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IBM Apologizes For Racial Slurs On Its Recruitment Webpages (theregister.co.uk)
The Register: IBM has apologized after its recruitment webpages asked applicants whether their ethnicity was, among other options, the racial slurs Yellow and Mulatto. In online application forms for positions within the US tech giant, in among other questions ranging from military veteran status, and eligibility to work in America, a bizarre drop-down menu asked whether jobseekers were Caucasian, Black, or Indigenous, as well as the aforementioned insults. The Register was first alerted to the baffling error on Monday by an engineer who tried to apply for a technical role at IBM earlier this month, and was stunned by the slurs listed for a mandatory input field labeled: "Please state your ethnic group."
Well what else would Homer Simpson be?
I used that term with a friend of mine who is mixed-race. He told me it was offensive and that it was an Italian slur that referred to a coffee drink where milk and coffee were mixed together. He said that it's not offensive because of it's content, it's because of the way people used it in the past. However, then I looked it up and it's actually a Spanish or Portuguese word with "uncertain" origins. I basically look at it like this, you shouldn't call people things they don't like. I have an unusual name and when people butcher it or alter it, I get annoyed in a hurry (mainly because it's easy to pronounce and they do it on purpose). I can imagine that a racially charged term that someone is used to being flung at them by hostile racist assholes is that much worse. However, I was glad that my friend simply explained it to me and I was able to say "Oh, well I won't be using that again, then." That's a much more pleasant method for race relations than the kind of crap the mainstream media tries to propagate. I wonder if they'd like a race war, just to improve ratings!
I'm from Europe, not from Armenia, Georgia or Azerbaijan
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I'm guessing this happened because the requirements only said to ask for ethnicity but failed to include the list. The developer went and found an obviously wrong list to force testing/acceptance to return a proper list. They all failed.
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Per Google search, using the search phrase, "etymology of mulatto":
so it was from Spanish, and does have to do with mules.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
This is what happens when you go to India of the Phillipines for your web development project and yell "okay, who's going to do this for the cheapest?" Tada, "localization problems" to put it politely.
So this was another side-effect of out-sourcing... gotcha.
#DeleteChrome
Why is "ethnicity" a mandatory field? Actually, given anti-discrimination laws, why is it not a "do not say anything about ethnicity, religion or sex on this or any other form" popup?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'm sorry you were triggered. Here, show me on this doll where the leftists touched you.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yeah, the answer to what happened is right there in the article, the page was created by or for Brazilians, where ethnicity = skin colour. The category "yellow" is a direct translation of amarelo, which is how Asians describe themselves in Brazil. So it's something that's the norm in Brazil where the page/code presumably came from, but less so in translation into English.