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?