On Positive Discrimination

Last night I got involved in a small debate over Twitter on the topic of racism and sexism in design conferences. The debate was started by a few tweets posted by Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) which said, in essence, that if you are organizing a conference and all of the speakers are men, it is the conference organizer’s moral obligation to get rid of some men and replace them with women JUST because women are a minority. This then caused another twitter user, John O’Nolan (@JohnONolan), to get involved. John sent Mike this message which caused quite a bit of controversy:

Are you retarded? How many black swimmers do you know? How many white 100m sprint runners? How many female fighter pilots?

Many people misunderstood what John was saying here and naturally took it to mean “All black people are shit swimmers, all white people are shit 100m sprint runners and all women are shit fighter pilots”. This is not what John meant at all, what he means is that different people are good at different things (as he clarified later). Not all black people are bad swimmers, but it just so happens that white people are better at, however at the same time, black people are better 100m sprint runners. So should there be a law that in every olympic 100m sprint race there must be at least 1 white runner? Of course not, this would mean that more often than not, 1 black runner who had put in just as much work as the white runner, would not be allowed race despite having a better chance at winning.

I imagine many of you feel that this is not a realistic scenario. Bullshit. Lets go back to the conference scenario, many speakers from around the world will have asked to speak at the conference and many of them didn’t get the job. This being a tech related conference one can assume that there’s a lot more men applying than women, but apparently that’s sexist so lets pretend the number of men and women applying is the same. The reason all men were picked was not because the conference organizer’s decided that they didn’t wanted any women speaking at the conference, the reason was because the men were better. This is not say that there is no such thing as good female speaker you can sure a lot of them out there, but you can be pretty sure that not one of them would be happy to speak just because they are a woman because this is positive discrimination and is every bit as bad as negative discrimination. The thing that shocks me most about positive discrimination is that people don’t have a problem with it! A conference of all women speakers is something that Mike praised as ‘equal’ but this not equality and is the exact same as having a conference of all male speakers! It amazes me that when people think of equality they think of conferences of all black lesbians speakers or even with exactly the same amount of men as women because forced equality is not equality.

If you’re thinking that there are too many men speaking at a conference and that you should replace them with women, you’re being sexist and I think John phrased this perfectly: “Equal rights means just that - EQUAL. Not “favourable” or “better”, but equal”. An ‘equal’ conference is not one that has just as many black people, women, lesbians, gays or any other minority as men speaking at it, it’s one that picks speakers regardless of skin color, sexuality or gender.

Small bit of rebuttal:

So far I’ve only seen 1 actual argument against my opinions other than “you’re sexist just because”. Mike decided pretty early on to resort to non-arguement, by accusing many peoples’ points of being wrong and then refusing to back up any of his accusations, because he’s just so damn sure he’s ‘right’; and retweeting valid arguments for the same reason mentioned before, this was a trick coined by John Gruber during football games and has since become something that people with lots of followers do to show off how big their argue. Anyway the argument against me that I was referring to earlier was from Jeremy Sear (@jeremysear) who argued that positive discrimination was something that would work in the long run and mean that in the future women would be treated equal. I strongly disagree with this. Apart from the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that this would work even in the long run (which basically mean between now and when the world ends), in my opinion it’s just as likely that if we continue to give women and other minorities preference over white men, who seem to be the big bad wolf of world, we’ll end up in a situation where men are discriminated. If I still need to explain why that’s wrong then there’s no point in arguing with me.

Notes

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