YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Curious to why the word Hispanic was used instead of Latino. If you are unfamiliar with the difference, read here: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Hispanic_vs_Latino
I absolutely agree there is a problem. I've heard many first-hand accounts of violence and disrespect from all races. I'm interested in a solution that doesn't just take the labels from a pie chart and reinforce the dividing lines between what ultimately is one group.
It is an example of a white male privilege that being frustrated and swearing at your computer screen is unlikely to result in a white male being put on a PIP for having a "threatening demeanor".
There are probably hundreds of things like this.
I grew up in a pretty diverse neighborhood, so I know the people to fear are not divided along racial lines. Someone who came from a wealthier area would probably not have that opportunity.
To the point I made elsewhere on this page, does a program like this help to reduce that perception of inferiority, or just get people riled up about someone getting a perceived handout?
If the problem really is circumstantial, education seems like the obvious solution to me. In your specific example, the symptoms are fear driven; the more diverse experiences someone has, they more they will see how little there really is to fear. Travel is one of those obvious things that reduces bigotry.
Bluntly: people getting "riled up" about "perceived handouts" are complaining in bad faith, and their opinions shouldn't be taken into account. The 20 minute phone call YC is offering today is the least of the excuses people could generate about the persecution of the majority. If it's not this, it's something else.
"Can we have this conversation in the stairwell so I can stand 2 steps down and make you feel comfortable?" <- actual thing I've had to say and do with a crazy female coworker
There may be some racial bias here (I don't have enough reliable data to have much of an opinion), but don't think majorities are immune.
At one job, I regularly interacted with a man who was larger than me and often angry. He was a few inches taller and 70-80 pounds heavier. He'd had a couple people threaten him with going to management for official notice when he got angry. I ended up dealing with him because I sort of understood how he felt about all that, so I'd just let his anger wash off my back. I knew he wasn't actually threatening.
But it did give be the perspective of seeing someone larger than me who was angry, which was something I hadn't encountered as an adult. I could then see where others were coming from as well.
It reminds me of a character in the `Tale of Alvin Maker` series by Orson Scott Card. Forgot the characters name, but he was basically a bully and a 'sadist'. He had a sort of geasa placed on him as a baby, so that he never really got hurt. Anyway, he looses it, and suddenly is hurt badly. He suddenly understands what it was like for the people he was hurting. It wasn't really that he was a bad person, it was just that he had never experienced pain himself. It was enlightening when I read it as a teenager. Is it possible to really empathize until you experience something yourself? Don't know.
BTW, I am not in any way implying you are a bully or sadist. :)
Just saying it is interesting that you had a earnestly hard time understanding why other people felt threatened until... The exact same thing happened to you! Some human experiences are very hard to communicate, they seem to only be learned through direct experience.
No, he actually is treatening if he is angry enough at work to cause people fear, alarm, distress.
It's absolutely not acceptable to be that angry at work. It's understandable if it happens once or twice, but here you've mentioned a person who has had several colleagues talking about escalating complaints about his behaviour.
That employee should have been supported to change their aggressive behaviour (because it causes harm to them, and it causes harm to other employees, and it causes harm to the company) with a fairly stern reminder to stop fucking about.
As noted above, other physical traits (e.g. blackness) also cause those reactions. Your claim - namely that people's subjective perception, rather than objective behavior, are what determines the bounds of acceptability - seems to prove too much.
Perhaps I should have phrased it as "Don't have a work environment that regularly causes your employees to display anger"; and "Support your employees with workplace stress".
But still, anyone who is regularly angry at work needs to realise that their behaviour is not acceptable.
No it is not. You cannot point to poor treatment of one group as evidence of the "privilege" of another group. There are more than two colors of people.
There are degrees of privilege, too. I'm not white - I'm multiracial white/Asian, though I look basically Asian. I'm also not a Stanford grad, and my parents weren't millionaires. However, I grew up middle-class in a reasonably affluent suburb, my parents stayed married, they were highly educated, and I'm not black or Hispanic. These are all privileges; they are unearned advantages that I obtained through circumstances before my birth. That I'm not white and can't call up a VC to get them to fund my company doesn't make me unprivileged; it makes me less privileged than certain 1-in-a-million individuals.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4099803,00.html
(Ynetnews is an Israeli paper, by the way)
"Since the mass immigration some 100 years ago, Jews have become richest religious group in American society. They make up only 2% of US population, but 25% of 400 wealthiest Americans. How did it happen, and how crucial is their aid to Israel?"
Hmmm...
Perhaps Jews do so well because Judaism teaches critical thinking and education as a philosophy, whereas Christianity teaches obedience and the power of wishful thinking. Only one of these schools of thoughts helps you in the real world.
Better is just to see it as a positive attribute, rather than a normative one. It is a fact that white men have some advantages in most tech workplaces, simply because they don't stick out. That doesn't make white men bad people, or obligate them to do things to genuflect to non-white non-men. It's just a useful thing to know, is all.
I remember CW Nevius at sfgate (San Francisco chronicle) offered this perspective
http://blog.sfgate.com/cwnevius/2013/11/21/aggressive-womena...
Ahmed Mohammed was considered a threat. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34266389
When was this? I also was once 14, and I look like my name should be Ahmed Mohammed. I too also brought in crazy stuff to school. I was never considered a threat.
Ofc this was 1994, and that was well before mass school shootings, and 9/11 (however it was during the height of gang violence and so any perceived gang affiliation was dealt with in similar manner).
* Innocent until proven guilty (See driving while black)
* Citizenship is rarely, if ever, questioned
* Friendly relationship with Law Enforcement/Authority
* Better health care[1]
1: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/black-kids-get-les...
* Less likely to die of curable diseases
* Lesser prison sentences for the same crimes committed by minorities.
* Less likely to get passed over for a job interview
* Easier time dating
* Until recently be a credible candidate for president of the us
(I have rebutted arguments that "It isn't racist to discriminate against blacks for having the black accent because it just proves they are uneducated and inarticulate" by saying "George W. Bush. If articulate speech is really the criteria, how did he ever get to be president? And if we can hire an inarticulate white guy but not an inarticulate black guy, then something in there is still racist somehow, no?")
Calling us "one group" diminishes the value of diversity, which is more or less a fact of nature. We are NOT all the same. Cultural intelligence is a thing.
Anyway the specific problem with your race-blind view is that throughout American history we have employed race-sighted policy at every level of government to ensure peril for certain minorities.
Correcting those efforts is an _active_ process of reaching out to the historically disadvantaged who, it can be proven, continue to feel the negative effects of racist American _policy_.
Is that a more reasonable argument?
It's a shame that we have to debate this in 2015...
There are over 200 million white people and over 4.5 million Asian people living in Latin America.
Do you mean Latinos of descent other than European and Asian?
Weird to focus there. Portugal was part of Hispania and is part of the Iberian Peninsula, just like the rest of their descendants in the Americas.
If anyone has read April Rain Tree. Well that was a Metis author. You can't judge a book by its cover. So I get being held two steps back and what trauma does to opportunity.
I think there are better ways to support experience specific generational understanding/education with then segregated environments.
I mean, until the ACA came along, I pretty much took a risk-aversion pattern career path so I wouldn't get thrown into the "prexisting condition" abyss, and I'm probably not alone here. Personally speaking, a lot of handicapped folk I've met through the years are quite clever, innovative, and determined, because starting life at the plate with a 3-2 count is a lot different than being on 3rd base, if you catch my metaphorical drift. Just curious.
This is part of the problem with things like this - while good intentioned, it inevitably alienates another equally oppressed group.
Why can't we just have "Office Hours" and make it absolutely clear it's for anyone -- and actually follow through with the intent.
It just seems silly to says "these here are for only this one small group - and that's how we're going to help combat bigotry".
Combating bigotry is a worthy cause, but it is not the only worthy cause, and evaluating unrelated outreach programs by their impact on bigotry is a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand.
I think this is worth pointing out: there is probably no criticism anyone is going to have of this program that the YC partners have not already considered. It's 2015, and they're not dumb.
I don't see this being much different than what being featured on Oprah's Book Club could do - sometimes things are overlooked, and using personal currency to bring attention to such things makes sense.
if a person is ill, you don't go around giving medicine to everybody so that the healthy wouldn't feel excluded.
Again, not trying to be a troll. Not American, just trying to understand.
Always seems like Asian men in the U.S. get the 'worst' of being a minority. Neither the societal advantages of white majority, nor the ability to access services available to Hispanics/Blacks or women.
Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
What makes you think that YC is categorizing by skin color rather than, as is more typical, self-identification?
The common racial categories today (of which others are subcategories) are (though different names are sometimes used) Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American. Sometimes Pacific Islanders are considered a separate high-level group, rather than part of a top-level group with Asian. [0]
(Hispanic is an ethnic group that is usually treated as cutting across racial groups.)
> There are Indians, Central Asians, Arabs, Persians...
In terms of the usual racial categories, that's Asian, Asian, White, and White.
> Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the old Mongoloid from the long-dominant threefold racial category -- which is the closest parallel in the old scheme to the modern Asian category but is even broader -- certainly did so even more than one could argue that "Asian" does in the dominant modern scheme.
[0] See, e.g., the categories used by the US Census (and the US government more generally, which do break out Pacific Islanders separately) http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
The claim that race is too murky a concept to pin down is generally invoked in cases like this; observed preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged races. If race can't exist, the argument implies, neither can racism. Always ask who wins if we allow ourselves to believe this.
The truth is that racism does exist, and we can test for it using methods that are repeatable in experiment. Race is not "meaningless" in this country, and anyone claiming so is selling you something.
As for hispanic, that's an ethnonym, i.e. an ethnic group, that's exactly my point. This is how we talk in say the Netherlands about what you call the 'racial debate', on the basis of ethnicities like hispanic. And these ethnicities can indeed comprise of black peoples, and within that context we can and do, all the time, talk about racism and discrimination, but that's wholly different from the notion that the human race has different subraces, a black, white, yellow whatever, that's a ridiculously silly and outdated sociological model and anyone claiming otherwise is terribly ignorant.
As for 'who wins if we allow ourselves to believe', really? Do you really base your beliefs on who wins, rather than on what is true?
Anyway, maybe this wasn't clear, when I say race isn't a thing I'm saying it's not a tenable scientific theory of human or biological taxonomy.
That doesn't mean that race as an erroneous social construct doesn't exist in the minds of people. In that way, race as a concept is still very much alive. But when someone says 'Asian is not a race', I think it's important to also note that black or hispanic or white, isn't, either, it's a social construct that is outdated, silly and that we should move past. Just like when people say 'homosexuality is a choice', when scientifically this is wrong, doesn't mean that this idea is not very much alive in the minds of some people. But when someone makes mention of it, it's important to note that it's a wrongful belief that homosexuality is a choice.
Some quick references for those who're unfamiliar with race as a social construct:
> As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct—a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others.
> Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race", following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.
> Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."
> Stephan Palmié asserted that race "is not a thing but a social relation"; or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym", "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference." As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: History and social relationships will.
Like a black person from Nigeria has very different experiences than a black Amercian, but black people from LA and NYC probably have a lot to relate about.
Besides which, the US as a country has put 100's of years of effort into making black a race through the force of law and through societal pressure.
Weird. Don't you think? :)
Do I get to raise interest rates?
How about being a credible candidate for US President?
Can I pay money to fuck kids and spend only 5 years in jail?
We (asian men) are well represented in tech--even when I was a kid, MIT specifically said they did not consider Asian as a underrepresented ethnic group.
Like black churches and communities, professional women's societies, women's shelters, scholarships for women, women's clubs at schools, and so on? In elementary schools, where >90% of teachers are female? Among psychology majors, with 60-70% women? Do you really suggest that it is always "white male time" everywhere?
Go ask a white kid growing up in a mostly black, poor neighborhood whether he feels like it's "his time."
Initiatives like this should be based on socioeconomics, not race.
Yo Eminem, what do you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminem#1972.E2.80.9391:_Early_...
I made no mention of social disadvantages. I merely pointed out that Eminem fits the description of hypothetical "white kid" the parent commenter referenced.
And did you really just suggest that "women's shelters" somehow advantage women over men?
Suggested Google search: [lucky ducky comic]. You might also enjoy the editorial cartoon stylings of Stan Kelly.
But that is beside the point here. My point was to list a handful of the many counterexamples to "it is white male time all the time", which is a silly claim, at least as stated.
Strike that example off the list, then. It doesn't change the original comment's point.
Your examples were bad. I'm going to go ahead and assert that the "black church" example shoots past "bad" and reaches "offensive"; predominantly black churches do not exclude people of other ethnicities.
>Your examples were bad.
I'm glad we had this productive discussion.
I had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy years ago and I am a woman on the street with my two adult sons. There is absolutely more support and better programs for homeless women than for homeless men. However, that is partly because there are a lot fewer women on the street than men, by a very wide margin. Which means that programs for homeless women serve a substantially smaller population, thus it is easier to provide something higher quality.
Part of why so few women are on the street: Family often makes sure a woman with small kids is not literally out on the street. She may not be welcome, but her kids are, and this gives her a place to stay, even if she is treated like crap -- for the sake of the kids. Furthermore, women on the street are at fairly high risk of being raped, something men on the street are not at risk of. So a lot of women will do whatever they have to do to avoid being on the street -- even if that means shacking up with some guy as a polite form of prostitution (an offer I turned down but have seen at least one other homeless woman accept).
My opinion as someone who has both studied it formally and lived it firsthand, and thus interacted with plenty of actual homeless people and observed them, is that men on the street tend to be in less desperate straits than women on the street. Fewer women end up on the street, for complex reasons which do not really translate to privilege per se. There are ways in which me being on the street is an exercise of agency that many women are denied.
Your complaint is kind of like saying "Cancer patients get the best surgeries!" It isn't exactly something to be envious of.
I do wish homeless services generally were better, mostly from a perspective of treating homeless individuals with actual respect, regardless of their gender. But complaining that homeless women have some kind of privilege is basically an ignorant statement.
As for your actual original comment about women's shelters: They exist as sanctuary for women who have been abused. A common way women end up on the street is they flee an abusive relationship where they are financially dependent upon the man. Thus, they flee for their lives with little more than the clothes on their backs. Although there are men who are victims of domestic violence, this is a much more common problem for women, both from the perspective of being assaulted and from the perspective of being financially dependent and, thus, finding it logistically difficult to leave. We don't have "men's shelters" in part because there is relatively little demand for sanctuary for abused and penniless men compared to the demand you see in the female population.
/public service announcement
I like to think we're all adults here. As a nerdy straight white male even I understand that it's shorthand.
Imagine we both have a bucket. Every time life gives you a "freebie", you drop a stone in the bucket. Every time you get passed over or catch crap just for being yourself you take a stone out.
I have had plenty of experiences in my life where I was targeted for being nerdy; bullied, harassed, etc. My parents were not rich and earlier in my life actually quite poor. The difference is my bucket is still mostly full. The average black man can't say that. The average white woman's bucket is fuller than the average black man's, but not as full as mine.
And yes you are pedantically technically correct: there do exist some white people who's buckets are relatively empty by this analogy. They are proportionally a much smaller percentage of all white people than the corresponding cohort of black people in the US.
That is what gripes me a bit about the responses my own tech/nerd community tends to vomit out whenever issues like this come up. Congrats, you pulled a few counter-examples out of your ass. Who cares? We're talking the overall big picture here.
Are you confused by the concept of affirmative action? It's not a new idea and there's a considerable body of academic research and opinions for and against it online.
IMO social context is key. it's asymmetric, and to fix it, you need asymmetric action. if the scale is tipped to one side, then to balance it out, you add some weight to the other.
These are serious questions. How do we decide: what groups should be represented (what about ugly individuals? people with specific disabilities?), and when everything is all "fair"?
and you certain its all due to their skin color etc? Sorry, I'm having a hard time to believe it.
> we also want to do targeted outreach to underrepresented
Having that much resources to invest (limited, are they?), you likely will end up funding a business based on founder's skin color. Sorry, but that how it looks like from outside.
If a group applied with a great idea in the "normal" pool of applicants I suspect they would fair perfectly find against the 6500+ applications.
Obviously, YCombinator is worried about their image and cannot figure out how to "close the gap" without this.
Which brings up another interesting point. Are all the ycombinator staff comfortable with being accused of being racists? What would happen to any ycombinator staff who publicly objected to this accusation?
It's much more worse to claim that you are in no way racist, since this just suppresses the problem. All you can do is accept that you have deep sub/unconscious biases and try to correct them in your conscious mind, though no one ever fully succeeds.
Eventually, hopefully, we'll all evolve in a better direction. In the meantime, this office hours is a good idea.
The difference between this and "We are all sinners; all you can do is accept Jesus into your heart" seems to be merely a manner of terminology.
The only sort of racism that should even be considered these days would be genetic research of ethnic groups. That's not something evil BTW. Researching those prone to heart disease, cancer or have positive/useful genes that could be used to protect all of us in the future. Alas, we aren't living the movie Gattaca yet.
The solution to being subconsciously racist is to be overtly racist instead? Come on.
I cannot imagine that YCombinator did not offer equal opportunity's for all applicants. But they have been slammed with some negative press over the past 2 years (and PG specifically), regarding diversity and women founders.
It is not all that surprising. They explicitly said last year they were going to do something to improve diversity.
But say you submit two applications of virtually same quality except one is stereotypical black/hispanic/woman, and the other stereotypical white, and the latter gets rejected, then you have a case regarding true racism, as oppose to just political correctness.
Is there a reason you're so defensive? I can find links to YC "trying to open markets", but it's 2015, and I don't think you are dumb.
My hackles are, however, raised by the virulent strain of HN comments written by anonymous users confidently asserting that they understand the motives of people they've never met.
The word "probably" in the comment upthread is where the switch flipped in my brain that made me respond. Oh really? Probably, you say? Please tell us more. You've made an assertion; it's right there in the thread. Now stand by it and back it up with evidence.
I on the other tend to give people the benefit of doubt before rushing to judgements. The fact that they excluded Asians whether for the East or the South from the preferential treatment makes me think that they're acting in good faith and with the best intentions till further notice.
BTW: I am not Caucasian. Since we brought up race in this discussion.
It is discrimination. Discrimination is having applicants use 23andMe to prove that they are more black than white, so you can give them a different preferential treatment.
Next to making the world a better place through more black startup founders, this is a PR move. Paul Graham stopped posting on YC around the time of those terrible threads on females in tech. Hackernews became renowned for their toxic response to these issues. You can still see some of that in the rest of this thread and in my comment.
What followed was Female Founders and this initiative. This discriminatory trend will only continue. YC thinks it can make their startup portfolio more diverse, by adding more black startup founders. In this lies the hidden assumption that black founders act or think differently than white founders. The terrible alternative being that YC judges the diversity of their portfolio on the skin color of their founders.
I think it's great that YC is concerned about helping non-elite people. What about just focusing on helping poor people compete in Silicon Valley in general? Does anyone think wealthy founders of any kind need more help than poor founders of any kind?
the sad truth is that being poor and being black/latino are both disadvantages when it comes to starting a startup in silicon valley. obviously both are overcome-able, but it's an uneven playing field.
This is a really, really, really terrible criteria to use. It is one with a proven track record of actively encouraging people to be failures in order to qualify for assistance and it becomes a trap they don't know how to escape. It is much, much, much more effective to define need or merit on some basis other than poverty. It is much better for society to say children, handicapped individuals, new parents, people recently fired...etc... deserve or need assistance and not "poor people."
I wish YC approached the shortage of women and other minorities in tech/startups differently. But I don't wish they took the approach you are suggesting.
YC is a numbers game. This simply encourages stereotypically atypical founders to succeed, skewing the numbers in their benefit for future investors. It also creates role models for potential founders, showing that this is not an industry dominated by just white guys.
From the perspective a middle class white male, I do worry you might be making the problem worse by reinforcing and/or encouraging elitism on both sides.
It seems to me, no matter what way you look at it, separated office hours will perpetuate segregation and bigotry, instead of the desired effect.
Any data to support this?
They're also targeting Female, Veterans and international founders. All of which YC has identified as underrepresented in SV startups.
as i said in another comment here, social context is key and should not be ignored. if the scale is tipped to one side, you have to add weight to the other one if you want to balance it out.
What if your sexual interests go beyond current definitions; are we to add a new slice to the pie chart simply for one person's identification?
The trans-gender, sexual-orientation debate gets specific, but it's irrelevant in the end.
As I advised a kid confused about his orientation recently: it doesn't matter what the media labels as OK, it doesn't matter what your family labels as OK, listen to yourself and come up with your own (potentially-unique) ideas and then get on with your life. Nobody is going to tell you how to do it as well as you can tell yourself.
in an ideal society, it should be as you say - everyone free to be themselves. but we do not live in that society. and if we want to get to that, then we need to take action. and asymmetric situations require asymmetric measures in order to achieve change.
i believe your intentions are good, but do you realise that what you're suggesting sounds like we should all pretend that we're not black/white/gay/str8/whatever? it's really silly. for gay people, it was important to show our pride, not because we wanted to label ourselves even more, but because we had to direct attention to the issue to get it fixed, raise our visibility, get heard. and ultimately, going to gay pride was for me an incredibly empowering experience. one cruel thing about systematic discrimination is that the people affected by it often internalize it, and perceive themselves as less worthy. coming together and standing up for ourselves helps fight that too.
The fact that you think this is a dichotomy is why the whole proposal sounds ridiculous to you. What if people don't want to feel that they have to choose between expressing their racial/sexual identity and being accepted as a human? Do you seriously not understand that that is the issue -- the fact that the issue is presented as a binary and exclusive choice: either express your atypical cultural traits or receive "normal" treatment, but not both.
> The trans-gender, sexual-orientation debate gets specific, but it's irrelevant in the end.
Do you realize that you're calling irrelevant the core feature of many peoples' identity? The only people who can spout this and seriously wonder why nobody else sees it this way are people who fit into mainstream, typical populations and are completely unable to take into account the fact that their own cultural affinities are accepted as normal.
In other words: you already enjoy the acceptance which you are blithely dismissing as a worthless goal for others to pursue.
As long as people are treated with a minimum level of civility and not discriminated against for irrelevant personal characteristics, their "identities" are irrelevant. I don't want to know or care about the "identity" of most people I interact with, and I guarantee you they don't want to know or care about mine. We're all very busy.
Do think about why you insist on labeling yourself. I don't care if you're gay, and it's certainly not the most important thing I want to hear about you. If we're not talking about sex, why would you bring up your sexual orientation?
Do you think that just because I don't shave, and have subsequently grown a long beard, that I should identify with all the other guys that have beards? Or that I only donate my money only to organizations who are friendly to bearded people? Or that I might have a slightly harder time convincing people of my professionalism, but think that's OK, because I believe in my choice?
I am not untitled because I am following others, I am untitled because I am unique and un-titleable.
> If we're not talking about sex, why would you bring up your sexual orientation?
because it's a big part of who i am. to give a simple example of just how thoroughly oblivious you are - i was invited to many hetero weddings, some pretty big ones, and it had not once occurred to me to come up to the bride and groom and say: "you know, do all these people really need to know you two are fucking?!"
love is a big deal in everyone's life, and i won't stick mine in a closet because you don't want to hear it.
but please, don't let my lived experience or the simple reality of the success of the LGBT rights movement, which is argument enough against your Nirvana-fallacy bullshit, stop you in lecturing other people what's best for them.
P.S. another confirmation of obliviousness, or maybe even bad intentions - nobody said you were following anyone. get it?
> love is a big deal in everyone's life, and i won't stick mine in a closet because you don't want to hear it.
I don't really think that's a fair comparison. A wedding is a public celebration between two people so of course they want everyone to know that they're celebrating something. But your own sexual orientation? How do you bring that up in a conversation not about sexual orientation? I don't care what someone's orientation is, they can be whatever they want, but if I'm meeting someone for the first time why do I need to know about their orientation?
Obviously no one here is saying to HIDE your orientation but, at least for me, being heterosexual doesn't make me who I am, does being homosexual really make people who they are? I feel like that's separate from sexual orientation. In my opinion at least.
Ah, surely what's most important about me are the things you want to hear about.
> I am not untitled because I am following others, I am untitled because I am unique and un-titleable.
But these are not labels, and are in no way ideas about yourself to which you attach an undue importance. If I were to blithely negate your perceived individuality by suggesting that you were utterly banal and unoriginal, that certainly wouldn't be a blow to your nameless ego, right?
I feel quite mixed about this. I can see that it's well-intentioned in nature but at the same time it also seem incredibly condescending. And what kind of message is this really sending: "minorities can succeed but they also need special treatment to do so?" I don't know about this ... I won't deny that in many ways these people struggle with issues that white people don't, but maybe this isn't the best way to go about levelling the playing field. After-all, I feel that black people and Hispanics are perfectly capable of making it through the front door of YC the normal way.
I wonder if this is really necessary?
This may be controversial as well, but the black founders I know are rich Ivy leaguers (granted I only know a few). They don't need extra help. (I know there probably are other black founders who didn't grow up in privilege who do not fit into that category.) I don't personally know any hispanic founders, my anecdotally-based sense of things makes me feel like they are urgently underrepresented.
Rehashing the same political divide over and over merely produces the identical hash over and over. That doesn't count as interesting in HN's sense—nothing predictable does. Meanwhile, interesting discussion about the specifics of the story at hand largely gets drowned out.
I'm not sure what if anything we can do about this, but it's seems lame and not in the spirit of gratifying intellectual curiosity.
I think a mod kicking off a meta-topic about the quality of discussion on HN every time he sees a post that falls into one of a few buckets, lowers the signal-to-noise more than posts like Uptrenda's.
For what it's worth, I do agree with Uptrenda. I do also want to explicitly highlight that this certainly is racism - and that whether it is justifiable racism is a separate discussion entirely.
That might be true on a general discussion site, but it's a non sequitur on HN, which values substantiveness.
Another way to look at it is that even if individual experiences are varied enough that they will drown out racial contribution when considered one at a time, racism can still hold back a group of people by 5-10% or whatever, and so that needs to be addressed.
It helps explain why a policy like this is not generally considered racist, but if YC were to single out one individual for YC on the basis of his race, it probably would be.
[1] cf "Poor people should skill up and improve themselves" as well.
I personally find this type of stuff uncomfortable since we are all just people in my book. Gender and race don't mean anything beyond where you might be from or what parts you're born with. This is until programs like this come out and remind us all how good intentions point out differences that none of us can do anything about. It almost comes off sounding like somebody is trying to "fix" skin color based on a weird notion that hue handicaps the brain.
I admit that I yearn for the days when we can all finally be treated equally in a colorblind and gender neutral society. For me, special treatment or lowering/hiring bars based on born attributes is an anti-pattern to achieving true equality. It simply divides us all up more.
Maybe I just wish this read: "YC Open Office Hours for Founders"
I'm curious -- why did you chose to craft the program along racial lines, as opposed to along socioeconomic lines, which seems to be the recent trend in higher ed affirmative action?
But I have no experience with these things, so applaud the effort. The YC guys seem good at changing/improving things as they go.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-blac... "For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one."
Taken from a forthcoming paper by Sampson and Kristin L. Perkins, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality among Chicagoans, 1995-2013,” in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
Professor Sampson has an endowed chair at Harvard and was previously the chair of his department there. While I have not yet gone looking for preprint versions, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that he might have a firm grasp on the difference between statistical and anecdotal information. I see no reason for the author of the Atlantic article to recapitulate the methodology of every single academic reference in a long discussion of social policy.
That's the problem with arguing based on name recognition. Cite rigorous, peer-reviewed, established work. Let the veracity of the work speak for itself.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-jam...
I'm not saying that it's intentional on the VC end, because it's human nature to go with who or what you understand and feel comfortable with.
By announcing a program like this, it may encourage minorities to seek advice, when they otherwise might not have.
There's something especially galling about the repeated concern that targeted outreach to minorities will somehow label its beneficiaries as "inferior", since one expects that most of the time it's exactly the people raising that concern who are rushing to get the ink in their label printers refilled.
It's like saying "this makes African Americans inferior, but you don't get to hold that sentiment against me because I couched it as a concern". At least have the spine to make the meanness plain.
Peace.
Edit: and have an upvote as a token of good faith.
So in regards to your question, AA has been disastrous around the world. In India and Bangladesh hundreds of thousands of deaths, people burning each other in the street, terrifying stuff. All because of class wars instigated by benefits to one class over the other. Same results, on a different magnitude, in Malaysia, Nigeria, Iran, Australia and to a smaller extent the U.S. AA has never worked in all of recorded history.
there's also a book out there claiming the Nazi regime was all the work of gay people. look it up, you'll probably love it.
In India and Bangladesh there is recorded history of hundreds of thousands of deaths. The book sources these facts, if you want to invalidate anything I suggest you go to the original sources, not make a straw man arguement.
I will reiterate, read the book, read the sources -- if you want to invalidate something, invalidate the primary pieces of evidence -- than come back here and we can have a productive conversation.
i certainly don't have the time or will to read a 200 page book for the sake of an HN discussion. this should not be a surprise. you could maybe outline something? i'm particularly interested in how exactly these killings came about. wikipedia quotes some criticism - that the examples were cherry-picked, and not even entirely comparable to affirmative action in the US, the contexts were too different (and, kinda funny, one critic states that he already published this same book in the 90s under a diff name :D). but then, wiki also quotes some very interesting arguments he laid out that i did not see here and that sound good.
all in all, i can agree it's a crude method, but hey, it's better than nothing. lots of people here pointing out problems and only some offering solutions, although strictly laughably unrealistic ones. certainly, no mass killings have happened in the US because of it, and such fear-mongering helps nothing. i personally would bet that, were the US a social democracy, all of this would probably be much less needed. when health and education are provided, opportunities are more available to everyone. but the way it is now, any disadvantaged group is more likely to stay that way.
I still hope the world can improve on these models, but that is no small task.
Have a good day.
Does it include the over 100 million Spanish speakers in the Americas of European descent? What about the 26 million white Americans of Latin American descent?
What about 100 million "Latino" Portuguese speaking Brazilians of other than predominantly European and Asian descent?
French is also a "Latin"/Romance language. Do the predominantly white Québécois count as Latino? What about the Métis, who are both indigenous Americans and speakers of a Romance language.
What about Native Americans who speak English rather than a Romance language? What if the Native Americans learned Spanish in high school?
What about the hundreds of millions of people from China and India and elsewhere in Asia who grew up in materially worse conditions than any ghetto in the United States?
I mean, I get the whole "isn't this just affirmative action and isn't AA bad?" thing, I really do. But this is a private business, not a government agency, and they are free to try and address issues of equality and what-not in whichever way they see fit. And when you're part of a group that is (or is seen as) disadvantaged, it can only help to have some very specific support thrown your way.
If this does even a small bit of good in terms of creating more successful companies founded by black or hispanic founders, I will benefit us all in the long run.
That there is underrepresentation with respect to a minority is indicative of that minority generally having lower socioeconomic status, and perhaps prejudices against it. To try to combat whatever those prejudices may be, the suggestion here is that "diversity is good" and that just having more minorities will help the problem.
The difference is that it actually won't, because now you have a perception of people being given opportunities they don't deserve, just because they are a minority.
A much, much better way to try to deconstruct the sorts of prejudices or minority disadvantages, which this initiative is ostensibly trying to do, is to make these sorts of initiatives open to anyone disadvantaged (such as the poor), and invest in programs targeted at children in poorer (disproportionately minority) communities.
I disagree. I think having more companies (especially successful ones) founded by black and hispanic founders will help everyone broadly, for this reason: It will provide young, potential founders, who might not otherwise have pursued entrepreneurship at all, with positive role models, and will show them actual live examples of how success can be achieved.
My feeling is that this promotes entrepreneurship in general among increasingly larger portions of the overall population... and if you believe that technological progress in general is basically a net positive for humanity (a position which I admit is not without controversy, BTW, although I personally adhere to it) then this is a Good Thing. More smart people working on new ideas, and creating things to solve problems? Yeah, I can accept some private companies engaging in a little "affirmative action" if it supports that.
is to make these sorts of initiatives open to anyone disadvantaged (such as the poor), and invest in programs targeted at children in minority communities.
Having grown up "white but dirt poor" I mostly agree with you, in the sense that I think addressing poverty - regardless of race - is also a valuable thing. I'm just not sure one approach is more or less important than the other. I think both are valuable things to do.
edit: Relevant article http://www.allinportuguese.com/blog/2013/02/25/are-portugues...
Also, how would YC handle, like, a Japanese Chilean immigrant?
PS. I'm neither living in America nor a native speaker so excuse my lack of knowledge
I guess if you really stretch the idea, they count as minorities.
Perhaps focusing speakers that cover challenged and topics of interest is better then reducing intercultural exposure?
Hell, I've met Americans giving me blank stares when I would talk about how difficult it is for me to get even a tourist visa to go to the US.
First world privilege should end. Black, white, asian, latino - doesn't matter. If you were born in a modern and developed country, you are already a part of a privileged group. Acknowledge this, gain some humility and try to better yourself and others around you.
I urge people to organize YC Open Office Hours for non-first-world people, immigrants and the like.
You have to know what to search to land on HN or some other popular startup site. My point (and argument) is that most minorities don't know about YCombinator, HackerNews, etc; partially because most live in a non-startup, tech-oriented community. And searching for reasonable keywords like "start a business" isn't a direct invite to the world of startups.
This is why outreach is important. We need to key certain demographics into the startup world via outbound.
Put it this way, there are 50 states in America and the areas with the least amount of blacks/hispanics are where words like "startup" is king (and vice versa). Until then, outreach is vital until certain demographics pick it up at scale.
two cents. More theory than facts.
A) It seems both condescending and racist at the same time (i.e. you're a minority in SV? surely you're doing terrible - let us help. You're white in SV? you must be doing great, move along we're not looking to help you) -- As others have stated, it's also partly because of the specified groups.
B) If the ground really is that uneven maybe the problem is not the founders, but the system (again, how to change that is a super complicated discussion)
I feel like a more tactful way to put out such a call for people who would like help might be something like:
"YC is putting on a special series of office hours for struggling startups. In past series we've found that certain groups of people were underrepresented, and we'd like for that not to be the case, so we are going to prioritize the following groups: <group listing here>. This doesn't mean anyone who is not in those groups is unwelcome."
As others have noted, getting away from the group listing would be even better. Maybe just making a call for anyone who feels like they have been "marginalized" in the SV startup community, or aren't receiving enough help might suffice (without making a laundry list of underrepresented people).
I have many opinions on the whole "diversity" debate, but I think my most defensible opinion is for organizations to aim for population-parity demographic distributions, and work to upset any limiting functions that might be skewing your sector away from the wider population's distributions (again, how to do this is highly debated, and I have a ton of my own opinions on the subject, but I digress).
I've also intentionally left out my own race/cultural group/whatever in this comment, but make sure to check your own biases at the door - I could be caucasian, latino, african american, asian, lgbt, trans, whatever .
Honestly the point of my comment was to do with tact and wording. It's super clear that YC is trying it's best to be accessible to all, and to do the right thing by groups that may feel marginalized (whoever they may be) -- however with the current hubbub (that has no end in sight) around these issues, a great deal of tact should be applied.
More than 0 people feel that the whole "diversity" spiel is antagonistic, as well as more than 0 people feeling that it's completely justied/the opposite. It's a touchy subject, and I feel that wasn't respected by this post. Yes, you want to help a specific group of society that you see struggling, but it's also divisive to make it seem like a group is inherently more valuable for no reason other than the color of their skin, or life choices, or whatever.
it is also the truth, and it is a problem. labelling is like a joke compared to all the things that discriminated groups experience.
edit - apologies, i thought you said 'vulnerable'. valuable? where did you get that from?
diversity is good/desirable -> minorities are more valuable than white people at your company (since you clearly already have enough white people) seems to be the point of a lot of blog posts/conversation. This kind of thinking is most clearly visible in when companies state that they try to hire X underrepresented people to some position, as if you just need to get a certain number (and/or when corporations lower meaningful meritocratic barriers to hire people that otherwise wouldn't have been in the ballpark).
"meaningful meritocratic barrier" to me means "show me you can do fizzbuzz", rather than "tell me which ivy you came from"
There is obviously a case to be made for diversity (independent of morality), but most modern literature doesn't seem to address that at any meaningful level of complexity. I discovered this when talking to a colleague who was annoyed with what seemed to be a devaluing of potential hires just because they weren't "diverse" enough.
when blog posts that make such absolutely ridiculous claims get commented on here, then we can discuss that and heartily agree, ok? :D but in this discussion here, you are the one who said that this action implies minority founders are more valuable. this is simply not true.
i do agree that affirmative action is a bit crude, but it's done for a greater social good, by people who recognize the problem, sympathise, and want to help. the field is, after all, uneven. an asymmetric situation that needs asymmetric action to correct it.
don't avoid this discussion, it is essential. it's not complicated. we are all part of the system, and if we all chip in to even the field, things will improve.
I discuss these issues somewhat regularly with some colleagues, so I feel like I have solutions that work for me (maybe I'll make a blog post sometime, but I am worried I'll just add to the noise).
That's some grade A idiocy.
By not being discriminating? You don't fight discrimination with more discrimination and the very idea is so mindboggingly stupid that it hurts. It's sad to see that the social justice warrior bullshit has arrived at HN.
Can't sing enough praise about it. Sourced incredibly And clear logical points.
"Notes [...] [2] One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you're not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with."
I guess they are looking for the talented blacks, Meso-Americans and females who weren't happy with being handed the jobs they were under-qualified for, and wanted to risk throwing away being at the top of their in-group mating market for self-actualization or helping the world or something?
The whole Faustian world-saving, or hyper-competitive, tech hobbyist, leadership inclinations aren't really found in the populations they seek to reach out to. They don't want to invent anything new of valuable, they merely seek to re-distribute funding and opportunities in tech to themselves.
The same inclinations to start tech companies are more similar to ones in people who play strategic games, or who contribute to open source software, or who engage in hacking for fun or bragging rights. I think they would have far more success reaching out to those groups. It's not really imaginable that the kinds of blacks and Hispanics they are seeking to fund were the kinds of kids who would lend their friends books on programming growing up that had nothing to do with school or a career. If they believe that starting a world-class company is simply a good business decision for anyone with the talent, then, they should do more recruitment of people who actually have the skills for that.
They fail to realize that marginalized minorities are not raised to "be leaders", and "take risks". In a state where the "oppressed" talented can coast on their racial credentials, why bother taking the risk?