this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Yes, of course many people are virtue signaling. But measuring true diversity of opinion and experience is difficult and time consuming, so people use race and sex as a proxy because it often does lead to diversity of opinion and experience.
Red lights don't reflect the true state of an intersection, but when the light is red it is a bad idea to drive. Similarly, a group of men and women of several races may have all been raised in the same neighborhood, but it's unlikely.
In other words, 'true diversity takes more work to ascertain, so let's use racist/sexist/etc. stereotypes as a half-assed shortcut that perpetuates those stereotypes as a nice little toxic side effect'.
Yeah, that's not okay.
I don't know if you realize just how horrid this analogy is. A red light is a feature that is deliberately designed to signify the state of the intersection, it exists explicitly for this purpose. To think of things like race and sex in this way is actually grotesque.
I disagree both with your characterization of my position as well as your assertion that it is "grotesque".
Skin color and sex can be used as indicators for hidden, hard to ascertain traits. It may be racist to assume that the indicator perfectly predicts those traits, or that skin color and sex predict hidden traits when they do not, or to assume that sex and race cause the traits to occur when they don't. But it's not racist or sexist to make assumptions based on race or sex if there is a real correlation.
Sickle cell anemia is much more prevalent in blacks than in whites. It's not racist to suggest that blacks should be tested at higher rates than other communities.
Women experience more sexual assault than men do, and the vast majority of the perpetrators are men. It's not sexist to assume that a woman who is assaulted was likely assaulted by a man.
If we created some sort of viral genetically engineered cure for SCD tomorrow, race would stop being a predictor of that particular trait. If we found a way to bring male sexual assault down to the same rate as female sexual assault, continuing to assume the sex of a predator would be incorrect.
And obviously, in legal or scientific contexts, we need hard evidence of the underlying traits themselves rather than assumptions based on sex or race.
Assumptions of this sort can be racist or sexist when the person making them is motivated to come to a particular conclusion, but making assumptions is not inherently bigoted.
In the original scenario, the assumption is that a group of people of various sexes and races have had different life experiences. There are relatively few downsides to this assumption. If you're wrong, then you've mistakenly formed a group that is slightly less "diverse" than you hoped for. The upside is that you don't need a full biography from everyone involved in the group in order to promote diversity of experience and opinions.
To be clear, I find most manufactured diversity to be asinine, and I think that it can certainly be taken too far. That doesn't mean that the actual assumption is incorrect.