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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Example: I have an African American neighbor one block over that I see regularly. He works in IT/devops. Like every IT person, he gets yelled at by random people at work all the time; it's a high-stress job. But when he gets visibly frustrated, he's The Angry Black Man. Dipshit coworkers complain that they don't feel safe.

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.

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As a large white man, similar things have happened to me.

"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.

I've had similar as well. Literally had managers tell me I can't express anger the way others do because it was intimidating when I did it. Size matters as much as anything in that kind of situation.

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.

I actually think that is kind of interesting. As a 5'9'' guy, it aint a problem, but it is interesting.

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.

> 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.

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.

If a physical trait causes people around someone to feel fear, alarm and distress, then that person actually is threatening and it's not acceptable.

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.

It's not the physical traits of height or maleness or colour, but the anger displayed.

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.

Yeah, well, the difference is, every single black person I've seen that works in the industry has had a superlatively gregarious personality -- comfortable to talk to, ultra-diplomatic, with a good sense of humor. Any similarly sized group of white men I can think of, be it groups of coworkers at different companies, people I play golf with that are in tech, etc, have some angry, caustic personalities. Where'd all the angry black people go?

Right, so imagine how much worse it would be for you if you were black on top of being large.

Implicit trust is how to decode 'white privledge' quickly. Point being that it is something to take for granted, unless you have to establish it (or pay for the privledge). But it is very necessary in tech where alot happens by way of informal networking & referrals and lots of heuristic social screening comes into play (buy necessity, not malice). So those who have implicit trust are at a huge advantage (or at least an even playing field). And those that don't are on the ooposite end of that (battling uphill, etc).

Another example that should be nearer to the hearts of anti-YC partisans: the "looking for people that look like Zuckerberg" bias Paul Graham accidentally evoked a few years back.

That's really interesting. It sounds like that is very much a symptom of ingrained racism; something these people have been encouraged to do for most of their lives.

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.

The idea behind the phone call is that it welcomes people into the field. If we want to couch these issues in the emotions of the victims, rather than the (often inadvertent) perpetrators, then yes: it's mostly about ameliorating "fear". I don't know that we need much psychoanalysis, though. Mostly what YC is doing is just neighborly common sense.

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.

I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that people are complaining in bad faith. They might just be wrong.

"It is an example of a white male privilege"

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.

Isn't that precisely what privilege means? Having advantages that accrue to you simply by membership in one group?

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.

What I read in that is that we can say Argentinians are privileged vs Paraguayans, because due to circumstance beyond anyone's control, Argentines are better off than Paraguayans. Same for Greeks vs Swedes?

Fair assessment, I think. I don't know anything about the specific situations in those countries, but privilege is very frequently used in referring to say, coming from the U.S. vs. the rest of the world, or developed nations rather than developing nations.

Okay, and when are we gonna talk about Jewish privilege? Because they get all the benefits of white privilege when they're white-passing, PLUS the benefits of being Jewish!

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...

Or how about the drawbacks of being Jewish? According to the FBI (https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2013/topic-... "Of the 1,223 victims of anti-religious hate crimes: 60.3 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias."

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.

And yet, no one has a "Perhaps white people do so well because..." and if they do, they're racist. Right?

Then whats the cause of the poor treatment?

If you are saying white privilege is the cause of poor treatment of the black man mentioned above, you are way off base. Privilege is not the cause of the treatment, it is the result.

I'm just simply asking whats the cause of the poor treatment? If you are able to assert that it is not due to white privilege and know if someone is off-base, then I'm assuming you know that cause to make such an assertion. That's all.

I don't think you grok the concept of privilege as I'm using it. My guess is that like many people who reject the term (or its common usage), you think "privilege" is an indictment of the people who hold the privilege, or a demand for them to relinquish it. That may be some people's notion of privilege, but it's not a very useful one.

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.

You are focused on the word "privilege" but my point was about the word "white". Anyone not a black male is privileged to be able to get angry in the work place according to your example. It's asian/indian/middle eastern/eskimo/white/other privilege.

Ok, let's carry this logic- the same disparity exists between men and women. Would you describe women who don't feel safe around their visibly angry coworkers as "dipshits", and dismiss this anger as venting? This must be an example of female privilege, right?

You're reading this backwards... The privilege part is that the Angry White Man doesn't get called out for raging much of the time. They get latitude. The black guy doesn't.

Right. So the fact that the Angry White Woman doesn't get called out for raging much of the time, while the man does, is an example of female privilege. Right?

Sex differences of this type can be seen as privilege, but, in the real world, women who show strong emotion are often described as being hysterical or with other negative terms and marginalized while men are described as driven go-getters for the same behavior, and rewarded.

I'm not sure men who show strong emotion are necessarily viewed as go-getters. Strong emotions can get men in plenty of trouble.

I remember CW Nevius at sfgate (San Francisco chronicle) offered this perspective

http://blog.sfgate.com/cwnevius/2013/11/21/aggressive-womena...

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