Matt Donnelly's Tumblog

Circular Arguments on Discrimination

I’ve spent the past hour defending myself from people who you would swear I had insulted. While I was perfectly happy to have a civilized argument over the whole discrimination thing, nearly every person opposing me has chosen to resort to bitter name-calling, snide remarks and the Gruber Retweet move I mentioned in the previous post. However, among the few people I have had proper discussions with, this circular argument has come up time and time again. I thought I had addressed this in my previous post but either I wasn’t clear enough or they didn’t bother reading it.

Anyway, this argument usually begins with something along the lines of “but they weren’t choosing between a black lesbian, who knows nothing about design; and a bunch of white guys with years of experience. They’re choosing between men and women”. Of course this is not the case! Of course they can choose anyone in the world, man or woman! But in this instance they have chosen male speakers only, more specifically white male speakers which people have an even bigger problem with. And what people have chosen to interpret this as is that they have chosen men because they are not women, which is false. The men have been chosen because they were the best speakers they found first, not because the conference organizers are involved in some sexist/racist government conspiracy or because they have political agenda.

The response I get to this every time is “they’re just being lazy”. No they’re not! If they need to find 10 speakers and they immediately see 10 great white male speakers standing right outside, the conference organizers are going to choose them if they are in any way rational! If they chose instead to only take 8 of them, leaving 2 perfectly good speakers there and tried to find 2 women to replace them, who could by all means be better or worse, they would be is positively discriminating, regardless of whether you think it is a bad thing or a good thing. They are not trying to find the very best speakers in the entire world (which would imply that they think men are better than women), they are trying to find some excellent speakers as quickly as possible, which a woman has just as big a chance of being part of.

At this stage I’ve explain this so many times that I feel like a broken record and if you still want to argue: I’m not interested, the only response you’ll get from me is that we have different opinions so I don’t want to discuss it further. However, while it’s true that I have received a lot of abuse today, I’ve also received some tremendous support, so I’d like to sincerely thank anyone that has, it means a lot.

Edit: Received a message on Twitter from Nate Abele (@nateabele) which sums up everything I was trying to say just perfectly: “Either race and gender are factors or they aren’t. You can’t have it both ways.”