Again, not trying to be a troll. Not American, just trying to understand.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What makes you think that YC is categorizing by skin color rather than, as is more typical, self-identification?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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