What does your opinion about Recurse's financial aid program have to do with whether their community guidelines are good? Either the isms rule is good or it isn't; its validity does not depend on you agreeing with the rest of their actions.
This post[0] from the Advocate has a great line that is relevant here. The current dialogue around diversity "...propagates something harmful: the idea that gender is simply the lack of maleness, race a lack of whiteness, sexuality a lack of gayness."
When someone establishes rules and does not adhere to those rules, they end up redefining the words in those rules until they no longer carry the literal meaning they once did.
The policy reads:
Our last social rule bans subtle racism, sexism, homophobia,
transphobia, and other kinds of bias.
Our last social rule bans subtle racism (except against white
people), sexism (except against cisgender men), homophobia,
transphobia, and other kinds of bias (except any bias against
white cisgender men).
Language evolves, and the actions of people can shape how it evolves.
[0] http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2011/01/20/im-wh...
Don't get me wrong here. I'm not anti-diversity. I'm actually a huge proponent of diversity. I just believe that hypocrisy and reserve discrimination is the wrong way to get there. And I believe that there are many more dimensions in which someone can contribute to the diversity of a group besides gender, race and sexual identity. Cognitive and cultural diversity for example are examples of two other vectors in which someone can contribute to diversity. What happened to MLK's dream of focusing on content of character instead of color of a person's skin? At the end of the day characteristics of like gender, race and identity are merely a few of the many factors that contribute to the sum total of experiences that makes someone who they are and who they will be become. The are just superficial proxies for the type of diversity we should be seeking out and celebrating and that's diversity of content of character.
What kind of message are we sending our kids when things like this can happen:
Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls
only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was
explained to him that girls need special help to become
interested in technology, and that if there are boys
around, the girls will be too scared to try.
My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a
mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his
first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he
saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local
hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one
of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his
school acting like girls were dumb?
Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very
unfeminist ideas in my son's head. [2]
The Recurse Center's guideline against "subtle -isms" takes place in the context of offering financial aid only to favored groups. This suggests that "subtle -isms" against less-favored groups might be policed less vigorously. For example, many ordinary white men might reasonably consider the term "underrepresented" itself to be a "subtle -ism", but I doubt complaints to this effect would fall on sympathetic ears.
This issue applies to Hacker News because being inspired by the Recurse Center's policies risks importing the expectation that "avoid subtle -isms" mainly applies to speech against their favored groups. If Hacker News is to adopt Recurse Center–style community guidelines but wants to avoid such bias, it should be explicit in disclaiming any notion of "protected classes", instead insisting that the guidelines be applied equally to all groups.