I’m going to respond to the individual incidents you describe, because I think some interesting patterns will emergy here.
I brought my significant other (SO) to an EA party and another guest kept on commenting awkwardly and rudely on the height difference between my SO and I
That sounds mildly annoying. I’m sorry it happened. A reasonable response would be to move to a different group of people. An unreasonable overreaction would be to read it as indicating something sinister about EA, and describe it in a DEI discussion with the implication that this person engaged in some kind of terrible ism. Is Heightism even a thing?
In another of my encounters with EA, another EA asked where a non-EA PoC (also present) was from. When the EA was told “Sweden” (which was true, birth, citizenship and fluency in Swedish) the EA pressed on wanting to know where the PoC was really from
Again, this sounds annoying and I’m sorry it happened. I can imagine a curious person with low social skills (know any of those in EA?) thinking this was an interesting point to press on, but I can also understand why the PoC would be unhappy about this line of questioning, and I would not blame the PoC at all for disengaging and thinking less of the questioner. But I have trouble seeing it as indicative of a big dramatic problem of racism in EA.
At the only EAG I attended, and to almost the first PoC I talked to there, I was told this EA PoC was during one of the first EA events they attended asked by another EA where they came from and this EA PoC subsequently had a very rough “onboarding” into EA in large parts due to this incident
I’m getting this after 3 links in a game of telephone, so there is a lot of uncertainty about what happened here, but, um, asking someone where they are from seems like a normal way to try to get to know a new person. I’m not seeing the problem here. Is that a question we are only allowed to ask white people now?
EAF posts on eugenics (e.g. posts like this by white people on eugenics in poor, non-white countries)
Your link leads to a discussion of modern technologies very different from traditional eugenics, and the connections between genes and intelligence and what that implies for doing good, which seems like a reasonable topic to discuss in EA. And your suggestion that the author’s race (and I’m not sure how you even know the author’s race) is relevant seems pretty racist to me.
Of course all the Bostrom emails, inappropriate sexual behavior and what not
One bad email 25 years ago, before there even was EA, and for which he appologized, should be a non-story.
In terms of your introductory story of your presumably non-white friend being threatened with a shotgun on a stranger’s private property, you stopped right before the most important part. 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? Just from what you’ve said, the suggestion that race was a factor seems unwarranted. Lots of people, particularly the sort who live in the middle of nowhere, love their property and their guns and will point their guns at any strangers on their property regardless of race, and view it as their right to do so. I believe you and your friend were in a difficult situation and that your friend was reasonably very scared from the encounter, and I am sorry about that. But your friend’s apparent belief that race was a factor is not evidence that race actually was a factor. You have presented no other evidence that race was a factor. And telling stories like this, without evidence, just perpetuates unjustified racial fears of exactly the kind your friend experienced.
In terms of your own story of your experience sitting next to an arab man on a plane, I don’t particularly blame you for having those thoughts, we all have irrational thoughts sometimes, though I hope some of your language (“flod of adrenaline”, “grips of panic”, etc) was an exageration for dramatic effect. I see that you noticed that you were having an emotional reaction, you took a step back and asked whether the objective facts justified your fear, you rightly concluded that they did not, and therefor you rightly chose to take no action. Congratulations, this is how a mature adult handles a random irrational thought and corresponding emotion. What baffles me is that you found this experience significant enough to remember and retell. You never quite articulate why, or what you think it says, but I take your retelling as implying that you see yourself as somehow racist for having the thought and the emotion, and to me that just does not follow at all. Nothing seems to have actually happened, so this should not be a big deal. Viewing it in the context of what else I know about you, which is thatt you see basically all social interactions in terms of the races of the people involved, that you see your own whiteness as important to how you interact in the world, I have to wonder if you would have had a strong reaction here if you stopped looking at the world in terms of race, if you stopped thinking of your whiteness as important. I suspect it is your own habbit of thinking about race that made race so salient to you in that moment.
So after going through 7 stories that you present, the only clear racism that I can find is in your description of another writer here on the forum. What I see is a lot of things that are either everyday annoyances of someone being a jerk, or not actually connected with race in any apparent way, or both. It seems that you have chosen to view these events through a DEI lens and place a sinister interpretation on them, when there was no need to do so. And this is at least consistent with the DEI trainings that I have seen in a corporate setting. Those trainings were composed primarily of stories of someone being a jerk to a person who happened to be a woman or a PoC, and then telling us that what we saw was sexism or racism. And that is actually a terrible way to interpret the world! People are actually jerks to each other in minor ways all the time! With people of every race and every gender on every side of that jerkiness! And in most cases, it is both more accurate and more useful to interpret it as a random jerk, and not as being related to race or sex.
The other thing that baffles me is your claim that in other environments you inhabit, your job and non-EA social circles, you don’t see these things. Has nobody every been annoyed by anybody else being insensitive at your job or in your other social circles? If so, that is absolutely amazing and we should send in a team of social scientists to try to discover what is going on and see if we can replicate it. What I suspect is actually happening is that you haven’t been given a narrative, an expectation, that people will be racist or sexist in those environments, and so when you do see someone being a jerk, you correctly interpret it as just someone being a jerk, you do not interpret it through a DEI lense. By contrast, you have been hearing stories of terrible racism and sexism in EA for years, and so when you see someone being a jerk in an EA space, you do interpret it through a DEI lense. I think the difference you see between the different spaces you inhabit is a difference in what lenses you choose to interpret what you see though, and not a difference in the world. I suggest you consider making different choices about lenses.
I’m going to respond to the individual incidents you describe, because I think some interesting patterns will emergy here.
That sounds mildly annoying. I’m sorry it happened. A reasonable response would be to move to a different group of people. An unreasonable overreaction would be to read it as indicating something sinister about EA, and describe it in a DEI discussion with the implication that this person engaged in some kind of terrible ism. Is Heightism even a thing?
Again, this sounds annoying and I’m sorry it happened. I can imagine a curious person with low social skills (know any of those in EA?) thinking this was an interesting point to press on, but I can also understand why the PoC would be unhappy about this line of questioning, and I would not blame the PoC at all for disengaging and thinking less of the questioner. But I have trouble seeing it as indicative of a big dramatic problem of racism in EA.
I’m getting this after 3 links in a game of telephone, so there is a lot of uncertainty about what happened here, but, um, asking someone where they are from seems like a normal way to try to get to know a new person. I’m not seeing the problem here. Is that a question we are only allowed to ask white people now?
Your link leads to a discussion of modern technologies very different from traditional eugenics, and the connections between genes and intelligence and what that implies for doing good, which seems like a reasonable topic to discuss in EA. And your suggestion that the author’s race (and I’m not sure how you even know the author’s race) is relevant seems pretty racist to me.
One bad email 25 years ago, before there even was EA, and for which he appologized, should be a non-story.
In terms of your introductory story of your presumably non-white friend being threatened with a shotgun on a stranger’s private property, you stopped right before the most important part. 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? Just from what you’ve said, the suggestion that race was a factor seems unwarranted. Lots of people, particularly the sort who live in the middle of nowhere, love their property and their guns and will point their guns at any strangers on their property regardless of race, and view it as their right to do so. I believe you and your friend were in a difficult situation and that your friend was reasonably very scared from the encounter, and I am sorry about that. But your friend’s apparent belief that race was a factor is not evidence that race actually was a factor. You have presented no other evidence that race was a factor. And telling stories like this, without evidence, just perpetuates unjustified racial fears of exactly the kind your friend experienced.
In terms of your own story of your experience sitting next to an arab man on a plane, I don’t particularly blame you for having those thoughts, we all have irrational thoughts sometimes, though I hope some of your language (“flod of adrenaline”, “grips of panic”, etc) was an exageration for dramatic effect. I see that you noticed that you were having an emotional reaction, you took a step back and asked whether the objective facts justified your fear, you rightly concluded that they did not, and therefor you rightly chose to take no action. Congratulations, this is how a mature adult handles a random irrational thought and corresponding emotion. What baffles me is that you found this experience significant enough to remember and retell. You never quite articulate why, or what you think it says, but I take your retelling as implying that you see yourself as somehow racist for having the thought and the emotion, and to me that just does not follow at all. Nothing seems to have actually happened, so this should not be a big deal. Viewing it in the context of what else I know about you, which is thatt you see basically all social interactions in terms of the races of the people involved, that you see your own whiteness as important to how you interact in the world, I have to wonder if you would have had a strong reaction here if you stopped looking at the world in terms of race, if you stopped thinking of your whiteness as important. I suspect it is your own habbit of thinking about race that made race so salient to you in that moment.
So after going through 7 stories that you present, the only clear racism that I can find is in your description of another writer here on the forum. What I see is a lot of things that are either everyday annoyances of someone being a jerk, or not actually connected with race in any apparent way, or both. It seems that you have chosen to view these events through a DEI lens and place a sinister interpretation on them, when there was no need to do so. And this is at least consistent with the DEI trainings that I have seen in a corporate setting. Those trainings were composed primarily of stories of someone being a jerk to a person who happened to be a woman or a PoC, and then telling us that what we saw was sexism or racism. And that is actually a terrible way to interpret the world! People are actually jerks to each other in minor ways all the time! With people of every race and every gender on every side of that jerkiness! And in most cases, it is both more accurate and more useful to interpret it as a random jerk, and not as being related to race or sex.
The other thing that baffles me is your claim that in other environments you inhabit, your job and non-EA social circles, you don’t see these things. Has nobody every been annoyed by anybody else being insensitive at your job or in your other social circles? If so, that is absolutely amazing and we should send in a team of social scientists to try to discover what is going on and see if we can replicate it. What I suspect is actually happening is that you haven’t been given a narrative, an expectation, that people will be racist or sexist in those environments, and so when you do see someone being a jerk, you correctly interpret it as just someone being a jerk, you do not interpret it through a DEI lense. By contrast, you have been hearing stories of terrible racism and sexism in EA for years, and so when you see someone being a jerk in an EA space, you do interpret it through a DEI lense. I think the difference you see between the different spaces you inhabit is a difference in what lenses you choose to interpret what you see though, and not a difference in the world. I suggest you consider making different choices about lenses.