Black Conservative Programmer | Hacker News Reader

Black Conservative Programmer

11 pointsBracketMaster38 comments

I'm an African American programmer who's been writing software since I was 7(born in the late 90s). I currently run a small company that does consulting for Machine Learning and Rust programming.

I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be many black programmers(I've only met one) where I am(U.S.), and certainly not many conservative ones.

Curious about the experience of others.

Also acknowledging ahead of time that HN isn't always the best place for certain social topics.

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I'm only acquainted with two black programmers (and I shared this link with them in case they want to comment on their own) but neither of them are conservative.

For my part, I have a hard enough time fathoming why working-class white people like me would buy into conservatism; the movement has become more blatantly populist and authoritarian since 2001, and its economic aspects only seem to benefit the already-wealthy. Most of them do it because of cultural conservatism, which does them few favors either. I won't even attempt to speculate on why black people would choose conservatism since most of my few conservative neighbors are still nostalgic for Jim Crow.

Read some works by Thomas Sowell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell Would highly recommend Basic Economics/

Gives a good foundation on the fiscal side of conservatism. I didn't even realize the author was black until a few years after I read the book.

I find that the question of why someone would or wouldn't be fiscally conservative for fiscally conservative reasons seems to have departed long ago in the US from the one of being "conservative" without some hyperspecific qualification.

How does/can/should a modern political subject reconcile themselves to support a movement that is so much bigger than just finance based on finance alone, black, white, or otherwise?

I personally have some properly fiscally conservative values, but I can't reasonably call myself "a conservative" in the US because not one of the conservative leadership are fiscal or even legislative conservatives. The ones who drive political direction on the biggest issues of the age tend to be fundamentalist christian nationalists wanting to facilitate rule based on a particular version of "god says that abortion is bad and gays are bad and guns are good and the poor and the sick deserve it because everything is according to His plan" evangelical protestantism. So thinking of myself as conservative means thinking of myself in league with, collaborating with even, a movement that ultimately seeks to eliminate me.

Independent? Sure. Hard right religionism? Yes. But what "conservative" politic is there in the US really?

You make lot of false assumptions Social conservative believe poor should have opportunities and self determination.

Work hard, plan smart. Make money. Keep your own money and build wealth. High taxes and regulation stop that.

Welfare creates dependence on government and destroys morale. Why work hard if you get free money? Oh you decided to get a job to earn a bit. Let's cut off all your welfare so you're stuck forever.

Guns are two fold. * Do you have the right to defend yourself? * Keeping government from getting too out of control.

China is locking people into buildings, letting them starve to death. Anyone that disagrees is silenced or disappeared. They have death camps where they are committing genocide and using them for cheap organ harvesting. If those people had a 2nd amendment then much of that nonsense wouldn't be possible.

49 senators just voted to allow a 9 month old baby thats half way out to be killed. Anyone that supports this or votes for someone that does is just plain evil.

> 49 senators just voted to allow a 9 month old baby thats half way out to be killed.

Are you talking about HR-3755?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3755...

I'm reading this now and I'm not seeing any references to "intact dilation and extraction" or "partial birth abortion". It specifically limits abortion to before the point of fetal viability unless the mother's life is at stake:

> (a) General Rule. — A health care provider has a statutory right under this Act to provide abortion services, and may provide abortion services, and that provider’s patient has a corresponding right to receive such services, without any of the following limitations or requirements:

> (snipped)

> (8) A prohibition on abortion at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability, including a prohibition or restriction on a particular abortion procedure.

> (9) A prohibition on abortion after fetal viability when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.

Have you even read this bill for yourself, or are you reacting to some journalist's interpretation of the bill's text?

> If those people had a 2nd amendment then much of that nonsense wouldn't be possible.

The US rounded up Japanese people and put them into concentration camps during WWII, the second amendment made no difference.

Protection against the government comes from organization and political consensus, arms can be acquired as a consequence.

The second amendment movement is mostly based on mythology, not on reality.

> The US rounded up Japanese people and put them into concentration camps during WWII, the second amendment made no difference.

Also, ask Bobby Seale how exercising Second Amendment rights worked out for him, Huey Newton, and the rest of the Black Panthers.

I've read Basic Economics by Sowell. I've also read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. When I was a much younger man I found the simplicity of right-libertarian politics and Austrian economics appealing. I've since come to suspect that neither are workable except in an "ideal" world that has no room for the vast majority of the people who live in this world.

I can comment a bit as a black programmer(as aformentioned). I'm mostly for small government. I think the left simply exploits social issues every four years before election cycles without providing actual solutions.

I think looking to gov't for solutions is a dead end and that in general, the gov't should be much smaller...

> I think the left simply exploits social issues every four years before election cycles without providing actual solutions.

I don't wholly disagree with that. IMO, Queensrÿche diagnosed the fatal flaw of US leftists back in 1988 in their song "Spreading the Disease": "Fighting fire with empty words / While the banks get fat and the poor stay poor / And the rich get rich and the cops get paid / To look away as the one percent rules America".

I personally find social justice advocates hilarious. Whenever I talk to one, they seem to expect me to take individual and personal responsibility for systemic issues I had no part in creating, and expect me to remedy injustices that occurred long before my birth. They don't want justice; they want revenge for the past.

However, I'm not convinced that "small government" is the answer. Many of our economic issues are due to the issue of a few megacorporations dominating their industries, but "Small government" advocates are typically OK with letting corporations do as they please as if the Constitution didn't explicitly list the regulation of interstate commerce among the powers delegated to Congress.

> However, I'm not convinced that "small government" is the answer. Many of our economic issues are due to the issue of a few megacorporations dominating their industries, but "Small government" advocates are typically OK with letting corporations do as they please as if the Constitution didn't explicitly list the regulation of interstate commerce among the powers delegated to Congress.

All good points. Actually, overall - your answer has a refreshing sense of humor to it. Even as a small gov't advocate, I will concede that we probably need a military given the number of nation that want to blow the U.S. off the map - and yeah, divesting ATT in the 80s and the subsequent 10x drop in phone call prices probably wasn't all that bad either.

But fast forward 20/30 years later, and people use whatsapp, FB, and telegram - I can't help but wonder if monopolies will work themselves out eventually as technology re-invents itself.

> But fast forward 20/30 years later, and people use whatsapp, FB, and telegram - I can't help but wonder if monopolies will work themselves out eventually as technology re-invents itself.

Maybe they will, but cancer eventually works itself out too. The problem is that the patient usually dies in the process. I'm not sure it's actually a good idea to wait for monopolies, monopsonies, or oligopolies to "work themselves out" because when corporations (and individuals) become too rich and too powerful they can place themselves above the law and do as they please.

A situation where a few corporations and individuals are essentially sovereign entities equal to the world's governments doesn't seem like a sustainable situation to me. I think the governments representing us should have the authority to prevent such accumulations and abuses of power from happening.

I also think that when a government agency or somebody working for a government agency oversteps their authority, they should be thoroughly investigated, publicly tried, and (if proven guilty) punished without mercy. If, for example, the FBI steps out of line again, it ought to be shut down. If a cop summarily executes an unarmed black man for driving with a busted taillight, he should be guillotined.

IMO and incidentally, the only valid use case for cryptocurrency is the one Jim Bell outlined in the 1990s when he wrote Assassination Politics. Though that's probably not a good idea to actually implement in the real world, lest you have Elon Musk paying to have trolls whacked instead of just blocking them on Twitter.

I just interviewed and gave a thumbs-up to a Black programmer. I didn’t inquire about his politics, not relevant.

In my 40 years in the software business I have worked with quite a few Black programmers and technical managers, but they do seem under-represented. Women were more common in my workplaces until the mid-80s, then seemed to disappear for some reason.

Until recently it seemed understood that the workplace was not the forum for airing political or religious views, so I probably worked with people I’m not particularly aligned with on those issues, but we didn’t conflict because it didn’t come up at work.

I did have to fire a conservative programmer once because he insisted on bringing a handgun into the office, asserting his rights. Management (and I, and his other co-workers) did not agree. He had vocally expressed his conservative views at every opportunity but no one seemed to care until he armed himself at work.

I worked for a big tech company for a while, and there were a moderate number of black engineers. Not tons, but not "almost none" either.

Politics is harder to judge. At that big tech company, it was not safe to be conservative, or indeed anything other than the extreme left. In my time there, I found maybe a dozen people who could reasonably be described as "conservative" -- but because being outed had such strong negative consequences, I'm sure there were tons more that I never detected.

None of the black engineers that I knew expressed explicitly conservative views, though one did mention quietly that they didn't like how uncomfortable everybody made it for him to express his Christian faith and the degree to which it was just a tacit assumption that everybody was atheist. Religious, though, isn't the same thing as conservative.

Yep. It's getting really hard. Used to not matter much as people didn't talk politics or religion outside of small groups.

I'm finding more and more that company meetings are open grounds to bash white males. Particularly any straight and / or Christian ones. The people that preach inclusiveness are the most bigoted people I know.

Nothing like having co workers explain to me how reluctant they were to hire me based on race. Only that there were desperate for someone that could actually do the job.

Decades spent trying to treat everyone fair and equal is now out the window and you're called a racist for doing so.

Montreal (white) engineer here: I've been working as an FPGA guy here in Canada for 30 years, and black programmers and engineers are as rare as hens teeth up here. I have met only 2 or 3 over the span of 3 decades and there are zero black managers in engineering/software. It's mostly a question of supply, only 4% of the province identifies as black. I see far more asians and Indians than blacks, which is a bit sad, since I learned digital logic design from a black engineer in Los Angeles when I started out.

This is very interesting! I actually tried doing an FPGA related contract for a customer a year ago now.

FPGA engineers are so few and far between these days - and a rather under-appreciated skill...

Are you in FPGA/finance or FPGA/defense?

I’m somewhat confused by this question.

Stats show that there are fewer black programmers than there are in the general population, and that African Americans tend to vote for democrats over 90% of the time. Add to that the general political slant of the tech industry, and it’s not surprising that there are few black conservative programmers.

What are you looking to glean from this post?

Yes - this is well known. I'm wondering if anybody has had a "black conservative programmer" sighting I guess - that's all.

Now why am I interested in sightings - IDK...

I also wanted to answer any questions others might have about why I might be a black conservative programmer.

Ok I’ll bite, why are you a conservative?

This is sort of a braindump - so pardon me... But here goes

There are a number of reasons. I like small gov't. I'm actually not entirely against gov't programs - but having grown up 20 miles outside the hood, wellfare just seems to breed more wellfare.

Also, my parents worked their butts off to get where they are. One of my parents is an immigrant, the other grew up lower middle class. One went to MIT and did quite well.

Growing up and hearing these stories and growing up in strict discipline really instilled the value of hard work and making lemons from lemonade.

Liberal values just seem to want to coddle everybody's issues.

All this talk about hate speech and don't offend somebody else sickens me. If somebody says something racist to me in public, I don't get mad. I'll actually sit down and have a conversation with them to understand why they feel that way.

As someone on the left, my read is that welfare programs are designed to fail, and that’s a bipartisan consensus.

Republicans don’t want to spend the money and democrats only want to help people who “need” it. So you can’t get food stamps if you have more than $2,500 in the bank, which sends the clear message: don’t even bother trying to get ahead.

I should note I'm not entirely against wellfare like programs - but like you pointed out, their current implementation doesn't help much.

I get that sometimes, people just need some cash to get through the day. But how can you make sure your program doesn't train people to be dependent on it?

I wonder if there is a clever optimization hiding to this problem somewhere.

Then there are the social issues...

Racism will always exists - it even exists in various African countries(more as tribalism) - I have relatives in various countries.

After doing research into BLM and watching various debates, BLM's arguments register to me as sensational and consistently seem to fall apart in the face of basic statistics.

With regards to LGBTQ, I had a trans friend who killed himself. He was really miserable and I'm not sure "transitions" are really a good first option - they should be a last resort. Also, he didn't kill himself because he was ostracized. People actually liked him...

I used to be a little softer on abortion, but after watching a video I can't unsee, I just can't swallow that anymore.

> BLM's arguments register to me as sensational and consistently seem to fall apart in the face of basic statistics.

Do you have any examples of this?

I will concede however that racism did have a negative affect on black culture up to the mid 1900s and we're reaping the fruit today.

But twitter-mobbing and taking to the streets everytime somebody gets shot will never in a million years make real progress. Neither will zoning laws, or wellfare... Etc. These are only patches to the problem.

And as a black person, I'm embarrassed frankly - to have the media always portray black people as victims.

The solutions must come from within each black individual - the resolve to take lemons and make lemonade - which(even with all its faults) is a basic tennet of conservatives. I believe in sending the message to every person that you can make it in life - no matter how tough things get - and like I said before, this is basically the diametric opposite of the liberalism which seems to focus on equalizing outcomes in society rather than empowering people to escape victim mentality.

There are countless stories of people born and raised in abject poverty who are now millionaires... Why do you think I'm running a software Rust/ML consultancy? :P

> this is basically the diametric opposite of the liberalism which seems to focus on equalizing outcomes in society rather than empowering people to escape victim mentality.

I think the biggest problem in our political discourse is the degree to which people from different viewpoints/parties/etc make statements that aren’t the best faith representation of the other side’s perspective.

In this instance, I’ve never actually heard anyone besides liberals make the “equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome” comparison. I think a more reasonable dichotomy is that conservatives make the assumption that everyone has roughly equal opportunities while liberals don’t. In the end, both actually do believe in equality of opportunity.

As someone who does ML, you should connect with the probabilistic argument well: if we assume that am everyone has the same opportunities, who would we consistently see such disparities in outcome? The only answer is that there is something intrinsic to these groups that leads them to be the cause of their own shortfalls, which is the conservative argument you put forward here (that black culture is the problem).

The liberal counter argument is that there is a strong weight of hundreds of years of history in America to suggest that opportunity is very much not equal. Further, it’s an American value that we assume all people are equal regardless of race, therefore it’s most reasonable to assume that such disparities are the result of bias. This of course does not mean that individuals aren’t able to be statistical outliers due to their own efforts.

So here is an interview with a BLM organizer in NY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5XHGo_CTg4

The guy on the show is a respectable character, but he somehow manages to turn every issue into a race issue.

When I say basic statistics, I'm referencing the fact that BLM supporters will talk about issues that affect everybody and magically turn it into a race issue.

I'm not disputing for example that black people are affected more by COVID in the U.S.(https://sph.umich.edu/news/2020posts/covid-19-and-the-dispro...) but systemic racism?? Please...

OK - so the article says that black people tend to work lower income jobs than white Americans(this is true where I live) - so they had more interactions and chances to spread the virus... Fine. How on earth is that caused by racism?

Some will try to say that black people are zoned in poorer school districts and don't get as many oppurtunities. Somewhat true - I'll admit personal experience reflects this.

But, where I went to HS(where sent one black student to harvard a couple years before I graduated), most black students were simple uninterested in academics.

We had 20% asian, 25% black, 35%white, 20% other roughly. I've actually observed this consistently - black people just don't give a crap about trying in school or on the job - and it pains me to say this as a black person. I've observed a few exceptions to the rule. When I was in HS, black people always cared about new shoes, basketball, and hair.

And if you want to pretend that BLM leaders actually care or represent black lives... - https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091487910/blm-leaders-face-q... - https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/inside-blm-co-founder-patrisse... - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/us/black-lives-matter-fra... - https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-based-activist-faces-federa...

And right outside where I grew up, black officials in Atlanta regularly embezzle funds... Our roads are continually rundown and the water runs inconsistently... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasim_Reed#Bribery_charges_and...

Kaseem Reed had a huge cartel - many of which were corrupt black people.

There are obviously many great black people in the city too such as the late John Lewis.

But pretending that black people suffer in modern society because of "systemic racism" is mostly a lie. Yes, black people consistently come last in many metrics behind other people groups, but now it has more to do with black culture and less with racism.

I think the primary issue is a lack of fatherhood in many black communities. It may sound old fashioned, but 60 years ago, there was a 20% fatherlessness rate in the black community - now its more like 60%

Props to all the single moms out there, but two people seem to be better than raising children than just one.

Not that I don’t think your personal experiences aren’t interesting (they’re certainly different than my own), but you had said that the arguments fall apart against basic statistics, but you mostly offered personal anecdotes. The only statistics you cited were the fatherless household rate.

It would seem that it’s less about evidence and more about interpretation.

What do you think structural racism is?

Fair, yes mostly anecdotes, although the COVID article had some numbers about how COVID affects black people more and the margins relative to white people. Yes - interpretation. I may have to eat my words that BLM arguments fall apart, if they only fall apart in my interpretation.

But I'm not so convinced that BLM is helping anybody AFAICT.

I'm just now learning about structural racism. Thanks for this.

What are your own experiences, if I may ask? I'm curious.

I’m a white guy who grew up in the PNW. My city is often described as the whitest major city in the country, but the high school I went to had the one of the highest percentages of black students in the district, it’s been quite a while now, but it was somewhere around 15-20%. I didn’t know anyone who was seethingly racist, but racist jokes were common. As I went through grades, I had fewer and fewer black students in on my classes. I was mostly taking advanced placement classes my junior and senior year, and it seemed like the biggest determinant of who was in the was taking those classes was social class rather than attitude or effort.

I wouldn’t say I was necessarily any more “woke” than any of my peers, a lot of the realizations I’ve had about that time came later as an adult.

Frowning up in a liberal environment with liberal values definitely made me predisposed to accepting the left position on these issues, but there was also some tangible things that really connected to me, like the fact that ruby bridges is still only 67 years old. The past really isn’t all that far away.

My bet is HN will downvote this post because HN fights hard to "conserve" against alternate viewpoints such as those of the author

I've found HN to be a mixed bag. Mostly liberal, but not always. Biggest thing is to keep your argument well written and reasoned.

Unlike reddit where people are in a cult mindset. Anything remotely against the grain will get dozens of downvotes in seconds. Outright lies by the left get thousands of upvotes. Want 5,000 points? Just bash Trump in world news.

It depends entirely on who shows up first, because top posts tend to dominate a thread regardless of their quality. I've seen plenty of 'liberal' topics get burned to the ground here because the other side is triggered or wants to brigade or do damage control for someone.

>Want 5,000 points? Just bash Trump in world news.

I bash Trump all the time - and i just get downvoted and flagged. I've seen plenty of what you would probably consider 'lies from the left' treated the same way. It's all relative.

hope I don't owe you money - it got flagged - sigh

For what it’s worth I think you’ve been completely reasonable and engaged in productive discussion.

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