That lumping is, again, descriptive. And it's an often-useful description/category in large part because of that historical racism.

Getting worked up over that is a huge waste of time, to the point that I now wonder if it's a sideshow. If we waste our time arguing about if this "the diverse hires left and the new hires after them were white" description is bad, we've been successfully distracted.

The idea that anyone is actually offended or feels harmed by that paragraph we're talking about is absurd - could you imagine how such people would feel if they were part of one of the out-groups instead and didn't just get lumped together but also had been attacked by the centuries of racism in the US?

This is the paragraph in question, once again:

> For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in “diverse” tech spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet white guys.

If you don't let yourself look at the demographics, you blind yourself to any ability to evaluate effectiveness in terms of fighting the historical and present effects of white supremacy in the US. Note that the "diverse people" are similarly lumped together because it's non-judgmentally discussing the effects of a policy, nothing more. I don't see any way someone takes offense at that paragraph, but I see lots of ways someone would pretend to in order to make reactionary/distracting claims about if we even need to try to fight that historical racism.

> The idea that anyone is actually offended or feels harmed by that paragraph we're talking about is absurd

It surprises me that you don't see that language like this is the same language used against marginalized groups. Nobody but the person that is offended gets to decide how they feel.

We as people of lots of overlapping concerns have to be empathetic or we'll get more factionalism instead of unity and inclusion.

I don't see it as at all the same thing. People get offended at slurs and insults, and I don't see why I should interpret this usage as either. Do you think the "diverse people" referred to in that paragraph should also be offended?

Someone here is upset about the author "assuming all white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be lumped together" - I fail to see how they're lumping those people in this story together any more than they are the other group.

Someone here is upset about the author "being prejudiced against a group full of unique people" - I fail to see the prejudice in the quoted paragraph.

Someone here is upset about "cishet white male shaming" - I fail to see the shaming.

I don't see marginalized minority groups getting offended at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican experience in the US for that same sort of grouping.

That the term wasn't invented ourselves[0] seems to be the only real case being made here, but its an abbreviation of two technical terms, not an obvious slur. We could make an analogy to someone getting upset someone using one of one of "African American" vs "Black" vs another such term, but then we're getting pretty well into niche territory versus talking about something obviously offensive to everyone the term describes.

[0] as far as I know, anyway, though I suppose it could've been.

> I don't see marginalized minority groups getting offended at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican experience in the US for that same sort of grouping.

I see your point but I think you are making really big bunchings of value judgments. I live in a Hispanic community. There are lots and lots of people in that group that are cishet white males, their family members aren't going to call them that, though. Not a small number of them find being cishet as only morally acceptable.

It's similar to latinx. They are terms that are used in very specific groups and mean something important there but when they get used across boundaries different groups are basically talking about different things (it's a freedom fighter/terrorist issue).

So would we be having this dicussion if the author had written: "Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cisgender heterosexual white guys."?

My guess from your comments is: probably not, from your perspective? Much of your original post that I disagreed with is about the use of the term itself.

But I don't get that sense from the reactions posted by others, since those other quotes I included don't seem to be justified by this article at all, to me.

> could you imagine how such people would feel if they were part of one of the out-groups instead and didn't just get lumped together but also had been attacked by the centuries of racism in the US?

You do realize that the majority of white cis heterosexual people live outside the USA right? This is often a source of frustration for me, as people in the USA don't seem to realize the rest of the world exists. All of these things about whiteness, white cishet and white supremacy don't really translate well outside of that context.