I’m Not “Black Enough” for Inc. Magazine | Hacker News Reader

I’m Not “Black Enough” for Inc. Magazine

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There's something that always bothers me when someone sees a statistic that says "Among racial and ethnic groups, African Americans had the highest poverty rate, 27.4 percent, followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent." and flips it to say "almost 75% of blacks are not poor!"

Yes, that's true, but if I were to go further and look at the source he cited's fact sheet on African Americans then I'd see some interesting factoids about wealth. For instance:

> In 2010, the median wealth, or net worth, for black families was $4,900, compared to median wealth for whites of $97,000.

> Blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have zero or negative net worth—33.9 percent compared to 18.6 percent.

So yes, we can say "nearly 75% of Blacks are not poor" but that doesn't really work as a jumping off point for any argument about black wealth, at least in my opinion.

It looks to me like this guy has taken his suburban upper class experience (he called his living situation "Huxtable-esque") and assumed that all black people who are living above the poverty line are somehow doing just as well as he is. Therefore the media is going out of its way to find the "archetypal" black entrepreneur who comes from that ~25% of blacks who grew up in poverty. I don't really buy that argument, especially because being above the poverty line doesn't really speak to matters of wealth, class, and social mobility.

I'm not saying any of this to diminish his success, I'm happy he's made it, but I think he's failed to recognize his (sadly) exceptional situation that doesn't really speak for the rest of the 75%.

EDIT: cleaned up some grammar.

> It looks to me like this guy ... assumed that all black people

Thus is the heart of the matter - in reverse. I'm not trying to be pointed, but there is no other way to say it, so here it is: it is you who have assumed, not the author. This extrapolation of the one to the many is at the heart of modern identity politics. It is the core of what the article gets at - to be identified as a thing you have to fit the stereotype. And anything the one does is instantly assumed to be a comment on the many or, in some cases, the all, and any way the one varies from the many doesn't change the definition, it is merely discarded.

I despair at this, I really do. Why do we breakdown the individual homo sapiens in a story to their base elements of race, gender, sexuality, religion, rather than celebrate their unqiueness?

I had a 23andme DNA test years ago, and I shared my racial profile (X% Scndanavian, y% norther european etc) and someone made a comment about the last line: "100% 5thaccount - you are 100% you". I still think about that comment a lot. These elements that make us up don't define us, as we are not the sum of these elements the way water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. We are our own selves, who are more than, or sometimes less than, the sum of these things. Rather than reduce our experiences to the net sum of these simple elements, I think we should praise the unique - an unique implies not generalisable to the many or all - outcomes we each create.

We can still "celebrate uniqueness" while acknowledging that how we're treated by society is in large part determined by what groups we happen to belong to.

For example: if you're black, you will likely receive a longer prison sentence than a white person who commits a similar crime[1]. Full stop. You're your own self, you can't be reduced to the sum of your race/gender/etc, and yet on solely on the basis of your skin color you'll be given a more severe punishment.

The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...

> The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly.

Yes, but everyone is being bucketed by society. By their gender, skin color, age, height, hair type, personality type, on and on and on—there are so many buckets that eventually you reach the level of the individual. Everyone is in their own bucket.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.

Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.

I'm going to delegate my response: https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445

Highly recommend the whole thing, but 40:45 to ~46:00 is, to your point, the most eloquent argument I've ever heard about this topic.

Thank you for your response.

I watched that section, and I offer a rebuttal.

My summary:The speaker here argues that post-modernism's great illogical flaw is that it invites all individuals to assign themselves labels of victimhood, and argues that if one were fair and listened to everybody, everybody is a victim.

Firstly, that argument doesn't appear very insightful - the individual's narcissism is incompatible with fairness. On a separate note, the speaker uses self-identifying label as a call for victimhood when many individuals (which is the perspective he is using) would never see it that way, so he is revealing a prejudice about the labels he is referencing. Either not self-aware or a deliberate choice.

But that's not the point here - this argument has it backwards. It's not about a black person saying 'I am disadvantaged because I am black'. It is about statistical facts showing that black people are disadvantaged, and historical laws showing that this is due to decades of policy and laws which were a result of another bucket of people (whites) saying, 'These people are black, let's disadvantage them'.

The segueway about LGBTQIAK label is I think parallel/tangential to this and is itself super interesting with a whole bunch of complications that societies have to unravel, but let's not conflate the two, because they are not analogous.

edit:grammar and clarity

I feel the same with respect to being "just you." On a personal level, I can't relate to people whose sense of identity is strongly tied to any aspect of themselves that's outside of their control---whether that's their race, sex, family, birthplace, etc.

At the same time, I thing loads of people feel that way, and I'm in the minority. It's something I've tried to make myself more conscious of throughout my life... I've definitely been less sensitive than I should have been with respect to this sort of thing.

Holy cow, someone made exactly the joke/remark about my DNA ethnicity overview "%100 MyNAME", when I shared it with my friends :D

> "It looks to me like this guy has taken his suburban upper class experience (he called his living situation "Huxtable-esque") and assumed that all black people who are living above the poverty line are somehow doing just as well as he is."

That's exactly the point. He hasn't. He's pointedly trying to avoid generalizations, and he's frustrated by the fact that the media only trafficks in anecdotes and stories that fit the prevailing generalization.

And these generalizations aren't even reflective of the vast majority of black experiences. We can quibble over numbers all day, but even with the numbers you cited, the majority of Blacks aren't living in poverty. The majority of Blacks don't have "zero or negative net worth." The Author's life and experience is just as reflective of the "Black experience", as that of someone who grows up poor in the inner-city.

Imagine if a Swedish newspaper decides one day that they want their readers to better understand "how Americans think". And so they start following, interviewing and publishing stories featuring a number of Americans. They approach you one day, you agree to go along, and then after a few months, you're told that your story is getting dropped because you don't resemble the "archetypical American". You do some digging around and find that every single one of their stories feature White Trump voters living in Middle-America, struggling financially. And the only reason you weren't featured was because you were a Democrat who didn't fit the above labels. How would that make you feel? Yes, the middle-America Trump voter is indeed an American, but that doesn't make Democrats any less American either.

Ultimately, we need our media and news sources to tell the story of all individuals and perspectives. Because the only way we can better understand the world, and each other, is if we are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives and experiences. There is a very real danger of people only being exposed to a single story, and starting to stereotype everyone they meet to fit into the mold of that one single story.

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a...

Was the author really pointedly trying to avoid generalizations? His last paragraph suggests, at least to me, that he's more interested in building a new narrative of the "archetypal black entrepreneur".

> We have a responsibility to command an image of the ‘archetypal Black entrepreneur’ which represents the majority of us, and not just the minority. By realigning the story from stereotypes and struggles to the significant amount of positive movement in the Black entrepreneurial space — and acknowledging the fact that many of us come from backgrounds set up for success, we can better serve our collective advancement. Let’s move away from the emphasis on Black suffering, and make the celebration of Black excellence — the new normal.

In my opinion he's looking to replace one generalization with another rather than do what you're suggesting and push people towards telling stories of all individuals and perspectives. He's also doing this by zeroing in on a single statistic, emphasizing it's inverse, and then using that to build a case that more black people are living in his situation than are living in poverty. Unfortunately I have a hard bias against anyone who pulls numbers out of context in order to build a narrative. It also troubles me that taking a deeper dive into his source's findings on the lived experience of many African Americans shows that the single statistic he made up (based on the inverse of the source's findings) is fairly misleading. In my opinion he did the same thing that Milo Yiannopoulos did on Bill Maher. Milo said trans people are disproportionately involved in more sex crimes than the rest of the population. He said this while arguing in favor of the North Carolina bathroom law. Yes, what he said was true, but he failed to mention that trans people are the victims in the vast majority of those cases. While we can "quibble over the numbers", I think its dishonest to take data and twist it to push a narrative -- no matter the point being made.

That is in large part what frustrates me with this article -- I find it paints a dishonest picture of black wealth in order to push a generalization of black entrepreneurship favorable to the author's own lived experience. While I'm largely in agreement with what you -- and Adichi -- have to say with regards to the dangers of the single narrative, I am not at all convinced the author's post was written in that spirit, considering he feels we have a "responsibility to command an image of the 'archetypal Black entrepreneur'".

The guy doesn't fit the narrative that's currently oh-so-trendy, thus he is not deemed valuable to the media. Makes you realize how much intentional selective bias there is in these publications' portrayals of the world.

"Can we cause outrage with this? Nope? Ok, discard this dude, find someone who supports our hypothesis so we get more page views"

Remember, the media are not in the business of keeping the public informed, they're first and foremost interested in putting bread on their own tables, like any other business out there. They like having a job, and these days, given how high our tolerance for absurdity has become, their job requires they come up with the most dramatic and outrageous content they can in order to keep people hooked.

Similarly - when reading an article that has a single-line quote from a magazine - people can read all sorts of nefarious motivations into it which conveniently fit their worldview.

It's natural selection, regrettably. Things that won't rile people up display poor fitness. Technically, I think it's a human problem.

Indeed. They need to be at that sweet spot where they're maximizing outrage, but the content is still plausibly true vs say.. tabloids, where a ton of content is completely fabricated and people know it.

A classic about this very phenomenon: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage....

It's an artifact of the article-by-article payment/consumption model.

It used to be that people would have to buy a whole issue or subscription to a publication. So you'd choose based on the overall reputation of the publication. So that's what the media maximized.

Now, on the Internet, people consume articles for free from many sites based on links. They don't care (and often don't know) anything about the reputation of the publication they're reading. And sites get paid based on views (through ads served). So now the sites are optimizing for getting people to read this article, without much concern about the overall image of the site, which most people won't know anyway.

It's an obvious, huge, and very impactful change in incentives for media people.

Are you sure that is true? I mean, we had the whole Yellow Journalism phenomenon at the turn of the last century, and they weren't selling on an article by article basis. The publications had reputations, but they still got people to read their paper by sensationalizing everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

>they weren't selling on an article by article basis

there were literally newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline and making you pay two cents to read the article itself. I don't think subscription papers existed in large amounts during that time.

> newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline

it's weirdly hilarious to me to think that urban sidewalks used to be analogous to facebook...

When you paid for a newspaper, you paid for the lurid headlines, the coverage of local politics, the funny pages, the investigative journalism, the sports reporting, the crossword etc etc. Nobody in management was entirely sure what part of that mix actually sold newspapers; editors had a large degree of discretion over what went in the paper and who got paid.

Ad-supported online journalism has unbundled news and precisely quantified each part. Management know exactly what each piece of "content" earns. Editors can no longer pretend that the prestige of serious reporting is a worthwhile investment.

Ad-supported online journalism is now almost entirely dependent on traffic from social media. As we have learned from the "fake news" imbroglio, reputation means almost nothing in this arena. You're only as good as your next clickbait headline.

As I see it, the only future for quality journalism is subscription-based, one way or another. Adsense is killing journalism.

No it's not an artefact of that monetisation model at all.

The fact is that tabloid, clickbait style of journalism has been going on for decades and was popularised by Rupert Murdoch first in the Australia then UK then the US. What we see on many online websites are merely digital versions of The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph etc which were all very popular news publications.

This is the central thesis of Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. The internet ruined media by changing the revenue model to a per-article rather than per-subscription basis. He made this claim in 2012, long before most people recognized how dangerous the changing media ecosystem was going to be.

Great book, if you're looking to understand how media in the internet age became such a disaster I recommend it highly.

I think there is a LOT in this, as individual pageviews dictate revenue more than reputation, However, I think there is a misnomer about pageviews vs reputation.

In Australia, the equivalent of the NYTimes is probably The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald. On both sites, people read a lot of gossip. I haven't seen stats recently, but when a mate worked there they were usually the top stories on any given day outside say Steve Irwin dying.

Someone can read gossip anywhere - so why go to a reputable site to do it? I think people still go to reputable sites because they can convince themselves they aren't one of the masses that reads gossip. Oh no. They read The Age / NYTimes etc.

The publications that chase pageviews at the expense of reputation threaten to destroy that convenient delusion, and I wonder if, longer term, that will hurt the bottom line. Fake News SHOULD be a huge financial gain for the mainstream media, as reputation is the number one factor people suggest when working out if something is fake news. So more than even reputation is the key - even when the goal is more gossip pageviews.

There's an incredible write-up on this effect by Scott Alexander, that goes into depth about the cultural propagation on the internet of exactly the phenomena you're describing.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

On the other hand, this article is on HN because it fits an other narrative. There is never just one "the narrative". There are always two or more competing narratives and people publish, share and upvote stories that fit the one they prefer.

Conflicting narratives is pretty much how news work, that's just a fact of life, no denying that. Don't know if I would claim that HN has a particular interest in suppressing a certain narrative though, can you explain? Who is to gain here?

If discrimination is a real barrier to entrepreneurship - that contradicts the narrative that entrepreneurship is an objective meritocracy.

I'd be surprised if people here actually believed that to be a successful entrepreneur your starting conditions do not matter.

Your race, your country, your culture, your health, your finances, your dependents, your family all have a massive impact on whether you can stop doing whatever you're doing and focus fully on turning an idea into a high growth business. Maybe it's just me, but I personally believe that it is a huge privilege to have the ability to pursue entrepreneurship.

I could be a coal miner in war-torn sub-Saharan Africa trying to make ends meet to pay for my sick child's care, instead I'm sitting in a comfortable air conditioned office in the Bay, able to complain that the snack selection is not sufficiently locally sourced.

What narrative do you think this guy isn't fitting, then?

I'm sure they'd agree that conditions matter. But people here regularly disagree that gender and race discrimination in the US is a factor in tech. And they have for years, often vehemently and in great volume.

If I had to make an overly broad generalization of the HN readership, people reading links here are more willing than the average person to read an article that disagrees with their preconceived stereotypes and worldview. Whereas mass market media (the magazine Inc, etc) is going in the opposite direction from that.

> If I had to make an overly broad generalization of the HN readership, people reading links here are more willing than the average person to read an article that disagrees with their preconceived stereotypes and worldview.

You're right, that was an overly broad generalization about the readership of a public internet forum.

Yeah, let's have a 2-sided conversation about EVs on HN and see. Tesla is God, Tesla is King, Musk will save our souls.

It only took 4 minutes for therpe1'a comment to be flagged. Sounds to me like HN isn't actually so inclined.

I'm confused why therpe1's comment was flagged. It makes a reasonable point. It doesn't seem outrageous. There are worse comments here on this page. I would upvote the comment if it was already dead. I am puzzled that this particular comment is the one that is flagged.

I would guess it was flagged because it didn't have much substance and just wildly lashed around at things said here - claiming it was predictable HN would say those things. Yet every one of those points has been followed up with opposing opinions so the post is trying to paint the HN community as one-sided when it clearly isn't.

So it seems therpe1 is mainly upset that critical commentary takes place here, which is the almost lamest possible thing to complain about. The only thing that would have made it worse is to put something in like "Edit: bring on the downvotes, you know I'm right".

But there are certain types of comments that seem to show up on threads about race. It seems valid to point out that the majority of comments have a particular theme. If some comments are predictable, and I say they are predictable, surely I'm just stating the facts? It's seems like heavy-handed moderation to kill a comment just for that.

Maybe on which programming language or framework is best. Most articles regarding race/gender discrimination even if they directly involve major tech firms are flagged and downvoted by large portions of the community. If they survive the initial wave, the top comments are usually pretty dismissive

Large businesses being evil is a very common narrative and a lame cliche really.

So if HN is downvoting, it's probably because educated people are not liking being played by a tired narrative.

Major tech firm is worse with race/gender discrimination than the community at large? Please, ever worked blue collar and seen their hiring practices?

They are dismissive for a reason.

If the tech community wants to set a good example, great. Being played to feel like they are worse than society... to smart for that narrative.

If there is an issue it only matters if it's extremely egregious and the worst example?

No. Not at all.

As long as it is reported as such. Which it is not. Hence my point.

IIRC the "strange year at uber" article was one of the most up-voted articles this year.

People on here are always willing to read stories with substantiated claims or new information. However, yet another article pointing out how there is a general gender imbalance in the workforce that matches college CS graduation rates is likely to fall flat.

That's why it'd be great for a publication to publish a diverse range of narratives, exposing people to both (or multiple) sides of a story and allow people to make up their own minds.

> this article is on HN because it fits an other narrative.

Which narrative do you think that is?

One potential narrative might be that silicon valley is a meritocracy.

I think people are having an issue with the story at face value - binning people into groups and then taking advantage of that.

It is demeaning and patronizing to hear that you're victim and your race should be what defines you.

The author is trying to say "Here look at the cool business I built with a lot of work and talent. Check out the algorithm I am using etc." and journalist wants to instead write about "Poor black person somehow made it out of a poor neighborhood. Let's point out his race over and over...".

What this author is trying to say is separate from the narrative people may try and build off the back of this article.

The narrative built could be that journalists are mistreating successful entrepreneurs by looking for stereotypes.

Also, someone could look at this article and think it signals that discussions about race and its effect on entrepreneurship are now actually harmful overall.

Another narrative could be that the archetypal black entrepreneur is well represented by this guy.

Alternatively, someone could build this into a narrative that black people aren't inordinately effected by poverty.

I don't personally think there is enough quantitative evidence relayed in the article to substantiate any of those narratives, but I'm pretty sure at least one or two of those narratives have been cognitively hardened in someone because they read this article.

Ah, the "well the other news is fake news so this fake news is okay" approach.

The people have read your narrative and the article author's and have judged his to be more sound.

This is such a juvenile view of how things work.

Remember, the media are not in the business of keeping the public informed, they're first and foremost interested in putting bread on their own tables, like any other business out there

Short circuit logic, here you conflate things to make it disregard the first statement and push your own agenda.

1. A media business is not necessarily the same as a news business.

2. Either way both a media business and a news business are in the business of creating and selling stories.

3. Both a media business and a news business can have objectives of both selling stories that inform the public and sell junk to the public.

4. Stating like any other business doesn't serve any credibility to your argument, rather you're trying to slant a profit motive as evil. Would non-profits providing news services be the only good people in your head?

They like having a job, and these days, given how high our tolerance for absurdity has become, their job requires they come up with the most dramatic and outrageous content they can in order to keep people hooked.

Because they like jobs therefore they must be willing to take the low road to whatever they can to earn the duckets those jobs? So they create sensationalized and dramatized results, to use generalities to gloss over nuanced matters?

Kind of like this post here?

Good job.

Everyone's in the business of selling stories. You tried to sell yours but I'm not buying it.

[I've decided to delete this comment as it didn't generate good discussion. The reply it got was a complete non-sequitur.]

So what you're saying is that I can get into all ivies with a 2200 SAT score and 3.8 GPA?

And get internships at top companies based on my race?

And have parents and family who can speak proper english and understands American culture?

Sign me up.

On the other hand, the narrative of a successful black entrepreneur who made it against odds is also the narrative favored by conservatives: "You can overcome discrimination if you work hard. Instead of complaining, just show what you're capable of! If these guys made it you could, too."

It all depends on how you view the story.

That is a good point. This is the kind of story they'd cherry pick out to claim the victim or discrimination narratives are either fabricated or just biased research. That they told him he wasn't a fit for what they're looking for would be evidence of conspiracy to push a false narrative.

I think the selective bias is simply to choose interesting stories, not push a narrative. The guy who was 'Not Black Enough' simply did not have a particularly interesting story to tell.

Although there is a focus on black urban poverty, the media will sometimes also tell the other side of the story. For example, here [1] is a New York Times from last year: "Poverty is far more prevalent in black households than the general population, but the vast majority of African-Americans do not live in poverty. According to census data released last year, 26 percent of blacks live in poverty, compared with 15 percent of the country as a whole"

That sounds like a pretty balanced statement to me.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/us/politics/donald-trump-...

67% of black kids have a single parent so if you randomly picked a black person they would likely have been raised by a single parent home. He states that he came from a dual parent household from the suburbs. So he isn't an average black person just from statistical point of view. He got really lucky. I think if you give black kids two parents some money and a good school they would probably do as well as everyone else.

They're no thinking about it. Black kids with two parents who finished high school do statistically slighter better than similar white parents. There's a lot to being said to finishing high school, hopefully going to college, and definitely getting married, to ensure your kids do as well or better than yourself.

Serious question. What is the average black person? You can't just pick a single statistic and use that to define what average is. You certainly can't pick something as benign as coming from a dual family home. The average AA male is 5'10. Is he not an average black person if he is shorter or taller?

I think overall you missed his entire point, which is basically that it is at best disingenuous to categorize every black person in America as having lived a life of struggle and hardship and at worst racist. His being an entrepreneur is certainly exceptional but his upbringing really isn't. Yet the publication in question basically made the decision that his "blackness" wasn't good material because it didn't contain that element of struggle. That's fine from a narrative perspective I guess but I think he is certainly within his rights to be offended by it.

That 67% number seemed shocking so I tried to dig up a source. Only found this:

http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-...

And it says: "In this definition, single-parent families may include cohabiting couples ..."

So it may not be quite that bad - co-habiting couples sharing children are not a particular risk setup even if they are not married. Where I live - north Europe - they are entirely normal.

But what is the proportion of kids, and black kids, actually living with just one parent in the US?

Europe is not the USA -- the longevity of unmarried relationships is not the same.

I was interested about the statistics of this. 67% living out of wedlock, but how many of these are actual co-habiting parents?

From what I have read, the norm for the Black community in the U.S. is that the baby's daddy leaves the picture and mom gets involved with someone else because young Black males are the "last hired, first fired" and also much more likely to spend time in prison than any other demographic in the U.S. So what happens is that many young Black males are not in a position to actually support their children. When "the bum" father who "won't"/can't support the baby exits the picture and mom gets a new boyfriend, since the baby is not his child, anything he does for the baby is viewed as generosity and expression of good character.

(Edit: Since you are European, let me explain that this is due to systemic racism and the fact that welfare only pays if you are an unwed mother. So very poor women cannot get married, because they would lose their welfare benefits. This is a horrible thing warping the Black community in directions that Whites then condemn as "immoral" behavior. I have known a White welfare mom who would not marry the father of her kids because he was an unemployed alcoholic and her Catholic mother was incredibly condemning of this, but a) her psycho bitch mother is part of why she was in this mess and b) her psycho bitch mother was not in any position to make sure the kids ate if her daughter lost her welfare benefits. There is a reason we have a saying about how you need to be able to afford middle class morality. Further, the U.S. has a terrible track record compared to Europe in areas such as paid maternity leave...etc. The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world and most of our children are growing up in poverty because we have very serious issues. This is in no way like YOUR experience.)

Furthermore, from what I have read, the Black community in the U.S. is as resilient as it is because they brought a matrilineal orientation with them from Africa: Like a pride of lions, it is female blood relatives that are the backbone of the family for Black Americans. This helps them survive in the face of high unemployment and high incarceration rates, much of it completely unjust.

For example, see: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilto...

There is also this (NSFW) piece about discrimination in the fashion industry:

http://globalnews.ca/news/3115014/black-mirror-project-highl...

Having said all that, I am very sympathetic to the author of this piece. I am female and I get a lot of flack from other women, apparently for failing to be as crapped on by men as they are and for failing to be as bitter about my life as a woman as they are -- at least, that seems to be the gist of it, as best I can tell. And when I try to talk about what I think works and is effective, the most common response is to accuse me of blaming the victim for telling women what they can do to try to handle life as a woman more effectively, in spite of the assholes in the world.

I find it enormously frustrating. Like "Do you actually want a fucking solution? Or do you just like being a victim and want someone to validate that it isn't possible to have anything better?"

I spend a lot of time wondering why the fuck I bother trying to be helpful to people. I spend a lot of time wondering if I need to just quit trying to be helpful and just focus on figuring out how to solve my own financial problems, and to hell with the rest of the world because it sure as hell does not give a flying fuck about me, so why should I give a flying fuck about it, only to be kicked in the teeth for it?

And I say that (about my own life experience) to say this:

Yes, the Black community in the U.S. has real and serious problems. This man's experience is not the norm. But I think he has a valid criticism of the media here. Blacks routinely complain that they are underrepresented in media and they lack good role models because of racism by Whites who control so much media, yet he can't get his story published in a major Black medium because it isn't enough of a sob story. I think that is a completely legitimate thing to point out as something very wrong with the system.

First off, thanks for being a woman and staying in our industry, in spite of the flack you get!

Secondly, you say "This man's experience is not the norm." but I'm wondering what you base that on?

I base that on the statistics being discussed in the parent comment and the details I started my comment with. Plus recent stuff I have read about how much wealth people of color have lost in this country in recent years. From a piece about how eviction has become such a shocking norm in the U.S. for the first time in history:

Hispanic and African American neighbourhoods had been targeted by the sub-prime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/12/americas-evi...

Re: your aside about your personal experience, I've heard it called "engineer's disease" to hear a person complaining about something in their lives and respond by trying to offer a solution. For many people, commiserating about bad experiences is mostly a bonding exercise, and your main job is just to listen and empathize. If you immediately jump into problem-solving mode, even though you're trying to help it can feel hostile.

You may already know that, but since it's not a thing I ever would have figured out on my own, I thought it was worth mentioning.

(Hey, I just noticed: I'm a black man posting my experience in the comments to an article about a black man's experience, but my only comment is unsolicited advice to a woman about how not to offer unsolicited advice to women. My irony detector just crashed.)

For many kinds of people, working together is also a bonding exercise. Maybe we should also appreciate that instead of calling it a disease.

Huh, I expected the playfulness of the term would come through. Sorry about that.

This was a term coined by engineers to explain why the behavior that seemed, and still seems, so obviously right to a certain kind of brain can be so unwelcome in general.

I didn't mean my response to come across so personal and pointed. Apologies.

I was pushing back against the wider phenomenon of telling people to clam up and stay disengaged when confronted with pain or discomfort in the people they care about. It's (perhaps ironically) a very narrow perspective that undermines people accepting and understanding one another.

>If you immediately jump into problem-solving mode, even though you're trying to help it can feel hostile.

To elaborate on this, if the solution involves the person doing something, people frequently will feel the need to defensively explain why they aren't already doing it or why they don't want to start.

A simple solution suggestion can magically simultaneously accuse someone of being stupid and lazy at the same time. I've stepped on this landmine before.

Wow. That was an interesting, loaded comment. I think the discrimination part is correct but needs to be modified with their own cultural contribution to their problems. Like with your women reference, attitude and priorities go a long way to improving success in a biased or hostile environment. Going to black schools, I got to listen to them tell me lies about their experiences that they were too young for that I later heard their parents saying. The defeatist or defensive mindset was passed down based on the parent's worst experiences with them still believing that's all that happens to them even when their situation was better (eg black-controlled city or schools w/ no oppression). There were others, much fewer, that believed they could do anything they set their mind to, studied, and got stuff done. Like their parents. Then there was the thug culture where a subset told me it was cool to sell hard drugs for piles of cash, get/play women, and kill who was a problem. Later I found some of their lines were from black music and movies. Also some realistic thinking about how most "honest" jobs are evil companies exploiting people for profiting owners so why not take risk to make more cash for themselves? (Sounds more like startups, eh?) So, very important to remember a culture contributing to a vicious cycle that started with their enslavement or racism by whites plus increased with some of their own traditions. The OP's experience fits in perfect as the stories they looked for were the same shit the blacks in school told me "always happens" to blacks but not anyone else. Right...

Note: They were also convinced whites had their whole life handled to them, never experienced ostracism, and so on. Other myths creating an us vs them attitude that I later found was human nature in general. All groups do it unless they explicitly counter it like, say, the two of us each stated trying to identify our biases & reduce them. Most folks don't do that enough, esp for heated topics. So, traditional beliefs (including bullshit) spread faster than objective analysis of past or current situation.

"Yes, the Black community in the U.S. has real and serious problems. This man's experience is not the norm. But I think he has a valid criticism of the media here. Blacks routinely complain that they are underrepresented in media and they lack good role models because of racism by Whites who control so much media, yet he can't get his story published in a major Black medium because it isn't enough of a sob story. I think that is a completely legitimate thing to point out as something very wrong with the system."

Great overview.

"wondering if I need to just quit trying to be helpful and just focus on figuring out how to solve my own financial problems"

A problem we share. I'm already doing R&D, online stuff, etc way too much. I probably should focus on short-term elimination of major problems (esp financial & some stressors) with most or all my effort with high focus. I give same recommendation to you, too. Just allocate a small amount of time to stuff like your blog or HN with majority on improving your situation. Just don't quit entirely as I doubt I'm only one who will miss your good comments whether they're those I agree with or disagree. It's what I'm going to do when I switch employers as this one drains my energy too much. R&D, HN, etc are how I recharge my brain. :)

"it sure as hell does not give a flying fuck about me, so why should I give a flying fuck about it, only to be kicked in the teeth for it?"

It's in your nature to be helpful and write. At least, I think so based on what you've said. So, you should continue doing it to some degree. Life might be tough being who you really are but far more satisfying than being fake out of bitterness or greed you don't really believe in. Again, if those are your traits. I have no idea.

Thanks for the thoughts. A couple of points.

As far as I understand, not most of American children are growing in poverty. There are figures of 20-25% of children living in poverty, but even there the numbers are skewed - here poverty is measured before social security transfers that are meant to alleviate poverty. So those numbers are just carefully selected to make the problem look worse. If you look at the post-welfare poverty figures, they are in the few percent range. If the same methods were applied in Europe, we might have a higher child poverty rate because average income is lower and living cost is higher.

(Only trust statistics you've forged yourself.)

Over here, the marriage status of mothers does not impact their welfare payments - their co-habiting status does. A big difference here (in Nordic countries) is that we have a Big Brother society where people actually report to the authorities where they live and everyone has an official address. You need an official address to get welfare (though you don't need a home). As a result, the new partner marrying (or not) has no impact on welfare payments of families with children; if the couple moves together, they are treated as two parents. Yes, the privacy in U.S. creates some perverse incentives, in this case to not to commit to a marriage.

As a result of the Big Brother thing, we don't do door-to-door census here, there's just someone who says things like SELECT COUNT(person_id) FROM persons WHERE permanent_resident=true; and it's actually reliable, except perhaps for some parts of the recent wave of immigration from Middle East which is creating a totally new class of paperless people.

Anyway, I agree and appreciate your point. People actually seem to like being and feeling victims, which results in more victims.

PS. The engineer in me can't help correcting that it's flak, not flack, because the word comes from German.

http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html

About 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to underestimate the needs of families. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 43% of children live in low-income families.

I am old. The last time I looked at the figures, it was above 50%.

Still, I posit that one of the richest nations in the world having 43% of its children growing up in poverty is some incredibly fucked up, inexcusable shit. Even if it were, in fact, "only" 20-25%, we are falling down on the job in a really big way, imo.

Furthermore, studies have shown that every dollar spent on children under age five saves multiple dollars on things like prison costs. The appalling American record in terms of neglecting the nation's children is directly linked to our high incarceration rates.

This does not meet the test of civilized behavior in my book.

PS: Thanks for the FYI about the word flak.

I still find it pretty strange that the definition of federal poverty threshold is based on pre-tax income.

What actually matters for poverty (and income equality etc) is income after taxes and transfers.

(I.e. before deciding if someone is in poverty, take into account income taxes, which are progressive, and social security payments which are meant to alleviate poverty).

> I still find it pretty strange that the definition of federal poverty threshold is based on pre-tax income.

> What actually matters for poverty (and income equality etc) is income after taxes and transfers.

The federal poverty line is used to define eligibility for many benefit programs (both state and federal), so "after taxes and transfers" would be problematic and make individual program beenfit decisions undecidable; post-tax pre-transfer would be sensible except that tax liability is settled far enough after the fact that, again, application of the FPL to things it is primarily used for (benefit eligibility) would be problematic.

For assessing eligibility to benefit programs the definition of poverty threshold is fine.

But using pre-tax pre-transfers figures to describe shocking levels of child poverty is disingenuous, in my opinion. To assess poverty, we should look at the situation after all the actions that are already done to alleviate poverty.

At least you shouldn't argue for more benefits or social programs, if you don't take to account the existing benefits and social programs.

At least you shouldn't argue for more benefits or social programs, if you don't take to account the existing benefits and social programs.

As far as I know, no one in this discussion is doing that. So, I have difficulty understanding why this comment is here.

If you are interpreting my remarks that way, you are in error.

Sorry, this wasn't specifically "you", it was the "you" as a passive voice (I suppose that is not very correct English, what we call the ice-hockey-player-interview-you).

"You shouldn't argue for...", i.e. "one often sees someone arguing for...".

I was a military wife for a lot of years. The military provides excellent benefits, including free medical care for the family, that most civilian Americans do not have access to. I suspect quality of life for poor European children is generally higher than for poor American children because the government pays for things like basic medical care in many European countries.

I think it is incredibly hard to compare poverty rates in a meaningful way between such extremely different systems. I believe this in part because so many people new to the military look at the nominally low pay and bitch and moan about it and say they could do better outside of the military. Then they leave the military and find that their pay does not go as far as they think it will because they have to pay out of pocket for so many things that were free or had a nominal fee in the military.

For example, when we had on base housing, I had a phone bill but I don't think I had any other utility bills and I could go to a building on base, show my ID and check out a lawnmower for free or get free sod to get my lawn up to standard so it would pass inspection. When my kids were little, I could fill out a form at the military pharmacy once a month and get free OTC drugs, like cold medicine and Tylenol. (They no longer do this. Military benefits have been eroding for years. But cold medicine is not cheap and you need it endlessly when there are children at home.)

I have spent much of my life trying to figure out how to adequately compare the low pay and high benefits of the American military to the often higher pay and lower benefits of civilian jobs. I am good with numbers and it is really hard to do, even though it is the same country. I think the comparison you are trying to make is much, much harder to make than you realize. Different countries with very different systems for everything is very much an apples to oranges type comparison.

Please take my word for it that the quality of life of many American children is appallingly, shamefully bad for such a wealthy country.

Which makes forced integretation of schools, access to credit, and workplace provisions to promote diversity to be actually the best outcomes that 1960s congress could have thought of?

We'll Ill be....

What do you mean by lucky?

Was he destined to be black, and lucky to be among the 75% who aren't poor?

Or was he destined not to be poor, and unlucky to be among the tk% who are black?

In what sequence does your version of destiny execute its instructions?

I want to point out a couple things from the article:

> In fact, nearly 75% of Blacks are not poor.

~75% of African Americans live above the poverty line, however ~45% of young African American children live below the poverty line.

Also African Americans are the largest ethnic group living in poverty.

Poor in this case is defined as $22,314 for a family of four. Where do the numbers go if you raise that to $37,000 for a family of four, which is still arguably not a lot of money.

While I understand the basis of the authors argument, I did find that 75% statistic to be misleading.

The author definitely cherry picked that number. He also completely ignored the fact sheet on African Americans.

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/african-ame...

It's not as misleading as you suggest. I read that statistic and thought to myself "I would've assumed it was closer to 50%". He's challenging the popular notion in white America's mind that most blacks are poor. He's not wrong either in restating the figure to emphasize the non-poverty percentage, or in his assessment that Inc. magazine is only interested in furthering the notion that most blacks are poor.

The statistic (even as you restated it) supports his general thesis of the perceptions of black people that media outlets want to promulgate really well.

It's the difference between "how poor are blacks" and "how black are paupers." Two different questions with two different answers.

OP is refusing to be reductive, and isn't misleading.

The culture has an ideology about race which is shared and fed by the media. It's almost a nostalgia for the sixties where people want to pin halos on themselves by pretending its the 60s and that they are fighting against segregated buses etc.

The demand for stories which fit this narrative outstrip the supply. The same thing can be seen with various 'hate crimes' which are eventually revealed as hoaxes. The media - and the public - are strangely desperate for this bigoted world to exist - because they can feel more noble fighting it.

I'm guessing it has something to do with all the ideological refugees, in academia and the media, from the 60s and 70s who are fighting battles that are long over.

There is a Virginia gubernatorial candidate encouraging supporters to fly the Confederate battle flag, there are several states that celebrate Confederate History Month (and one more introducing legislation to that effect), there are multiple states with a Confederate Heroes Day or holiday for the birth of the CSA's President, and the POTUS himself has well-documented housing discrimination against blacks, but you believe we live in a post-racial society? Give me a break.

The person you are responding to never said we live in a post-racial society.

They didn't use those exact words, but the comment clearly suggests that racial discrimination no longer exists, and that there are few if any real instances of hate crimes.

I think you have enemies that believe racial discrimination doesn't exist, and then you too eagerly fit random internet commenters into that pattern of your enemies.

It's actually simpler than that. I just read the comment. It clearly says that hate crimes are largely made up.

Not sure how you can say this when a literal white supremacist just literally murdered a random black man in New York because he was black. Is that a hoax in your view?

Gp said the demand for stories exceeds the supply. Any one story being supplied can't disprove that.

Who said anything about proof? It's not as if the GGP proved his claims either.

"iPhone demand is greater than supply"

"Not sure how you can say that when this one guy sold his iPhone"

It sounds like a counter argument and fails to be one.

The idea of "demand" for hate crimes doesn't even make sense, so there isn't any argument to respond to. Clearly, the intention of the original commenter was to minimize the existence of hate crimes. That is what I was responding to. You might also bear in mind that it is not difficult to find other examples of hate crimes than the one I chose, or to find official statistics:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015

was the random black man literally black or just black?

Depends whether you think that 'black' as an ethnic classification has a separate literal meaning from 'black' as a color term. If you do, then yes, literally black. If not, then no, not literally black in color.

Statistically this event is irrelevant, it doesn't happen often and black person is more likely to die because of anything else, most likely because of another fellow black person. Stop fearmongering.

You could say the same thing about terrorist attacks. The effect of hate crimes goes far beyond the deaths of the individuals involved.

The suggestion that we shouldn't worry about hate crimes until they're a leading cause of death for members of minority groups presumably doesn't deserve a response. Even in the Jim Crow south, it's not as if a majority of black people died from being lynched.

It's quite silly to suggest that I'm 'fearmongering' merely by referencing something that's already all over the news. I don't think my mention of this incident deep within an HN thread is likely to cause anyone to be more frightened than they already are.

It's no better than stormfront users spamming the stats about blacks in prison, black on white rape and crime etc.

As I said, statistically this event is irrelevant and doesn't add anything to discussion.

Saying that I'm no better than white supremacists on the basis of my fairly anodyne comments is pretty clearly crossing the line.

I hope that you are not being sincere.

In any case, as I already addressed your point about "statistical significance", it appears that you have nothing further to contribute to the discussion.

Don't put words in my mouth.

Do you have a police report to link to back that up?

A simple Google search turns up many results.

Inc Magazine is very identity politics, very much written by privileged Silicon Valley kids with preconceived notions of diversity. I gave up reading it a long while ago and I'm as liberal-left as they come.

...ok, I goofed. Getting confused between Inc and Mic (three letters, two of which are I and C, very similar logos). Apologies, please ignore above comment.

The weird thing about Mic.com though, now that I'm thinking about it, is they have the best breaking news app I've ever used on iOS. It literally exists in the notifications so when something happens you can read the story from the notifications screen and be done with it. I wish more media companies would offer that.

Wow - here's what I found most telling about the article: The top Highlight was this:

"The real problems are things like unanimous votes at Venture Capital firms. There is always someone who “can’t get comfortable” with the Black guy’s deal. It’s grey, and blurred, and subtle, and can always be substantiated by some facts."

And the rest of the paragraph is:

"And though this type of discrimination exists, it certainly does not leave Black entrepreneurs completely under funded and out in the cold. For example, Black women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the country — outpacing all other startups by six times the national average. This is significant, yet woefully under reported."

So the thing people want to highlight in his article are the only two sentences which fit the narrative he's trying to counter. SMH...

Similarly, I read this really great article about the decline in black business just this morning:

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchaprilmay-2017/the...

Over the same period, tens of thousands of black-owned retail establishments and local service companies also have disappeared, having gone out of business or been acquired by larger companies. Reflecting these developments, working-age black Americans have become far less likely to be their own boss than in the 1990s. The per capita number of black employers, for example, declined by some 12 percent just between 1997 and 2014.

EDIT: After rereading, I realize my comment is NOT similar to the parent, actually contrary to it. I'm gonna leave it though because the Washington Monthly article actually is really good!

Conversely, this article is one of the thousands written by black entrepreneurs that this website has chosen to upvote.

This is a great point that challenges the views I brought to this thread with me.

I don't think there's a different comment that you could have made that would make me happier. Thank you!

If the people from the magazine really threw away all their work because the guy wasn't the "archetypal Black entrepreneur to hang the story around".... that's quite sad?

I mean, they have a journalist shadow the guy for two months, and then they decide that the material doesn't fit their story and they toss it?

Shouldn't it be the other way around? Do the research first, write the story afterwards?

I worry that a lot of journalism really suffers from this. The magazine has an idea what kind of story they want to write, and then they look for sources / people / material that corroborates their story.

That won't lead to stories representative of the real world...

It's almost like magazines aren't trying to educate people.

The magazine has an idea of what kind of story their audience wants to read, and then they look for sources / people / material that would work for that. If some story represents the real world but isn't particularly interesting for their audience, then there's no place for it in the magazine; just as the classic example of why "dog bites man" isn't a good story but "man bites dog" is, exactly because it's not representative of the real world.

There is a reason why the things we read in magazines and newspapers are called "stories".

1) Silly black-person. In the US, "black" means "loser", so if you are successful, you are ipso facto not black. Uh, unless you're an athlete, or other entertainer.

2) I grew up in a prosperous white neighbourhood and spent a lot of time at University of Toronto, as a kid. My dad was a math-teacher and programmer. I recently met a developer -- a young woman of colour at a conference, who came from a stereotypical deprived background. I could barely understand her experiences or the language she used about identity, inclusion, and diversity, because I have never felt excluded. Ambitious, envious at times, but never excluded.

3) I've just realised in the last few months that it's probably harder to be a woman in tech, of whatever skin shade, than to be a 6'3" half-black guy from a scholarly middle-class background. As far as I can tell I've faced no discrimination. I've been sexually harassed once, but it started as a joke and the woman had no power over me. One time outlier. Caveat: I have not sought VC funding, nor have I progressed to leadership roles in someone else's organisation.

4) At one small company I worked at, we were approached to do a TV segment. Two of the four founders are white Africans. The reporter seemed really intent on pushing a rags-to-riches story. The guys had to keep reminding her that they had started the company from their basement while they both had well-paying jobs. They were the sons of a professor. This was really eye-opening with regards to reporters pursuing pre-conceived narratives.

> 1) Silly black-person. In the US, "black" means "loser", so if you are successful, you are ipso facto not black. Uh, unless you're an athlete, or other entertainer.

I an not from the US, but I guess the impression that in the US race is a proxy for talking about class. The latter word is such a taboo as much as anything coming from Marxism or economic left. You even go to say "losers" instead of working class, which is so insulting.

This keeps the left running in circles in identity issues. And keeps the poor fighting against each other (see poor whites supporting Trump).

You raise some valid points, but as recently as 60 years ago (in living memory) there were laws on the books that ensured that blacks were on-average a lower class.

Race, specifically African American race is tied to class in the US in ways that it's not in other countries.

I agree with you.

Inarguably the best reply: https://medium.com/@mr.ed.dunn/please-dont-use-supposition-o...

Is it? It doesn't seem to address any of the points in the original article - it just repeats the accusation that he is, indeed, "not black enough".

No, it's because it explains how he is misusing the term "not Black enough" (used originally for dealing with colorism in the Black community) and accuses him instead of being a boring person. I can't call him out on the former but the latter I wholeheartedly agree with.

If a journalist wants to write a story about overcoming adversity and you respond that you haven't had any adversity to overcome, if they reject you it's pretty silly to complain about it and also pretty plainly because you're too privileged to understand why this is important and his reaction makes it pretty clear that he is indeed too privileged to understand why talking about adversity is critical to overcoming it. (Also mentioned in the reply)

It is not clear to me that the magazine was actually explicitly trying to write a story about adversity, or whether they are just trying to write a story about being black, and implied that this should include adversity (which is what the Brian had a problem with, if it's a racially-based implication). Indeed, it does seem to be more of the latter, at least if his words are taken at face value:

"I was approached by Inc. Magazine for a feature on the life of a successful Black entrepreneur."

>and implied that this should include adversity (which is what the Brian had a problem with, if it's a racially-based implication)

What, so we're not allowed to imply that racism exists anymore?

Seems like society works like a pendulum.

People spend decades fighting discrimination based on race. But, in the end, their focus on race makes it a defining characteristic.

We try and fix one imbalance, and end up just shifting it around. Still I guess we're better off today than in the 1960's.

When and where has race not been a defining characteristic?

Nowhere, but wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't?

EDIT: I guess I meant we kept it a defining characteristic, just changed the definition

In many places. Ancient Rome for instance.

> When and where has race not been a defining characteristic?

When the individual doesn't want to make it their defining characteristic. Same thing with other "characteristics". Not all gay people make it their defining characteristic, maybe they are parents, athletes, engineers etc who happen to be gay. Same with immigrants (I am one) and so on.

Assuming otherwise and forcing "defining characteristics" onto others is the problem here and what the article at hand is about.

> When the individual doesn't want to make it their defining characteristic.

How do you not make the color of your skin a "defining characteristic"? People see you and make a judgement based on that. Are you denying that racial discrimination exists?

> People see you and make a judgement based on that.

What kind of judgment. I think you mean it in a discriminatory sense with prejudices and stereotypes. Not just oh look someone has different shade of brown than me.

> Are you denying that racial discrimination exists?

Are you sure everyone automatically makes judgments based on that? What if the person is a woman also? What if they are gay? Which characteristic is the defining one?

Should we assume and write a story about that or let them tell us what defines them? Maybe they want to be a parent first who happens to be black and not a black parent. Or they don't know any better and need a journalist to come and interpret that for them.

> I think you mean it in a discriminatory sense with prejudices and stereotypes.

I do. That's what this whole discussion is about.

> Are you sure everyone automatically makes judgments based on that? What if the person is a woman also? What if they are gay? Which characteristic is the defining one?

We don't have to hypothesize here: there's a theory called intersectionality that specifically examines how these things interact. There doesn't have to be just one "defining characteristic".

>How do you not make the color of your skin a "defining characteristic"? People see you and make a judgement based on that.

I don't.

Probably most places, for most of human history, given the lack of travel.

Not that they didn't find other reasons to dislike their fellow humans.

A lot of genocides have been committed between races that, particularly from an outsider's view, are quite racially similar and nearby.

For example: Hutu/Tutsi, Serbians/Croatians

The problem is not only prejudice, it's journalism: journalists write stories first, and then go look for "facts" to support or illustrate their narrative.

Yes, journalism is just stage writing where the play is strung together by selectively taking quotes from people and putting them out of context into a sequential order that makes it look as if it were caused by a preconceived narrative.

Read about black Trump supporters' experiences in "coming out". As soon as you slightly deviate from the media's narrative about how a black person should be, you run a high risk of being ostracized and verbally abused. The media don't want stories about self-made successful black people, the want stories about how the establishment helps black people being successful (preventing them from their inevitable fate of becoming drug addicts and criminals).

Look at how Ben Carson has been treated by the Democrats and main stream media since he joined the Trump administration.

> We are facial recognition for .com's, as opposed to .gov's.

WTF does that mean?

Corporate surveillance is ok, government surveillance is not ok, I'd imagine.

That's a shame. It's not just narrative that's important, and well-off African-Americans can still be impacted by the effects of systemic bias.

If he feels he didn't suffer for being black, why should he get any preferential story treatment from Inc. over anybody else who didn't suffer for their race or background? His point is very poorly argued.

If they're presenting the truth, they should be looking at what many types of black people are doing in multiple places with what results. If something made many succeed, then that should become part of a Reality-Based Narrative. If there's racism holding them back, there should be evidence of that. Any personality traits or tactics that successful ones use would be game. And so on.

A media group only interested in evidence for one hypothesis while suppressing counter-evidence is showing its bias in favor of promoting that hypothesis even if it's incorrect. They're lying for ratings/revenue. Typical in media with biases/narratives varying based on their customers' demographic.

Nonsense. Inc. wasn't writing an academic article about race and entrepreneurship. They were specifically looking for a feel good rags to riches story to highlight. He didn't fit the story that they want to tell, so he has no more reason to complain than you do as an upper middle class or wealthy white man.

That's another one. The narratives blend in his case where they expected him to start in one then end up in another.

Except he did talk about that. He just suggested it was something different that what was presented by the narrative:

> The real problems are things like unanimous votes at Venture Capital firms. There is always someone who “can’t get comfortable” with the Black guy’s deal.

What is the difference between the adverb 'black' (or its US synonym 'African American' when used for skin colour) and the capitalised adverb 'Black' used here?

They are the same.

I love Brian Brackeen. Very smart guy!

So how do I share this with my black friends that feel the same way, without offending them?

This sort of "all blacks must be poor and perpetually victims of racism" narrative was exploited very well during the Democratic Primary by the Hillary campaign. And then Trump happened. It was and is shameful.

And yet, the fact is that among those 75% of blacks who aren't poor, a much higher ratio of them as compared with whites (even poorer whites) will fall victim to a great many life-impacting negatives, from poorer quality of treatment by medical professionals to discrimination in finance. The difference is definitely related to racism.

Also, his anecdote certainly isn't typical for poor folks or black folks, and especially not poor black folks. Overall he has a decent point regarding the "poor, racism beaten" stereotype, but it's not very well argued, in my view.

I think you have this a little backwards. It's Trump who portrayed black communities like that.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/politics/donald-trump-african-...

> I think you have this a little backwards. It's Trump who portrayed black communities like that.

lol no. But as you are pointing to a CNN article it makes sense you would think that, if thats where you were getting your news. They were trying to influence the election just as much anyone (aka the Russians), but apparently that doesn't bother anyone.

Trumps literal argument for why blacks should vote for him was "What do you have to lose?".

Independent source - AP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jasg-_E5M

Did it work?

The article is for the quotes which are accurate. It's Trump who said African Americans have 'nothing to lose', described the conditions in which they live as the 'worst ever' and portrayed the communities in which they live in outright dystopian terms. So I think that's a 'yes' and not much of a lol.

re: "What do you have to lose?" - This is simply the very valid argument that many big cities have been Democrat-run for the last 50 or so years, and saying the equivalent of "its not working, stop voting that way".

It doesn't matter what the argument is, it suggests that they are doing very, very poorly. We were discussing whether Trump employed this rhetoric. Yes he did and it was the centerpiece (and nearly totality) of his campaign's black voter outreach. The premise is that conditions for African Americans are a disaster. I'm not sure what there is to dispute here.

All the black folks I know, including myself, did not take it like that. The point, being made in front of an all white audience, as it was, looked a lot more like a reinforcement of the well trodden belief among conservative folks that black people's problems are due to Democratic mismanagement, their own rotten culture, and not racism (because racism hasn't been real since the 60's)

I think that there's an argument to be made that Hillary didn't rally the Black vote well enough, because she assumed that it would transfer to her as part of a new permanent Democratic majority instead of being an artifact of enthusiasm for the first Black president. In other words, she took them for granted. I didn't see much pandering from her at all. The most shameful race-related story of the Democratic side was when Bernie was libeled as a racist by Black activists with thinly disguised connections to the Clinton campaign.

Hillary made strategic missteps, I don't think that portraying Blacks as victims was one of them.

Your point may be that the Democrats have played this game too long and turned off working-class whites, creating an opening for a populist, politically incorrect Republican who only has to agree to keep his hands off of Social Security and Medicare and he's "liberal enough." I think there's some truth to that.

Hillary didn't rally the black vote well enough during the general, but that's one failing among many of hers as a candidate in that election. I was referring specifically to the campaign for the nomination, in which she and her campaign successfully cast Bernie as a racist, as you note, and did so in part by portraying him as though he thought poverty caused racism instead of racism contributing to the poverty of black folks. There were other factors at play (e.g. Lewis' remarks about not remembering seeing Bernie around during civil rights protests and activities), but those are separte, if related, issues.

But, yes, you are also spot on regarding the Democrats' malfeasance in "play[ing] this game too long," too.

Interesting. I wonder if the Clinton campaign tried to get too clever against Bernie by dividing his support -- tell Blacks he's not committed to civil rights, tell Hispanics he's anti-immigration, tell women his supporters are all "Bernie Bros." This way, it would be hard for him to catch fire outside of white males, making the math hard for him. She may have won the battle but lost the war: the message that she's not the candidate for the white working class resonated too well, and she didn't do enough to pivot back to the Rust Belt when it mattered -- giving Trump an opening to "pick the lock" on the great Democratic firewall.

That and there were plenty of black folks pissed off at the "all blacks are poor" character of the campaign (in fairness the Bernie campaign was terribly tone deaf and made it all too easy for her to do what she did).

Even during the democratic primary there's not much of a case to be made that her campaign sought to portray Sanders as a racist. We even have emails that show her campaign's strategy was largely focused on wooing over black leaders during the primary[1]. Also, several staff members from Sanders' campaign admitted they did not do a lot to appeal to black voters, having already assumed they were in the bag for Clinton[2]. She drew comparisons between her own campaign's efforts at outreach and his[3], comparisons which have been proven to be true. Saying she cast Sanders as "racist" is both misleading and ignores the fact that his outreach to black voters was provably lackluster.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-w...

[2] http://fusion.net/story/323539/how-bernie-sanders-lost-black...

[3] https://secure.politico.com/story/2016/02/hillary-clinton-sp...

None of these things contradicts what I wrote or supports your assertion.

Then prove to me she was casting Sanders as a racist.

Show me how Sanders' campaign was not lackluster when wooing black voters.

> I didn't see much pandering from her at all

This one was hilarious and disgusting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ESQvJ-qlsk

H: "I always carry hot sauce in my bag" (referencing a lyric in a recent Beyonce song)

Radio host: "I just want you to know, this is going to look like pandering to black people"

H: "... Is it working?"

She's clearly joking about something she's talked about since 2012 (carrying Tabasco sauce in her purse) suddenly becoming culturally relevant. What's so disgusting about understanding a radio show's audience?

I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever pushing the "all blacks must be poor and perpetually victims of racism" narrative. If anything that sounds like a caricature to me considering Donald Trump said the following.

> “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”

I mean, one candidate was recruiting campaign surrogates to get out the black vote while the other was asking black people "what do you have to lose?" I don't see much of a comparison.

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