"We'll tell a higher-up why his new plan is stupid and that we're not very excited to waste our time on it"
There's a difference between 'what my instinct is' and 'thoughtful communication'.
It's possible in these kinds of situations that 'the plan is objectively dumb' and surely therefore someone might not be interested ... but I've seen more often than not people not really understand why something is initiated, what the objectives are etc. and just make narrow assumptions with belligerance, which they believe is 'being direct'. It's 'direct' in a way, in that it's a 'direct articulation of a narrow set of assumptions' - but that doesn't make it good or professional.
"This is dumb, I don't want to work on it" is surely direct, but it's also essentially an immature and unprofessional way of communicating.
More appropriately it would be: "I don't think this plan will achieve the understanding I have of the objectives for this, this and this reason, but here are some alterations that might work" - or "Technically, I don't think this will work because of this reason, but I don't understand what the non-technical objectives are so my feedback is limited to that scope" - or "I think these areas are more risky than implied, but these areas will work" or better "This won't work for these reasons, but fill us in on the strategic objectives and we can fill in the blanks with something that will, if we can".
I personally appreciate 'directness' a lot, but a lot of people misunderstand that to be 'what I think off the top of my head without trying to actually address the issue'.
And yest, there's way too much sensitivity around criticism going on. Legit criticism needs to be allowed. It's also really hard for some people to separate themselves form their critique or their work and so communications sometimes gets mangled on both sides.
I don't like your alternatives, because they are not the same thing. They also use too many words and assume you have mythical improvement.
But also, "this is dumb" is insulting. It is not direct, it it's just insult with 0 information.
"This won't work" or "this will cause issues" or "this is complicated" would be better equivalents, because they actuality hint to what your issue is and wont insult. The management, if it listens and have good reasons is then fully able to modify their own plan or stick with it while noting objections. They are also fully able to explain why they are doing it is objection seem to miss the mark.
Floor-level employees voicing discontent in only a few words to a director who just happened to walk past their station, is still infinitely more information than when they had kept their mouths shut and eyes down.
It's then up to that director to hear them out and find out what their concerns are really all about. Perhaps they should be given a bit more information, so they can also see the bigger picture and how it'll benefit them too.
Some really high leverage opportunities can come out of this.
Can someone comment with relevant experience about the fact that maybe emojis should not be part of unicode? And that we should literally just send tiny images as part of text?
This way, you know the host system is 100% going to represent what you want to say correctly, that the emoji will look right, and you don't need to worry the system will replace it, that it supports it etc..
And you can literally use 'any emoji' you want.
There is an infinite number of things we can put in emojis, why are we trying to standardize such things?
I wonder if someone has some insight as to the history around this?
Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones. Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Japan, so they implemented emojis using Unicode's Private Use Area which initially was a feature only available in Japan, but people quickly figured out how to use them outside of Japan.
Emojis became a rather popular feature of iPhones, and Android wanted to have emojis as well, however using Private Use Area just like iPhones did wasn't ideal, so they made a proposal to Unicode Consortium to encode emojis in Unicode.
Later, there was a lot of demand to add new emojis, so more and more emojis got encoded into the standard.
But how it works is that big players send them an advance notice ultimatum which comes down to “Standardize it accordingly, or we'll do it in a nonstandard, hackey fashion ourselves.”, which would cause undesirable chaos.
This is lesson in media, PR, liars, spin, misrepresentation, attempts to explain, yada yada. There are hardly any good actors here: Signal for misrepresenting, the press for turning a blind eye, Facebook for collecting too information etc..
Cui bono: who benefits? This seems an asymmetric affair in favour of increasing Signal's visibility (infamy is still fame) and in reducing people's trust in big tech. A win for privacy team, even if you can debate whether it's a win for Signal in particular.
Although colonialism played a role, 'it started' before that.
It's fair to at least 'talk about' the 'pyramid of hate' and maybe 'believe in it' so as to 'make a point'.
But I don't think it's ok to accuse regular, well-meaning employers of 'holding up systems of White Supremacy'.
It's also basically tone-deaf for an executive, facing a 'sensitive moment' to challenge claims of racism with 'reverse racism' - even if the executive might have a rhetorical point - it's just going to inflame the situation.
I think the execs should have basically 'not acted out of contempt', said some conciliatory things and moved on. Even if they had a legit point to make, they're supposed to be 'bigger than that'.
So I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to dig into the rhetoric, but rather, they should have just found a way past the issue.
Finally, it's a good example of how toxic this stuff can be.
"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."
This kind of gaslighthing though.
"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"
If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.
Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.
Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.
It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'
It's not a matter of disagreement about 2 equally valid viewpoints, it's about one side being wrong about everything following a deliberate and calculated campaign of misinformation, and the other side pointing out how wrong they are and how dangerous their ideology is.
No-one likes being told they're wrong, which is why the capitol riots happened on 6 January and Trump still got so many votes despite being an abjectly horrible president, and the head of a party that does nothing for the vast majority of its constituents.
This kind of rhetoric I think might be at the root of the problem.
If you believe the company founders, in the face of being told they occupy their position 'due to privilege' is 'right about everything' then you're the problem.
Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning.
If you're of the position that 'anyone who questions claims of racism is a white supremacist', then you're entitled to that position, but it's 'war language' that is driving a lot of irresponsible toxicity in the workplace.
"Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning."
Singer's quote:
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He wasn't talking about the company, he was talking about society. Unless you think he was saying they "live in" the company ...
Saying he got sacked for questioning it at the company is a spin added later by his apologists.
To the extent that white supremacy is synonymous with racism (which, at least at this point in history, I think is arguable given the fact that we live in a world dominated by the vestiges of the British empire, and that structural inequality is almost entirely against non-white people globally) then people who question the claim of racism are at the very least inadvertently advancing the causes of white supremacy.
CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.
CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.
Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.
Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.
I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.
Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
Aggregating everything and taking an average doesn't prove 'everything is racist', it just proves some portion of people are. It's not traffic stops, 'the police', or 'the system' that is racist, it's individual cops making the decision to pull over one person and not another. If this were an example of systemic racism, there would be a systemic fix, but there isn't. The only way to fix this would be to wipe out or even out the biases of the individual officers. Police departments in the bay area are very ethnically diverse: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/do-bay-area-police-dep...
The claim they were contesting was that the poster couldn't find "a single example of systematic racism". Countering that doesn't require that every single person isn't racist, just that racism exists and has a measurable impact.
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
If you define any amount of discrimination as a failure to provide an appropriate professional service, then, mathematically, any amount of racism will become 'systemic' or 'institutional' so long as there is an uneven population distribution:
Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.
If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.
We're overrepresented in poverty and crime, so it's reasonable that police officers would be biased against black people.
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
> This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
I think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?
Both problems are caused by having a corruptible, warmongering, spying and controlling government.
I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.
I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.
I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.
Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.
I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.
Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.
I largely agree- especially yes, we do have to fix poverty itself if we want to fix the disturbing racial skew in our justice system. However, when I think about the wars on drugs and terror, I think that they are heavily supported by xenophobia and racism. I don't think incredibly highly of the voting public in general, but it strikes me that there might be a much greater voter pushback against our foreign interventions if they were occurring in predominantly white countries, and prominently affecting white people.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.
You're clearly not looking very hard. As a super simple example, look at the countless studies that have shown that signifiers that point towards you being black on a resume (your name, school, etc.) have a measurable effect on getting interviews. That's textbook systematic racism.
'White Supremacy' classically means men in Pointy White Hats.
The CRT people now use it to mean 'regular white people' because they, in their regular, day to day actions, uphold oppressive systems i.e. 'White Supremacy'.
The denial is usually of the later, not the former.
Many progressives are now using the denial of the later, to imply denial of the former, as a kind of bad faith rhetorical weapon, which I think is unfair.
Employees calling the organization 'White Supremacist' is the thing that should be 'jarring' or at least controversial. There are arguments to be made, sure, but the language is fairly extremist.
People are constantly confusing the issue with 'politics'.
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
There's a difference between 'what my instinct is' and 'thoughtful communication'.
It's possible in these kinds of situations that 'the plan is objectively dumb' and surely therefore someone might not be interested ... but I've seen more often than not people not really understand why something is initiated, what the objectives are etc. and just make narrow assumptions with belligerance, which they believe is 'being direct'. It's 'direct' in a way, in that it's a 'direct articulation of a narrow set of assumptions' - but that doesn't make it good or professional.
"This is dumb, I don't want to work on it" is surely direct, but it's also essentially an immature and unprofessional way of communicating.
More appropriately it would be: "I don't think this plan will achieve the understanding I have of the objectives for this, this and this reason, but here are some alterations that might work" - or "Technically, I don't think this will work because of this reason, but I don't understand what the non-technical objectives are so my feedback is limited to that scope" - or "I think these areas are more risky than implied, but these areas will work" or better "This won't work for these reasons, but fill us in on the strategic objectives and we can fill in the blanks with something that will, if we can".
I personally appreciate 'directness' a lot, but a lot of people misunderstand that to be 'what I think off the top of my head without trying to actually address the issue'.
And yest, there's way too much sensitivity around criticism going on. Legit criticism needs to be allowed. It's also really hard for some people to separate themselves form their critique or their work and so communications sometimes gets mangled on both sides.