On 6/13/22 23:11, Barry Leiba wrote:
For what it's worth, we have collectively used "greybeard" to refer to
long-time IETF participants, for various reasons and don't further
this particular conversation, and it's not fair to say that we can use
it to refer to ourselves but others can't use it to refer to us. We
can have a separate discussion about whether it's a non-inclusive term
that's an artifact of the past and better let go, but at this point
it's neither ageist nor misandrist to use it.
I don't consider the term "greybeard" by itself to be ageist or
misandrist. It's the construction taken as a whole that raises a red
flag for me.
If you don't see the problem with the construction, try this exercise:
Make up as many combinations of:
"Those <derogatory-adjective>
<people-identified-by-physical-characteristic> did <bad-thing>"
...and see whether you think the resulting expressions are overt
displays of prejudice. Be your own judge.
(and for this particular example, perhaps also recall that there's some
recent history of IETF community leaders explicitly promoting that kind
of prejudice, which adds additional context for those who are aware of
that history)
But if your experience is that
every time you've been treated badly it's been by a long-term IETF
participant, it's NOT ageist to tell people that that's the case.
I disagree, but because of selection bias. If you have some prejudice,
you're very likely to pay attention to experiences and/or information
that supports your prejudice, and give more credence to it, than to
experiences and/or information that would contradict your prejudice.
Pretty much everybody does this, so I don't blame people for having such
biases. I do, however, blame people somewhat for promoting such
prejudices, encouraging them in others, trying to penalize those whom
one is prejudiced against.
Even though our brains are pretty much wired to identify and name
patterns, including patterns of people, educated people should know to
give other groups some benefit of the doubt. It's not a perfect
solution to the problem of prejudice but it's kind of a minimum
responsibility, IMO.
And
then we need to ask ourselves whether there's a tendency toward that:
is it true that we have a long-term IETF culture of behaving that way?
Well, I offered a possible explanation in another message, without
trying to promote prejudice against any group of people, and with the
goal of trying to provide insight and suggesting possible changes to
address the issue.
Is that an aspect of our long-term culture that we would be better
off changing?
I think we do, and it is, and getting offended and claiming ageism
when someone points that out doesn't help. Let's look at ourselves
and see how we can do better.
Sure, but I don't see anything wrong with us realizing when we're being
ageist or misandrist, while we're also looking at other things.
But do we have over-critical people in IETF who are too eager to shoot
ideas down? Sure we do, at least IMO. But of those people, why
penalize only those who have grey beards, or who are older males? Why
are those things relevant? What purpose does that serve?
Keith
