as the one that you did is simply considered good form; you show that even if you are not actively working on the great political causes that are being so eloquently argued to be of existential importance by their protagonists every day, you are certainly aware of them, support the good guys and ready to do your part for their cause if it you are in a situation in which you can contribute. Meanwhile, for those who adhere to a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible, the very mention of it in a context where there seemed to be no external reason to is gauche in a similar way to if you suddenly started talking about sexual prowess (taking care to insert a parenthetical remark about what you believe about your own). It doesn't seem to me like your explanation of the "why" here is particularly helpful to cross that gap of expectations, either; it only really makes sense if the reader is already primed to assume that describing people as "interesting characters" and unusual people must at least suggest something about race and gender, but from the other side's perspective this is not any less gauche, especially as it might be taken to suggest that what makes those characters "interesting" to you is just a matter of those characteristics.

Even worse, if the culturally remote reader's degree of familiarity with modern US norms is not zero, the one blurb they likely have in mind is something like "the US has a self-admitted racism problem". In that case, a remark such as the one you made might not just register as introducing a topic that is unsuitable for polite conversation, but actually as betraying attitudes that are opposite to what you wished to communicate - imagine if for instance a speaker of the German police, talking about something mundane such as their strategies for fighting pickpockets in Frankfurt, injected a line lamenting the small number of Jews in the force. Indeed, if my read of US society is correct, antisemitism is one context in which the other (older?) version of antiracism norms still survives in it. To get a rough model of how a given post or statement would sound to the cultural outsider, then, you could try to imagine your post with everything mentioning race replaced with analogous remarks along the "Jewish or not Jewish?" axis.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think of it as a four-step process. Take Sonia Sotomayor, for a not-currently-controversial example. Step one is that she can't be a Supreme Court justice because she's hispanic. Step 2 is, she's hispanic, but she can be a Supreme Court justice anyway. Step 3 is that she's nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, and nobody mentions that she's hispanic. Step 4 is that, when she's nominated for the Supreme Court, people mention that she's hispanic, but in the same way that they mention that she was born in the Bronx - as background personal-interest information, not as a "does that disqualify her or not" issue.

The US started at step 1. It's moved to step 2. My personal impression is that it was moving to step 3, though I'm sure that at least some people will disagree. But it seems to me that the current progressive approach is dragging us back to step 2, not moving us toward step 4. And I think that the older approach, what you call "a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible", would have gotten us at least solidly to step 3, and maybe eventually to step 4.

I don't think dragging everything back to step 2 is progress.

[cdsmith]

Fair enough. For my part, I didn't include that comment as just an obligatory remark, though. I did so because it occurs to me that, for instance, the only tech community I'm involved in where I have regularly met people who identify as non-binary gender is Haskell. I don't think that's entirely a coincidence, and I do think it's related to the strong role played by non-industry Haskell programmers in the community. So I said so.

[zozbot234]

You're of course correct that mentioning so-called "race" as a legitimate category at all is extremely divisive outside of a very U.S.-centric and very intellectually-niche discourse, but there's also a sensible norm against injecting any kind of politics in quasi-professional contexts where people should be able to cooperate seamlessly across political, cultural, and intellectual divides.

These tiresome and uninteresting remarks about U.S.-centric political causes, no matter how worthwhile these causes may be on their own terms, stand out as an eminently avoidable reminder of uncomfortable social conflict.

[jfengel]

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public.

That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere, because no place seems to be any worse than any other."

I personally am very conflict-averse, and much prefer it when people remain very polite. But reading HN in particular, I've come to realize that a lot of people are still going to insist that racism isn't a problem in the US and demand that others not talk about it. They assume that if they're not seeing it then it's not a problem for anybody -- or worse, they're deliberately inflicting it and hiding among those who are merely obtuse.

I find that so offensive that it overrides even my conflict aversion.

[zozbot234]

> Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of ways to do that. What turns people off to the real, actual problems is casual and unhelpful claims like "the U.S. is an inherently racist/white supremacist country" or the like. What that looks like to outsiders is folks who want to seem like they're meaningfully talking about real issues that some might face, but all they manage to do is to be divisive and stir up pointless conflict for the heck of it. At that point, tuning out is a sensible response.

[jfengel]

That sounds to me like an excuse to not engage.

We all watched a man be murdered last year, and HN was filled with people making excuses for the murderer. He was convicted only because every single person watched it; others whose murders weren't caught on film escaped punishment. Much less the numerous others that are less than murder.

When people can't even agree that a murder in front of their eyes was a bad thing, I'm going to say out loud that something is deeply wrong. If that seems like a pointless conflict to you, then it's going to keep happening and I'm going to be shocked that I have to say to your face that it's bad.

If your aggravation about their time offends you more than the injustice done to them, then you know why the tone will keep getting more aggravating.

[rataata_jr]

Thank you for responding and keeping it respectful.