HUMAN 1
Not all diversity is good diversity.
It’s like you heard someone say, ‘This smoothie is a mix of powdered glass and fruit’ and you felt the need to say, ‘Not all fruit is fresh fruit’.
HUMAN 1
Actually, that’s not what I meant.What I meant was hiring somebody from Saudi Arabia, praising yourself on diversity, then finding out they hate women and LGBT people.
Not all diversity is good diversity — there are plenty of people who come from diverse backgrounds who are bigoted as all hell.
As contemporary events seem to make more apparent by the hour, I don’t think one needs to scour as remote a place as Riyadh to find examples of those things.
The pews of rural Iowa and suburban Houston often underwhelm in their diversity though remaining overblessed in their capacity for hatred of vulnerable groups.
If I say some ‘diversity is bad because it may contain religious bigots’, and to make that meaningful I use it as an excuse to oppose diversity, it’s more likely I’m upset with the diversity or foreignness of them than the bigotry they may share with domestic homogeneous folk.HUMAN 1
David, for me, as a transgender woman, I have a lot to fear from people who come from places where people like me are murdered in broad daylight to the attention and care of not a single passerby.
I have absolutely experienced discriminatory behavior from Middle Eastern men, for instance, that absolutely makes me fear for my safety while around them, and if I’m working with them.
Just because somebody has a diverse background, does not in any way mean they can’t turn out to be hateful fucks towards me. I mean, I’ve been coding professionally for well over a decade, and I just simply don’t have time to waste telling some ignorant fuck new to this shit that I’m going to be coding circles around them until they catch tf up to me, and that maybe they should see me as the teacher not the “fucking tranny I’m forced to work with.”
Not all diversity is good diversity. Just because somebody is a minority in no ways means they won’t treat other minorities like fucking shit, just like the rest of bigoted society does.
HUMAN 2
Not to invalidate your experiences, which are indeed horrific, but generalizing ethnic groups of people as discriminatory, hateful, or otherwise “bad diversity,” is pretty xenophobic. You’re denigrating one form of bigotry with another form of bigotry. Transphobia is fucking awful, but so is Islamophobia, Orientalism, etc. We can criticize all forms of bigotry without perpetuating harmful stereotypes against other marginalized folks.
As H2 said and it seems like you’re saying, prejudices flow downhill to people more vulnerable in society. And that’s true even when the behavior or attitudes we’re criticizing are deplorable.
There’s nothing wrong with me criticizing banking practices or Wall Street, but if I become fixated on a particular ethnic group or criticize how those ‘damn bankers are always out to make a shekel’, clearly I’ve let underlying biases veer me into something more than a fair-minded critique.
In U.S. society at least, the problem is tech or business culture in general that regards transphobia to be acceptable or at least something not worthy of serious punishment. The immigrants don’t define power structures beyond their own communities until they’re no longer minorities.
A co-worker who sincerely believes women shouldn’t be allowed out of the home or disapproves of fornication — they aren’t a problem, regardless of whether they’re Baptist, Baathist, or Buddhist, so long as they can’t safely express this publicly or act on it.
Absolutely, being an LGBTQ person in a conservative Muslim family can be terrifying.
But when outside of that group, what’s terrifying is Christian conservative politicians blocking sexual orientation and gender identity from being protected classes against discrimination or hate crimes, and it’s homegrown tech bro douchebags who create hostile work environments on the idea that people just need to ‘deal with conflict’.
Because they’re the ones with the power to do that, and they’re not a particularly diverse group at present.
ADJ 