1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors"
2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"
3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories
4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That's just what we don't want here, because it's extremely repetitive. It also almost always turns nasty. Those properties hold true regardless of which ideologies people are battling for or against. All of this is therefore off topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you badly perpetuated this flamewar downthread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
It won't happen again.
what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion of all others.
As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy.
If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should), then the question becomes whether you can make the system provide more of an equal opportunity.
Or: "white" culture emphasizes values that tend to produce people who are more interested and/or more capable programmers. The same way that, say, asian immigrants are more likely to value education than other demographics. This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the extremely negative connotation of the term and poisons the argument with a dishonest framing, as though the only possible outcome in a perfect meritocracy is equal representation. Nothing about human nature suggests this to be the case.
Diversity of opinion also implies diversity of interests. The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests. Some groups of people value athletic achievement above intellectual achievement, and it would be unreasonable to expect those demographics to produce a proportional number of competent programmers.
It's a perfectly reasonable argument, if not at times overfitted. In the US, zero (0) presidents have been born post-Civil Rights Act. In fact, Ruby Bridges [0] is only a year older than Bill Gates. So did Ruby's peers just happen to not produce programmers at the same rate as Bill's because they didn't "value" education? Hey, maybe it's true. Who knows? But the idea that a demographic whose grandparents had to be escorted by the national guard to protect them from white supremacist mobs on the way to get an education being behind in education has nothing to do with white supremacy, is ridiculous at absolute best.
> The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests.
So let's make the opportunity equal and see where the cards fall. Did the kids in my neighborhood and school find making computer games any less interesting than I did? No, but I could afford a computer. Guess where we are now, respectively.
...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first question myself.
oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them.
I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation.
It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).
"our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc.
Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
Yes, we could talk about systemic racism etc. That is why one might engage in a lot of political projects. However a highly specific demand about ratios in upper-middle-class high-status industries... these specific demands are a little harder to parse.
The #metoo movement was not about the masses in the industry, it was about the elites. The academic "fire them" movements (eg., against pinker) are likewise not about the army of PhDs and their sexism. Rather these are intra-elite warfare using somewhat valid grounds to wage an attack on resource-horders.
I agreed that these groups have justifiable reasons to make demands; that's partly my point. The issue, where it exists, it their methods.
It is very easy to become cynical and take these demands "too literally" as demands for quotas, and for reinstitutionalising racism "as a corrective".
Rather, it is better to see them as the same ordinary politics everyone both engages in, and is entitled to engage in.
As for the "theology" that refers to the particular dogmatic moralising and evangelising approach taken, and the frequently dubious premises.
Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration - all of those are designed to be broad based. That those people also want the people who tell media stories and who make political decisions and who run major enterprises to be representative of our population as a whole does not, in my view, indict those people as "elitists."
What's wrong with moralizing? I think some things in how our society is structured ought to change. Is that "theology"?
Are, indeed, not what i'm talking about.
Most people demanding jobs in journalism arent engaged in projects to reintegrate schools. I'm talking about those demanding the jobs, not MLK.
Most people who want greater diversity in journalism aren't demanding jobs for themselves (indeed most of them aren't journalists and are not in that profession).
It seems you've constructed this whole narrative on a pretty thin basis.
As somebody who is prohibited from having "people", the whole "our people" thing rubs me the wrong way from the beginning.