Why are there so few black tech entrepreneurs?
bbc.com
bbc.com
Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work.
The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none.
Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why would they be motivated given what goes on?
Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-06-diversity-silicon-valley-tech-... - using weighted average of the histogram.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
Are you saying that they also discriminate against above-average white workers in favor of average white workers?
> The entire c-suite has a single person of color.
How many people are in the C-suite, and what's the ratio of PoC to total number of employees in your company? I'm not trying to disprove you, it's just that a single number (1 PoC in the C-suite) doesn't provide any insight into your situation.
We have a bit over 100 employees and about 30% are PoC.
When were you able to enter the field, compared to them? Do they have more experience at an earlier age?
To be clear, I am in no way arguing or trying to minimize your experiences. I’m looking for holes in my own view of the problem, which I stated in a top-level comment. Based on that I would expect that the VP probably had a lot of starting advantages over you. That doesn’t make it right, but it may highlight effective strategies for changing the dynamic for your children.
Meanwhile, PoC with extensive experience are told, "oh next year, you will be eligible for Associate Director or some other BS"
I entered the company at just above entry level despite quite a bit of experience. I cant say more or it might become obvious who I am.
You should leave. You should go somewhere your skills and experience are valued, and you should advise your non-white colleagues to do the same.
How is your social network? I’m also posting using a nominally anonymous username, but if you’d like I’ll set up an email so we can get in contact. My own network isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be, but my employer is hiring and if you’re remotely a good fit for what we do I can at least get you past the initial hiring filters and ensure you’re considered. Let me know.
Why?
Is it a special company where it might be advantageous to do this or was it lack of alternatives?
Not counting "CTO" of a 10 person startup where the title is obviously bogus.
In my company of 100, we have 4! Once is 27 now, but was promoted at 25.
Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place.
Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families start in middle/high school.
And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.
I can’t. I’m a white dude and completely outside that experience, to the point that I would have to drive more than an hour to get somewhere it’s happening.
I believe cultural is by and large a result, not a root cause. As a society we must identify the causes of the negative culture, work to change those things, wait, and modify our approach based on observation as time goes on.
In terms of concrete ideas I would say:
1: judicial reforms. All else being equal, Blacks receive longer sentences than Whites. Stop that, through any means necessary. For the immediate future, the President and state governors should look for Black offenders in particular that are serving time and grant clemency and pardons as appropriate.
2: legislative reforms. Crimes that are predominately committed by Blacks have harsher prescribed punishments. Cocaine possession versus crack cocaine possession is a great example of this. Mandatory minimums should be significantly reduced or eliminated. We should consider some means of reducing the latitude that judges have for determining sentencing.
3. social support. This doesn’t have to mean the government spending tax dollars - it could, and that could be effective, but I’m sure you can infer from my username that that’s not what I want to happen. The biggest thing here would likely be the people who “made it” staying involved in their local communities. A child who grows up seeing all of the adults around them either struggling to survive in a dead-end job, incarcerated, or actively involved in criminal activity and apparently better off for it has the deck stacked against them.
I live in a poor, rural area. I take every opportunity I get to show kids what I do, how I got here, and what it would take for them to take a similar path. AFAIK, that’s simply not happening in most poor Black communities.
Truancy can be dealt with by providing food to the kid at the end of the school day, food meant to be brought home.
There are of course arguments against this, e.g., school are not meant for this. Well, schools are not meant to operate with absent students and whatever can fix should be considered.
It sounds like training dolphins.
I don't even know if that is a good sign or a bad sign, but... wow.
Or you can get off your high horse, try something new, and see whether it solves this problem.
What is "our" field? Food service? Car repair? Carpet cleaning?
>to be able to afford college on their own
No college is needed to be an entrepreneur.
To be an entrepreneur, you do need connections and a cushion (like savings or family with means to support you) though.
Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1].
So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
[1] http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...
Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”?
I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to culture.
What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges. Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully integrated into our society.
I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time.
Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.
One factor - white Americans have historically identified not as "white" primarily, but by country of origin - Italian, German, British, etc. "White" as a culture tends to be used as a reference in contrast with and in comparison to "black" culture or people.
Whereas African slaves and their descendants were deprived of the opportunity to identify with their culture and countries of origin, so they had to build a cultural identity around the only common attribute and heritage they were afforded - their race.
This is literally all the evidence one needs to see the problem here. Their poverty is the result of decades of discrimination.
> "why are there so few white rappers"
False assumption. White people have pretty good representation in the rap game now, unlike black people in board rooms.
Not necessarily. For example the Joseph Rowntree Foundation defines poverty as bottom-third. By their method the proportion of those “living in poverty” is fixed, regardless of overall standards of living. To be poor in America is still to be much better off than most of the world.
Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-...
In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off.
Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.
Black college students are over represented in low earning majors. Blacks that focus on high paying majors go into law, medicine, or business. If black leaders want more black IT executives, they need to push black kids into IT related careers.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majo...
>I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason
That mentality can be seen in anybody. When I did consulting in the late 1990s, I had a client company where an Indian manager refused to promote or hire non-Indians. Same company, an engineer from Taiwan gave bad marks on interviews if the candidate was of Korean descent. He told me, "I won't work with gooks."
Various humans have various racial biases -- but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and give in to those biases! Seeing those biases should spur us to recognize them as real and damaging, rather than normalize them
> being arrested for no reason
I think a lot of people in the US would disagree with this statement. It’s (typically) not precisely true, but the idea I believe you’re expressing absolutely is.
Blacks (and other minorities) in the US are policed more aggressively than Whites. This is a fact, and I don’t know anyone who would disagree with it. I suspect it’s very uncommon for them to be arrested for no reason, though. Rather, they are investigated for little to no reason, and for crimes that are rarely or never enforced for others.
A White guy driving down the road with a joint in his ash tray is less likely to get pulled over. He’s less likely to be asked to allow a search of his vehicle. The cop is less likely to be looking for contraband. If it’s found, it’s more likely that the cop will either completely overlook it or decline to charge him with possession. If charged, it’s less likely he’ll be convicted. If convicted, he’ll likely get a lighter sentence.
By saying “for no reason”, we emotionally charge the debate and give people with opposing views a straw man to attack. Worse, I’ve found that people who are simply ignorant of the issues or who haven’t examined their own views at all to latch on to this and never even consider the reality of the situation. Instead, it’s easier for them to think “this person has an agenda, and they’re wrong because this is technically false”.
Many actual black people, for one:
> When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.
> Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
If you live in a rough neighborhood, it is reassuring to have a police officer nearby or at least in the area. However, that doesn't mean you want that police officer harassing you for trivial offenses.
I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
But the Indians passed through a strong selection filter from the billion Indians in India, which is both restrictive toward people with low economic potential and permissive to people with high economic potential.
Blacks in the US are like the so-called "backwards" castes in India, with much less opportunity and who aren't coming to the US for grad school and careers.
In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
I am happy with where Indians are but I'm just trying to understand, in the light of recent situations, how deeply Black Americans feel they don't have any chance at success within their own country.
I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population.
On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.
Here in the UK Indians 'succeed' because, as I mentioned, they invest massively in education. If you look at the grammar schools (selective state schools) exam, quite often the majority of children in the room are Asians.
The same route is open to black people, to white people, to anyone. The issue is much more complex than claiming that a specific group is victimised.
People are, in the vast majority, hired on merit. If you have an opening for a software engineer you can only hire someone who applied for that job. Few black people in tech starts at 6 years old.
It’s clear that Blacks are less likely to succeed in the US than Whites. One can phrase that as “Blacks are disadvantaged” or “Whites are advantaged”. Both are true statements, but one leads to positive actions and the other to negative.
As a society, our goal should not be to eliminate the advantages of one group above another. We should be trying to provide more advantages to everyone, both as a population and individual groups.
Then, people take the opportunity, or their don't.
Race should not be relevant. My problem with current climate is that it perpetuates race as something to notice and to treat specifically when we should aim for the opposite.
But we are fighting close to 400 years of systematic oppression to turn those opportunities into tangible results. That history requires some type of direct action to advance the current state of Black Americans.
According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society.
(1) https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-business...
Maybe I used the term wired a bit loosely, we're all the same DNA to be sure, but we are shaped by our environment, biology, wealth, upbringing, culture and so many other factors. I don't think how given a multitude of factors you can achieve equal representation unless you also have equal representation along the other axes. (Edit: Also, humans are not robots. There is still the element of free-will here. It may well be that Eskimos have no interest in entrepreneurship. :))
And student loans have no accessability requirements in the US.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble:
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.
Yes, you certainly can.
Looking through the thread I see a lot of what appears to me to be honest discussion, and I would also consider it of reasonable intellectual level. Those common "unspeakable" opinions you allude to tend to drag the quality of discussions down, rather than lift them up.
But if it helps, everyone is aware of those opinions, it's just that most people just don't find them interesting or worth discussing.
Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies).
So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.
So the question becomes why do blacks and women want tech jobs without becoming qualified for said tech jobs? or do they even want tech jobs in the first place? is it just someone else who wants them to have tech jobs?
That's why we now have campaigns here in the UK to make girls in primary and secondary schools interested in these subjects and to make the message that girls can study anything they want. The same goes for boys and 'girly subject' though the push seems less visible.
Old school. If you needed another team member HR and the Boss would hire one. And you'd have to work with them. If the company thought they weren't hiring enough women and blacks they'd just hire some women and blacks.
New way, we only hire from the top schools and programs. And we allow members of the team to act as gate keepers over vague things like 'cultural fit'. Over time your team becomes composed entirely of upper class whites and a few model minorities.
Discrimination against the lower class is invisible within the white population. It just goes undetected. It is never reported to the government. Group photos doesn't raise suspicion.
If race and class are correlated, then one type of discrimination can be misdetected as the other.