I am amazed that I work at a company full of extremely intelligent individuals, some of whom are truly cream of the crop types given the work we do.
Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books.
Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included.
Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position.
And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like "blacklist" are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there's any correlation between how technically smart someone is versus how immune they are to this over the top woke activism/virtue signalling. Works at a different part of the brain I guess. I've always been so puzzled to see extremely competent and productive open source developers who blast identity politics all day long on their Twitter, and I wonder... How can someone so smart be so stupid? Fortunately, they are easy to identify - preferred pronouns, effeminate appearance, infinite compassion for the in-group and total hostility for anyone that's their perceived tribal enemy.
A large part of the reason for the success of these movements, starting with the feminist movement is redefining and overloading things.
They redefined scrutiny as attacking.
They redefined gender (a word used people it wasn’t proper to say sex) to “what sex you feel you are”.
They are trying to redefine racism so only white people can have it.
They are redefining majority as “not by numbers”.
They are redefining past suffering as “only that which happened to blacks or glbt”.
I know people who come from places with 25% casualty rates during WWII (actual recent immigrants) and are told they need to check their privilege and they don’t know what suffering is.
They have redefined slavery as the only crime that matters and slavery if blacks as the only one that counts.
Not buying in is now a phobia.
When people redefine words like this it is the clearest sign of a campaign of gatekeeping and attempt to expunge history and culture.
To be fair, the other side did it too. When Texas school textbooks redefine slaves as “migrant workers” you can’t tell me that’s not an attempt to expunge history.
He probably works for HashiCorp. One of my friends is there and she told me the CEO is constantly virtue signaling and emailing feminist and leftist propaganda links company wide. She told me people are so hypersensitive that anyone who slows down to ask about why rioting shouldn't occur, or that spamming the corporate Slack and email with white guilt and original sin shouldn't happen is quickly labeled a racist and reported to HR.
My company luckily has less of this going on but it's slowly growing.
The CEO of Cisco and upper management within the company are openly recommending the book White Fragility to their employees. The book basically claims that anyone who is white is automatically a racist and that there is no way out of being a racist. I am sure it will be any day now where I will be compelled to openly confess and apologize for this new original sin. I will have to stand my ground as a non-conformist and declare that I will never apologize for false accusations about my character and wrong-doings that I never did. The world is becoming disturbingly Orwellian very quickly.
As a student of history of a few countries, China included, it is hard not to see parallels of today to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session . I have already seen public service and community advocacy meetings descend into chaos as people try to out-woke each other while accusing others of being racists.
Fortunately I am not at HashiCorp, and where I work isn't quite that bad- the company wide email only went out due to the protests.
That said, we do have higher ups who have no problem talking politics while waiting for people to join video calls, and naturally they all agree with each other. Noone with half a brain would speak up unless they were also agreeing- higher ups are our bosses, not our friends, after all.
Companies have been virtue signalling to leftism on social issues, but I doubt they would be doing the same on more economic issues within leftism such as workers rights or unions.
I haven’t had “the talk” at work and I don’t feel like I’m the one that should bring it up, but was there a decree from up high for renaming or did your team discuss it?
I would just caution too that no one speaks on behalf of their whole race, and what people say to you in such a climate is not necessarily what they feel in their heart. It’s interesting that someone would be principally concerned with feeling like they were perceived as fragile.
There was no discussion about it at the "do-er" level, I.e. anyone below architect / director that i know of. I am sure it is just a matter of time before the master branch is switched over to "main", though again if it is happening i wont know until it is announced (and I am a fairly well placed Senior, if that means anything).
Been there. I would not raise anything of this with anybody in the company as it can get you into trouble. The best way is to silently look for another job. Vote with your feet. And when they ask you why you are leaving, just say the workplace is too political and nothing more.
"blacklist" isn't banned because it is thought to hurt black people's feelings. It's banned because it promotes a psycholiguistic effect tending to disrespect black people.
I think this only makes sense if you buy into the core thesis of "white fragility" and other such things- that individual identity is fundamentally subsumed and subordinate to group identity.
The idea that false cognates should be banned because they might contribute to bad thinking ignores, or at least downplays to a foolish extent, the individual relationships and interactions people have.
We might as well ban the word "gift" as well at any kind of celebration, for fear of making German speakers think that it is okay to poison people.
“psycholinguistic effect”: that’s so ethereal as to be meaningless and unfalsifiable. That’s the insidious part too with a lot of anti-racism. You can scarcely disprove or prove any of it.
I think it's pretty clear what gowid is saying here. The "psycholingustic effect" is the psychological effect on people of color of a language tradition that enforces the idea that light = good and dark = bad. Reasonable people can disagree on how pronounced the effect is and where to draw the line, but it's not meaningless.
I've seen posts elsewhere that claim the etymology of blacklist, specifically, isn't based on this metaphor, but this metaphor exists throughout English. Consider this line from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Not Hermia but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove?" where light > dark is so obvious that all you have to do is compare one girl to a dark bird and one to a light bird to make your point.
Again, it's possible to go to far with this (e.g. whitespace), but that's a question of where to draw the line, not if.
The problem is that it isn't a language tradition, it's inherent in the nature of "darkness" (i.e. the absence of light) as a concept. When it's dark you can't see, it's night so it's cold and there could be predators etc.
If we're going to make a change to language then it should be to stop describing people as black or white. Which was never particularly accurate to begin with, since "black people" are really varying shades of brown and "white people" are varying shades of pink to light brown anyway.
I assume it's too much to ask that we stop categorizing people by "race" entirely.
Batman is a superhero that operates in darkness and has black clothing, yet people don't think of Batman as the BBEG of their comics, no?
There is an entire TVTropes page dedicated to "Dark Is Not Evil" and it's not a purely subversive trope either, quite popular in media as well.
There is also plenty of media (and culture) where darkness is sacred and pure, not evil or cold. Consider the dwarves in the discworld series that hold this belief. For more real-life examples, the hebrew bible generally refers to shadows and darkness as good since when you live in a desert, those things will bring you some fresh air and protection from the sun.
> Batman is a superhero that operates in darkness and has black clothing, yet people don't think of Batman as the BBEG of their comics, no?
Superman: Literally powered by the light of the sun, boy scout who never breaks the rules, hard-working member of the proletariat.
Batman: Tortured soul with tragic backstory, lawless vigilante, billionaire (regarded as evil in popular media, cf. Lex Luthor).
The darkness in Batman is the adversity the hero has to overcome. It's integral to the story but it isn't pleasant. You can't imagine the young Bruce Wayne wishing for somebody to murder his parents so he can grow up to don a bat suit and punch criminals in dark of night.
And so it is with the other common depictions of darkness in hero types -- an internal struggle, not a desired characteristic in itself.
You can find the odd situation where darkness actually is positively desirable in itself, but not enough to overshadow all of the more common ones where it isn't.
I don't believe darkness being positive is the odd one out. Even major media has "darkness = good" not as a subverise but integral trope (see, for example, darkness).
I don't agree with your assessment of Batman and I would point out that Batman isn't regarded as evil in popular media (and even if he was, Superman was evil plenty of times, see Superman Red Son)
Lastly, I would mention that in hero types, a internal struggle is usually desired to counterbalance or embolden external conflict. Even superman has internal conflicts.
It might come as a shock, but majority of people using the terms “whitelist” and “blacklist” are not native English speakers. For them the words “black” and “white” have a completely different connotation, even translated. In some cultures, death is white. So who are you guys to draw an universal line for the rest of the world?
Race in America is only ever about race in America, of course. It's why white politicians get kente cloths draped over their shoulders by the black politicians as a show of solidarity, despite the history of the kente cloth.
I think that there is a line to be drawn, but not with respect to the degree of the effect, but to the semantic concepts that the white = good, black = bad apply to.
For example, I have black eyes and hair, but I never once felt I was less a person because of this abstract generalization. I don't recall ever having made such a connection until when I started thinking about arguing against the reasoning behind banning blacklist.
Similarly, obsidian and black granite are typically considered beautiful. When I choose the color of my phone or display or car, I don't think white = good or black = bad. When there is context, this abstract association does not come to mind; rather, for example, I think that white can distract from the screen of a phone, or that it wears its stains easily. Or when I choose a dark theme for my editor and apps for ease of viewing in low light. Or with clothes; I don't think (black = bad) when I wear my black clothing.
So this is why I disagree with this; we associate ourselves with black things and make color judgments all the time, but rarely does the value judgment of white = good, black = bad figure in these judgments (modulo actual reasons in particular contexts, e.g. stains easily, vs. hard to see in low light). An argument that this "psycholinguistic effect" actually happens also needs to address the many other categories in which we make color judgments in our lives. (Question: does a strongly racist person significantly and subconsciously disassociate themselves with black products more than the average person? Beyond conscious decision on color to symbolize their attitude, and the subconscious generalization from this symbolic desire.)
With respect to blacklist, it seems to me that this is the most unfortunate product about the whole discussion. I believe that hardly anyone has associated the word "blacklist" with derogatory attitudes against blacks, but now someone has made "blacklist" and black of race so tightly bound semantically that we can't help but think of race when we now see the word blacklist --- even when nothing close is ever being intended by the people who use the word.
I think that my model that there are many semantic categories of blackness for which the value judgment (white = good, black = bad) doesn't figure at all as a "psycholinguistic effect" is more accurate. If this is indeed the case, then ironically the whole discussion over "blacklist" has caused more harm than good, since it is enlarging the collection of meanings that remind people of derogatory attitudes against blacks.
I have long assumed that this language tradition has its origin in the fact that we are a diurnal species and naturally prefer day to night. However, I'd be very interested to know if this kind of metaphor is as common in non-European languages or if its usage changed as Europeans came into greater contact with other cultures.
You might want to consider that doves are quite docile and generally peaceful birds, whereas ravens are carrion eaters, frequently associated with death and violence as a result.
Also, while we are on the topic of Shakespeare, you are overlooking the tragedy of Othello, a black (Moorish) protagonist who is betrayed by the white Iago.
Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books.
Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included.
Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position.
And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like "blacklist" are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.