Listen to one minute of this podcast from 18:45 to 19:45. The guy talking is a Stanford virtual reality researcher who met with Mark Zuckerberg before he paid two billion for Oculus. What he describes there is obviously well-intentioned; but am I the only one who finds something creepy, even Orwellian, about changing the gender and race of people in a computer science class (including the instructor) to make the only black girl feel like she is just blending into the crowd?
What if a white guy wanted to take *away *all the diversity in the classroom–is that okay too? What about when the black girl becomes a black woman and goes out into the workforce–won’t she wonder where all those other black females went? What about if she looks at photos of MIT graduating classes from the past–will we need to go back and Photoshop them to create some alternate history where black women have always been highly represented among mathematicians and engineers? Isn’t that in itself offensive to the civil rights struggle? Even today, if we want to agitate to get more minorities into fields like that, how do you develop budding activists if kids grow up thinking there’s no problem with underrepresentation?
The researcher and I would probably agree that you don’t need budding activists if people think there’s no problem with under-representation because the problem with under-representation is how people think.
Under-representation is a perception-based problem and changing perception is one way to consider addressing that problem. I don’t think it will be as simple as VR… but I see no reason to believe that people are under-represented except for two reasons 1) people of the majority discourage minorities and 2) people of the minorities discourage each other. If you eliminate the perception of race, you’d eliminate both root causes.
Edit: As for Mark Zuckerberg… I guess Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilms proves to you that Walt Disney aspired to build a planet-destroying space station? Seriously, you’re reading way to much into it to make any statement about Zuckerberg.
Isn’t her race kind of irrelevant (not really) considering the demographics of a CS class already skew male? Last time I took a CS class (many years ago, might be less skewed), there were only 2 white guys, and maybe 2 females total.
Hard to say what is meant without a link. It seems to me that any prejudice or discrimination can hardly be fixed by making someone feel less self aware of themselves, especially when there are so many other variables.