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Comment by aeflash | Hacker News Reader

It likely will. You revealed an unconscious bias you have. You think that focusing on diversity is lowering the hiring bar. This is a fundamentally biased position -- it assumes minorities are worse tech workers. You're the top comment on a popular HN thread, many people are rebutting you, and are getting linked from many external sources.

All it takes is one hiring manager to read this thread, realize their unconscious bias, and then realize that focusing on diversity does not compromise employee standards. Then a black person gets hired.

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Your ability to repeat your talking points is impressive. But you demonstrate zero engagement with any other views, zero understanding of the lived reality of minorities in tech, and zero understanding of the decades of research and discussion around racism and employment.

The charitable assumption is that's accidental. There's no reason white people end up knowing about this stuff automatically. I sure didn't. But at some level of repetition and entrenched defense of an apparently naive position, it gets pretty hard to say, "Oh Steven2012 just doesn't know."

It begins to look like you don't want to know. Which is also fine, really, as long as you own that and move along in spite of it. Maybe try that? It seems better than being the poster boy for statements like "I don't read HN often. But it can be instructive. You get to read unfiltered sentiment from ppl who don't realize they're misogynist/racist."

Actually what is even more remarkable is your ability to smugly pooh pooh everyone's ideas and point out how everyone is a closet racist, despite their good intentions.

What, pray tell, is your idea to increase diversity, and what have you personally done to increase diversity?

Ah, yes, let's turn this around. No matter that you haven't addressed any of the criticisms of your comments. No matter that when you get replies you don't like, you just delete what you wrote rather than owning your words and working through your mistakes. (Let me know if you'd like a copy; I saved it for you.) No matter that I encouraged your one actual idea, which was to maybe start volunteering. No matter that you don't know anything about the research on or the history of this topic, yet feel qualified to judge other people. Let's do it.

My idea? I don't need to have "my idea" to increase diversity. Other people have already had plenty of ideas. Better, they have discussed, researched, and critiqued those ideas. As a white guy, I'm unlikely to have any particularly good ideas, because I have little direct experience of the problem I'm trying to solve. I also try not to have ideas on products to create for the Chinese market, better approaches to goat herding, or the particle makeup of dark matter. I know I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to clutter the discussion talking like I am.

And what am I actually doing? A fair number of things, but the most important of them is to listen. I talk with actual people about their actual experiences. Via RSS and Twitter, I follow a lot of people who think and write about this stuff. I read studies on the topic. I read about America's incredibly fucked-up racial history, and about how we're still dealing with the effects of that today. I listen to actual minorities in tech about their actual experiences. And ones outside of tech, too.

I encourage you to try it. Because then you'd know that racial bias is widespread in the US despite "good intentions" [1]. You'd know that outbursts like this are a symptom of white fragility [2]. You'd know about the white savior complex, where a white person decides the only solution to racism is for them to go share their time and wisdom with those poor unfortunates, ignoring the structural issues that created the situation.

And then, once you get past the Racism 101 stuff, maybe you could help me and others who would like HN and the tech industry to have discussions on this that aren't somewhere on the horrific/remedial end of the spectrum. But take your time with the listening. It took me maybe 3 or 4 years of work. The hard part wasn't the learning, it was the unlearning of what I thought I knew. [3]

[1] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/implicit-test/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-white-people-freak-out-w...

[3] http://bengtwendel.com/your-teacup-is-full-empty-your-cup/

Hey wpietri, thanks for writing this comment. Sometimes, I read through threads like these, and see a lot of vocal white people saying shit that makes me lose hope for the future. White people are in charge in this country, and any change will require them to back it. Reading this helps undo some of that despair, and gives me some hope for the future.

Thank you, and keep being exactly what minorities need right now.

Thanks. I was an ignorant fool on these issues for a long time. Now that I have slightly more clue, I figure one of the best things I can do with my privilege is just to visibly object, to get white dudes to listen to, well, anybody else. So much of what I got wrong happened not because I heard both sides and picked the wrong one, but because I didn't even know there was a choice.

And for what it's worth, I'm as impressed as hell by people in their 20s today. As an old, I think I'm supposed to grumble about kids these days. But I see so many young-ish voices that are so much smarter about these topics than my cohort was. I have enormous hope for the future.

I guess the tldr to your response is: "I'm actually doing nothing."

If that's what you take from it, then it looks like we're done here.

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