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Comment by s4n1ty | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "red lining" in the 1990s and how this constitutes evidence of bias by Google against hiring black women in 2020?

You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.

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I grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood in the 1990s. My neighbor was a Caltech/Stanford grad that needed help building some RF measurement equipment, which I did as a summer job during high school. That evolved into a job programming a driver for spectrum analyzers, which evolved into a job developing software for embedded systems. By the time I graduated college, I had a guaranteed engineering job and a bunch of connections in the field.

There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?

There are unquestionably advantages to growing up wealthy, but that's a question of class, not race.

In this case, it appears as though you can draw a straight line from racial redlining policies to the current status quo elite profession pipeline.

While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.

Questions of class are questions of race because in America, the median wealth of black households is 1/8 that of white households. Apart from that, even upper middle class black people tend to be excluded from these opportunities because tech entrepreneurs live in upper middle class white neighborhoods instead of upper middle class black neighborhoods. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

No, the disadvantage is racialized. White households at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile of income live in neighborhoods where the median income is a double digits percentile higher than black households at the same income level, and the effect amplifies the lower your household income is.

I suspect it's being pointed out that racial discrimination doesn't just start at age 30 when applying for a job at Google, it impacts many key points of development and opportunity along the way. Perhaps true support of black founders takes this truth into consideration, especially if a business idea is solid.

I am not irate. I am pointing out a lack of seriousness in demanding evidence for a proposition that is obvious on its face. If you don’t see that black people, in America, have deliberately, systematically, and consistently faced discrimination and destruction of their wealth and ability to accumulate wealth it is willful ignorance not thoughtful insistence on fact based reasoning.

Red lining was a government sanctioned practice of refusing to underwrite and subsidize mortgages in neighborhoods that had large minority populations.

Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

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