(Black man here)

Two things can be true at once.

I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on.

That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aimed at cultivating black people in tech. Prior to this, in the earlier internet age, you had to cut your teeth on IRC and forums. That was where technical people were in the computer tech space.

Do you know VIRULENTLY anti-black (or woman, or gay) these communities were? I can't begin to describe it. That is totally off-putting to someone who has the ability succeed but does not want to deal with the hate. There's also the fact that most (read: all) of the computing pioneers are white. I respect all of those people, but it does help to have someone to look up to. I'm positive that Satya and Sundar are great motivators for indian kids to look up to (as they should be).

These DEI initiatives aren't perfect in any way, but the goal is to give the affected groups the foundations to succeed. To put people in the affected communities out front as role models. I accept the annoyances for the sake of good and progress.

EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.

I see a different risk with DEI, and I’d sure love your perspective if you’re willing to give it. I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness. This includes changing away from “master” as a branch name, to creating an extensive list of taboo words such as “whitelist”, “blacklist”, and “subordinate”, to chiding colleagues for saying “brown bag lunch”*.

DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.

So, all that being said, the justification is these changes help make black people in tech feel more included, a goal I support. In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?

* For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.

> I see a different risk with DEI, and I’d sure love your perspective if you’re willing to give it. I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness.

Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.

> DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.

This is not a problem with DEI. Look at the landgrab that is enterprise management.

> In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?

Your premise is off, so I can't answer this.

> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.

This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.

> Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.

Woah this suddenly made the behavior of some people who gave me the creeps but were doing "all the right things" make sense. Thanks.

On the brownbag thing, I've had someone tell me we shouldn't say "picnic" because of a racist etymology. When I showed her this etymology wasn't real, she said it didn't matter. We still shouldn't say it because it might harm someone. This doesn't make anti-racism absurd. I think there are real heroes there. But that interaction sure felt absurd.

Anti-racism is a specific and horrid ideological tool.

Don't be anti-racist. Just don't be racist and call it out where you see it.

I think it makes it absurd indeed and even worse I think it has a overall negative impact. It completely disregard intent, a pretty extreme position to take for any form of communication. Now you are not using the definitions of racists, which opinion might be worth disregarding, you are also using fictitious ones.

You won't get through life without being hurt and learning to understand the meaning behind people using words is a skill you cannot skip to acquire. Misunderstanding happen and you need strategies to deal with them. It can but rarely results in conflict. You cannot expect everyone only using thoughts, associations and words you are content with. It is a false strategy without solution.

>This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.

What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2014/febr...

It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.

> What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was.

The paper bag test doesn't make paper bags racist. It's a shade test.

> It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.

I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.

Yes! Brown bags aren't racist, fraternities doing things like that were racist, at least as I see it.

I appreciate your response. I think I have been so repeatedly told that the ridiculous elements of DEI (and anti-racism) are the core of those two… movements? by their (ostensible) advocates that I now strongly associate them with silliness, though maybe it is in fact a case of Nazis and the swastika.

> I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.

I sat in a meeting where two young, white colleagues informed another colleague that the term was racist and we should come up with a different one. I tried to push back gently, but I am a white man and as such have no standing in the DEI hierarchy. So it was decided in this meeting full of white people that we would no longer use the term as it might cause offense to someone, maybe. And the two young engineers were satisfied they had made the world a slightly better place. I found it disturbing but don’t know what to do.

Well, it (brown bag lunch) made the Stanford harmful language list. I agree there is enough moronic content on that list to give the impression that the writers were playing false-flag games. But I’m prepared to believe they were sincere.

Just to add some context for that infamous Stanford list, it was a proposed internal list within the IT department about language to use for the text on official Stanford websites. As far as I'm aware that's the only place it was intended to be applied by the authors and it was never implemented. I know your intent wasn't bad but I found a lot of the media coverage massively over the top for what was essentially an overzealous suggestion to modify a website style guide.

It gives us evidence (for the above discussion) that the term “brown bag lunch” has actually been documented as harmful by someone - and wasn’t just made up as a stick to beat diversity initiatives with.

I would argue it also gives an indication of how “mission creep” works.

(A well-used term like “tarball” now being deemed potentially offensive, presumably because it sounds like “tarbaby”, even though it’s obviously just referring to a bundle of files archived with the “tar” command.)

Anyone who thinks tarbaby when they see tarball is a racist and I refuse to let that become my problem.

"tarball (tar archive)

While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby."

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguag...

I'm genuinely fascinated by how this came to be written. Were there brainstorming sessions where people threw out random word associations to show willing, combined with a fear from the rest of the group of accusations of racism for calling it out as arrant nonsense?

Sadly, It's not the silliest example I've heard, let me tell you that.

> I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness.

A more compelling reason is because demonstrating "leadership" in DEI is a prerequisite to getting a promotion or getting a management job. It's baked into many job listings now and is part of the executive interview process. If you don't check the DEI box on some tangible dimension, you don't progress to the next round, especially if you are white.

This will only be made worse by the ESG/stakeholder capitalism.

> and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.

I think this is the real harm being done here. Being trained to accept irrationality and poor judgment bleeds into engineering decisions.

The more conspiratorial believe it is deliberate, as it seems to draw parallels with the subterfuge Yuri Besmenov described and that the CCP is perhaps silently continuing.

There is power in victimhood now. If you can prove you're a victim or prove you're submitting to a certain group you've "victimized" then you are put at the top of the order. You become part of essentially a religious cult and given certain "powers" that you can bash the "sinners" over the head with.

I think you're exactly right here, the largest proponents of this stuff tend to be white and left wing (mostly women). In a way I find them extremely racist. To me, they're acting just like OP says. They don't think certain groups are intelligent enough to bring themselves out of squalor and everyone MUST believe like they do; that skin color is an impediment. So, they need the white savior to come rescue them.

>There is power in victimhood now

Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "persecution" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural legacy of evangelical Christianity that was (and arguably still is) deeply engrained in US culture.

Clarification please - where do you find "power in victimhood" in Judaism 2000+ years ago?

The argument is probably that Judaism was the first religion to introduce concern for the victim into its moral teachings, and therefore inevitably there would be people hijacking that to differentiate themselves, boost their status through claims to victimhood.

I do think DEI has many religious and dogmatic believes that mirror other religions. It is pretty weak on the absolution part though. That is what a church sells, DEI sells an inquisition, making it even worse in some parts.

It is a bit weird overall. It decries conservatism, but is very heavy on fundamentalism. It is far more conservative than other groups it indicts with sexism/racism. And mostly these accusation are also false.

I'm confused... are you endorsing acting this way or against it?

Kinda seems like you're justifying the current action of "woke" people by discussing past injustices? Isn't the whole idea of the "woke" DEI initiative to fix injustices in our society?

I think they're just saying this occurrence isn't unique and it doesn't look like they approve of it. Many of us identify with our own struggles in deep ways. If you create an opportunity for people to organize around those struggles then people will, because as was said, there is power there. That power is in representation. The problem is generally in the silo'ing of representation. This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address.

We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution that devolved in the ~200 years since it's founding to go on to oppress others. We can and should do better.

Ok, and my point is that doing the exact same thing as those people did in the past isn't doing better. You don't fix oppression by moving that oppression to a new group.

Simply pointing out that victimhood has always existed serves no purpose at all in response to my original comment.

"This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address."

How? All intersectionality does is create a competition for the most oppressed. You will never be enough of a victim. Nothing good comes of a society that focuses specifically on how oppressed they are and vies for the most oppressed group or person.

"We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution"

Name a country where this hasn't happened. There are many where this is still happening and to a further extent than anything in the US.

Ironically, you're right in weird roundabout way that I do not think you fully comprehend. EVERYONE has been a victim of some sort so it's irrelevant and we shouldn't spend one iota more of our short lives trying to discern who the highest victims of our society are. What a waste and it does nothing to improve the supposed oppressed.

Your description of intersectionality is the exact opposite of what it is. It's entire purpose is to show everyone that playing the operation Olympics is a pointless game that no one wins. It's too show that everyone's struggles don't fit into neat little boxes that define them, and show that social problems are multidimensional that don't have simple solutions, and shows that a lot of DEI initiatives are superficial, and likely won't make any real difference.

Intersectionality? The ideology famous for having a victim heirarchy so you have an ideological rating of how much of a victim someone is?

Could you link me to the source that describes intersectionality in a way even remotely approximating that? Or where this "victim hierarchy" is detailed? I'd love to calculate my victim score™.

https://medium.com/@burntoakboy/the-hierarchy-of-victimhood-....

AOC isnt exactly a shining light of intersectionalism. In fact, she kind of prides herself in tribalism. Consider this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/aoc/status/1103163478024601601 Rather than trying to share ground with others she's being reminded that she regularly drowns out other people's voices. She went on to do exactly that after this.

If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not all people who use intersectionalist words actually have the values, then I'd respond with, "duh".

Intersectionality isn't about telling one person's story or exemplifying one person's pain. It's about showing that these things are interconnected and effect people differently, and ways in which you probably wouldn't expect. It does the absolute opposite of a hierarchy.

Well thats just it. If you're a Muslim female your score is higher than a Muslim male. If you're a gay trans disabled Muslim you're higher than the Muslim woman. Thats how you figure out your victim score(tm).

(I could care less about AOC. She was like 1% of content of the article I posted.)

You keep insisting there's a score or hierarchy, but I've yet to see an example of what that looks like. To me, and clearly others in this thread, the point is that there is no victim hierarchy. Nobody's victimhood, trauma, problems, whatever are any more important than anyone else's.

What’s missing here is a notion of intersectionality, which explicitly is about how people are not just a singular identity, but an “intersection” of many - some of which may confer privilege, some of which may be discriminated against.

Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about some people at the exclusion of others?)

You missed the forest for the trees, friend.

There’s not much of a forest there, as far as I can tell. Unless you want to actually make a point?

ctrl+f "intersect"

> 0 results

So to answer my question, no you can't provide a source.

Even if it hadn't been the case that the article you linked failed to mention the topic actually under discussion even a single time, a random right wing ("brexiter") blogger is not a "source" for corroborating claims that intersectional egalitarians have a clear "victim heirarchy".

(And to be explicit, identity politics and intersectionality aren't the same thing, despite the right's habit of using them as meaningless scare words)

Ye gods, not a dreaded right winger! Didn't we throw all those people in camps?

"everyone that playing the operation Olympics is a pointless game that no one wins"

Except reality has proven you wrong. We've never lived in a time where people are more well fed, have more personal belongings, longer life spans etc.

It is in fact, objectively, not a pointless game.

"operation Olympics" is pretty clearly an autocorrect typo of "oppression Olympics", which makes this response kind of a non-sequitor.

Anyone who has worked in government in a high crime city is aware of this. So many nonprofits bank off crime and destruction of the black community by “studying”, “studying some more”, “evaluating the study”, “working with stakeholders”, “drafting a strategic plan” etc. it’s actually an easy way for white people that have mediocre prospects to advance. It’s a low rigor environment where buzzwords mean a lot and underachievers can profit off of black people

DEI is Latin for God. Is that a mistake? Surely it is.

I've heard this called the racism of low expectations. It's disgusting.

> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.

I think that's a inaccurate and misleading description. I think the correct term is "colorism" not "racism," and it sounds like those distinctions were more significant within the black community than outside of it. I don't think a stereotypical anti-black racist would accept a black person into a social club if his skin was as light as a paper bag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test:

> "The Brown Paper Bag Test" is a term in African-American oral history used to describe a colorist discriminatory practice within the African-American community in the 20th century, in which an individual's skin tone is compared to the color of a brown paper bag....

> The Brown Paper Bag Test was heavily documented and normalized with historically black fraternities and sororities (especially among sororities) and historically black social clubs founded before 1960, whose members selected others who resembled themselves, generally those reflecting partial European ancestry.[8][9] Some privileged multi-racial people of color who came from families freed before the American Civil War attempted to distinguish themselves from the mass of freedmen after the war, who appeared to be mostly of African descent and from less privileged families.

colorism is just racism.

I think that in the DEI ideology, racism is not the sane, traditional definition, but rather that postmodern power + prejudice equation that is used to prop up the idea that only whites can be racist.

So in order to keep their ideology consistent in the face of clear and present racism throughout the non white communities as well, they had to invent the term "colorism".

So yes colorism is just racism.

It's an embarrassment to HN that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683200 got flagged to death. IIRC, the author of that comment is from Bangladesh and is a position to actually know something about colorism.

I vouched for it as I'm from India and see it a similar way.

Colorism isn’t racism because racism isn’t about color. Color is merely an imperfect proxy for distinguishing different groups of people. (Many white people, especially Greeks or Italians, are darker than many East Asians, but that doesn’t change the racial categories.)

In some communities, colorism is a byproduct of racial categorization based on color. But in many places it’s just an aesthetic preference. Colorism in Asia and Africa long predates colonialism or contact with white people. An important thing to note is that in these societies, colorism doesn’t imply that white people are seen as the most beautiful. A person can be too light, just as they can be too tall or too skinny.

the brown bag thing was colorism, which while technically a subset of racism is not useful to investigate in the context of popular anti-racism as it pertains to DEI in the west, which would be better labeled as anti-white-supremacism

> I'm positive that Satya and Sundar are great motivators for indian kids to look up to (as they should be).

I'm doubtful about that. At least among my cohort (first generation south asian immigrants to the east coast) there's not a strong sense of racial identity. There's strong identity in the sense of ties to religion, home countries, culture, and traditions, but not group identification or a feeling of collective destiny. I recently told my dad about being at a professional event where there were three south asians "at the table" so to speak. He was like "huh, that's interesting." He had a stronger positive reaction when I mentioned that Chris Sununu (governor of New Hampshire) went to the same high school as my brother and me. I have to think it's similar to Jewish Americans--they're not looking up to Mark Zuckerberg because he's Jewish.

I also disagree that Indian kids "should" look up to Pichai or Nadella because of their ethnicity. Insofar as there is an "us"--a definable group with distinct interests--"representation" will never advance those interests. Pichai or Nadella will run their companies how white shareholders want them to, exactly the same way as a white CEO would. They wouldn't have been selected if that wasn't the case. The "representation" doesn't advance the agenda of the group in any meaningful way.

To the contrary, "representation" is used by white people to obtain the support of minority groups without giving them anything. I see white people pressuring my daughter to look up to Kamala Harris (because Harris "looks like her"). This is just manipulation. Harris will not meaningfully advance the distinct interests of south asian people, nor is she a good model of south asian culture or values.

As to your main point--for sure people on the internet have better manners today. Is that creditable to DEI initiatives? Can we have online spaces and workplaces where nobody is made to feel excluded because of their immutable characteristics without forcing people to write diversity statements or having Robin Di Angelo types come in to lecture white people about their inherent racism?

I was hoping to find a reply like this; glad someone could articulate it better than I could.

Overall, I believe that culturally-same role models is a stand-in for lazy parenting. Children whose parents constantly push their kids to be better, push harder will look towards successful people of any cultural background. Compare that with children with apathetic parents, who I surmise will only have the imagination to self-associate with those who "look" like them.

It also robs even involved minority parents and communities of power. If you persuade minority kids to look to “representation” for ethnic role models, then the white people who select those representatives gain tremendous power in defining ethnic identity. Call me crazy, but I want my kids to learn what it means to be Bangladeshi from me and my parents and my extended family, not from teachers or role models selected by white people for that purpose.

It also reduces identity to something that’s offensively shallow. White people think Kamala Harris is a role model for south Asian girls because she has the experience of walking around with dark skin in America. But white people’s reaction is extremely low on the list of things that define south Asian identity.

> To the contrary, "representation" is used by white people to obtain the support of minority groups without giving them anything. I see white people pressuring my daughter to look up to Kamala Harris (because Harris "looks like her"). This is just manipulation. Harris will not meaningfully advance the distinct interests of south asian people, nor is she a good model of south asian culture or values.

It's also not hard to receive this behavior as completely fucking racist. Do whites presuppose that just because we have the same skin color, ethnic background, or similar physical features, that we will be aligned on political or philosophical points?

How has it become acceptable to participate in such blatantly racist behavior, while still somehow being able to publicly label one's self as "liberal" or "anti-racist?"

I think it's time we conduct an audit of all self-identifying liberals or DEI advocates to determine which ones are actually free from unconscious bias and implicit associations, and which have merely co-opted the movement to weaponize minorities as part of a political power struggle.

> It's also not hard to receive this behavior as completely fucking racist. Do whites presuppose that just because we have the same skin color, ethnic background, or similar physical features, that we will be aligned on political or philosophical points?

Yes. There are many white people who align on skin color. That's how the US Antebellum South, SA Apartheid and WW2 persecution of Jews worked.

Look how far afield those examples had to be drawn from!

It is "anti-racist" because "anti-racist" does not mean against racism. It is a specific ideological term within DEI.

Not sure about where you live but where I am, people (especially direct family) were very proud that Pichai and Nadella were CEOs of famous companies, they pushed us to want to be more like them. I don't see why they wouldn't serve minority interests therefore. As to your white shareholders comment, I am not sure why white shareholders would be any different from other shareholders in that they want to all make money. Go to an Indian company's board and you'll see that they act exactly the same way.

So in other words, without DEI, white people are evil and with DEI, white people are evil. Are you sure "white people" are actually in control?

Yes, by white people who use DEI for power.

so no non-white person has ever profited from DEI? It's all just white people's fault?

Good point.

(Black man here as well)

This is a great way to put it. I mean, I'm a bit older and over time I've been used to actually being that token, because for a lot of places I've been it was me and no one else. So, I didn't much mind the role as something of a pioneer.

So I'd say, anyone who doesn't like it, e.g. DEI, definitely understand the history, please -- and moreover, the difficulty of externally changing culture. It's ultra-clumsy, but at least for a time it was both inevitable and necessary.

I very much don't personally enjoy is at as well -- but I don't think that means it's without value. I suppose I see even the bad parts as a "bug, not a feature," because we're talking about it.

> There's also the fact that most (read: all) of the computing pioneers are white

Not refuting this take as it's accurate, but if you're looking for someone that's Black in early computing I'd recommend free software pioneer Brian Fox (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programm...) best known for inventing Bash.

Kelsey Hightower is also notable as the man that pioneered the use of Kubernetes at many businesses through his book.

Marian Croak is the pioneer of VOIP and now heads SRE among other things at Google.

Mark Dean pioneered ISA which is still the leading standard today in industrial applications.

(Non-exhaustive list, but these are the programmers that are Black that I know of off the top of my head)

I'll caveat this with my own take: all these folks worked in what is in the industry referred to as Systems Engineering, which is very much still a "working man's" profession when compared to traditional software engineering and prior to things like SRE paid accordingly less. It's also how a lot of vets, POC, and people without degrees enter the industry.

Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either.

Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.

I'm much much younger than John23832, but I definitely recognized a lot of the same in some of the gaming communities I was a part of in the mid to late 2010s. There wasn't quite as much racism (at least in the places I hung out), but there was plenty of sexism and homophobia. It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".

However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.

> It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".

Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate.

It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.

Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful difficulties experienced by minorities if you assume that only overtly hateful comments can be disparaging.

> Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate.

Who really claims that though? Saying "black people are always late" is racist because it's a racial prejudice, but that's not an expression of hatred towards black people. I think everyone gets that.

I also agree non-hateful comments can be insulting. So we're in agreement: erasing nuance is dumb. My point is that this nuance dictates that we shouldn't group these distinct behaviours all together and respond to them the same way.

Sure, some racism is expressed as DEI initiatives.

> If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable.

Sure, some of those things can be harmless. I agree that when calling out bad behavior you shouldn't necessarily go all the way to 100 (ofc depending on severity). The main way to gauge malice is people's reactions to a reasonable request to tone it down. Apologizing and not repeating it? Cool, that's how basically any friend group figures out where the line is drawn. Doubling down and basically saying "grow a pair"? Not ok.

There's also a difference between something like "hah, guess they were on IST" vs "typical street shitter" (using my own ethnicity as an example).

The problem is that if you don't personally know the views of the people involved, racist jokes are often indistinguishable from hate.

Outside of a context where the humor is understood by all like a stand-up comedy act, you aren't entitled to how other people perceive your behavior.

If you walk like a racist and talk like a racist, people are just gonna assume you're a racist.

If that's a problem for you, there's a really fucking simple solution.

The point is you don't know how this person walks or talks, you only see a fragment of a conversation typically taken out of context. I hope you see the problem here, to say nothing of the problem with assuming someone is intrinsically evil unless they toe your specific line.

Furthermore I'm entitled to argue for what I think are good practices for communicating online, just like everyone else.

If people making jokes is a problem for you, there is a really fucking simple solution: don't get offended. You aren't entitled to people going out of their way to accomodate you. If you don't know if someone is doing something out of hate, assume they are not.

Angsty teens trying to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable are unfortunately heavily overrepresented in Internet culture, from what I've found.

A bit of pushback and people are usually super apologetic. Usually they're just aping someone else who said something counter-culture because they thought it sounded badass, and don't really believe it.

I did FIRST (about 10 years before you, ha). FIRST is a very inclusive space by design. I think it's great.

Ha, that's awesome; I loved meeting the mentors who also did FIRST way back. It's a great program, I credit it for putting me where I am now!

I feel that with gaming communities the main problem is simply having too many teenagers without supervision. It's pretty much like school really, immature people picking on others because of their own insecurity / problems. Eventually most people even in very toxic communities grow up and stop hating people for no logical reason, at least the smart ones.

It was exactly this; I was one of those teenagers for a little bit

It's not about telling people your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, it's about WHAT IS SAID about your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.

Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog."

... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.

>> except they didn't mean dog

The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking.

See the original image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....

'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.

Dog was used a a euphemism for undesirable. In the more specific case of the image, black. Look at the color of the dogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Maybe. Maybe not.

It was newsprint, so the color is not clear.

Maybe the dog was brown:

https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif

Not that it matters much.

I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article:

Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."

> The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog

That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.

I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams."

I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.

Of course they meant dog. Which is a placeholder for _anything else_.

> they meant dog

> which is a placeholder for

... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal.

It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.

Definitely no hints to that in the cartoon at all. None... none at all... >.> <.< >.>

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....

No, we literally meant dog. It was a joke.

Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.

> but IRC wasn’t

No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet.

Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't.

But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right?

There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men).

We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.

IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.

Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.

The joke is even funnier if you're a furry, and the entire point of your online persona is people knowing you're a dog. (Even if your fursona actually is, say, a cat. The joke is enhanced.)

No, no. You need other people to tell you what you meant. It's how things work now. Don't you dare think otherwise!

And now we're doing this whole "guilty of X by technology choice".

/s

Where and when does this this neurosis stop?

We focused on technical discussions on technical channels.

I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.

Great, that's your experience. But I was sharing mine, and those of the other minorities I know very well.

How do you know the experience of other categories of people very well?

I don't. I only know my experience and the experience of other minorities, that I personally know well, who have convey their experiences to me.

My experience was a lot of petty interpersonal drama instead of technical discussions, but very little about race.

2/3 of GNAA weren't even white people.

I was only active on IRC in later years (early 2000's onwards) and there was definitely a lot of casual homophobia. Using 'gay' as a synonym for bad was extremely common, I picked it up as well. Calling someone a fag was done all the time as well, not even always as an insult.

I don't think the majority of people using the words were actually homophobic (I wasn't), just copying other people to "fit in" without even thinking of the possibility it was harming someone. I think it was early 2004-05 that someone private messaged me explaining that it sucks when people use the word that way and I stopped.

I don't recall much racism against black people, but I can totally see the N word being used casually in the same way in some other servers/channels.

I don't remember anyone trying to doxx anyone's race on freenode. Perhaps they're talking about USENET/IRC at large as opposed to the tech community which I believe were mostly on freenode (now libera).

Otherwise I can only assume that chats within all-chat appeared to be racist in nature but again, that's not something I've seen (especially unchallenged) in any of the freenode channels I frequented.

I feel like this might be a bit generational. Not freenode, maybe, but EFnet the decade before? Definitely lots of casual -isms.

The key thing is there needs to be a falsifiable condition whereby we agree these programs have achieved their primary goal, and that the risk of scope creep, corruption, or other externalities like the ones the OP mentions has exceeded the potential further benefits, so they should be wound down. I'm not going to state my opinion here, but if such a condition is not identified in any way, we should assume these groups will do what it takes to perpetuate themselves far past their point of utility, like any bureaucracy that doesn't have a way to prove directly how they're contributing to the bottom line.

The falsifiable condition is that the underlying social attitudes driving the racism/sexism/etc have dissolved.

Problem is, this is a social process that takes centuries to complete. You are never going to hit a point in a single institution where you can say "We fixed our diversity problem, let's go home", because it can just come back as you hire more people and older hires leave.

Furthermore, society is frustratingly prone to generating new discriminatory attitudes. America is pretty conscious of a handful of very specific racial minorities, and we have a vague idea of what sexism looks like, but we have little knowledge of things like caste discrimination[0], colorism[1], classism and so on.

To fully explain why this is a problem, try re-reading your original comment, but pretend it's talking about the police instead of DEI initiatives. What's our falsifiable condition where we say "ok, all the crimes are solved, let's abolish the police?"

[0] Discrimination based on the occupation of your ancestors, typically driven by religious beliefs. India is the poster child for this though Japan had a form of it too.

[1] Skin-color discrimination within a specific race. We don't see this in the US or Canada all that often because the mix of European ancestry that we brought over and called "White" is universally one skin color. Latin America has this in droves.

What you have pointed out is the exact opposite of a falsifiable condition. If we can’t disprove the possibility of a regression back to the past, then this is not meeting the test, and we should expect the results I mentioned.

You actually could and should abolish the police in certain kinds of terminal states where crime was eradicated - the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.) One falsifiable condition would be “surveys show a fundamental shift in sentiment by the public towards the motives that have historically led to crime.” If you’re going to condition the abolishment of the police on a scenario where we need to also prove that this won’t regress, then in a scenario where the underlying motive of crime is systematically gone, the police will exist and seek out ways to regenerate it to ensure they have a purpose, among other toxic phenomena.

> the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.)

For a generation or two, sure, but eventually it will come back unless the cultural training continues. I mean, there's a reason for historic cultural universals such as racism, dueling between men, and talking down to lessers.

I think the best case scenario is that DEI eventually gets rolled up into regular HR.

Tribalism is pretty innate but the tribes change. I’d argue if DEI programs had an analog during the reformation era we would be more likely to see Protestant vs Catholic discrimination persist as those programs inflamed it for their own self preservation.

Why do you assume any particular DEI goalpost will persist for years or decades or centuries? It's not as if generalized racism has persisted against the same categories since the late 1500s.

And why do you assume the generalized tribalism will persist based on particular initiatives? The old initiatives used to be hire from the gentry. Attitudes amongst the many do change. It doesn't matter if some vocal minorities keep the same attitudes going.

DEI initiatives and targets are measured periodically: https://hbr.org/2021/02/research-how-companies-committed-to-...

The entire question of this thread is the mechanism by which DEI can unwind a given goalpost. (And if/when the last goalpost evaporates, so would DEI.) It sounds to me like your own perspective there is no way for them to do so, given that any given goalpost could be argued as possibly at risk of regression.

Concretely, if your own perspective is taken as the standard, we ought to expect that without any motive or standard to dictate we unwind DEI goalposts around (for example) racial groups, we should expect those goalposts to persist, regardless of the general presence of the phenomena which motivated their creation in the first place.

Irrational bias will always exist, but it will always be a bunch of shifting goalposts.

Once DEI systematizes enough it can be incorporated into whatever HR eventually turns in to, instead of being a separate division.

Purely irrational bias isn’t really the issue since most people of sound mind can be dissuaded from purely irrational acts. The issue is stereotyping of individuals based upon statistical or anecdotal patterns by people imagined to be a member of the same class combined with the usual human natures of otherization and tribalism. This isn’t purely irrational, since stereotypes can provide predictive power beyond pure randomness - if you don’t believe me, consider the fact that there are countless “positive stereotypes” for certain groups we happily tend to accept and make decisions on given it complements the presumed members of that group, as opposed to increasing distrust or hatred of them.

Ironically, programs seeking to reduce discrimination which characterize the former phenomenon as entirely irrational is what helps perpetuate the latter, because it undermines any sense that there is a good faith engagement going on.

I didn't use "purely", "entirely", or other otherwise modify "irrational", because I didn't want to be too verbose, but yes, any stereotyping has some degree of irrational underpinnings. Figuring out and teaching people what is irrational (or at least irrelevant) bias and what isn't irrational bias are the difficult parts.

> "Ironically, programs seeking to reduce discrimination which characterize the former phenomenon as entirely irrational is what helps perpetuate the latter, because it undermines any sense that there is a good faith engagement going on."

From what I recall I don't believe these programs generally characterize implicit bias as entirely irrational. I see them characterize it as problematic. So I don't see how the "undermine good faith engagement" follows from this.

On a total tangent I think the main problem with counteracting people's biases is that it can lead to people totally discounting their gut reactions. Which has lead to people getting murdered, raped, etcetera, by bad people.

Very much agree with this comment, creating and gaming KPIs is at the heart of most DEI departments now.

We do need long term improvements at the start of the funnel, but no-one is adding a 7 year KPI for improving stats of 14 year old girls quitting AP math.

I don't know about falsifiable, and I think you never reach a goal as broad as eradicating ethnocentric thinking, but one way to short circuit a lot of this nonsense is to somehow achieve a lot more intermarriage between disparate ethnic groups, as well as mire immigration.

> EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.

For what it's worth, this aligns with what I've seen on IRC as well (in the 00s.) I really think a lot of people just don't see bigotry for what it is when it's not explicit. (E.g. "lol girl = guy irl, there are no girls on the internet" being a common sentiment that might just be easily forgotten.)

My experience growing up as a southeast Asian child in the early 00s is that I suddenly had access to practitioners and even experts in the field who now gave me an audience, as both my age and ethnicity were completely inaccessible to my counterparty on the other side of the chat window.

No one asked, and no one cared. We discussed technical topics, and what mattered was the strength of your ideas and their ability to withstand rebuttal. Your identity did not factor into the discussion, as the medium being used (IRC) abstracted away all notion of geographic location, physical appearance, skin color, accent, tone of voice, gender, sex, etc... into the written word. That's all everyone saw - your words, and your words only.

Now, in our photo and video driven digital landscape, your physical appearance - the way you look, present, the color of your skin, etc. - is front and center. In fact, without a visual representation, you may as well not exist - "pics or it didn't happen."

Which makes the matter all the more aggravating - people are now using media that bring cues for common stereotypes (i.e. judging someone for the way they look [0]) to the forefront, while simultaneously declaring that, no, they are completely free from any and all such bias. Why not remove all doubt, the, and use blind Zoom interviews (which I did myself), text fora (such as this one), and text-only protocols (such as IRC)?

It's fascinating to see just how differently I am treated and perceived on purely textual media vs. other media where my physical appearance is evident. If IRC was racist, then I would say the new media is orders of magnitude more so, as I have been subject to numerous misjudgments of my character and/or microaggressions based on my physical appearance - which simply would not have been accessible in older, text-based protocols.

I can't escape the new "ethnic minority" or "visible minority" label that these DEI initiatives (and related ideologies) have created - they are now automatically and subconsciously applied to me the minute others take a look at me, and as a result all of the associated ideas are subsequently brought to mind - "disadvantaged," "lacking education," "lower socioeconomic status," "hired because of their race," etc.

I'd rather go back to IRC. None of these judgments would be possible there, and I wouldn't have to have the "minority" label applied to me if I chose to simply not to disclose my appearance or ethnic background.

[0] https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac...

> No one asked, and no one cared. We discussed technical topics, and what mattered was the strength of your ideas and their ability to withstand rebuttal. Your identity did not factor into the discussion, as the medium being used (IRC) abstracted away all notion of geographic location, physical appearance, skin color, accent, tone of voice, gender, sex, etc... into the written word. That's all everyone saw - your words, and your words only.

For the most part "there are no girls on the internet" was actually just a snarky way to say exactly this. It could just have easily been "there are no boys on the internet", except people would jump all over themselves to help a girl, so the only reason to bring it up was to get special treatment. The snark was to stop that, it's just really easily misunderstood.

An alternative more-PC version you've probably heard is "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog".

This is why it's so sad/annoying that the word "priviledge" has devolved into a meaning-devoid cudgel, because it's such a useful term in discussions like these. If you're not personally affected by something, it's easy to miss something for what it is or even just not see it, even if it's happening all around you.

To be clear, do you think race-based diversity hiring is good? I can agree that having good role models and educational opportunities is important but I'm not so sure race-aware hiring is a good thing, for the reasons stated by OP and others.

At what point do you think DEI should stop? Is there any metric or threshold at which these programs/events should end? One of the biggest issues for me is that these measures are either argued as good because "diversity is intrinsically good" or because "we are righting historical wrongs", meaning reparations. While one could argue for or against either of these justifications, it would seem that the former would terminate once some ideal demographic composition is achieved, while the latter would end once some calculated total sum of restitution is reached. To me, these details are very important, since race-based hiring is an intrinsically bad thing that should be avoided. After all, it is part of the reason people of color got so screwed over in the 20th century in the first place.

They’ll never end, because 1. The people making money off of running them don’t want them to, and 2. “historically oppressed groups” never (and can never) become “not historically oppressed”; it’s my belief that this is intentional via the choice of words used by the DEI cadre.

> Do you know VIRULENTLY anti-black (or woman, or gay) these communities were? I can't begin to describe it.

That has not been my experience at all, whatsoever, and my involvement in tech communities, both online and in the flesh, dates back to the 1980s.

> There's also the fact that most (read: all) of the computing pioneers are white. I respect all of those people, but it does help to have someone to look up to.

I don't need people with whom I share superficial characteristics to look up to. I can look up to brilliant white men, men from all over the globe, or even women, believe it or not.

> That has not been my experience at all, whatsoever, and my involvement in tech communities, both online and in the flesh, dates back to the 1980s.

Do you believe you have had the same experiences as a person of the races/genders experiencing the -isms, or that you will perceive as -isms the same things they do?

> Do you believe you have had the same experiences as a person of the races/genders experiencing the -isms

What do you mean?

> Prior to this, in the earlier internet age, you had to cut your teeth on IRC and forums. That was where technical people were in the computer tech space.

> Do you know VIRULENTLY anti-black (or woman, or gay) these communities were? I can't begin to describe it. That is totally off-putting to someone who has the ability succeed but does not want to deal with the hate.

Wow, thank you. Gives me a new perspective.

Yeah I forgot all about this. Also a lot of anti-Semitism. You had to have some thick skin on the old internet.

He’s completely, totally, and absolutely incorrect.

I spent decades on IRC starting in the early 90s, and this is a politically-driven contemporary re-imagination of what existed at the time.

We were open to all because we ourselves didn’t fit in elsewhere.

Some communities did have a lot of virulently racist and male-chauvinist trolling. The infamous 4chan forum culture didn't just spring up out of thin air, after all. It's a bit harder to tell whether that was anywhere close to representative, of course.

Yeah but 4chan and sites like it are shit. Why even go there? For one of those low tier sites there were hundreds of forums and communities which were normal.

Not a valid data point. You’re picking some fringe element and assuming the whole internet is like that.

I think 4chan can hardly be put in the same category as freenode channels. It's just an incredible leap in reasoning in my experience with both (albeit not much experience with 4chan, others than the occasional snippet I've seen online)

This is obviously going to depend on the space, but I suspect many of the white participants simply won't remember it because the bigotry was both casual and just euphemistic enough.

I don't think there are IRC logs from the 90s, apart from bash.org, but we could check Usenet archives to see how inclusive (or not) it was back then.

I was never on IRC much but I spent an awful lot of time on usenet and he's a lot more correct than you are.

That was my experience as well.

> We were open to all because we ourselves didn’t fit in elsewhere.

Yes, totally, most of us were indeed social misfits. But many of us also instead of being empathic and understand what was the real issue there, simply perpetrate the same abuse to someone else who was in a weaker position.

absolutely not...the amount of homophobia and racism and antisemitism and nationalism etc... was pretty intense compared to what you see in most parts of the current internet.

IRC tended towards super edge humor and was a big piece of like early internet culture generators like somethingawful and 4chan.

I suppose if that's the goal, we should have a defined goal. I grew up in India and I think we have the problem of a runaway effect of this. I totally agree that it helps, there are remote tribal communities or disadvantaged communities in India (say based on caste that historically, and even currently, face stuff like untouchability) but there's got to be a goal at which point you stop. When I had to pick a college for undergrad in India, there are so many quotas put aside based on caste, tribals, sports, defence, rural/urban, language medium of schooling etc that college quotas available for general merit is roughly 50% (haven't kept up recently, but should be there abouts). Some people game the system to try and get paperwork to show you belong to such a section so that college enrollment, public sector jobs etc get a lot easier.

)))Some people game the system to try and get paperwork to show you belong to such a section so that college enrollment, public sector jobs etc get a lot easier.

Prominent lawmakers in the US also game the system.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/01/690806434/warren-apologizes-t...

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/16/17983250/elizabeth-warren-bar...

VOX: New evidence has emerged [SENATOR!] Elizabeth Warren claimed American Indian heritage in 1986 Warren identified as “American Indian” on a registration card for the State Bar of Texas, according to a Washington Post report.

By Ella Nilsen Updated Feb 5, 2019, 8:29pm EST

(TLDR for those not in the US: wealthy powerful while woman rose in ranks after abusing DEI quotas, now has huge influence over tech industry and always angry about an industry which has real diversity (tech:Asians) but conveniently not angry about lack of diversity at Harvard or Senate.

Not disputing your bad experiences, but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone? :)

Speaking of 2 things being true at once, what's amazing about BBSs/USENET/IRC/etc. especially in the early years was that they had:

- online discussions where a lot of things just didn't matter. Race, gender, etc. just didn't matter. You got judged on the merit of your ideas, not what you looked like, not what you sounded like. It wasn't white people and black people talking together. It was just people. Genuine friendships developed between people that otherwise probably would have never connected because of societal barriers.

- online discussions where people were insanely cruel. Prior to getting online, I thought I understood how mean people could be. Boy was I wrong. It was a real learning experience to be on the receiving end of vile hatred, bigotry, insults, just... meanness. There are interests I walked away from because the toxicity of the community was too much to deal with.

I can't speak to not being white, but I can speak to being female and gay in those spaces. I'm a 3rd generation geek/techie/hacker and the hostility really ramped up when I hit puberty. 8 year old me was treated decently: I got a lot of shit for asking stupid questions and me + my intelligence was insulted regularly (since most people didn't know I was a child), but the rape threats and constant sexual comments starting when I was about 11/12 and had the audacity to let people know I was a girl were terrifying. There was also a clear difference in how I was treated when people knew I was female versus when they were assuming I was male. By the time I was 18 and considering what to do with my life, CS and programming weren't options to me because I didn't want to put up with that crap for the rest of my life.

As a father of a daughter, I appreciate you speaking up about this. I'd say the problem with being raised to be respectful toward women I really haven't seen much bad behavior toward women. I just didn't realize what a problem it was. But a regular at the coffee shop my daughter was working at started stalking her. We and the store both got restraining orders against him. Then we were out at dinner one night, sitting outside, and she actually saw him. I was facing my daughter and he came around a corner walking toward her (my back to him) and I saw my daughter's face. It was crushing as a father to see my daughter so utterly devastated so quickly. That is a memory I will carry to my grave.

Guys - be decent. Just, always. Always be decent.

This - be decent, and even more importantly - call out "indecentness" when you see it.

Call it out to 'friends', to family, online, in person - even if all you feel you can say is 'that isn't right' - say it - you don't need to get into fights, you don't need to be a saviour, you just need to call it out. You can use that as excuse to leave, or you can use that as a reason to stay.

But don't just ignore it.

As a straight white dude, yeah there were a lot of nerd spaces with white dudes that imagined they were surrounded by other white dudes and some of them felt no need to be inclusive. But I wouldn't judge any profession too deeply solely by the behavior of teenagers who express interest in that profession. They're going to act like teenagers no matter which profession. Find a big enough young hacker space and you'll be able to find the more mature subgroups within.

I know for a fact a lot of the people participating in these communities were fully adults, and the age of the people being racist does little to mitigate the impact it has on the people on the receiving end of it.

I find it really bizarre how many people here are insistent on diminishing or excusing the experience the original commenter had.

I find it bizarre you're diminishing mine. I got roasted by leetcode pros and othered by turbonerds too. That's humanity. I bet they haven't gotten as far as me since then, and that's an attitude that anyone who has faced pointless discrimination should keep in mind.

> I find it bizarre you're diminishing mine. I got roasted by leetcode pros and othered by turbonerds too.

But you weren't targeted for this behavior due to your gender identity or skin color, and you more or less started off with "I don't think your issues as a Black person/as a woman have been that bad because my experience hasn't been bad." Like you immediately centered yourself in a discussion about other people, and have done nothing to show any effort to even hear what they're saying.

Additionally, one person's positive anecdotes do not outweigh another person's negative anecdotes. If I'm thinking about joining some arbitrary group of people and most of my friends say it's a good time, but even one person says "I showed up and all the men either sexually harassed me for being female or witnessed the harassment and did nothing about it", well, that tells me a lot more than the other person who says "They kind of joke around a bit but it's really a mostly positive place!"

I think it's nuanced. Women experience way more sexual harassment and being stalked than men online, even though men as slightly more likely to experience any online harassment in general. I can totally understand being specifically stalked or sexually harassed is on a totally different field than being called a retard for a suboptimal leetcode answer.

It's very different.

Being roasted for being a moron was something where it was/is allowed to stand up for yourself. I know that when people thought I was male, I was allowed to give as good as I got as long as I knew how to take an L once in a while and had a thick skin. Arguing and insulting back is accepted and a lot of the arguments can be conclusively settled in some way. Even if you pedantically argue for something incorrect long after you should, you can usually make amends by accepting you acted like a dumbass and letting people clown on you for it.

The shit I got for being female was different because it was a bunch of projection that I had no way of addressing. There are a lot of people who are just plain not okay with the opposite sex and could not handle being turned down. The most vile crap was spewed in private and then it turned into 'he said/she said' or 'I/we can't control what members say or do outside of the channel/forum/newsgroup'. Ambient sexist atmospheres could not be diffused by giving the guff back as places that are 90/10 male to female do not respond well to the women clowning on the men: You can't answer 'get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich' with 'get back to the factory and make me money' because the men fall in line to support each other. You can't answer it by bringing it up seriously because then you're a buzz kill, etc. It's not two equals arguing; it's one side being told to shut the fuck up.

I had someone pay money, like $10 to attach a banner to my name on a forum, denying that I had a certification that I revealed I had to back up my claims of knowing a superior answer to some pointless argument. It was unsettling and aggravating for about a month before I found humor in it all. It's still one of my favorite communities and overall far more mature than when that happened ~10 years ago. Most people there are within a few years of my age, currently 30.

That doesn't address my point that women are way more likely to explicitly receive sexual harassment and stalking even when men report receiving more online harassment generally. I'm not arguing that you weren't harassed online, only that harassment is way more nuanced than whether or not everyone was equally victimized.

I mean, I get lots of sexual hate/harassment online for being traumatized from being circumcised, and advocating against it when not absolutely medically necessary, from people who tell me it's not a valid thing to be traumatized by. Most people just don't want to think about it but some people really put in effort to trolling about it. There really isn't a worse form of sexual discrimination than preventing one of the sexes from feeling full sexual pleasure.

That's still not addressing my point that this is more nuanced than "who got victimized more". You're just giving me multiple anecdotes of harassment you experienced personally, which is myopic if we want to talk about harassment on a population level (whether or not early-IRC was incredibly vitriolic towards minorities moreso than what is baseline normal for early-IRC). I'm literally agreeing with you that we have studies that show harassment generally occurs equally to everybody, except that some minorities receive greater proportions of specific kinds of harassment, and maybe that adds some nuance to the conversation. It has nothing to do with you personally.

Nobody diminished your experience since you didn't relate your experience - you simply said that someone else was taking their own too personally.

> Online discussions where a lot of things just didn't matter. Race, gender, etc. just didn't matter. You got judged on the merit of your ideas, not what you looked like, not what you sounded like.

We actually had real diversity and inclusion before these rent-seeking social media corporations and their fake DEI came in and ruined it. On IRC no one knew I was a 14 year old, or an 80 year old retiree, or male or female, or black or white, whatever.

This ignores the rampant racist/sexist comments often made on IRC/BBS, which were a reflection of society. Anyone who spent a good amount of time in these communities know it was a problem - hence why some very small invite-only communities were formed.

So yes, the idealism is there. No one knows who you identify as in a text channel unless you let them. But it does not remove the fact that these communities could often have bigoted pockets.

> This ignores the rampant racist/sexist comments often made on IRC/BBS

Nice straw man argument you got there...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

But I'll take the bait...

> Anyone who spent a good amount of time in these communities know it was a problem...

Interesting.

I've been on IRC for decades, and while any online forum has the feature where trolls are capable of making awful remarks for the lulz, it's been my observation those are outliers, and NOT an actual problem for focused communities.

> So yes, the idealism is there. No one knows who you identify as in a text channel unless you let them.

hrm... yeah, there is a dichotomy there, but not the false kind, more of the ying/yang kind. The same feature that fosters diversity is the same feature that allows for trolls.

> But it does not remove the fact that these communities could often have bigoted pockets.

There is no reason to practice fatalism here, or characterise rare events as common place. This is probably a variation of another fallacy called reductio-absurdism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Ultimately IRC has admins, moderators, and the ability to mute other people. That is why good prevails over evil on IRC, and why IRC has remained the place for smart people to connect online for so so very long... longer than any other mode of chat communication.

I've been on IRC for a similar amount of time, sexual harassment was always done in private so you wouldn't have seen it on main rooms, and victims were often newbies who didn't know reporting channels or didn't feel empowered to report, being the noobs and all. (Think randomly PMing women to ask for feet/boob pictures, or asking to be PMd to help debug something and then use it as an opportunity to pressure for sext)

I used to be part of multiple IRC channels that swear up and down that they're not a bigoted/political community they're just a focused technical chat about .NET or something, and then spout off calling things "faggotry" every day with no self-awareness whatsoever.

If one wanted to substantiate some of your claims here to be convinced of the problem you suggest, what's the best way to do that?

What are the names of the IRC channels you were part of that said they weren't bigoted but used homophobic slurs every day?

I'm just responding to one flimsy anecdote with my own flimsy anecdote. You can believe me or not. But I would suggest you ask yourself why you responded to me with this and not the guy I responded to, who also didn't provide evidence where they were.

Just for other people's benefit: this comment is an excellent example of the kind of harassment women and others face online. When they try to relate their lived experiences, they are questioned relentlessly and asked for proof of things that obviously cannot be proven in a conclusive manner. (And if any proof is given, the goalposts are typically moved.)

If your first response to someone saying "I was harassed" is "I need objective evidence before I believe that this could possibly have happened", you're part of the problem.

4 things (for other people's benefit):

1. This person didn't claim THEY were harassed. They claimed others were harassed. This was not THEIR lived experience. They were talking about harassment secondhand.

2. The secondhand claims of inappropriate language were made on the internet. The internet is different than the physical world. Much text typed on the internet is/can be recorded. It is a very common practice for someone who is being harassed on the internet to share with others the record of their harassment. The internet is perfect for this. It's certainly much messier out in the physical world to prove which is the analogy you seem to be trying to apply to internet communication.

3. I just asked WHERE it happened, not to provide a precise record of the claims. It wasn't a tall ask to respond with an internet location (i.e. channel).

4. Questioning claims is NOT harassment, especially when the cost to produce evidence supporting the claim approaches zero (as on the internet). This is a toxic mentality to employ, though I'm sure you think you are being noble with your #believeallclaims approach. If anything, people who employ a "DON'T QUESTION IT!" approach do themselves a huge disservice, as that is probably the least persuasive tactic to do and immediately signals a huge red flag to any neutral onlookers.

The topic here is asking for where secondhand claims of harassment on a part of the internet happened, with the context of it being contrary to MY lived experience in similar parts of the internet. I'm trying to square how this secondhand claim could be contradictory to MY lived experience, and to update my understanding if given new information.

As a last rhetorical example/hypothetical: Let's say I made a claim that someone replied to a tweet of mine this week calling me the n-word. Do you automatically believe me? If you sought to prove my claim by looking at my tweets, are you a racist that is harassing me? What if there is absolutely no record of the alleged tweet reply happening/existing (even accounting for a potential delete)? Would you ever waver in your belief of my claim?

Sure, I am being hyperbolic and should not be when presenting my perspective. Use the word rampant was misleading.

My point is that people hail these communities as the golden child of diversity in a community, but back in the late 90s and early 00s internet nerd culture was anything but diverse. Again, I am not saying diversity did not exist, but if you were to measure the amount of say.. white males vs other groups on IRC we all know which way it skews.

My other point was that, back then it was common in internet culture to throw offensive, racist, and sexist terms/jokes back-and-forth with no recourse as a form of trolling. The people using these terms may not even be racist/sexist, but from the perspective of a minority there is no difference.

I enjoyed being on IRC, to the point where most of my free time was spent gaming but then shifted to just chatting with folks on IRC. It was great. I miss it dearly. But I do not see it as some diversity golden child we should all aspire to.

As an anecdote, I was very active in those communities/networks back in the day, and I don't remember the rampant racism/sexism you suggest.

The main vector that people demeaned others on was based on technical skills.

i'm curious how much of this was actual racism vs spouting off a specific n-word in order to anger as many people as possible via minimal effort

Yes I believe this is the case, and was general internet culture in those days. Many offensive words would be thrown around without understanding of what they meant. But still, from the perspective of a minority, the intention probably does not make a difference to the experience.

Yeah not to defend how bad those spaces were but my memories of technical IRC channels on like Freenode was that they were mostly about helping people and discussing the technology the channel was about.

You never had to disclose any aspect of your identity. Your gender or ethnicity. You were just a username. The only thing someone could find out about you was your general location based on IP address but even that could be masked if you want.

I understand closer relationships formed on IRC I’m just saying, you could go there for help without experiencing prejudice. There was no expectation of revealing your real self.

Man, IRC was so toxic in many regards. Two stories:

On EFnet, there were aggressive racists in positions of authority. References to burning crosses, etc. Many of the earliest bash.org quotes originated there, including the idea that "the bash.org 'worst' quotes list is just "the best racist jokes list." The place was in generally incredibly abusive, and frequent channel and nick takeovers. The expectation of anonymity was a feature that enabled this behavior.

On Freenode, things were better. Pseudonymity let you hide from others but less so admins. But still there was a period of time where everyone was getting PM's about an IRC network where black people were banned (also, the thing was offensively named). It got so bad they had to institute a system to prevent DMs from unregistered accounts. You may also recall that one of Ubuntu's earliest contributions was a Code of Conduct, and that this was relevant because the #debian-* help channels were borderline abusive.

So yea, you didn't have to identify yourself, just humiliate and dissociate.

This was what I was thinking. There were lots of jerks on those forums[^1], but I didn't see many racists. Frankly, I don't know how anyone would be able to ascertain others' races in the first place.

[^1]: as far as I can tell, no one was welcome to ask questions unless they could first prove that they were smarter than everyone else about computing, in which case you wouldn't actually need to ask questions in that forum in the first place

> Not disputing your bad experiences, but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone? :)

So the opportunity to make many different people feel excluded is better? I'm not sure what you're getting at?

The point was an answer to this question:

> Do you know VIRULENTLY anti-black (or woman, or gay) these communities were? I can't begin to describe it.

The answer is: "in a somewhat limited way, yes, yes I do". I can't know exactly what it was (and is) like, but the diversity of awfulness in some of those communities allowed me to experience meanness on a level I had never experienced before, which in turn has helped me feel more empathy towards those who deal with things like sexism and racism both online and offline.

Before, I had only an intellectual understanding that those things were terrible, which led me to under-appreciate just how much they can hurt. Perhaps I still under-appreciate it (who knows?), but I'm definitely closer to understanding than I was before, and that's a good thing.

> The answer is: "in a somewhat limited way, yes, yes I do".

Prefacing "I know your experience" with "In a (very|somewhat) limited way" is vitally important.

I'm not.

Tbf, I miss the former dearly but am happy the latter is gone, particularly from forums. I don't know why people online felt they could be so abusive and harsh to others for no reasons. The taunting and garbage on twitter is mild (yes with "cancel culture" and all that) than the sheer virtriol that was just common place on forums in even the mid to late 00s.

Sure, virulent about everything that differed from the "engineering norm". How often were comments made mocking, stereotyping, or denigrating whiteness and white people? I can tell you not nearly as many as were made punching down at everyone else, and not nearly as harsh or gross.

The argument isn't that there was no good to be had from those communities, it's that you can't dismiss or ignore the bad that they put out as well.

I would not disagree, but wouldn't that follow the demographics of the population to a big extent? If we examine other communities in other languages, what were their dispositions, who did they target or not target? Did blondes target blondes or non-blondes, etc.

In other words did it or does it show disproportionality? If it's disproportional then that indicates it's outside the global norm. The above does not mean the global norm is an acceptable norm but helps calibrate and figure out how good or bad things were or are.

How is that relevant? Yes communities tend to be prejudiced against things outside their assumed norm and the anonymity of the web makes it easy for them to express it without repercussion. That doesn't make the negative impact it had on people in those communities not real.

Furthermore in regards to race specifically I would argue there probably were very few online tech/engineer communities anywhere in the world that widely targeted and denigrated white people until maybe just recently, and even then they are likely not popular or widely participated in.

I'm struggling to understand what the point you and other commenters here are trying to make responding to the original comment.

I think you might want to reflect for a minute on why you thought "but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone?" was an appropriate response to a black person talking about their experience of racism. I recognize you believed yourself to be mitigating the effect of your statement by prefacing it with "Not disputing your bad experiences," but I think you'll find that the net effect of your comment is still one of dismissing a black person's lived experience, or at least pulling focus away from it in an unhelpful way.

Hmm... this sounds an awful lot like, "because you're responding to a comment made by a black person, the only acceptable response is one of total agreement". I think you might want to reflect for a minute on the importance of nuance in a discussion, and the net effect of trying to police comments on others' behalf.

I completely believe the commenter's experience, but I also witnessed the opposite a lot (and was deeply encouraged by it), and it's not wrong for me to chime in and point it out. And guess what? Experiencing vitriol on the internet directly contributed to me being more sensitive to things like racism. Although I've been on the receiving end of racist remarks offline, it wasn't until the internet that I caught a glimpse at how hurtful people could truly be. Again, not wrong for me to pipe up about it.

But it is unclear what you are disagreeing with. They never said that there was nothing positive in those communities. So what is the point of your comment? To make sure no one leaves this thread thinking that those communities were a net negative or something? I understand the desire to defend something you were a part of and got something positive out of, but the original commenter isn't criticizing people for enjoying or benefiting from those communities, they are pointing out that they had a clear negative impact on people who were targeted by those types of awful comments.

It’s unclear because you’ve concocted it. You’re asserting that there’s disagreement when there never was. I don’t strictly blame you for perpetuating ill rhetoric, but at least be aware that you’re responding to a stance that the comment in question never took in a fever to defend a black OP that never asked for any help and frankly IMO doesn't need it based on the high quality of their comment.

This is a discussion site, so not every comment needs to fit neatly in a 'agree' or 'disagree' bucket. That said, I'm in agreement with the comment I was replying to, and not actually defending anything at all - I meant for my comment to be taken at face value, nothing more.

> You no doubt have any number of other things you could be doing, but you’re in here. Might be worth thinking about why that is.

Obviously this applies to you as well. Maybe you've taken what I wrote as some sort of disagreement or getting defensive or... something? And then from there concluding that I shouldn't be allowed to participate? I'm not sure, but this is a discussion site and I'm participating in the discussion, and please don't take this the wrong way, but it's really not your place to tell me that I shouldn't participate. My original comment was in agreement with the poster I was replying to, and I was adding nuance and finding common ground in a semi-shared experience. None of that is wrong for me to do. Have a great day!

> My original comment was in agreement with the poster I was replying to, and I was adding nuance and finding common ground in a semi-shared experience.

Do you genuinely not see how "adding nuance" to a "semi-shared experience" is taking the focus away from the parent commenter's experience? When someone is recounting racism they suffered, how is adding "other people experienced other kinds of hate" adding any nuance? Do you genuinely believe that there's valuable common ground between, for example, a black person being called the n-word and another person who isn't black being called the n-word or some other slur?

"Authoritarian mindset" indeed!

Anyway, you seem to have misunderstood by initial and subsequent comments, so other than rereading them in good faith until you believe me when I say that I was neither disagreeing with the comment, nor trying to undermine his experience, nor defending bad stuff online, I don't think we can make any progress, so I'm moving on to other things. Have a great day!

> The best you can offer is sympathy. > I can almost guarantee that you have not [experienced racism] - especially if you are American.

My goodness! How can you honestly make such an assertion? I am American, I've visited every state and lived in a dozen of them. I am well-acquainted with many forms of racism and am fascinated that you could believe such a statement. All I can say is that you are unequivocally wrong.

> Don't wash the black community's suffering with white experiences.

This is absurd - finding common ground is the key to rooting out and overcoming things like racism. Always insisting that someone's experience is too different for others to understand only serves to perpetuate division.

I will never know what it's like to be a black person and all of the stupid things black people have to up with. But experiencing unkindness and bigotry helps me understand a little. And while having just a couple of experiences where someone judged me and was cruel to me simply for being white is nowhere near the same thing as dealing with it for years, it's something I can extrapolate from, and it taught me more about racism than any number of books or articles ever could.

> All I can say is that you are unequivocally wrong.

You, as a white person, have been a victim of racism?

Edit: > finding common ground is the key to rooting out and overcoming things like racism

How is refuting the experiences of a black person finding common ground?

> You, as a white person, have been a victim of racism?

Have I been told to leave somewhere because they don't want "whiteys" there? Yes. Have I been yelled at for being a "honky"? Yes. Have I been told things like, "all white people are ___"? Yes. Have I been in a group when someone said, "don't give any to the white kid" ? Yes. Have I been threatened with violence with the sole given reason being that I am white? Yes. Has a friend of mine been told not to be my friend because I'm white and we shouldn't mix? Yes.

(for reference, these occurred while living in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia)

Are these common experiences across the U.S.? I doubt it. Are they as bad as what black people have to deal with? No. Are they as widespread as racism towards black people? Almost certainly not.

> How is refuting the experiences of a black person finding common ground?

I haven't done that at all - maybe you read some other comment and thought it was mine? If so, no worries for the confusion, there's a lot of comments flying around.

You're conflating racism with the reasons for racism.

It doesn't matter how good or bad your reasons are: once you are feeling or expressing prejudice simply because someone is a member of a particular ethnic group, that's racist.

No way. Racism is when you treat people differently because of their race. It doesn't matter what the reason is or if that reason is justified.

I won't be paying any more attention to this thread. I have evidently engaged in a fool's errand. If you continue to disagree with me and my learned viewpoint (I once believed that my police brutality experience was racism) then it is likely my fault for not being able to adequately convey this viewpoint. I can't see a way for me to express it any other way, so this discussion is pointless.

I have gone from your current viewpoint to my current viewpoint, because I was wrong. I won't be changing my mind to what I used to believe, now that I understand just how wrong I was.

Best of luck! If you do care to revisit the topic, I urge you to start with focusing on what racism actually is and isn't. Specifically, a racist act or thought isn't non-racist just because there is a "good" argument for it.

If you can get past that idea, then a lot of how we can fight racism follows pretty naturally (and, by extension, it becomes more clear that at least some of what is happening today in the name of fighting racism actually engenders it).

word!

And to counter your claim here - someone's "lived experience" is not a sufficient ballast for blindly accepting an anecdote.

People's memories suck. And more often than not subjective experiences don't map onto reality, especially when negative or stressful emotions are involved.

One negative experience on an IRC/forum can cloud a person's entire recollection simply on the basis of the Negativity Bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

The point isn't to figure out whether these communities were a net positive or negative. I wasn't a target of any of the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc on these forums and chat rooms but I sure saw a lot of it everywhere I participated at a level that was kind of ridiculous in some cases. It clearly had impact on the people it was targeting, the degree to which it "clouds a persons recollection" is entirely irrelevant.

Is your point that their recollection should be dismissed? That they were too sensitive? It's unclear what this response's intent is.

I think the point was that you can’t debate or argue with anecdotes, in essence dismissing both comments.

I think you might want to reflect for a minute that you are playing the exact DEI game that the OP is complaining about. You are dismissing your parent post's argument without addressing content of the argument. Essentially, your post boils down to "Don't argue with Black people. "Lived Experience" trumps all rhetoric and discussion. In the future, please keep your thoughts and concerns to yourself."

You are fostering a culture without room for discussion. You are also presuming to speak for the Black person two posts up. Solidarity is important, but shutting people down based on racial context isn't it.

Are you Black?

> but I think you'll find that the net effect of your comment is still one of dismissing a black person's lived experience

Pointing out that those venues were full of anti-everything hate is not dismissing a black person's experience, it's validating it, while pointing out that he's not alone.

Hate directed at black people, who have been exploited, oppressed, enslaved, killed, and more for over 400 years has a more significant and problematic impact than hate directed at other, more privileged groups. Recentering the conversation away from the black person's experience is a form of dismissal, not validation.

An abuser on IRC calling a black person the n-word is objectively more harmful than an abuser on IRC calling pretty much anyone else pretty much any slur.

I reject the claim that such a response is recentering the conversation, and I also reject the implicit assumption that words can be objectively harmful.

For instance, a black person might be reasonably angry at hearing the n-word, until they find out the person suffers from Tourette's, at which point the "harm" vanishes. The harm clearly did not result from the word but from the framing of the situation, and the framing exists entirely within the mind and can be changed.

This pattern of harm resulting from framing is seen repeatedly throughout psychology. Of course we should still push for relegating incorrect and outdated framings, like the various -isms, to the dustbin of history, but there's considerably more latitude for how to do this than naive language policing like is commonly suggested.

> Pointing out that those venues were full of anti-everything hate is not dismissing a black person's experience, it's validating it, while pointing out that he's not alone.

But it implicitly implies the negative experiences were similar in scale unless otherwise noted.

It downplays the very large weight that racism adds to the negativity of that experience even if the intent is a noble one of making that person not feel alone.

Or, maybe you’re the one projecting negativity for assuming that the existence of another anecdote downplays the black one in play? I give it no such credence.

"My mother died today." "Well, lots of peoples mothers died today."

Do you not see how that response is problematic? How it downplays the person's experience?

Thats not an accurate reduction.