For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

Even within her book she claims that no amount of training will solve the issue, it seems that "White Fragility" is just another way for White people to tamp down the anxiety of race relations in the United States, rather than take any meaningful action towards changing it.

If your goal is to truly understand the Black american experience, it's best to start with actual Black authors. The House That Race Built by Wahneema Lubiano is a great set of essays about race and class structures.

I admit I only just started reading her book, so can't comment on that, but I would say that's not the takeaway I got from any of the online videos or interviews I've seen of her, most definitely not from the youtube one I linked.

It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired. Anti-racism provides the tools to contextualize and understand why certain phrases are racist or biased.

I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.

It's also problematic because the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions" and various forms of otherings that effectively sow more division than actually get non-whites anywhere.

The author is particularly clever for writing a book for the target of anti-racism, because the market for "look who's racist" media is thoroughly saturated.

Since race is becoming a greater and greater issue, I imagine it will continue to become a get-rich-quick scheme for some adept to the English language, or the language of CorporateSpeak.

Can you expand on this a little bit? It sounds a lot like:

>It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired

With extra steps. What are these tools and how do they avoid accidentally putting the cart in front of the horse in terms of goals vs. reality?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thomas+sowell

I thought “fundamentally understanding the lived experiences of the black community” was impossible for non-black people. What white person has achieved this goal? If none, is it impossible for a white person to be “anti-racist?”

I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.

Did you pick this idea up somewhere else or think of it yourself? I've not heard that concept, and it makes way too much sense.

I know at least one person who has.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/27/black-like-me-...

I know it's not possible for everyone to do what John Howard Griffin did, but reading that book and living that experience vicariously can be a start.

Anti-racism is being against making judgement based on race. Nothing more. No laundry list of buzz words or actions.

Understanding 'the Black community' doesn't even make sense at all. Like all Black people are part of this community where if you truly understand and experience the worst pain only then you can start to find racism in society and yourself.

Racism can come from anyone and be directed to anyone or group.

If you learn anti-racist behavior and perform it only to manipulate, eventually you're caught, with ramifications for your life or your legacy.

In any case, white America certainly needs to try to understand black America better, but also of great importance is that they begin to understand themselves better. Their history (e.g., "The Lost Cause" is a myth), their personal and communal psychology (e.g., white fragility and guilt), and their behavior (e.g., white flight and opportunity hoarding); and to square that with what they claim are their higher ideals.

I’ve always been a “treat others as you would like to be treated” person. But a lot of this anti-racist concept is appearing on all my pod casts. And now I have to see race?

I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts. Frankly I wish we’d stop importing US culture. Australia isn’t perfect but we largely agree on things like universal health care and getting rid of guns. So I think we can combat racism without having to look at the US for guidance.

Would-be spoilers get educated about their own unrealized bias, racism continues to be a huge problem in this country, activists are vindicated and the world moves on.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-r...

Based on that statement alone I think I can accurately conclude you are not an indigenous Australian (aboriginal).

Seems they share quiet a lot in common with native Americans from stealing of their lands/displacement, mass killings, enslavement By colonists, to ongoing racism that continues to carry on today.

I believe strongly these are more valuable than non-black corporate anti-racist consultants...

FWIW, I think reading it would help some people understand.

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

Further explanation:

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/intellectual-fraud-robin-d...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-haidt-on-the-cultural-...

https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-w...

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

But it seems racism in the US has a lot of deeper cultural implications so they came up with anti-racism. Australia needs to figure out what equality means to us and make our own cultural changes. Not copy the US.

Why do right-leaning libertarians always have to pretend they're being contrarians?

It would be clearer to just say something like "if you're interested in a conservative take on this issue, check out Thomas Sowell."

> This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else. At least, that’s my interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo will be grateful to hear it. After all, I am what she would call a person of color, and whatever I write surely counts as “feedback.” Maybe that means she is, indeed, doing well.

I found this book review [1] to be spot-on with my reading of the DiAngelo book, and this is also where I learned of the above estimate from the Washington Post.

> As a business journalist, however, I’ve chronicled the slow progress people of color have made in the corporate world, even as companies spend, by one measure, more than $8 billion a year on diversity initiatives.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/despite-spending-bill...

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-is...

contrarian =/ smart. Sometimes you are objecting for the sake of objecting.

The term is, somewhat ironically, often applied in a reductionist manner.

"In Defense of the Status Quo"

"White Silence is NOT Violence"

"A Principled Statement of Opposition to Critical Race Theory"

"Eight Big Reasons Critical Race Theory is Terrible for Dealing with Racism"

Further investigation shows the site owner, James Lindsay makes his entire living being an activist against gender studies and critical race theory. There's an extraordinary amount of resources dedicated to pushing back against the Robin Diangelo. Having heard her speak and having read at least a bit of her book, most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance. Its insisting that you do something actually about it rather than patting yourself on the back for doing what you think is the right things. It takes a great amount of twisting about to ignore the main points, and all of the writers you linked have done so.

What you call the "dogma" of dealing with a racist culture I call people lived experience. Its heartbreaking to me how very conservative-minded and flat out defensive on issues of inclusion and race the HN community has been when the subject of race is allowed to be a thread.

Its also the only place in adulthood where people willingly or unwillingly must work together with people different than them and not necessarily of their choosing to reach a common goal.

I doubt your definition of "right leaning libertarian", belongs to someone who adheres to pragmatism, meritocracy, multiracialism and Asian values or communitarianism, right?

Should be in relative terms to other aspects, like health care or should it be in absolute values?

This is more or less obvious given that the top 10 grossing movies in 2019 took in ~ $13B in global ticket sales and < $2B of that went to non-US studios. (Also nuts is the percentages of 2019 global ticket sales attributable to the Avengers franchise and Disney.)

In 2017 US film industry revenues were ~$43B according to

https://deadline.com/2018/07/film-industry-revenue-2017-ibis...

That said while I haven't read the DiAngelo book the scenario I imagine for situations like this is generally not someone waking up and saying I will write something to get some money out of these people but rather I will write something about this situation, later getting offers of more and more money and then behaviorism takes control of the journey.

It is difficult to get someone to change what they're doing once they start getting paid for doing it.

This is of course all separate from whether I might agree with the book if I read it. I can still agree 100% with someone and think that their perspective is constrained by how they have begun to profit from it.

As far as I'm aware, the majority population in any country, irrespective of skin color is intolerant to various degrees toward minorities, ranging from genocide and internment camps to harassment and minor discrimination.

The US is certainly not leader of the pack, but not exactly terrible either, when one looks at the constant amount of outrage. It seems to me that a group of people in the US concerned about the topic of race in their country is projecting its distorted view of things on the planet and has furthermore chosen an approach which is doomed to fail. Good luck with that, but maybe this time the US could try to not also damage the rest of the world in the process of fighting a war on abstract nouns.

Edit:

Someone in a nuked comment said "Why on earth does one have to make a broad comparison of cultures to rank badness at racism before dealing with this instance? And are you saying 'inclusion' is quantitative or something? "

Because by doing this comparison one can check if the problem of bias is universal (yep) and ingrained (yep), therefore suggesting that focusing on black vs. white in the US is counterproductive. Instead we should do research into individual and systemic biases and see how those could be kept under control.

Punishing individuals is hilariously bad. In fact there's a direct parallel between this and safety engineering, where clueless organizations will punish an employee which made a mistake while they continue to lumber from incident to incident.

Questioning those things is basically mainstream conservative discourse. You’re questioning them right now.

(Also FYI, it's not about opposing institutional bias, it's about signaling and corporate power games.)

Robin DiAngelo explicitly said "Biologically, race isn't real. But socially, race is a very real set of socialized worldviews shaped by segregation and superficial anatomical features. The white experience of both the majority and systemically powerful is one which normalizes a rejection of the existence of our own bias and enables us to ignore the existence of radically different lived experiences."

A bias towards normalizing whiteness and being blissfully ignorant of the lived experience of others is being blamed, not genetics.

Even more, Americans assume that sexism elsewhere must be the same as sexism in America. They just seems to be completely confused about other countries having somewhat different gender stereotypes and different expectations on genders. The end result is that local sexism is combined with American version of sexism - end result is not more equality, it is less of it.

When transgendered Vietnamese Jane Doe got assaulted and robbed, racism and homophobia was at play

But not when it happened to Andy Ngo.

Certain animals are better than others and thus get to set the feeding time tables, ya?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-reli...

But other places in the country have a different political bent (right). Chick-fil-A's anti-LGBT stance actually increased its sales (for a time, anyway). [1]

You can see this effect play out similarly when Trump says something that rankles the Twitters of Silicon Valley and New York, but which gets him even bigger approval ratings in the red states. All this to say - your points might feel like activism in the Bay Area, but that doesn't make the above poster's claim that it's mainstream conservative discourse false.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people

I'm surprised there are any natives left there at all, the way they have been treated.

This doesn't seem to aplly for the otherside. People like Alex Jones make a load of money representing the opposite opinion. For him, making money all of a sudden isn#t a problem anymore.

Its literally just talking about the US here. There's no projection elsewhere - this isn't just "minority rights", this is attempting to break away from a culture of systematic oppression that half the country up until last month didn't believe was a thing!

Sowell has the advantage of being black, which makes his view closer to home than the vast majority of anti-racism activists, who seem to frequently be white people telling other white people what black people find offensive (see: comments on the GitHub master/main discussions).

Sowell also ends up on the receiving end of genuine racism, at least according to his own claims, in particular racism of the form "why are you conservative and telling black people to solve your own problems when you're black?", as if being black actually requires him to be on the left, or makes him some sort of race traitor if he isn't.

The US is an immigration society where many white people from countries which weren't involved in US slavery and now they're all painted with the same brush. It's not reasonable for someone from say Russia to be attacked for the deeds of American slave drivers hundreds of years ago. And as far as I know white immigrants were strongly discriminated against in the US in the past two centuries.

"People are recommending a book by an author." Fixed that for you.

I'll give you the BLM, that's an instance of necessary discrimination. The rest ... if the authors advice is wrong, criticise it, if the book or person does something bad, criticise it. Don't just pick out the skin colour of the author, or of someone recommending the book, and use that as a reason why it's bad. That's racist.

[Please note I haven't read the book, and do not know the author, and am categorically not promoting either.]

Which country are you in? Have you checked that statistic or did you assume it?

Don't judge a book by its cover, nor a man by his edgiest quotes.

Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.

I can usefully talk about MySQL because I used it in a multi-year project that pushed its performance to the limit. I cannot usefully talk about Cassandra - the most I have done with it is install it.

Similarly, I can usefully talk about the experience of a male Russian immigrant to the US. I cannot usefully say much about the experience of a black woman who lived in the US since birth - I have not lived it, all my sources would be second-hand; my listener would be best served by referring to the sources directly.

I may suggest that to find out about the experience of black Americans, it's best to refer to the words of actual black Americans.

Seems it's a perfectly accepted logical fallacy; and the only people who deny it are the sjw crowd largely because it is such a favoured tactic within their ranks.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kafkatrap

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=kafka...

Still not seeing it.

That is my point. People were having a discussion with content and you dropped into a stock political response.

Leave your baggage out of it with your claim that people espouse anti-racism for the money, your shots at high tax countries and your need to link to political dogma.

I get that it's free karma on HN, but it lowers the quality of the discussion.

And desperately clinging to any page-not-found of whatever website you can find to display it isn't exactly the most secure display of debate.

Nobody but libertarians looking for excuses for racism use that term, deal with it.

... very cautiously, very anonymously.

> Using a kafkatrap against an opponent you can't beat in debate when they have just pointed out the tactic is probably ill advised; perhaps try something else; Ad hominem or motte and bailey for example.

Allow my to quote from one your trusted sources: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

> Ad hominem: This is an attack on the character of a person rather than his or her opinions or arguments.

It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification.

And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJbrLs_8_0

We're also free to find new jobs if we don't like them, but it sure is harder than those other choices.

You don't know who coined "coined", but they may well have been a racist. Are you going to stop using it if so? Does that mean it's no longer useful for communication? Are you going to investigate every word on the chance it might've been and strike those from the lexicon?

Conservative just means you want things to stay the same or have things to back to how they were when you decided it was good enough to “conserve it”. In this case the fight is about frustration over lack of progress and lack of acknowledgement that police violence and systemic discrimination both very much exist and are actively harming black people. Most of the working world just sees it through a tiny keyhole in that there’s maybe 1 or 2 black software developers in a company of 1000. We need to get better as stewards of society and the companies we work in.

A Russian who moved here in 1998 certainly didn’t have anything to do with racism. But he is participating in a society that claims to be a just one, in which he will get preferential treatment over a Black person just because the color of his skin. Is that his fault? No. Is it his moral responsibility as a participant in society to help create a more just society? Yes.

But it's disingenuous to believe that activists 1) will not see what "obsess" them everywhere (that's a common psychological bias) and 2) will not try to make their cause as important as they can by inflating the numbers.

Then you're responsible for the climate problem, the extermination of native Americans, the Vietnamese death, the Iraqi deaths, etc... ? From what you preached you can only answer "yes" to all these. Then : what do you do to make amends for all those horrible crimes?

Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. They’re is getting paid.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-revolution-comfor...

I had never heard of this guy before so I gave him a chance, turns out he's just another in a long line of contrarian for the sake of being contrarian conservatives.

Nothing of value here.

I gather statistics show USA police are not targeting black people ("damn lie and statistics" though, so I'm Caruso's about that result), contrary to how I imagined it. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it possibly means the problem is more concentrated - ie in general the police are doing well, but specific groups/officers are being highly discriminatory.

Absolutely.

And to say "this opinion is not grounded in experience" is a worthy note, but doesn't make their conclusions wrong.

As a generality people suffering a situation aren't able to take a measured approach - emotion gets the better of us - so it's not just a case of experiencing a situation. Not being subject to something doesn't discredit your viewpoint.

If you tell me I need to do sharding to improve my database performance, or whatever, and I say "this is a database of Chinese people, your opinion is invalid as your not Chinese" then I'm just being xenophobic.

People can have way more in common with others of different skin colour than they have with someone of the same colour. It's a people issue.

Focusing on segregating people's arguments by skin colour, rather than by validity of their arguments is so antithetical to the whole object of removing unnecessary discrimination that's why I felt I needed to comment, and I stand by that comment.

Other countries and people need not and should not accept sharing the blame for US sins against black people.