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Ex-Google Employee's Memo Says Executives Shut Down Pro-Diversity Discussions (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A memo written by a former Google engineer claims that the company's human resources department and a senior vice president pressured him to stop discussing diversity initiatives on company forums, interactions that ultimately motivated him to leave the company. The document, which was written in 2016 and shared publicly this week, provides a striking counterpoint to allegations made by former Google employees James Damore and David Gudeman in a discrimination lawsuit filed against their former employer. Cory Altheide, the former employee who wrote the memo, began work as a security engineer at Google in 2010 and departed the company in January 2016. He recently published his account in a public Google document. Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
...we have another employee suing because he felt discriminated-against because of policies designed to increase diversity.
You can't satisfy all of the people all of the time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
>provides a striking counterpoint
I don't think so, it looks more like managers have their idea of how they want "diversity" to operate (for diversity read tokenism, PR nonsense, and a complete obedience to management ideas at all times).
*ironic captcha == 'complied' :P
Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
Given that was exactly the same as what Damore did, I don't see how it's a counterpoint. Or is it that Gizmodo only approves of Altheide's diversity and Damore's diversity is "wrong"?
Fortunately, there's a lawsuit by Damore and Gudeman against Google happening, so it's quite likely the matter will be explored fully and we can all enjoy finding out what's been going on.
Can you think of a bigger waste of time? I'd shut that shit down too. Do that garbage on your own time, at church, or your famous PTA meetings. Life's too short for this crap. Christ! You can't even flirt anymore. Fucking dementors taking all the joy out of life!
And please note, I am a zenophile. Fucking your own kind/race/nationality is almost gay.
There is a difference between dropping diversity as a business necessity and denying minorities' right to exist.
#DeleteFacebook
This isn't exactly a "counter-point". From an article about Damore's case:
“We want to be inclusive of people not ideas” one employee identified as Alon Altman wrote in a message included in the lawsuit. Damore says that sentiment was backed up at an Inclusion and Diversity Summit he attended in June, when he was told by Google employees the company does not value “viewpoint diversity,” but actively strives for “demographic diversity.”
This new memo seems to reinforce this perspective. It might not be illegal or anything, but this memo definately doesn't "counter" the claims included in damore's suit.
This whole diversity/gender debate thing is getting and more into an absurd territory of epic proportions. It's quite some time ago that I've been able to take larger parts of mainstream contributions to this debate seriously.
To me a very welcome addition of reason and level-headedness was the open letter of ~100 women of influence and fame in France speaking out against #MeToo, it's totalitarianism and a false pretense of feminism published two days ago in Le Monde (basically the French nyt) that went largely unnoticed/uncovered by mainstream media. These ladies deserve a medal or something and they deserve to be heard, despite mainstream media trying to ignore them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And suggesting that "Slashdot has a rusty iron up it's ass" passes for intellectual discussion?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
We know exactly what Damore's memo said. There are no quotes from Altheide's posts in the article, except thread titles (“If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention" and "Just Asking Questions").
Why do I have the suspicion that these posts weren't as well reasoned (and backed up by cited scientific research) as Damore's memo?
Damores article essentially attempts to justify centuries old gender bias with "science." Most people in the scientific community, including myself, were reaching for the popcorn and fascinated to see just how deep he would go trying to prove a pretty tenuous point.
https://www.wired.com/story/th...
Damore makes a pretty sophomoric error several times, conflating gender and sex, but if that controversy isnt enough he starts flogging nature vs nurture. I myself being an evolutionary biologist nearly joked from laughter on my jiffy pop.
Im sure google would win this in court, however its cheaper and easier to settle out of court with the usual no-fault, no-deny and a litany of contractual boilerplate that keeps anyone from speaking of this ever again. Expect this guy to tour Fox news a few times and write a book in a few years, but the idea that he will ever face summary execution in front of a jury of actual scientists is unfortunately not going to happen.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The problem with these pro-diversity talks, is that we're hiring people because they're diverse, rather then if they're skilled and the right fit. If you see a development team who is all white and male, you have SJW's crying discrimination, when in fact, in 99.999% of cases, you have qualified people, the right people working together. People shouldn't be hired because they're diverse, they should be hired because they're the right fit.
Maybe Altheide was trying to discuss REAL diversity, and not the faux diversity that stops at the color of your skin and the shape of your genitals that's so fashionable at Google?
In other words, a REAL discussion?
You know, kinda like Damore did?
FTFA:
Over the course of several months, employees engaged in a debate about gender representation at Google in an internal thread titled “If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention.” The debate became contentious, Altheide said in his memo, and had to be shut down by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, and Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure. . . .
Ramaswamy wrote: “Google is not a debate club or a philosophy class. We are a workplace and we have an obligation to make sure our discussions remain respectful. Debates around topics like product excellence can support a wide variety of viewpoints and are great to have. I don’t think the same can be said for debates around sensitive issues such as gender, religion, race, or sexual orientation.”
No, they can't their God hates sex
If you RTFA what Google execs did was shut down contentious discussions about diversity. Altheide posted pro-diversity comments which apparently tended to spark big flamewars, and he was told to stop.
The fact is that this is a contentious topic in the tech industry, inside Google just as much as everywhere else (including slashdot, obviously). Google employees have lots of internal communications fora which are unpoliced and heavily used, and the employees are not closely monitored, which creates a risk that when contentious topics arise on these internal fora people get sucked in, wasting a lot of time and generating a lot of bad blood, both of which have significant negative impacts on productivity.
One of the core tenets of Google culture is that one should always assume good faith and competence on the part of their colleagues (unless proven otherwise, obviously), but that's a tenet that works much better in a small company that is highly selective in its hires. In most situations it works reasonably well in a big company that is highly selective in its hires... but as you grow the law of averages catches up with you and assholes and incompetents sneak in. This is particularly true around areas that won't come up in an interview, like attitudes about diversity.
As a Google employee, my takeaway is "This is why we can't have nice things." Open discussion fora with light oversight, and a culture of internal transparency and openness are really awesome, but they appear to be incompatible with being a large multinational corporation. Sigh.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So why run your mouth. It's basically political discussion. You probably make as many people happy as pissed off by doing this. Just shut up and do your job!
Well in this case, at this moment, diversity seem to be new Communist Revolution in USA and Western Europe.
There is always someone who has to complain about how they are treated. It's a job, and if you don't like it move on. What I do find really interesting is the image Google is showing to the world. It appears Google wants their employees to fit their mold and not question. In the case of diversity, if you question for or against it doesn't matter. What matters is what Google HR is pushing. Remember: HR is there for the company, not the employee. I would be worried for Google and this image as the best talent doesn't want anyone telling them how to think. That's the whole point. Allow your employees to think big and out there. This will hurt Google either way. Need to do some triage.
Any large entity generally has multiple, conflicted ideas floating around. The problem experienced by Cory Altheide doesn't dispute the problems experienced by James Damore. Google has 70,000+ employees! That's massive, and it's highly probably Google has opposite, conflicting problems that wind up re-enforcing each other as each "side" only sees the extreme of the other "side".
Damores article essentially attempts to justify centuries old gender bias with "science."
Except it did nothing of the sort. What he ATTEMPTED to do was say, if females and males are biologically different, what we can do to improve the workplace environment for females? He may have been ham-fisted about it but that was the obvious intent. It was a paper focused on perceived environmental issues that he thought worked against women, and how he thought might be corrected... a great place to start a discussion on where he was right and wrong, not such a great place to start a series of violent threats followed by immediate termination.
Im sure google would win this in court, however its cheaper and easier to settle out of court
*I'm* sure that Damore will win, and it's refreshing to see that deep down even the most obtuse SJW inherently recognizes the obviousness of his case and thew wrongness of Google for immediate termination over it, thus also predicting victory... how many millions do you think he will get to further his efforts on recognition of gender differences, I wonder.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
However wrong in reasoning Damore may have been, why wasn't his thesis simply rejected in a rational discourse by those who know the matter or took the time to research it?
Maybe you can say that his bringing the point in the first place, however measured, betrays his hostility and distrust towards the policies pushed by the management. But that is often the case in argumentation. If you know you are right you respond to such in a measured way. Judging from the reaction, a nerve was hit which inflamed emotions that made people on the other side blind with rage. That it wasn't one or two crazy folks but many shows that something is deeply wrong within Google.
Which I wouldn't care about, it's Google's thing, if Google weren't the most powerful company on earth shaping the public opinion and perception of reality. This is shit we need to know about.
You are a scientist, how do you react to this internal Google post (part of Damore's filing, Exhibit B):
"I Google'd 'Big Five Personality Differences Male Female' (psych terminology) and nearly every top result backed the offensive claims of Neuroticism and Agreeableness (mean not absolute) differences by gender. Is Search wrong? Should we link to academic finds that may support incorrect stereotypes?"
https://i.redd.it/zxlp6gea8490...
Do you want Google to decide for you what Truth is?
Actually it is. Freedom of speech means exactly that: Freedom from consequences. At least freedom from consequences from the government.
It has never meant anything else.
Anything else is like the old joke:
Is there freedom of speech in the USSR?
In principle, yes. But there may not be much freedom after the speech.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In a system tailored for white supremacists, denying diversity is effectively telling minorities that they should not exist.
Y'all pretend that being "neutral" is not inherently racist, I'm starting to think that's less stupidity and more maliciousness, I bet you KNOW you have white privilege and you're pretending you're all righteous and just only to maintain your white privilege.
White people have enslaved other races for centuries and enjoyed the benefits of doing so. Simply removing slavery doesn't magically undo the centuries of subjugation and abuse, white people today are still benefiting from past slavery and there is also the important issue of justice: white people never truly paid for what they did.
Sorry tech bros, but losing a few job opportunities is a pretty low price compared to the way white people enslaved, raped, massacred and tortured people of color all throughout history. You can complain about being oppressed by minorities when you're in chains, picking their cotton and with your backs full of scars.
Who do you think sold those black people into slavery - news flash - OTHER black people. White privilege indeed.
Not even half as entertaining as the global warming threads are. There's even sometimes a meaningful posting on these threads here.
Sad.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On topics like this, it is because they are afraid of lawsuits.
Fleur-de-lit - 1/11/18 10:38pm
Sounds like they just wanted to douse flamewars that were using up company resources. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It's no different than someone creating any other type of provocative political threads on a corporate message board creating a massive distraction for employees and a waste of time for no productive gain.
It seems to me the root of the problem is the fact that companies want to hire based on "merit" but that is contradictory to diversity because external to the company, educational opportunities are not equal and penalize people that to an extent can be connected with their diversity. Since a given corporation doesn't see itself as responsible for the lack of diversity in the surrounding society, it doesn't see that it should be the one to fix the problem. And since the problem is external to individual companies, and it isn't being held to account (and in fact, often made worse by government undermining educational institutions in favor of moneyed interests), the problem isn't getting fixed so people are looking to blame at the result rather than at the cause, because it is the result that individual people actually have to deal with.
How much money did you pay for that brainwashing?
Damore makes a pretty sophomoric error several times, conflating gender and sex
Oh, so then I guess what Google is attempting is not 50/50 split of SEX between males and females, but 50/50 split of Gender. Well that's easy, since Gender is a social construct and is fluid on a spectrum. Just say you have 50/50 and BOOM, diversity achieved.
Oh wait... doesn't that just support the Gender binary ? BIGOT ! BIGOT !
Maybe your education as a "evolutionary biologist" isn't as great as you think it is. I suggest you actually read the memo, rather than reading a Wired story about what a Journalist thinks of the memo he probably didn't even read.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
White people have enslaved other races for centuries and enjoyed the benefits of doing so. Simply removing slavery doesn't magically undo the centuries of subjugation and abuse, white people today are still benefiting from past slavery and there is also the important issue of justice: white people never truly paid for what they did
Assigning collective guilt is one of those bulletproof ways of showing what an asshole you are.
Ezekiel 23:20
the only reason he can sue is because California is a left wing state. The right wing states don't have any protections for political views.
I do wish people would stop dumping on right wingers though. As a left winger I don't find it hard to point out why their beliefs are objectively wrong (I'll spare everyone that in this thread) but looking down on them or worse threatening violence doesn't help. Yes, right wingers are wrong. As the saying goes reality as a well known liberal bias. I think we're much better off letting facts speak for themselves then going off half cocked. We're just feeding into a persecution complex encouraged by right wing propaganda...
All that said, I can understand some of the fear and frustration on the part of the left. We had literal Nazis marching in Charlottesville and a President who called them good people on the sly. We've got guys like Alex Jones engaging in extremely thinly veiled anti semitic rants who pull in millions of subscribers. And let's not forget how many of our closest allies treat women (Saudi Arabia comes to mind). Meanwhile Trump ran on populism but has promised to sign any immigration bill that passes his desk.... Don't forget Bernie called out H1-B abuse but still lost out.
What I'm saying is there's a lot to be scared of if you're on the left and a lot to be scared of if you're just plain a working class American. People react badly to fear. We could use a good, stable leader who genuinely has people's interests at heart to calm it all down. Sadly it looks like the Dems are going to give us more milk-toast right wing blue dogs...
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the goal of these diversity talks is to get more skilled candidates by any means necessary. Tech Businesses are concerned that women and minorities don't enter tech because of a hostile work environment. Having worked in lots of all male tech shops yeah, they're right. There's a lot of casual sexual harassment that turns women off. What we men call 'locker room talk'.
Now, that said their goals are not noble. The point is to have more people to hire from to depress wages. Period. They're not doing this for diversity or SWJism, they're doing it for cheap labor. As always, follow the money.
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The right have controlled America since Clinton took office by moving the Democratic party right to forge the alliance that won him the election. They own the State legislatures, the House, Senate and Presidency. Even Obama was pretty right of center. I think you're mistaking "Seeing a lot of left wing social issues on TV and in movies" with real political power. The only thing the left hasn't lost ground on in the last 30 years is gay rights. Every other issue (Abortion, Gun Control, Healthcare, minimum wage, the Wars, economic regulation, etc) they've been beaten back. Even the ACA was a desperate and lousy compromise and the left giving up on Single Payer once again.
Part of the trouble is when Clinton moved the Democratic party right the Republicans had to follow suit in order to maintain their brand. That's a big part of where the hard right shift came from. It's why you see folks like Roy Moore winning primaries and only losing the election because of a sex scandal (and even then only by 1.5 points).
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It is a problem for your employer. It is not (should not be) a matter for the Attorney General to address.
Yes, it may well be reasonable. Whether it is or not, however, should be up to your employer, not the government.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
we have another employee suing because he felt discriminated-against because of policies designed to increase diversity.
That's exactly backwards.
Damore is suing because he was *FOR* promoting diversity, and was fired for discussing ideas related to that. That's literally the whole basis of his lawsuit.
Any discrimination against him was not because of the policies related to diversity, but because the people did not like his ideas related to promoting diversity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are not paid because you are worth anything as humab beings. You are paid to act as code/design repairing machine who just happen to be human. Do what you are paid and say nothing, these rights are only reserved to others who are superior to you.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
> the only way to be just is to account for the historical oppression that whites have inflicted on people of color.
Who cares about being 'just'?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
No, we'll simply continue to ignore you. It's that easy.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Sane companies manage to comply with the law and provide a safe and welcoming work environment by gently discouraging contentious speech.
If Google had shut down all conversations on gender, race and political affiliation then everybody would be treated equally and company resources wouldn't be getting used to create a work environment hostile to men, white people or conservatives.
So really the treatment of Altheide was the correct approach; they just went wrong by only going half-cocked on it.
Note that it's possible to discuss and promote diversity without creating company wide forums. You just need to be adult about it - something it's clear is a struggle at Google.
you're missing the point. The woman you work with are like that because if they weren't, if they were uncomfortable with locker room talk, they'd leave. That is the conclusion of hiring mangers the world over. It's held up and born out in a lot of research/surveys. Heck, I'd be uncomfortable in that environment (I'm a bit of a Melvin) and I'm a 6' tall 220lb guy.
Furthermore, something we tend to forget (or conscientiously ignore) is that virtually any man is a physical threat to a woman. There's a super creepy scene in Hulu's 'The Handmaid's Tale' that illustrated this.
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white people also enslaved other white people.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So the outcome is YMMV if you're employed at Google. Duh. If one out of five employees is told to stop posting about diversity because it starts flame wars, and another one of five is getting paid a cash bonus when they threaten white male employees with violence, firing, and discrimination if they talk against the status quo about diversity, it still means Google is still promoting and engaging in systematic and illegal discriminatory practices as per the class action lawsuit.
All the AA regulations say/do is that a company has to keep records of it's hiring decisions. At no point in time did AA have quotas. That was a myth. This isn't to say individual institutions might not have done quotas, but it wasn't AA that made them do it. It was a private decision (and also one that, had anyone bothered, could be challenged and ruled illegal. Yes, being a White Male is a protected class).
You're fury is being directed towards Affirmative Action so you'll ignore the real reason why you're not getting ahead: That your productivity no longer keeps pace with your wages.
The point is to divide the working class into castes of some kind. America does it with race. India does it with a literal caste system. Japan used Buddhism to create an underclass deemed 'unclean' and the UK had classes. It's the same pattern over and over and over again. The aristocracy is few but they claim anywhere from 50%-80% of the wealth. You can't do that unless you divide and conquer. Don't fall for it.
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Maybe. This does not contradict my point, however. Which is that the "Social Justice" busybodies have found a way for the government to prosecute people saying disagreeable things — without obviously violating the letter of First Amendment, even if blatantly violating its spirit.
Even if Google, in particular, is a willing participant, and would've been doing the same things without the threat of governmental prosecution, the very existence of the threat is an outrage.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Unfortunately he was brainwashed by the U.S. public education system - so that means that you and I paid for his brainwashing.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Funny how you don't have to talk to most social justice warriors for more than about 5 minutes to see that they're far less interested in achieving anything resembling justice than they are in just plain hurting white men.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
It is, actually - that is, in fact, the definition.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It bothers me that Americans don't understand what the term freedom of speech implies
It bothers me that so many liberals (of all people) don't realize that there's the first amendment, which describes freedom of speech from a legal perspective, and freedom of speech as a general concept, and that the two things can be discussed completely independently.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Actually it's even more than that. The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom from consequences of speech, but freedom of speech as a concept - an ideal rather than a legal concept - is more general than that, and that's probably what the grandparent is referring to. It's disturbing that so many liberals can't comprehend the difference between a social ideal and something enshrined in law - to them, the only way to accomplish anything is to put the government in charge of it.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
They certainly plant those seeds starting early these days, but you have to go to secondary education the get the whole 9 yards. We'll probably end up paying for it when they default on their publicly guaranteed loans.
Black slavers were socialized into acting according to a white system of values
lol. This bit of historical revisionism brought to you by the author of "We Wuz Kangs 'n' Shit".
All the AA regulations say/do is that a company has to keep records of it's hiring decisions. At no point in time did AA have quotas. That was a myth. This isn't to say individual institutions might not have done quotas, but it wasn't AA that made them do it. It was a private decision (and also one that, had anyone bothered, could be challenged and ruled illegal. Yes, being a White Male is a protected class).
This is what is cause "plausible deniability". We didn't TELL them to use quotas, but we would sure as hell have used those statistics against them in any lawsuit that came around. How do you provably show that you do not discriminate against minorities? You show that you hire and promote minorities just like majority. You can't just say, "but...but...we have some black managers and female engineers." The SJWs will immediately turn to the statistics.
The same problem exists when declaring that one is not a racist. Somehow it is a negative to proclaim that you have close associations with minorities. But, how else do you fight back against the claims of racism?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Altheide: Given multiple chances and still had more room to go after being told. Damore: Terminated on the first memo.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
The right own virtually all forms of government in this country. And don't kid yourself, Google is a mega corp. They're not terrible left wing themselves. Not being homophobic does not not make you left wing.
And the media has a strong right wing bias on economic issues. There was never any serious discussion about the wars and they colluded with the Government to avoid showing soldier's caskets coming home. They worked hard to sell the Walstreet bail out and they're working hard to sell Republican tax cuts for the wealthy while ignoring Paul Ryan going around talking about entitlement reform (read: ending SS & Medicare for anyone under 55). The Media is hard right on the economy, and we shouldn't be surprised. Look who owns them.
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That's funny coming from someone whose country most likely abolished slavery many centuries after mine, but whatever floats your boat...
Ezekiel 23:20
this is how you make it possible to enforce anti-discrimination laws. It's necessary when you've got institutionalized racism. E.g. when racism is built into your institutions. Otherwise companies just say "no qualified blacks applied". Companies are actually doing the exact same thing right now with H1-Bs and getting away with it because the law isn't enforced. But in the absence of the paper trail it becomes damn near impossible if you ever do want to enforce it. You can just lie and say the person never applied. Bog the case down indefinitely.
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It's different in Europe.
A comedian (of all the people...) put it correctly in my opinion. Americans deal in terms of contracts with each other. With Europeans it's more in terms of relationships. Americans want to know what they can expect from their partner, they want it defined, they want the borders set and they want to know what's yours and what's mine. You can expect this from me, I will expect that from you, we both know that, we both accept that and that's all there is.
If you try that in Europe, you'll notice that quite a bit of hostility is going to meet you. Yes, even in a business environment. We don't like hard definitions. Everything here is kinda, sorta, maybe and possibly. And a lot remains undefined because both sides enjoy a bit of leeway when it comes to how you treat each other. It's actually pretty amazing that it still works out. We don't have a law concerning freedom of speech. Yet still we somehow have it. And everyone knows just how far they may go. Surprisingly, also everyone not only knows that unwritten law, people also comply with it and they can get VERY upset if you dare to ignore it.
That's really hard to describe. You'd have to experience that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a matter of historical fact, there were very few slaves enslaved by "white races". The vast majority of African slaves that were brought by "white races" were purchased from Arabs and Africans that lived on the coast.
Of course you will never believe that as it does not suit your racist philosophy.
People
only cure their own evils. The US has not made Holocaust denial a
punishable offence - it is somebody else's problem. The US has not made
glorification of the Sati custom a punishable offence - they have other
fish to fry. The US banned slavery, after practising it for centuries -
this has been the demon in the US and they are exorcising it.
Indians and Germans don't get to gloat about the "failure" of the US to
draft certain criminal offences in their Constitution. And vice versa.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I was mostly reacting to the implication that US' future is necessarily my future (that I will be "dragged into kicking and screaming"). Seeing as we happily avoided being pulled into USSR's future a few decades ago, we're not overjoyed at the idea.
Ezekiel 23:20
Race shouldn't be a basis to judge someone's character....complains when conversations based on race favoritism are shut down. Make up your mind, you can't have it both ways. "Diversity" for the sake of diversity is stupid....hire people based on their ability to do their job, not what color their skin is or where they're from.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
White people have enslaved other races for centuries and enjoyed the benefits of doing so. Simply removing slavery doesn't magically undo the centuries of subjugation and abuse, white people today are still benefiting from past slavery and there is also the important issue of justice: white people never truly paid for what they did
Assigning collective guilt is one of those bulletproof ways of showing what an asshole you are.
What is even more hilarious about Anonymous Coward's position is that it takes no account of history overall. Africans were some of the original slave "owners". White people being held in slavery has been a thing for most of, including recent, history; especially in the middle east where white women were in great demand as concubines (still are but the market is not public anymore)... but let's forget about all that and insist that white men must submit to slavery again to "pay" for "their" recent sins... Even though no white man that is alive today had any part of what previous generations have done.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Hiring someone that is a certain race/gender or more specifically that is NOT a specific race or gender to create an artificially diverse population where it wouldn't otherwise exist doesn't prevent racism or sexism it IS racism or sexism. The only way to actually end these things is to forget about "pro-diversity" campaigns altogether and hire/promote solely based on skillset, experience, credentials and on the job performance.
Scientists are starting to push back too. As are skeptics like Micheal Shermer.
I back Google on this one.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.