It’s always the same when discussing the challenges of any minority group. “You couldn’t POSSIBLY understand what it’s like to be black/asian/indian/a woman/gay/poor/etc…” Yeah, I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what that’s like. Duh. I don’t claim to. I still understand that the world is filled with prejudice and I know it sucks being held back in society because of the way you were born. Even a “default” like myself can be the victim of prejudice.

Ever try to use a bathroom somewhere if you’re not a customer? You see a girl (especially an attractive one) ask and she’ll be shown the way. I ask and I get shown the door… unless I want to buy something. Isn’t that a bit sexist?

Ever been followed by a store employee who thinks you’re going to shoplift? It’s amusing. You should mess with them if you get a chance. It’s fun. Still, it’s prejudice. I look suspicious because I’m young male.

To a cop a young male like me is always up to something. They like to point their lights in my eyes and ask what “the fuck” I’m doing. They love to give me shit. Cops love to give EVERYONE shit. I imagine a whiteboy like me gets the best of it, though.

I’m not good (but not that bad) looking. Large nose. Big ears. Circles under my eyes. I’m over it, but do you know how little respect that gets me? I’m sure you can imagine because almost everyone is guilty of treating people differently based on their looks. I have done it too, it’s human. It’s prejudice.

I get some racism too. I get the typical antisemitism, of course. Nothing new there. I also have gotten racist remarks intended for Indians/Arabs/Muslims/Sikhs/other-brown-people. Many racists don’t (or can’t) distinguish between those groups. I look vaguely Arabic with my beard and I have a tan. That’s enough to get a “towelhead”. At least it’s nice to be considered somewhat exotic for once.

So, I may not know firsthand what prejudices YOU have to deal with, but everyone has to deal with SOME kind of prejudice in their lives, even us “defaults”. That’s life. The ones I deal with are much better than the ones “non-defaults” have, but at least I have an idea what it feels like. It’s called empathy and almost everyone is capable of it.

Ignorance is what causes us to act on our prejudice and make bad or hurtful decisions about people or things.

Awareness of our prejudice lets us decide whether that prejudice is right or wrong.

Everyone has prejudice but if you step back and take a second thought, you may find your prejudice to be wrong.

Bigotry is when you do it on purpose and systematically.. I don’t think that happened here!!

I guess to me it just feels like there’s a suggestion of a diversity “quota” that must be met, and if it isn’t, well, that just looks bad, no matter what the rest of the item, article or what have you in question may be. Like somehow the lack of diversity invalidates any other accomplishments. I particularly dislike the assumption that if you, just trying to achieve your one goal, happen to NOT be diverse, clearly you’ve discriminated, like you’ve committed some crime when all you were doing was trying to achieve your stated goal and race wasn’t even on your mind. This is very poorly stated, and i’m sorry about that, I’m just having a hard time putting into words why I find this whole “unconcious racism” thing so extremely disturbing.

While I certainly agree diversity is good and should be striven for, bandying about terms like “unconcious racism” or “unconcious discrimination” just feels like its drawing judgement on people who’s focus was just elsewhere at the time. Unless we’re all supposed to think of nothing but diversity, all the time.

Argh. This still doesn’t fully represent how I feel about it, but its so hard to put into words.

I congratulate you on this post. It is important to keep in mind the different ways in which people are gendered in terms of race, class, and sexuality.

All human animals react to and distinguish the “other” as something different, lesser, and something to be somewhat wary of.

Presuming you discount all of those people who’s natural reaction to the “other” is “oh my god, that’s so cool!”

It’s impossible to say which of these situations occurred.

As much as I’d like to think we’ll be finished with overt prejudice in one lifetime, I’m not betting the farm on it.

Also, I am shocked to learn Post Cereals makes Quaker Oats. [Though I may be reading that wrong.]

Surely one of the best ways to get different perspectives is to seek people of different backgrounds, not simply people with different skin colour.
Skin colour does not equate to culture or background.

“Case in point: That post on women in science, itself. Several hours after I hit “publish”, I realized that I’d managed to put together a panel on diversity made up of nothing but white people.”

Sluisifer got there first. Dr. Isis is Latina.

Please, though, don’t go on to write another self-excoriation on how you made the mistake of assuming an intelligent woman was Caucasian because you view the world through eyes of privilege and can’t imagine that any articulate, well-spoken individual could possibly be of hispanic origins.

Sometimes mistakes are simply honest mistakes, not evidence of shortsightedness in oneself.

And from my LGBT perspective I am aware sometimes the ‘diversity’ card is played as a sort ot unintentional or intentional distraction/division strategy – as opponents know it can just take everyone off into a liberal self-guilt cul-de-sac.

As long as the furtherment of all women is your goal, then I see no problem, as long as you are open and inclusive where you can be – you can’t win em all for all groups, but you can listen and face up to your own biases and comfort zones.

We all do this to some extent – see someone and believe that we know facts about them simply drawn from some sort of category. The guy with the beard and the tie-dye shirt is probably a vegan, right? That slightly overweight girl with the tats and the piercings was probably molested by her uncle. The lady in the mall with the tiny dog and the designer shades is a spoiled b*tch. It’s a gut response based on prejudices formed over a lifetime of unique experiences, and it happens whether you want it to or not. The difference is how you process this “information” – whether you swallow it whole as gospel truth, or whether you question your initial instinctive response and seek to clarify it or dismiss it. I hate to say this, but I don’t think a huge percentage of people ever really question this kind of thinking. But that’s my own prejudice.

I am just as guilty of it as anyone. Does that make me *feel* guilty? Maybe, sometimes. But most of the time it just makes me feel like trying to be more aware of how I act around people who are different than what I am used to. It makes me analyze my reactions and second-guess my impulses. That may get me eaten by a saber-toothed cat someday, but I’ll take my chances. We’re not talking about sin here. We’re just talking about honest self-appraisal and rising above our instincts a little.

(Outside the actual town of LaPorte but in the county, right?)

Please imagine the world after it was proven that women performed, on average, worse in a certain field…

Sports, anybody? So what? Pick any woman at random, and she will kick any man’s ass in any sport. With a certain probability. So to heighten my chances in a bet, i would always bet on the man, if nothing else is known about the contestants. If the only thing i know is both have the same leg length, muscle mass, and cardiac volume, i’d go for the one with the higher testosterone levels.

What i want to say is this: The observation that in a complex interaction of variables, one variable is unevenly distributed does say jack shit about anything. For years, women were attributed with better touch-sense – turns out it was due to them being smaller, on average, thereby scattering their sensory cells (same number as men, on average) over a smaller surface, giving them better resolution. Men have, on average, the same touch-sense resolution as women, if size is accounted for.

Plotting the distribution of people along the length of a few busses, we discover that skin color correlates strongly with seating. May be we are looking at 1950′s USA’s public busses, coloured people being banned from the front of the bus, may be we are in 2010′S Thailand’s tourist busses, white and black tourists mingling in the back being driven around by a Thai in the front, may be somewhere else entirely, no telling by the correlation.
If you are checking for discrimination, do not go by correlation – Why should it be that any field is distributed equally between every possible variable? I recently read an article about a male german Kindergarten teacher. Less than 1% of german Kindergarten teachers are male. Many german job titles are either sexless, or male, being applied to females by adding the suffix ‘-in’. Kindergärtnerin is the only instance where the suffixed word is the norm. No discrimination going on, just plain statistical variance.

Imagine a world where higher socioeconomic status of the parents reflects on the offspring’s success in the natural sciences – or even in life at large – Seems unfair? It is. Yet it is not a sign of discrimination by individuals, but a sign of dicrimination by the system.

To go further, why is it that we pay the maximally (for her abilities) qualified IQ120 engineer working 50h a week better than the maximally (for her abilities) qualified IQ80 assembly liner working 50h a week?

Why is it, that the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of sports is never challenged with vigour?

During Obama’s campaign, a man tells his son, very excitedly, that this is a very important moment because a black man may be elected president. The son replies, “Oh. And why is that important?”

And that reply was not because the young man was a budding racist, it was truly because he didn’t see the difference between a white man being elected and a black man being elected.

I actually have a similar story about my own childhood. I was probably 7 or 8 years old, and I wasn’t very into politics at this time, but my parents were discussing Colin Powell’s possible campaign for president (which happened in ’96 according to Wikipedia). They were also pretty excited about his being black and having a shot at presidency.

I asked, what is the big deal about him being black and president? My parents then informed me that no black person had ever been president before. I said, “Really? Are you sure?” and they said yes. I honestly didn’t believe them, so I went to the encyclopedia (this was before internet) to double-check. And yeah, they were right.

This is the way your kids are being raised, people. Yes, we all swelled with pride when Obama was elected, but in 10 or 20 years, being black will be no big deal. Being proud of being black will go out of style, just like how it’s a big no-no to be proud of being white.

In fact, the irony in all this (in relation to this article) is the progress of women in general has fallen behind black progress. I mean, no woman has ever been president. Black men, white men, they’re all men. And if the next Ms. President is black, white, yellow, brown– who cares? Color doesn’t matter anymore, or won’t in the near future. I have high hopes that gender will no longer matter, either.

Of course, the alternative is to take children away from their parents at infancy, to be raised in state-run child care facilities with equal opportunity for all. And since parents would have no one to pass on their property to after death, everything would revert to the state (or the parents could bequeath their property to NGOs). Such a system would probably cripple the biological imperative for procreation along with much of the economic incentive for work, since there is no “profit” in having children. And even in this system designed to completely divorce the economic status of parents from the opportunities available to the children, there are the systemic risks of corruption at various levels, discrimination by the child-raisging workers, and mandated “opportunities” for the children that designed to address the needs of the state rather than the needs of the child. All in all, I prefer a bit more free enterprise and ability to pass resources through the generations.

On the other hand, there’s no reason we can’t use the tax code and public education facilities to help balance the playing field as much as possible without removing the procreation and profit incentives.

“Diversity” for the sake of diversity is just as pernicious as intentional discrimination. It says to the person “I’m only including you because I need a token, not because you deserve it on merit.

The true test of enlightenment is when you can look past the color of someone’s skin without purposely excluding OR including. Don’t beat yourself up.

So anyway, I loved your post when you put it up last week, and I also love this post. Pretty much everyone has some discriminatory acts, but what we need to do is TALK about it, not sweep things under the rug and consider discrimination “the way things just are” or “ought to be.”

There’s also this: sometimes people don’t think about color. Like, at all. If you lined up three women in front of me, one white, one black, one asian, and you asked me what I saw, I would say I see three women. Because I really do just see three women. And that’s probably what happened to you. Nothing to be embarrassed about.

I don’t want to live in a “post-” world where only duly authorized representatives are legitimate voices of their particular niche injustice.

I don’t buy into this balkanization of humanity.

I’m not saying that you can’t go out of your way to see if you can find a/some female non-white person to discuss the scientist issue. It is important that you do. But let’s not get to the point where we *can’t* have a man’s opinion on the challenges faces women in science – especially if it’s solely because he’s a man.