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Google Campus Security Singled Out Black, Latinx Employees (bloomberg.com) 336

Google's campus security system subjected Black and Latinx workers to bias and prompted complaints to management, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, leading the company to scrap a key part of the approach. From a report: The internet giant encouraged employees to check colleagues' ID badges on campus, and asked security staff to do the same. This went beyond the typical corporate office system where workers swipe badges to enter. The policy was designed to prevent unauthorized visitors and keep Google's open work areas safe. But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees, according to the people, who experienced this themselves or saw friends and colleagues go through it. As a result, these employees felt policed on campus in a similar way that they are under suspicion elsewhere in life, said the people, who weren't authorized to speak publicly about the issue. It's an example of the unconscious, or overlooked, biases that make working in Silicon Valley harder for minorities, the people added.
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Google Campus Security Singled Out Black, Latinx Employees

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  • by Issue313 ( 2840599 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:09PM (#60280278)
    Hope it's not a case of woke and broke.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And what the fuck is "Latinx"? That isn't a real word.

      Also, it's obnoxious how Americans constantly misuse the words Latin and Hispanic. Latin describes a person or thing from Italy and Hispanic describes a person or thing from Spain. Neither have anything to do with Central or South America.

      • by gizmo2199 ( 458329 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:08PM (#60280582) Homepage

        >Neither have anything to do with Central or South America.

        "The term was used also by Napoleon III's French government in the 1860s as Amérique latine to consider French-speaking territories in the Americas, along with the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed, including the Spanish-speaking portions of the United States (Southwestern United States and Florida)."

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • more importantly, how the fuck do you pronounce it?
        latin-x?
        la-tinx?

        (actually being serious for a change, with zero snark.)

        • The correct pronunciation is "Eye-m-more-on". Does not refer to anyone from below the Rio Grande River (well, the one between TX and MX)
      • Latinx sounds like a Latex plugin.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        So language does matter... Or does it only matter when you don't like a word, not the people who it actually refers to?

        • Why would he dislike people from Italy or Spain?
      • I think the language changes constantly in order to be sure everyone keeps up on their fashion, and anyone using the older terms is clearly an older fart who should be ignored.

        Anyway, I think latinx is short for latino/latina, because a few people don't like the fact that in Spanish that latino gets used as the plural term. It might work in writing but it's utterly unpronounceable.

      • And what the fuck is "Latinx"? That isn't a real word.

        It is a word, it's just not a Spanish word. It's a word that some people invented because they don't like the concept of a gendered language.

    • Hope it's not a case of woke and broke.

      I do. "Wokeness" should be punished with financial pain.

    • by knarf ( 34928 )

      Is it? I sure hope not. I just came back here from a 6 year hiatus to see how the place has weathered the oncoming woke storm after getting fed up with the awokening of some of the other forums out there. It would be sad to see the place go op in flames of rage.

  • Think of how much mischief you could work within Google, simply by following the rules...

    Were I a Google worker, and an edict was handed down to check badges of follow employees, my new 20% project would be to hang around outside the entrance of the executive suite making sure EVERY badge was in perfect order, including scanning them myself...

    There is no greater tool to removing silly mandates, than to make sure they apply fully to those mandating them.

    How many more internal rules like this Google must have

    • If you actually did that, the perception of the executive suite workers would be that you yourself are the problem that must be removed.

    • and then get git with an lawsuit over profiling by race

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      I work at a place that has a similar policy. The key is to cultivate a culture of reasonable people. You can challenge people in the hallways, but you should only do that if you know they're not a regular in that area, if you saw them tailgate through a door (a separate policy says not to tailgate, and not to let people tailgate behind you), or think they aren't supposed to be there.

      It's a reasonable security policy, but it can be applied unevenly and unfairly. I'm not sure why Google seems so full of ra

  • What the f*ck... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by canuco ( 1930572 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:12PM (#60280288)

    ... is Latinx?

    • Re:What the f*ck... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:15PM (#60280300)

      Latin languages in general are gendered, like latino is a male latino person while latina is a female latino person.
      And while the actual people that use spanish/portuguese etc just use the male variant as a default/gender free definition, well, the american left HATES anything gender, so they invented this awful shit they try to force latin people to use.

      • the male variant as a default/gender free definition

        It's just unmarked [wikipedia.org], that's all.

      • I thought it might a cool robot or something
      • Re:What the f*ck... (Score:5, Informative)

        by eepok ( 545733 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:52PM (#60280758) Homepage

        To clarify a common misconception, "Latino" is technically the non-gender-specific term (at least in Spanish). When we say, "Latinas", we state that all people in that group are women. When we say "Latinos", we state that the group could either be a mix of men and women or just all men.

        When you learn that through the lens of "seeking offense", you could derive that a women are having their gender removed by the being called "Latino" in a group. However, when there's a group of "Latinos", we assume 99% of them may be women.

        The Spanish language is highly gendered and most Spanish speakers have no clue that English-speakers are modifying the Spanish language to ignorantly de-gender the language to save us from ourselves. "Latinx" isn't even how Latinos would elect to de-gender because it's not really pronounceable. Neither as "lah-teenks" or "la-tin-ex" would be created by Spanish-speakers. Consider de-gendering "los ninos" to "lxs ninxs". Try pronouncing that.

        Instead, there's been a (very small) effort to use "Latine" (la-teen-eh) because "e" is used often for explicitly non-gendered nouns.

    • by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:15PM (#60280302)
      A new Linux distro, I think.
    • This is my first time seeing that term. I suspect it is meant to be like latino or latina, but gender neutral.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • And now Latinx.
      I didn't expect it would come to that, but here we are.
      Google was taken over by the Romans !

    • Some kind of faux Italians apparently, but the "Latin" trademark violation is still obvious.
    • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:14PM (#60280616) Journal
      It's what comes after Latin IX and before Latin XI.
  • by rookiebeotch ( 6202512 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:14PM (#60280296)
    First, im cuban american and i dont know WTF Latinx is and it sounds ridiculous. Second, then latinos and blacks should bitch to their community to stop encouraging and glorifying gang and ghetto behaviors so that the common white folk wont see them in that light. All you see are these low life rappers and people like snoop dogg, (remember bitches and shit but hows and tricks?) being celebrated. And he gets a freakin game show on ABC.
    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:17PM (#60280320)

      First, im cuban american and i dont know WTF Latinx is and it sounds ridiculous..

      LatinX was an upgrade from Latin9.

    • by mi ( 197448 )

      First, im cuban american

      Though I quite agree with you, I find it depressing, that you had to preface your — perfectly valid — argument with the announcement of your own origins.

      Your words should stand on their own, but, instead, who says them is taken into account...

      • He wanted to make sure we all understood that he wasn't "whitesplaining" and culturally appropriating the Latin American culture. Because that would be even more offensive.
        • The thing is that it's mostly the SJWs at this point who're whitesplaining. And if one of the people who are actually affected, i.e. a black person or a hispanic person, stands up and tells them to fuck off, he gets told that he doesn't understand.

          Care to explain to me how this is in any way appropriate?

    • by dirk ( 87083 ) <dirk@one.net> on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:56PM (#60280530) Homepage

      Hold up, you think black people made Snoop Dogg popular? And black people gave him a game show? All those black studio execs got together and decided to make Snoop Dogg popular?

      This big rapper are big because they are popular with white people. You think anyone becomes as big as Snoop Dogg because 13% of the population made him that way? His pot smoking ways are popular with white kids which is what made him as big as he is.

      As for making changes so "common white folk wont see them in that light", why is it that only applies to them and only white people? How many popular shows are about terrible white people? Does the Sopranos not glorify white criminals? Breaking Bad? So why is it that white people aren't thought of as criminal? Oh that's right, we are talking about how other white people see them, of course they aren't going to see white people as bad. How about instead, white people stop being racist and assuming an entire race is something based on what they sometimes see in popular culture?

      • You saw the two,lead drug dealers on breaking bad as being glorified?

        Their lives SUCKED! And the younger one even says at one point in S2 he has figured out who he is, "I'm the bad guy!"

        If that's glorification I can't imagine what you think a negative depiction looks like.

        I didn't watch Supranos so no comment there.

        • by dirk ( 87083 )

          Was their life perfect? Of course not because that would have been a boring show. But they were the main characters. Heisenberg was cool. They made huge amounts of money. They had power and respect. Think about much everyone loved the "I'm the ones who knocks" speech. Think about how everyone thought Skyler was terrible for not just embracing what he was doing. People were rooting for them not against them.

          Now compare this to rap songs. Sure, they talk about all the money they are making and and sex they ar

      • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10, 2020 @12:04AM (#60281978)

        How about instead, white people stop being racist and assuming an entire race is something based on what they sometimes see in popular culture?

        I'm a Gen Xer whose mom is from the midwest. She's mildly racist (I don't want to make it sound worse than it is; she was born in the 30's and still has some attitudes that are oh-well-I-never these days) but I went to public schools and watched the usual shows (Sesame Street, etc.) and I grew up on the idea that you shouldn't judge people by their skin color but by the content of their character. And the idea that if people need help, the help should be colorblind... you don't ignore the poor black kid because he's black, but you don't ignore the poor white kid because he's white either.

        These days it's race, race, race and I'm fucking sick of it. We have the Gen Z kids explicitly saying they want segregation based on skin color, for the good of the poor fragile blacks who need so much protection. Excuse me, the poor fragile BIPOC (that's Black Indiginous People of Color, an inclusive term that means black, Native American, and any other minority, except Asians because they do too well in school, and anyone from Israel because Israel is just so oh-well-I-never).

        I say that Will Smith's kids are better off than the kids of dirt-poor white people, and it would be unethical to give them aid just because they're black even though their father is a multi millionaire.

        What's that? You say black people are disproportionately poor compared to whites? Well that's lucky then, because color-blind assistance would then go disproportionately to black people. We don't need "reverse discrimination" it's enough to have NO discrimination.

        I don't want special treatment for whites, or special treatments for blacks. I certainly don't want special treatment for me.

        And I'm posting this anonymously because this is 2020 and I would be canceled for such horrible attitudes. (Seriously, Dr. Martin Luther King, one of my heroes in childhood, is considered "problematic" now because he thought segregation is a bad idea and didn't espouse black-first ideas.)

        I'm also posting anonymously because I don't want to throw my mom under the bus. My point was supposed to be that she managed to raise me less racist than she is. I'm certain she's less racist than the generation that raised her.

        There's a few people who make everyone look bad. What really bothers me is all the actually nice people who enable it. Like all the Black Lives Matter demonstrators who just want to make the world a better place, but just happen to provide cover for people who want to smash and destroy and steal.

        BLM fans: people attached to your movement have been shooting people. Like that 8 year old child... who was black incidentally. Sort your shit out. You need to start handing over the bad crazy people to the cops.

        Oh, what's that, you say all cops are bastards and there aren't any good ones? Then I guess all BLM protesters are rioters who shoot 8-year-olds. If you are going to jettison all nuance, the normal people who don't want to watch the world in flames get to jettison all nuance too.

    • Yeah, get some nice Bang & Olufsen speakers, that sort of thing.

    • by Baleet ( 4705757 )
      Thank you, friend. I made this same case to a liberal friend and he accused me of racism. I am white. Another point to add to this: It takes time for those stereotypes to go away. It won't happen in a generation or maybe even two.
  • I'd have my doubts that this was done unconsciously. It's either pretty openly suspecting people based on skin color or pretty openly annoying people because they want to and are in a position to do so.
    • I am not, from https://www.bbc.com/news/magaz... [bbc.com] it shows implicit bias

      Over the past few decades, measures of explicit bias have been falling rapidly. For example, in Britain in the 1980s about 50% of the population stated that they opposed interracial marriages. That figure had fallen to 15% by 2011. The US has experienced a similarly dramatic shift. Going back to 1958, 94% of Americans said they disapproved of black-white marriage. That had fallen to just 11% by 2013.

      And it makes sense you can think and not be racist explicitly, but changing your gut instinct is much much harder, you simply can't do it, you need a life time of experiences to change that. The article states even black people show implicit bias too.

      On the race test, most people show some kind of pro-white, anti-black bias. They are speedier connecting black faces to bad concepts than white faces. (Black people are not immune to this phenomenon themselves.)

      Are you suggesting black people are racist against black people? On a conscious level hard to believe, but unconsciously based on the environment where they are in not so much. The only way

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:20PM (#60280344)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      What they purged was just his clone. He has a secret lair on campus where he recruits thousands of security guards and grows Snoke clones in tanks.

  • ..It's an example of the unconscious, or overlooked, biases that make working in Silicon Valley harder for minorities...

    You see, its boss, making over US$100m per year is a minority and a fairly recent immigrant. He wouldn't have succeeded is Google were laden with all the ills against minorities we're hearing.

  • by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:34PM (#60280400)

    There is no "Latinx". The correct word is Latino. Even my browser spell checker knows it.

    Latinx is some bullshit word invented by dumb white SJW's. Don't buy into bullshit.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      As you get older, the common tongue inevitably changes so that it grates in your ear, as it has done to every generation going back to Chaucer and will for every generations that succeeds us.

      People who coin words like "LatinX" may not know what the term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" means, but they believe it to some degree, that words limit and shape our thoughts. The reality is more the other way around, that thought shapes words, so that over time a word's meaning is as firm as jello. If enough people deci

  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:36PM (#60280412)
    Sounds like a violin cleaning fluid. Man this prog Newspeak gets weirder by the day.
  • evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:38PM (#60280420)

    " But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees"

    but are they really checking Blacks and Latinirexxes (plural of Latinx, right?) more often, or is it another one of those subjective biases from the reporters who see 1 black guy getting checked and immediately squeal "systemtic racism"?

    So where is the statistical evidence for this? Not in the article, that's for sure.

    (and even then, Google has increased security after 3 of its employees were shot, and we know blacks make up more of the violent criminal, so checking blacks more often, even if it is true, could potentially be justified)

  • Kinda makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:41PM (#60280442)
    Not saying that it's right. But it kinda makes sense that security would check these people's IDs more often. If these races are underrepresented in Google's employee population relative to the general population, then mathematically:
    • Assume % of the population which is criminal is the same for all races
    • Assume the general population is 20% these two minority races, 80% other races
    • Assume 10% of Google's population is these two minority races, 90% other races
    • Assume 1% of people wandering Google are a criminal from the general population

    Then the composition of people at Google is:

    • (99% employees)*(10% minority) = 9.9% minority employees
    • (99% employees)*(90% other) = 89.1% other employees
    • (1% intruder)*(20% minority) = 0.2% minority intruder
    • (1% intruder)*(80% other) = 0.8% other intruder

    And thus

    • 0.2 / (9.9+0.2) = 1.98% of minorities you stop for an ID check are intruders
    • 0.8 / (89.1+0.8) = 0.89% of other races you stop for an ID check are intruders

    So if the goal is to maximize the number of intruders caught per hundred ID checks, security is better off checking the IDs of minorities more frequently.* The difference is even greater if the minority races have a higher criminal percentage among the general population. It's got nothing to do with race, everything to do with the disparity between your employee composition and the composition of the general population. As an example of an extreme case, if all your employees are Asian, and you see a white person wandering around inside, you automatically know they're not an employee.

    * (A complication arises from people being checked multiple times. Each security guard does not have a running list of who has already had their ID checked, so there's a chance they could re-check the ID of someone that another security guard has already checked. I don't know how many ID checks per day security performs relative to number of Google employees. Or for that matter what percentage of people wandering Google are actually intruders. So it's impossible for me to quantify when this happens. All I can say is that as the frequency of re-checks increases, the efficacy of checking predominantly these two minority races decreases. In the above hypothetical example, eventually you catch and eject enough minority intruders that their percentage drops below the 0.89% of intruders of other races. And you'd actually be better off checking more IDs from other races. Of course the simplest way to avoid this complication is to just check IDs purely randomly, completely ignoring race. It decreases your success rate when the ratio of ID checks to number of employees is low, but avoids decreasing it further when the ratio gets higher.)

  • by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:47PM (#60280488)

    They oppress wymyn and PoC. We need to peacefully protest at their HQ with fire, guns, blinding lasers, and good old fashioned clubs until they meet our demands to disband and give us all their money because justice or anti-racism or something....

    Hey hey ho ho google fascists have got to go!

  • by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby&comcast,net> on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:24PM (#60280660)

    Stop redefining words to placate SJW's. There is no such thing as Latinx - it's a fabricated term. The term certainly isn't used by the Latino community. If your foolish enough to use that term with actual Latinos in the real world outside academia or some corporate campuses you'll look like a clueless idiot at best and that's if you don't outright insult them on the spot.

    By the way, similar advice for using African American. You probably don't want to use that term in places like Central or South America or Europe. You might discover it's a good way to get in an on the spot fight.

    Regardless, outside of ivory towers, most people don't much appreciate having their identity redefined by self righteous twats. Be respectful and you'll likely get along with anyone who isn't a SJW.

  • Seriously? Is /. run by a bunch of Sophomore ethnic studies majors?
  • But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees

    How would you know this? Was there any type of study or survey done asking everybody how often their badges were checked? I didn't see any indication of this in the article.

    Black and Latinx employees were stopped and told “Let me see your badge,” even after they proved they had the right to enter the office by swiping in, one of the people said.

    Uh, isn't that what the policy is? To check badges of each other? Aren't they checking that the face/name on the badge matches the person that swiped in?

  • I'm reading at level 3 and can't find a single sympathetic comment for those minorities at Google.

    I think you all owe them an apology. Both of them.

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