Hi!
On 04.07.19 11:57, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Adding debian-project back in my reply since this is about a public mail
> I wrote, and a statement by the AH team is not a private conversation.
This looks like you think you're being treated unfairly and want to make
that public. So here goes another public reply to you, even though we're
now completely off-topic, as said in my previous email already.
> On Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 01:01:14AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 07:05:54PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>>>
>>> Some US universities do consider race in admission.
>>> It is called "affirmative action".
>>>
>>> White people need to be better than black people for university admission.
>>> Asian people need to be better than white people for university admission.
>>
>> This kind of statement has *no* place in Debian forums.
>>
>> Regardless of culture or background, it is utterly inappropriate within
>> the Debian community to characterise affirmative action as "black
>> people don't need to be as good as white people" etc.
>
> my understanding of affirmative action in the US is that where it is in
> place some white people get admitted to university, even though asian
> people with the same qualifications are not being admitted.
Note that in the US, a classification of something called "race" [0] has
been introduced with the first census in 1790. It has always been a
political instrument, which originally aimed at giving the Southern
states more seats in the US House of Representatives [1].
In the 1960s, according to Keith Prewett, author of "What Is 'Your'
Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans" [2], the
ethnical statistics of the census suddenly transformed into a tool to
fight discrimination: While knowing the quota of black people in a given
place or region, it looked simple to imagine and introduce quotas for
universities (as an example) to fight that discrimination. Prewett says
that "having a hammer in your hand, every problem looks like a nail" [3].
60 years later, there might be a eed to create "appropriate tools to
fight inequalities" [3], instead of using tools which "bear the risk of
reinforcing the racial divisions they pretend to fight" [3].
Now, back to what you seem to be trying to say. In your argumentation,
you reuse the same categories that you pretend to be denouncing at the
same time (you denounce affirmative action based on the "race" concept
of the US census, but you reuse the terms of that same census without
interrogating them).
Why are you doing this? I have the impression that you keep bringing up
US political issues to stress supposed unsolvable cultural differences
along the lines of good and evil, i.e.making up an imaginary space in
which it's "us" versus "them". But such categories are not sufficient to
describe and understand the world we live in.
> Is there anything or anyone in the Open Source world providing support
> by highlighting cultural differences, and how global Open Source
> projects can handle them best for welcoming global diversity?
I think you are using language and concepts that are not commonly shared
by everyone participating in this thread:
- using the term Open Source in favour of free software is one thing,
- "cultural differences" is a term that sounds good on the outside, but
the way you have been using it in this thread over-emphasizes
differences. This is also called "othering", and creates even more
potential for discrimination. (To be clear: you seem to want to
stretch the differences of an imaginary group of "native English
speakers" versus another imaginary group of "native German speakers",
and you attest both groups a common cultural background which in
itself is highly controversial in all sorts of ways.)
- "global diversity": I don't understand what this is supposed to mean
exactly and I'm not up for doing more guess work.
I'd like to end this "discussion" with a nice reading recommendation, an
RFC for diversity at the IETF: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7704
Cheers!
Ulrike
[0] "something" because the term is unclear, and may refer to national
or tribal origin, skin color, language groups etc. I personally
reject this term in any configuration possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
[2] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10032.html
[3] I'm quoting this from
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2019/07/BREVILLE/60012 in French and
I'm translating this back into English.
