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Re: Cultural differences and how to handle them



Adding debian-project back in my reply since this is about a public mail 
I wrote, and a statement by the AH team is not a private conversation.

On Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 01:01:14AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Adrian,

Steve,

> On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 07:05:54PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> >
> >Some US universities do consider race in admission.
> >It is called "affirmative action".
> >
> >White people need to be better than black people for university admission.
> >Asian people need to be better than white people for university admission.
> 
> This kind of statement has *no* place in Debian forums. 
> 
> Regardless of culture or background, it is utterly inappropriate within
> the Debian community to characterise affirmative action as "black
> people don't need to be as good as white people" etc.

my understanding of affirmative action in the US is that where it is in 
place some white people get admitted to university, even though asian 
people with the same qualifications are not being admitted.

Which sounds to me as if we white people don't need to be as good
as asian people for getting admitted to university.

I would consider this racism against a minority, but due to your 
different cultural background you might consider it appropriate.

I am coming from a cultural background where asking about ethnicity 
during university admission would be considered inappropriate.

And becoming aware of such differences makes me for example understand 
better why I consider Debian Outreachy racist, but other people do not.

If anything I say is incorrect, please say what and why.
And please do so publicly, otherwise whatever incorrect things I wrote 
might be considered correct by other people following the discussion.

On a higher level, I wonder how much of such conflicts like differing 
opinions on whether Debian should support pridemonth are based on
people in the US and UK mistakenly thinking that problems and 
discussions and solutions for diversity in their countries would
also apply 1:1 to a global project.

Is there anything or anyone in the Open Source world providing support 
by highlighting cultural differences, and how global Open Source 
projects can handle them best for welcoming global diversity?

> Steve, for the AH team

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed


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