All posts filed under: Diversity

The Infantilization of Black America

Published by Tosin Akintola

In contemporary political discourse, black America often seems to be perceived as a monolith. We are expected to think, act, and vote as one, and any attempt to step outside the bounds of our pre-determined spectrum of thoughts can lead to summary excommunication. Our diversity pertains to our race, ethnicity, gender orientation, or sexual preference when set against the rest of the American population, but the diversity of opinions, beliefs, and values found among American blacks is seldom acknowledged. Even though the ‘black community’ in America includes immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as multiracial individuals and descendants of the slave trade, we are often grouped together as one large indistinguishable ideological bloc. Consider the recent criticism heaped on Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. Prescott committed the apparently unpardonable sin of saying that he doesn’t agree with the NFL players who chose to protest police violence by taking a knee during the national anthem. Speaking to reporters, Prescott said: I never protest during the anthem and I don’t think that’s the …

Bill de Blasio’s Plan to Displace Asians In New York’s Top Schools

Published by Daniel Friedman

New York City has eight elite specialized public high schools, which admit students entirely on the basis of their scores on a standardized test called the Specialized High School Aptitude Test (SHSAT). Only the top 5% of New York students qualify for admission to the specialized high schools, and admissions are very competitive, particularly for Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, and Bronx High School for Science. These schools have also become predominantly Asian over the course of the last several decades. Today, Stuyvesant’s student body is 72 percent Asian, about 22 percent white, two percent Latino only about one percent black, even though black and Latino students together comprise about 70 percent of public school students in New York City. In an editorial on the education news site Chalkbeat, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio blasted the racial composition of the specialized high schools as a “monumental injustice,” and proposed eliminating the SHSAT and replacing it with a plan he believes is more fair. De Blasio’s plan to purge Asians The mayor’s …

Diversity and Discrimination in Open Source

Published by Rafael Avila de Espindola

Back in May, I decided to leave the LLVM project, to which I was a contributor. I announced this decision in an open letter to my colleagues, which received some coverage in the technical press at the time, and a number of requests for further comment, which I declined. In what follows, I want to elaborate upon my reasons for leaving and explain what I think is going wrong in open source generally, and at LLVM in particular. First, for those unfamiliar with the tech world, a little background. Software is commonly developed and made available to the public in one of two ways: either proprietary software is developed privately inside a company and sold for a fee, or open source software, as the name implies, is developed in the open for anyone to use and improve. Microsoft’s Office is an example of the former, and the Linux operating system is an example of the latter. Among programmers, there are ongoing discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of both models. I have been attracted to the open …

Shibboleths That Exclude in the Name of Inclusion

Published by Sebastian Cesario

The Bible can be surprisingly relevant to academic politics. The Book of Judges tells of an internecine clash between the people of Gilead and their faithless brethren from the Ephraimite tribe, who had refused to aid Gilead against a foreign foe. Gilead retaliated mercilessly against the Ephraimites, first smashing their army and then setting a clever trap for Ephraimite survivors seeking to return home from the battlefield. Any man caught crossing the Jordan had to utter the word ‘shibboleth.’ In ordinary Hebrew, this referred to a part on a stalk of grain, but at those checkpoints it meant the difference between life and death. In the dialect of Gilead the first consonant was pronounced like the ‘sh’ in ‘shelter,’ whereas in the Ephraimite dialect it was pronounced like the ‘s’ in ‘sinister.’ In this way, a linguistic subtlety became a tool to identify and kill 42,000 enemies. The stakes aren’t as high when universities hire faculty, but rhetorical nuances increasingly do stand watch at the gates of the professorial ranks. Many institutions now require aspiring …

Why Women Don’t Code

Published by Stuart Reges

Ever since Google fired James Damore for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” those of us working in tech have been trying to figure out what we can and cannot say on the subject of diversity. You might imagine that a university would be more open to discussing his ideas, but my experience suggests otherwise. For the last ten months I have been discussing this issue at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering where I work. I have tried to understand why Damore’s opinions generated such anger and have struggled to decide what I want to do in response. As a result of my attempts to discuss this, our mailing list known as ‘diversity-allies’ is now a moderated list to prevent “nuanced, and potentially hurtful, discussion.” Instead, I have been encouraged to participate in face-to-face meetings that have often been tense, but which have helped me to understand where others are coming from. I embarked on this journey because I worry that tech companies and universities are increasingly embracing an imposed silence, …

The RedState Firings and the Decline of Viewpoint Diversity on the Right

Published by Patrick Frey

“If you’re a Republican, that means you’re for free speech.” I used to believe this. I’m not sure I do any more. In late April, several members of the site RedState, including me, were fired en masse in a single day. It was not for poor performance; among those dismissed were some of the top page view earners, and none had published a post that had embarrassed the site in some high-profile way. We had one thing in common, and one thing only: we were all fierce and highly vocal critics of Donald Trump. It later emerged that the RedState firings were part of a larger effort by the site’s owner Salem Media Group to clamp down on criticism of Trump. CNN recently reported that Salem, which is also the largest broadcaster of conservative talk radio in the United States, had complained to some of its conservative talk show hosts during the campaign about the anti-Trump tone of some of their shows. In July 2016, a Salem executive wrote to hosts Ben Shapiro and Elisha Krauss: …

Should the New York Times Hire a Radical?

Published by Nicholas Phillips

If you find yourself in a room full of politically minded people and want to get everyone shouting quickly, start talking about the state of prestige-media opinion writing. Progressives and conservatives are both sure that their team is being systematically excluded from the op-ed pages of gatekeeper institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. Each side thinks the other is grossly over-represented. They can’t both be right—so who is? Lately, a new argument has emerged from the progressive side of this debate: if these publications want political diversity, they should get it by hiring opinion writers from the far-Left, not the Right. The far-Left’s story goes like this: after the Trump election, men like New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg concluded that coastal media elites lived in an echo-chamber that blinded them to the views of many Americans. Seeking to correct this, they hired conservative opinion writers like Bret Stephens and Kevin Williamson—despite the fact that these Never Trumpers don’t actually represent the views …

The Importance of Cultural Nationalism in an Era of Distrust

Published by Alexander Zubatov

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” ~Mark 12:31 “My brother before my cousin. My cousin before my neighbor. My neighbor before my countryman. My countryman before a foreigner.” ~Arabic proverb We are living in an epoch of escalating distrust. Whether within nations, international unions of nations, or trade deals, we are growing increasingly suspicious that others are free-riding and not holding up their end of reciprocal bargains. Germany thinks the economic laggards within the E.U. ought to step up. Some E.U. nations, meanwhile, think Germany is using its control over the union to keep prices in developing markets artificially inflated so that German exports will not be at a competitive disadvantage. Trump is tired of our NATO partners not pulling their weight. All over the first world, concern is growing that immigrants are not truly committed—or constitute an outright threat—to the nation-states that host them, and are either leeching away jobs or state benefits. Muslims suspect the West of imperialist aggression while the West suspects Muslims of being potential jihadists in-waiting. Distrust between rich …

Is There Room in Diversity For White People?

Published by Steve Salerno

It’s tempting to snicker at snowflake culture, with its noisy campus gauntlet of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and in-your-face privilege-checking—but transpiring quietly off-stage at academia’s administrative levels is a far more sinister phenomenon undertaken in the name of one of society’s more theoretically desirable goals: diversity. Here a disclaimer seems in order. Regardless of political affiliation, fair-minded observers will concede that educational facilities for minorities have remained decidedly separate, and in no way equal, in the several generations since 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. Such inequities naturally show up in college enrollment and performance: minority students who are products of inferior grade-school systems find it harder to negotiate the realm of higher education, in terms of both gaining entry and keeping up once they’re there. Accordingly, colleges have implemented various programs and protocols designed to boost campus diversity and help at-risk students feel more at home. Now, reasonable people can differ about whether academia, as the ancestral home of white guilt, has been overzealous at micromanaging outcomes. Significant race-based preferences remain widespread, and lawsuits continue to be filed …

The Cultural Diversity Case for Free Speech

Published by Geoffrey Miller

American campus speech codes and informal speech norms discriminate against foreign students and faculty, and that’s an important but neglected reason why they should be challenged. Speech codes often claim to protect ‘cultural diversity’ on campuses, but they often do the reverse. They impose narrow American norms of political correctness on foreign grad students, post-docs, and faculty who can’t realistically understand what Americans will find offensive. From neurodiversity to cultural diversity In an article for Quillette last year, I argued that campus speech codes discriminate against ‘neurodivergent’ people who have Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, PTSD, ADHD, or other conditions. These disorders make it hard to understand and follow speech codes that prohibit saying or doing anything that others might find offensive. In a follow-up article, I outlined how neurodivergent people could use the Americans with Disabilities Act to challenge such discriminatory speech codes. These neurodivergent conditions are all heritable, and they make people’s brains different from the ‘neurotypical’ average brain, so they could be called ‘genetic neurodiversity’. But beyond genetic neurodiversity, there’s ‘cultural neurodiversity’: different …