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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

> The brilliant thing about “equity” is that it refocuses everyone on distribution within a class instead of between classes.

This is something I hope is not true, but as more people mention it make me think really is. How sick is it, if true, people are purposely pitting people against each other for the sake of getting away with something.

Semi related...I hear a term a lot recently that seems similar...'pulling the ladder up.'

Seems most companies who are all in on diversity have all white C levels, often all men. Typical "I got mine." mindset. Seems increasingly those pushing divisive things are those not affected by them.

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> How sick is it, if true, people are purposely pitting people against each other for the sake of getting away with something.

I don't know if "purposeful" is the right word. More like the emergent behavior of lots of people in large organizations working in their self-interest. Imagine you're a young Harvard graduate entering Wall Street. In the olden days, you would reconcile yourself to being "the man," and convince yourself that the working classes deserved their condition due to their moral shortcomings. Now your schooling has filled your head with notions of justice and equality, but you're still "the man" and your personal incentives haven't changed. Committing to "equity" while condemning working class white people for their moral failings allows you to square the circle and make minimal changes that could affect your own self interest.

But the consequences of that attitude downstream are dire and indistinguishable from a deliberate effort. When a white manager commits to "equity" and condemns the white line workers as "racists, sexists, and homophobes," that not only divides the working class amongst itself. It also inverts the traditional cultural understanding that the line workers are "the good guys" and the managers are "the bad guys"--further depriving the working class of what little political and rhetorical capital it used to possess.

> Semi related...I hear a term a lot recently that seems similar...'pulling the ladder up.'

You see this acutely among first versus second+ generation Asians. I relied on meritocratic systems to get ahead after my parents immigrated here from Bangladesh. I went to a public magnet high school, engineering school, and law school based on my test scores. I don't know anybody on that side of the ladder who thinks there's anything wrong with using testing to identify talent. But my kids go to a private school where we have a second winter break for ski vacations. Whatever system replaces standardized testing, I will know how to work it and my kids will be fine.

When a white manager commits to "equity" and condemns the white line workers as "racists, sexists, and homophobes"

What are you talking about here? What's a scenario where this happens?

You see a specific example here: https://www.city-journal.org/walmart-critical-race-theory-tr.... It's also part of the larger zeitgeist. In my heavily left-leaning social circle, being a Reaganite who hates taxes and regulations will raise no eyebrows. Nobody complains about Wall Street. But someone's racist uncle in rural Illinois? He's the real problem with America.

You saw his dynamic play out in the professional class's (including the media's) reactions to Trump. You'd expect Democrats to hate Trump for the things he shares with Bush or Romney: tax cuts for the rich, trying to repeal Obamacare, etc. But even from the beginning, that's not what outraged people the most. They hated Trump far more for the things he shared with his working class voters. Indeed, the media rehabilitated Bush and Romney--bombing Muslim countries could be overlooked; saying nasty things about Muslim refugees could not be.

Above the Law is a manifestation of this. It used to be a non-political legal gossip site. These days, it's got a heavy dose of left-wing articles--all revolving around racism, sexism, etc.--juxtaposed against cheering six figure bonuses for 20-somethings. Never will you find any criticism of the work these firms do turning the gears of corporate America, or even the a milquetoast center-left ditty on raising taxes on these ever-growing bonus checks.

I think you're running this argument 100 yards past the end zone. Is there overheated rhetoric about racial equity in liberal communities and in the broader business world? Yes, obviously. Do suburban crypto-leftists equity-wash arguments to get their way or establish status? Yes, that is clearly a thing that happens ("we need a city-block-sized covered farmer's market, not more luxury housing!").

Where I snag on this is that I don't believe anyone takes the DEI-speak in that REI syllabus seriously; a long stretch of it --- not coincidentally the part that Rufo chose to highlight --- is almost verbatim the same content that the Smithsonian was forced to apologize for posting in a display about whiteness vs. blackness. The documents start with a framing (that most people would find risible, though it's mostly accurate) that "white" doesn't mean what you assume it means, but is rather a artificially constructed category deliberately design to exclude outgroups. That's true! It's not well argued, and nobody is going to pay attention to it, and it's a terrible flaw in the pedagogy, but it's also not valid to suggest that the document is saying you're automatically a white supremacist by dint of e.g. being a Minnesotan of Nordic heritage. The whole syllabus is shoplifted from other people's work, but probably 80% of it is stuff you agree with, or at least have in the past professed to agree with.

Isn't it enough just to call out hucksters making a buck off clueless corporate initiatives, or status-obsessed Very Online people trying to score Twitter points? The idea that white people are routinely attacked at their places of work for an unexpurgated original sin of racism is just not plausible.

> Seems most companies who are all in on diversity

Companies that are really all-in on diversity tend to be small and low visibility. Megacorporations that are all in on marketing social virtue of any kind (environmentalism, DEI, whatever) are doing image management that is, for the most part, either unrelated to or directly opposed to the substance of what the company does (not uncommonly, marketing bare minimum legal compliance, and sometimes specific sanctions imposed on the firm for wrongdoing, as virtue.)

That's a good distinction, thanks.

Just looking at two companies recently in the news for their 'white privilege' training pushes...Amex and Coke.

Amex - https://ir.americanexpress.com/governance-and-corporate-resp...

Coca Cola - https://craft.co/the-coca-cola-company/executives

Notice how these companies put out such trainings, but never properly diversify or offer to step down themselves.

The absolute gall of a 70 year old white rich ceo trying to make their 20 year old barely minimum wage stockperson feel like privileged racist trash is sickening.

One wonders if it is to take attention off of their exec level(again, I got mine), or perhaps more conspiracy theorist level...rich people getting everyone else to fight among themselves while income disparity grows and grows. Pretty gross either way.

Friend of mine recently went through what you could euphemistically call a "reshuffle" in an IT department. The end result being that the only Black director in the company -- my friend's old boss -- and everyone of color below him left due to how they were being treated by upper management.

Friend is holding down a support team two levels down by managing up. His new boss is a lawyer with zero domain expertise in IT. The support team is ready to leave, too, because of the upper managements' actions.

What made everyone so fed up? With the constant talk about DEI, constant promises about promoting people of color into prominent, visible, and effective roles, they were led to believe the company actually cared about those things. Apparently they found that not to be the case, and execs wouldn't (couldn't?) summon the initiative to do the right thing.

It's kinda sick how corporate America seems to operate.

Unlike many here I was a lowly laborer for most of my early life. In the southeast USA. And you know what... people just weren't that racist. When I was landscaping I worked with hispanics, blacks, whites, you name it. It was a pretty fair system of...can you do it. We were gruff, made fun of each other, and yeah...lot of 'racist' jokes. In fun. But we were pretty tight.

I avoided computers for that time because I found programming depressing (and still do, really). But the money was too good and I moved over, naturally.

Holy hell where are all the hispanic and black folks? Nonexistent. Then this company I work for has the nerve to tell me to be more accepting stop being racist, because I am even if I don't know it.

The world sometimes feels like a weird joke to me.

Well they can’t replace themselves.

What they can do is replace everyone below them, give themselves a big pat on the back, and continue to look out for number one.

Rich white folks don’t care about poor white folks. Never have. They care about keeping theirs pockets lined. If they can convince all the poor white people they are racist they can continue to keep them at the bottom and continue to line their pockets all in the name of equality. To summarize Tupac. “You white kids don’t need to be successful because you have Mark Zuck.”

TLDR: I think it has always been about class and equity is just the latest rich person hustle.

Really good comment that I agree with, except maybe

> Rich white folks don’t care about poor white folks

This is definitely true, but perhaps too exclusive. I don't think rich people of any race care about anyone below them of any race.

Which, I think you realize. It's pure class warfare at the cost of all of us laypeople's mental health.

The political class (both parties, but republicans in particular) and rich elites are absolutely polarizing the country, discrediting the value of tolerance and education, buying up all media, and aiming people at each other like nuclear missiles instead of promoting the general welfare.

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