I will answer as briefly as I can so please double click on anything you would like me to respond to in more detail. And I think the value of me responding here is to let others know better how I feel and the mechanisms at work in making me feel alienated from EA.
Is Heightism even a thing?
2 responses:
One can assume that a person of shorter stature has heard comments on their height many times before. And I think few such people find it flattering. I am interested here in describing my emotions and how EA differs from other spaces I am used to navigate, thus leading to my feeling of not belonging.
Height does correlate with race, so in that sense, it can cause emotional “spillover” or something like that.
Did you in fact go ask this person for water as your friend suggested? If so, how did this person respond? Did they threaten you with the shotgun, or give you water, or what?
Yes I went, as I judged that my friend was likely to be correct and I did not want to sleep in the bush (we did not have money to be towed). Nope, it went just fine when I went there. In fact, they were super friendly. Again, I do not trust my memory here 100% but if this is a crux for people in understanding my general feeling of being alienated from EA (which I do not suspect) I can see if I can confirm the story with my friends. And on the larger point about whether such fears are justified—I do not think that matters much for actions EAs can take. This is because we have 2 choices:
Work to convince all potential POC/women candidates for EA that their concerns about racism/sexism/etc. are unjustified. After we have convinced them they are not, they will naturally help increase diversity in EA.
Assume that their feelings are true and tell them this, maybe even believing it ourselves. Then act accordingly to make them feel at home in EA.
I have never seen option 1 successfully implemented, I think for obvious reasons. The reason to not go with either option would be because one does not think we need more diversity. That said, having too much complaints about diversity likely works against any work to increase diversity, see my other comment here on 3 options for EA “leadership”.
On the “airplane incident”: You might be right. But I both think “whiteness is true” and am embedded in a social circle that is super diverse. So if I have to choose between stopping to see the world through a racial/gender/LGBTQ+/etc. lens or stop being an EA, I will always, always chose the latter. Seeing the world through such a lens, or seeing it as much as I can from the vantage point of the people I love, is critical to my closeness to them. I really like who I am and the people I love. I would like to be an EA too, but that comes second.
Your second last paragraph: I think I answered this already. If I were to do this, which I also think is a less true view of the world, I would not be close to my loved ones, potentially even losing them. Not an option. And I do apologize for the unpolished/offensive nature of the post—I think I could have re-worded it much better but was encouraged to publish it unpolished. I really do not want people to feel like I am ascribing agendas to people—that was the whole point of the airplane incident—I know one can be totally “woke” and still have feelings that can result in behavior that other perceive to be racist/sexist etc. And I am largely uninterested in people’s intentions. The sole point of this post was to give an anecdote/some more detail on why a person might feel alienated in EA—the idea was that this might be helpful for EAs to take action and to bridge understanding. But it is a minefield because we so quickly start playing “the victim” instead of engaging in solving the issue. And my wording and tone might have contributed to this victim competition and that is not my intention. I would rather like to see EA being the victim if I left—I am very happy with my non-EA life. I guess if it is down to wording, tone and so on in my post I just cowardly seek draft amnesty!
Actually there were some instances of jerkiness/conflict at that workplace too. Actually someone there did comment on someone’s height difference. And another incident I remember is one where someone was allergic to perfume and someone wore thick perfume in the office. So not utopia but the feeling I got was in general one of belonging a lot more. And I think other EAs who feel alienated in the same way I do also have been in other spaces where they felt much more at home. And I am sure this is studied well—there is a large body of research and lots of work on implementing best practices in DEI. But this is easy to find by asking GPT/Googling.
Just let me know if I missed anything. Just keep in mind that I am really not interested in talking about politics. This for me is deeply personal and I only mean to describe why I care and I think attempts at convincing me, or the people close to me to feel differently is just likely to increase the feeling of not belonging. The best first step if one is trying to convince someone of something after they are hurt, is to acknowledge their feelings, maybe with a scout mindset. Of course you could play that ball back to me, saying it is my who do not understand and we can play ball like that and that is likely why maybe the best option is just for “leadership” to take a stance so that at least someone feel like they belong. But I do not want to advocate too hard for this—I am largely a lay person in these matters. And I would ideally like women/POC EAs to guide any actions I take and to let me know what I should endorse or not.
(I am the same TJ that wrote the original comment. I wasn’t able to log back into the original account so I created a new one.)
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “whiteness is true”. I feel like you just told me “happiness is true”. It just doesn’t parse. Happiness and whiteness are adjectives, they don’t have truth values on their own. If you tell me that a particular person is happy or white, then it becomes a claim about the world that is true or false.
That said, we probably do have some kind of genuine disagreement about how common racism/sexism is in EA or the world or something, and that is maybe cruxy? But you don’t seem to want to talk about that. You seem to want to talk only about your feelings, and that comes off as very not helpful. EA isn’t about making EAs feel good. Traditional approaches to charity before EA were about making donors feel good. EA’s big innovation was to focus on the effects on non-EA beneficiaries, not the feelings of its own members.
You seem to think there is a trilema where we either (1) want more diversity, and try to convince minorities that we are not racist/sexist, (2) want more diversity, and try to convince minorities that we are working to fix our racism/sexism, or (3) want fewer minorities. You further seem to think that 1 vs 2 should be evaluated as a choice based on what will actually cause more diversity. I think this is incorrect. How much racism/sexism there is in EA is a factual question, and nobody chooses their beliefs about factual questions. As I said, I think we may genuinely disagree about this one. But a person who believes there is not much racism/sexism yet chooses option 2 is being dishonest, they are trying to deceive minorities, and that does not seem like a good way to treat anyone. Similarly for a person who believes there is a lot of racism/sexism and chooses option 1. So if it is down to 1 vs 2, then that must be evaluated based on what is actually true about EA, not based on what we expect the effects to be.
As for 3, I don’t think anyone actively wants fewer minorities or women in EA. I have never once heard anyone say “there are too many PoCs in EA” or “there are too many women in EA” or anything remotely like that. That is just not part of the discourse. Nobody is complaining about diversity. Instead, I think what you are mistaking for that, is an option 4, which is to not concern ourselves too much with the racial or gender makeup of EA, and instead concern ourselves with the actual purpose of EA, to do the most good with the hours and dollars that we set aside for charity, and to work with the people who can best help us do that, whatever their races or genders, and whatever racial or gender makeup comes about as a result. In my view, this option 4 is obviously the correct course. Human history is littered with examples of people overly concerned with the races and sexes of those around them, pretty much always with unpleasant results. We should learn from that history and not repeat it.
I’m certainly not trying to separate you from your loved ones. EA isn’t a cult. Loving someone doesn’t always mean indulging their feelings or agreeing with their beliefs or trying to fix what they think is a problem. Sometimes it does, but not always. Loving someone means making a point of interacting with them in a way that makes them stronger. What makes them stronger may be highy personal and highly context dependent. But acting with the purpose of making someone else stronger is the essence of love. If a person incorrectly believes that they are being mistreated on account of their race or sex, then indulging that belief will generally make them weaker. That kind of belief both feels unpleasant and creates a self-fulfilling narative where the person has less control and agency. That is costly! And it is a much more costly error than incorrectly believing that they are not being mistreated on account of their race or sex, so where there is ambiguity, it is best to assume we are not being mistreated on account of race or sex.
You seem to believe that all of your PoC/women friends feel unwelcome in EA because of their race or sex, feel that they are discriminated against or something. I don’t know your friends, so I don’t know if this is true of them or not. I do remember a time in my life when I assumed that all my women and racial minority friends saw the world and their social interactions in terms of race and sex, and I was wrong about that. There are lots of minorities out there who don’t feel like the world is against them because of their minority status, who just try to get on with whatever it is they do with their lives, and they are generally better off for it.
I was wondering if our continued conversation would be better as a new post using the conversation format if that’s still in use? That said,I only want to do that if people find it helpful—I got pretty down voted including by people of the marginalized groups that I feel “bad because of”.
I will answer as briefly as I can so please double click on anything you would like me to respond to in more detail. And I think the value of me responding here is to let others know better how I feel and the mechanisms at work in making me feel alienated from EA.
2 responses:
One can assume that a person of shorter stature has heard comments on their height many times before. And I think few such people find it flattering. I am interested here in describing my emotions and how EA differs from other spaces I am used to navigate, thus leading to my feeling of not belonging.
Height does correlate with race, so in that sense, it can cause emotional “spillover” or something like that.
Yes I went, as I judged that my friend was likely to be correct and I did not want to sleep in the bush (we did not have money to be towed). Nope, it went just fine when I went there. In fact, they were super friendly. Again, I do not trust my memory here 100% but if this is a crux for people in understanding my general feeling of being alienated from EA (which I do not suspect) I can see if I can confirm the story with my friends. And on the larger point about whether such fears are justified—I do not think that matters much for actions EAs can take. This is because we have 2 choices:
Work to convince all potential POC/women candidates for EA that their concerns about racism/sexism/etc. are unjustified. After we have convinced them they are not, they will naturally help increase diversity in EA.
Assume that their feelings are true and tell them this, maybe even believing it ourselves. Then act accordingly to make them feel at home in EA.
I have never seen option 1 successfully implemented, I think for obvious reasons. The reason to not go with either option would be because one does not think we need more diversity. That said, having too much complaints about diversity likely works against any work to increase diversity, see my other comment here on 3 options for EA “leadership”.
On the “airplane incident”: You might be right. But I both think “whiteness is true” and am embedded in a social circle that is super diverse. So if I have to choose between stopping to see the world through a racial/gender/LGBTQ+/etc. lens or stop being an EA, I will always, always chose the latter. Seeing the world through such a lens, or seeing it as much as I can from the vantage point of the people I love, is critical to my closeness to them. I really like who I am and the people I love. I would like to be an EA too, but that comes second.
Your second last paragraph: I think I answered this already. If I were to do this, which I also think is a less true view of the world, I would not be close to my loved ones, potentially even losing them. Not an option. And I do apologize for the unpolished/offensive nature of the post—I think I could have re-worded it much better but was encouraged to publish it unpolished. I really do not want people to feel like I am ascribing agendas to people—that was the whole point of the airplane incident—I know one can be totally “woke” and still have feelings that can result in behavior that other perceive to be racist/sexist etc. And I am largely uninterested in people’s intentions. The sole point of this post was to give an anecdote/some more detail on why a person might feel alienated in EA—the idea was that this might be helpful for EAs to take action and to bridge understanding. But it is a minefield because we so quickly start playing “the victim” instead of engaging in solving the issue. And my wording and tone might have contributed to this victim competition and that is not my intention. I would rather like to see EA being the victim if I left—I am very happy with my non-EA life. I guess if it is down to wording, tone and so on in my post I just cowardly seek draft amnesty!
Actually there were some instances of jerkiness/conflict at that workplace too. Actually someone there did comment on someone’s height difference. And another incident I remember is one where someone was allergic to perfume and someone wore thick perfume in the office. So not utopia but the feeling I got was in general one of belonging a lot more. And I think other EAs who feel alienated in the same way I do also have been in other spaces where they felt much more at home. And I am sure this is studied well—there is a large body of research and lots of work on implementing best practices in DEI. But this is easy to find by asking GPT/Googling.
Just let me know if I missed anything. Just keep in mind that I am really not interested in talking about politics. This for me is deeply personal and I only mean to describe why I care and I think attempts at convincing me, or the people close to me to feel differently is just likely to increase the feeling of not belonging. The best first step if one is trying to convince someone of something after they are hurt, is to acknowledge their feelings, maybe with a scout mindset. Of course you could play that ball back to me, saying it is my who do not understand and we can play ball like that and that is likely why maybe the best option is just for “leadership” to take a stance so that at least someone feel like they belong. But I do not want to advocate too hard for this—I am largely a lay person in these matters. And I would ideally like women/POC EAs to guide any actions I take and to let me know what I should endorse or not.
(I am the same TJ that wrote the original comment. I wasn’t able to log back into the original account so I created a new one.)
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “whiteness is true”. I feel like you just told me “happiness is true”. It just doesn’t parse. Happiness and whiteness are adjectives, they don’t have truth values on their own. If you tell me that a particular person is happy or white, then it becomes a claim about the world that is true or false.
That said, we probably do have some kind of genuine disagreement about how common racism/sexism is in EA or the world or something, and that is maybe cruxy? But you don’t seem to want to talk about that. You seem to want to talk only about your feelings, and that comes off as very not helpful. EA isn’t about making EAs feel good. Traditional approaches to charity before EA were about making donors feel good. EA’s big innovation was to focus on the effects on non-EA beneficiaries, not the feelings of its own members.
You seem to think there is a trilema where we either (1) want more diversity, and try to convince minorities that we are not racist/sexist, (2) want more diversity, and try to convince minorities that we are working to fix our racism/sexism, or (3) want fewer minorities. You further seem to think that 1 vs 2 should be evaluated as a choice based on what will actually cause more diversity. I think this is incorrect. How much racism/sexism there is in EA is a factual question, and nobody chooses their beliefs about factual questions. As I said, I think we may genuinely disagree about this one. But a person who believes there is not much racism/sexism yet chooses option 2 is being dishonest, they are trying to deceive minorities, and that does not seem like a good way to treat anyone. Similarly for a person who believes there is a lot of racism/sexism and chooses option 1. So if it is down to 1 vs 2, then that must be evaluated based on what is actually true about EA, not based on what we expect the effects to be.
As for 3, I don’t think anyone actively wants fewer minorities or women in EA. I have never once heard anyone say “there are too many PoCs in EA” or “there are too many women in EA” or anything remotely like that. That is just not part of the discourse. Nobody is complaining about diversity. Instead, I think what you are mistaking for that, is an option 4, which is to not concern ourselves too much with the racial or gender makeup of EA, and instead concern ourselves with the actual purpose of EA, to do the most good with the hours and dollars that we set aside for charity, and to work with the people who can best help us do that, whatever their races or genders, and whatever racial or gender makeup comes about as a result. In my view, this option 4 is obviously the correct course. Human history is littered with examples of people overly concerned with the races and sexes of those around them, pretty much always with unpleasant results. We should learn from that history and not repeat it.
I’m certainly not trying to separate you from your loved ones. EA isn’t a cult. Loving someone doesn’t always mean indulging their feelings or agreeing with their beliefs or trying to fix what they think is a problem. Sometimes it does, but not always. Loving someone means making a point of interacting with them in a way that makes them stronger. What makes them stronger may be highy personal and highly context dependent. But acting with the purpose of making someone else stronger is the essence of love. If a person incorrectly believes that they are being mistreated on account of their race or sex, then indulging that belief will generally make them weaker. That kind of belief both feels unpleasant and creates a self-fulfilling narative where the person has less control and agency. That is costly! And it is a much more costly error than incorrectly believing that they are not being mistreated on account of their race or sex, so where there is ambiguity, it is best to assume we are not being mistreated on account of race or sex.
You seem to believe that all of your PoC/women friends feel unwelcome in EA because of their race or sex, feel that they are discriminated against or something. I don’t know your friends, so I don’t know if this is true of them or not. I do remember a time in my life when I assumed that all my women and racial minority friends saw the world and their social interactions in terms of race and sex, and I was wrong about that. There are lots of minorities out there who don’t feel like the world is against them because of their minority status, who just try to get on with whatever it is they do with their lives, and they are generally better off for it.
I was wondering if our continued conversation would be better as a new post using the conversation format if that’s still in use? That said,I only want to do that if people find it helpful—I got pretty down voted including by people of the marginalized groups that I feel “bad because of”.