[LoganDark]

Whenever I've tried to discuss this in cases of obvious tokenism and what I call "reverse discrimination" (which is when minority groups are particularly favored for their PR value), my language has always seemed to appear charged with privilege or something which causes people to attack me for it. I absolutely do not mean to come off that way though.

Someone once asked something relating to a literal "diversity quota" that they had to specifically hire only minorities in order to meet, and I was removed from that entire community for raising concerns of preferential treatment. I believe my exact words were "isn't that just discrimination in the other direction?"

So I think, this is still very much taboo? Either that, or I just suck at communicating. (Which is fair.)

[orwin]

The issue with "diversity quota" is that it only target "visible" diversity. But I guarantee if you want your SV tech startup to be really diverse, your next hire should be the white man from Pocahantas conuty, WV rather than the black man from Mill Valley, CA [0].

Anyway, i'm largely against quotas, i'd rather have blind resume and have hiring stat done on really big companies to prevent them from gaming too much. If you want to hire diversity for diversity sake (which in tech is a good thing, you want multiple point of view), hire outside of your zone of control, seek people who won't send you a resume.

[0] I've been twice in the US, and visited both places, i guarantee the culture is extremely different, although the National Park crowd is the same (i.e: extremely cool and interesting) in both place.

[ricardobeat]

Diversity hiring has the specific goal of equalizing the mix a little bit, which requires hiring particular people. Same as education quotas which aim to bring in more students from unprivileged backgrounds, an attempt to correct historical discrimination over generations.

Your question demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of this, which could be obtained in half an hour of reading; from this perspective being kicked out of the room is not an unexpected response.

I do strongly agree with the principle that any discrimination is still discrimination, but reality is more nuanced than that.

[spondylosaurus]

Agreed, and I think a key thing to note here is that discrimination against marginalized groups/minorities has historically run much deeper than hiring strategies, and so hiring strategies themselves provide a pretty superficial picture of how close we are to "solving" inequality.

It's not always this dramatic, but sometimes you can chalk up the difference between two people's opportunities in life (at least partly) to the fact that Person A's great-great-grandparents had a thriving family business, and each generation was able to provide a safety net for the next, versus Person B's great-great-grandparents who weren't allowed to own property. There are other factors, obviously, but advantages or disadvantages can accrue over time like compound interest. If Person B gets a good job, that's beneficial for them, but it might be exponentially more beneficial for their own great-great-grandchildren down the line—it just takes a while to see that change!

[LoganDark]

So my impression is this: in a vacuum, if everyone hired only minorities, then non-minorities would be at a disadvantage, instead of minorities being at a disadvantage. Your argument seems to be that since there is still so much discrimination against minorities, some companies only hiring minorities serves to make the job market as a whole more fair for them, by "balancing out more" against those who only hire non-minorities. If those companies "only" treated everyone equally, then everyone else only hiring non-minorities would have even more of an impact, and the job market would be even more unfair for those minorities. Do I understand you correctly?

(Also: sorry for constantly using the term minorities/non-minorities. I don't have a better word to use here. I know talking about things this way could be seen as being part of the problem.)

[wakawaka28]

You don't suck at communicating. The people who want to discriminate against you want to do it badly and don't care what you think about it. They don't believe in a colorblind society and equal treatment under the law, they believe in getting what they can get at your expense while crying victim. I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice to people, because some of them might legitimately feel disadvantaged by their minority status. But keep in mind that some of them know exactly what they're doing to abuse our sympathy.