The OP says:
>...Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys.
And:
> Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided. Adding a token minority speaker is offensive to that speaker, it says "You're here because you tick a box - not because you're skilled." It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style.
The second point is a strawman argument (and doesn't reflect well on the OP, unfortunately). Unless the detractors were complete reprobates, I doubt their reasoning was "You guys should include a non-white female for balance's sake!" I would hope that the line of allegation (and maybe it got muddled up in tweets, as oft is the case) was: you guys did not look hard enough to find alternative viewpoints, or: you guys have a narrow viewpoint on what makes for an interesting Rubyist.
Which brings me to point 1: Ruby was invented by a Japanese national. And last time the the Ruby 2.0 announcements were posted on HN, it was in Japanese. So in terms of pure white vs. non-whites, you most definitely can't say that all of the pioneers in Ruby are white, as you might be able to with other languages.
That said, I don't think (again I was only playing devil's advocate) that the organizers' intentions were bad. It's within the realm of possibility that every "minority" candidate they wanted could not make the conference. Yet it's also possible the organizers have a mostly-white circle, and without prodding, are prone to select from that group...not because they're racist, but because they happen to follow these people more and thus are more aware of their achievements. That most of these people are white males is a symptom of this natural tendency to look within your clique, without racism playing any influence at all.
Case in point: if you asked me to assemble a panel of top Rubyists and if I were unaware of the language's origins...I would most likely pick mostly white males and no Japanese at all. Not because I'm racist against Japanese (FWIW, I'm Asian), but because I don't speak/read Japanese, have never been to Japan, have never met other Japanese rubyists...and thus their accomplishments don't even enter my head when brainstorming top rubyists because I'm just unaware of their existence.
In that case, I'd welcome people to call me out for not ever looking up who this "Matz" character is. But I'd still probably be insulted if someone just called me a racist. So maybe in the OP's case, it's true that their circle is not large enough...and yet it's not right at all to just call them racist/sexist. The end result, I'm afraid, is that despite the well-meaning parties in this fight, the problem and problematic judgment of "tokenism" will just increase.
* One more point: The OP says:
> Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look beneath the surface before you retweet.
I'm not going to argue whether it's fair or not to expect this: but if an organizer is facing these kinds of allegations, then they can help alleviate the issue by writing a substantial post on their criteria for selecting the speakers and some examples of people they asked but who could not make it. If all outsiders see is the list of speakers as it stands, then they have to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt...which is not always going to happen...