In this day and age, who thinks that "homos" is a good label to use? And this is at Google, holy crap. How does a place that I'd expect to be filled to the brim with forward thinking techies even hire a person who thought this was a good idea?
Also, how would they know who to put in the "homo room?" How were people assigned? Did a senior executive walk up and down the hall, looking in offices, and going "gay, black, gay, gay, asian..." Something has to have been left out of the story, this is way too crazy to ever happen.
The intent was probably to expose people to prejudices they don't usually experience with their cis/white/male/wealthy selves.
In which case one would have wanted to have those people roleplay as minority identities.
The writeup's phrasing is definitely weird, if accurate. Not sure why people of color would need to be exposed to what it's like to be treated as "brown people"?
Then again... given the logic behind most HR training, I'd be unsurprised if someone misunderstood diversity training guidelines and instead tried to put people in "their groups." facepalm
"People of color" is the modern "black" (African heritage), and excludes dark skin colors from other locales. "Brown people", weird as it sounds as a phrase, is broader and includes dark-skinned groups like Middle-Eastern, but I think arbitrarily excludes Asian.
I've generally heard it as either "non-white", "non-white, with emphasis on 'brown' skin tones", or "non-white and not covered by a more specific group" in common real world use, depending on the context.
To some extent... it doesn’t matter. I’m gay: and if you randomly assigned me to a group that has to listen to gay stereotypes, it would still be wrong. Even though the method of assignment is technically okay.
Why it’s wrong is debatable. But at least for me it’d be wrong because honestly... that would drag up a lot of psychological trauma for me. Like “I need to take some time off work” bad.
Even if you can predict who that will happen to.. and you try to account for it.. there is no margin of error here that’s acceptable, especially when the material in question could be completed another way.
So yeah. This is a really, really bad look for the Googs here. :(
> How does a place that I'd expect to be filled to the brim with forward thinking techies even hire a person who thought this was a good idea?
If you spend 10 seconds on Blind you'll find the most out of touch thought processes with regard to race, religion and sexuality from employees at big Silicon Valley tech companies. Very different from the general population, not forward thinking.
