Racism in Tech
feld.com
feld.com
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
When I took them, I was pretty confident that I was, as a well-meaning nerd, beyond any sort of racial bias. I was wrong.
Although I am deeply opposed to racism consciously, various bits of racial bias lurked in my wiring. It's sort of like how even a very smart person can have plenty of dumb ideas or dumb reactions, especially on topics they haven't paid attention to. Since I took those tests, I've been much more aware of those biases, which a) lets me minimize the effects, b) helps me undermine them over time, and c) has made me much better able to see the subtle effects of racial bias generally.
Stop it.
Then again, I'm Chinese, which means I'm a bit racist against all non-chink people.
That there are too few blacks in the tech industry is a fact. The reason is actually very simple (as others have commented): African-Americans are underrepresented in CS, EE, and other tech fields. This is similar to the issue of the dearth of women in these fields. Now, the reasons for this are complex and are not easy to solve. So, instead, while waiting for the root causes and biases to go away, be pragmatic and solve the problem at hand.
The solution is easy, but is not affirmative action or specialized VCs or quotas: It's as simple as increasing the demand of black (or women) programmers.
How to do this? I am working as a software mentor for two FIRST Robotics Teams in Chicago South Side, these teams are almost all black and this is their first exposure to programming (unfortunately, we have to use C++ for first exposure!) So, I alone have the power to introduce 5-10 black programmers to tech community! Assume I have 20% success, which is really lousy, that means 1-2 programmers. If 1K people do this, that's 1K more black programmers on the market.
Another example: Finding that the teams on the Apps for Metro Chicago challenge were all-male, my friend Pallavi quickly assembled an all-female team of college students, who won the second prize (http://www.metroplanning.org/news-events/blog-post/6262) and were featured in the local press.
So, same as starting a company: you don't need anybody's permission to start helping kids to solve this problem.
And this is why I think the black incubators make sense. You can bring the idea of an incubator into the inner city and recruit young people of color and if a handful get modest success it will begin to breed something in their community.
All this is easier said than done and maybe even misguided, but I think that's the idea.
I don't know about the misguided part, but it's definitely not easier said than done, a lot of people are doing it (although juggling work and a kid is demanding). The response I'm getting from the kids is just awesome.
So, for ordinary engineers like me, the solution is simple: mentor those who you think are underrepresented.
BTW: it's a pity that in FIRST girls around encouraged much, most teams are more than 95% boys.
A white, upper-middle class student at an Ivy League, versus a black guy with a single mom from the Bed-Stuy housing projects. I don't think it's a very good comparison.
And I say this as a white guy with a working middle class upbringing who works on social networking software, and I still have a real hard time identifying with Zuckerburg.
If you can produce something of value, no one gives a shit about your race. The hundreds of people I've met in tech have been race blind as far as i could tell. I think the tech industry in general is a meritocracy from my experience.
I would never join a race based startup, as that seems quite lame to me. Then again, perhaps I'm an outlier as I think race based anything is stupid (BET, etc). We're like 99.9% the same yet people think a chemical within their skin alters something intrinsically about us. Absurd
It really comes down to poor role models in the black community, poor education & not enough resources. Why would anyone care about your race if you are producing.
I think racist people in tech would be the exception, not the rule.
I worked a company where the employees felt it was okay to make racist or sexist jokes with the person in the room, so long as the person didn't appear to mind. It made me terribly uncomfortable, but short of going to management, nothing I said or did mattered. (I didn't make an ass of myself, though. If the person isn't going to stand up for themselves, with me already standing, I'm not going to risk my job for them.)
Maybe those people didn't really mind. I know I don't mind when my ancestry is made fun of, so long as it's along typical stereotype lines. (Pointed attacks on my particular ancestors or family are another matter.)
I think we, as a species, have a long way to go in regards to dealing with each other. We have somehow never learned to treat each other with basic respect.
I will say, though, that the experience is very different when you're part of the dominant group. As a white male in the US, when people make jokes about some portion of my mongrel ancestry, it really doesn't matter. But when I was living in South America, jokes about Americans had a whole new edge to them. Sometimes they really were funny and welcome. But sometimes they weren't because the person really had something against gringos. That was at times really uncomfortable, and I occasionally wondered what it meant for my physical safety. I still laughed either way, though. Ha! Ha ha!
I also see your point about it mattering more when you aren't part of the majority, or if you felt there might be a threat to your person.
Now that that's out of the way, we can talk about the role of race in tech. I think it'd be useful to divide it into four categories.
1) Race as felt through through social structure. Minorities (defined as AA, Native American, and Latinos) have less access to educational resources than other ethnicities. This is a broader social injustice, and tech can't be held responsible for it. Tech is also hard at work to help mitigate this problem, though with varying levels of success.
2) Race as felt through choice of majors. Minorities disproportionately choose not to major in techy fields. This is in large part due to a combination of 1) and 3) (to follow). Even to the extent that minorities do have access to high quality education, it tends to be more liberal arts and non-techy. Minorities may also perceive that the tech scene tends to be less friendly toward them.
3) Race as felt through network effects. This, I think, is probably the biggest cause of the recent complaints. Everyone knows here how valuable having their social community overlap at least somewhat with the tech community is. Knowing someone who knows someone is how you get jobs and get involved in new projects. And you learn a whole lot through these informal interactions (having no CS background, I only learned about Lisp on a date).
People whom we know are usually of similar racial and class backgrounds. Not through any conscious decisions, but because of shared interests and the fact that people make friends through other nodes in their own social networks, nodes that have the same tendency of showing race and class similarity.
4) Racist prejudice. Examples of this are the null set, because no one here is at all racist.
In the end, though, 3) builds off of itself. You start out as an isolated island, and if you don't break out of it you'll never achieve your full potential. Once you do get pulled into it, though, the sky's the limit.
The question we should be asking is how to deal with 3).
Customer is a 'government owned military installation'. What branch? What site?
Was the customer military or civilian contractor?
The military is [1] _death_ on racisim, sexism, favoritism. Just does not happen. When it does it gets squashed.
While the military one thing, the individual service members are another. It's a very masculine culture, not unheard of for best friends to insult each other with words, phrases, etc that would sound blisteringly insulting to an outsider. But which are understood by the participants to be 'funnin' around'.
I conjecture: could 'B' have been hooked up with a guy who was trying to bond and it mis-fired?
[1] My last direct experience was 1993, when I separated. I have several friends who are enlisted, my step-son has been in the army since 1999.
Officially, yes, but that's probably BS.
This reminds me of two anecdotes about the IDF (not to make this about Israel -- it's just the data that I have):
1) One friend assured me that any soldier acting improperly would be disciplined immediately, as the IDF had very high standards, etc. etc.
2) Another friend used to tell me stories about his IDF stint and how he and his friends would get high on guard duty all the time.
So ... just because you were in a military, doesn't mean that you know what's going down with everyone.
Also, the attitude that you evidence in your post makes it less likely that you'll know the truth, because you'll be more resistant to contrary evidence.
Treat truth as stochastic/unknown. We don't know the truth. Now ask "what practices or attitudes will tend to help me discover what is true? What practices or attitudes will tend to obscure the truth?"
The attitude "nope that can't be happening because organization X is so disciplined" obscures the truth. Especially in an organization that emphasizes loyalty and duty.
What's most interesting about these IDF anecdotes is that you have one ex-soldier completely dismissing behaviour that another ex-soldier admits to. That pattern can generalize to any org, regardless of volunteer / non-volunteer selection. I.e. they can't both be right. One of them is over-generalizing.
EDIT>
I.e. saying "No one in org X is doing Y" is much less likely (given an individual's limited personal experience) than saying "someone in org X is probably doing Y".
I was making a claim about large organizations that depend on loyalty, not even specifically military organizations.
So, the specific difference between military organizations and cultures are neatly excluded.
The pattern (of which I gave a specific example) is:
Person X in large org Y claims something is true for ALL members of org Y, based on X's personal experience.
I submit that humans being what they are and organizations being what they are, it's more likely that there are bad behaviours that are tolerated in sub-organizations of Y even if they violate the officially stated rules.
TL;DR Without perfect knowledge it's better to assume that something somewhere is going wrong than to assume that nothing anywhere is going wrong.
A lot of science, engineering and process control basically boils down to this. Why do we forget it when dealing with human systems?
I'd love to say otherwise, but it just isn't so.
You're convinced it's BS. Fine. My experience says that it's not. Actual expertise trumps ignorance and anecdotes, always.
it's just the data that I have
That's not data, those are stories that you were told.
> Actual expertise trumps ignorance and anecdotes, always.
You are not an expert in other peoples experiences, only your own. We have a case here where one guy says "this could never happen". Another guy says "I used to do that all the time". Only one of them can be right, even though we accept both of their experiences as true.
If the first guy simply said "I never saw that happen, and I never heard of it happening, and therefore I doubt that it could happen", then they could both be right, and the evidence matches both of their beliefs.
The mistake is to go from "I never saw that happen, and I never heard of it happening" to "It cannot/did not happen", especially when someone else says it did happen.
That's all I'm arguing. I am not doubting your experience.
When someone's culture is sufficiently different from yours, it becomes enough of an unknown to engender fear. And fear due to the unknown leads to paranoid thought, usually at the subconscious level.
For example, if you get a job candidate whose demeanor screams "from the hood", you'll definitely pass him/her over. The last thing you want is for them to start a fight over "respect", or bring some "friends" over to rob the place (deliberate hyperbole, yes, but this is how the subconscious works). Similarly, anyone who has had much contact with Indian culture will know that fraud and corruption are tolerated far more readily than they are in the West. This means that you need to be on your guard lest the person of that culture starts behaving as if in that culture. I've seen it happen enough times in my own experiences, so this is not just idle speculation. This is also why second gen people have a much easier time of it.
You may argue that you shouldn't "sell out" on your culture just to get ahead ("acting white", for example). I would argue that in remaining "true to your roots", you hobble yourself by deliberately refusing to make it easier for the majority to accept you.
I've lived on both sides of this issue. I've seen actually racist people, but far more often I've seen people who are afraid of the cultural divide, and move to protect themselves accordingly. I've also seen people change their own culture to better match the one of the majority, and they made FAR better lives for themselves than those who refused to do so.
Do racism and sexism exist? Of course they do. And in the rare cases where you DO encounter the real thing, it is your duty as a civilized person to put a stop to it. But when it's merely a culture issue, raising a stink about it will do nothing more than stir up resentment.
Not really... I used some inflammatory language as an example of how paranoid thought would germinate as fear of an unknown brought someone to the extreme of the "what if". Kind of like how parents fears can grow into a near certainty that their child has been abducted by an axe murderer because he's an hour late coming home from school.
The rest of the post is about fitting in so that you don't trigger that fear response. In essence, comporting yourself in the same manner as is the standard in business in the area you find yourself in (i.e. no surprising behavior). I've made a habit of taking this approach, and it's worked quite well for me. I also know a number of others who refused to do this, and are now bitter over the rejection they suffered (sometimes to the level of violence, actually, which didn't help at all).
This is not to say that I haven't experienced racism in my career in technology. Shoot I have people turn me away because I went to college at an HBCU (Historically Black College & University). Yet, I don't think that was because I in this industry just those individuals bias and I know if there were more minorities exposed to the idea of being entrepreneurs then there would be far more in the valley.
Don't worry though I hope to be one of those that help with this problem
SN: for anyone who has never experience racism consider yourself lucky. True story: (mind you I am a well established ,for my age, government contractor.) After exceeding all of a clients expectations on a project I later had a co-worker come and tell me how shocked that a black person could code let alone do it well and that he thought I was only on the team as a ploy by the company to diversify. Then expected me to take that as a compliment lol. Now that's only one of many stories i can tell. Just my 2 cent
I work as an outsourced contracted consultant on a client which outsources to 2 outsourcing firms A(Indian) and B(Native). I work for firm A. Client had a seemingly untraceable problem which was not solved for more than a year.CTO personally used to come to my manager’s desk and express his frustration of not able to resolve the issues. End users were constantly complaining to him. So task force was prepared to which used to meet every day for hours and talk in circles with no resolution. They were not even able to devise an attack plan. I have some reputation for tackling this kind of stuff so they persuaded my managers and started inviting me to their meetings.
After couple of days of investigation I was able to devise a plan and find out the root cause and resolution to the problem. Actual was hilarious and sad at the same time. It was a bigger issue with overall design of the datacentres which was originally designed by vendor B. Millions were wasted because someone failed to understand how TCP/IP layers interact with each other.
I know communication is important so I kept everyone updated and prepared a detailed analysis in doc and ppt format. The moment my analysis was out, guess what Vendor B tried to blame internet for not behaving to make his solution work and client rallied behind him. When I shot down his bullshit argument , me and my firm were taken out of loop and separate meetings with vendor B started to propose potentials solutions. After couple of months of proposing bullshit they again came to us and we provided the solution. Guess what ? We were out of the loop again and solution implementation started by hiring a third vendor C(Native again!!) along with vendor B.
I think there is a very real sense of lack of shared cultural values and overlapping social circles.
During my stint at a certain mid-sized company in Mountain View that happened to hire quite a few H1Bs, I noticed that engineering teams were split. You had a tight knit group of people who were American/Western European and sometimes Japanese and then you had foreign-born Indians and Chinese who socialized with other foreign-born Indians and Chinese in other parts of the company rather than with their own team.
It was a bit dysfunctional and depressing.
a) Nobody knows or cares who wrote a piece of software, because 99.9% of the time, the customer never sees the photo of the author
b) If your software is super-hot and gaining a lot of traction and people are smelling the money, they will not care what colour you are
c) For those tiny number of people who don't have traction and want other peoples money, the colour of your skin may give you a disadvantage with some particular money givers, but it will give you an advantage with other money givers
In general, for the success of your product to be affected by peoples prejudices against you or the colour of your skin, you would have to belong to a very unlucky 99.99%. If that happens, well, bad luck, try again. That's what entrepreneurship is all about, isn't it?
I found this article the other day that Female Fortune 500 CEOs were at an "all time high". Female CEOs represent just about 3.6% of Fortune 500 company heads. That's 18, a new record. And it's not a very multicultural bunch: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/female-fortune-500-...
The issue is not "crap", it's a very real issue that a lot of people experience every day. Thank-you to Brad Feld for putting the spotlight on this issue into the tech world, at least for a few hours.
It will be interesting to look at CEO ratios in 20-30 years. That's about the time you'll start seeing women (more in the work force now then every, especially better educated) start to have the paper credentials to fill those roles.
What do I do? I accept the fact that I am asian and so it's okay for blacks to make fun of me when I play basketball.
This is how society works. Sometimes, you just live with it. Stop the whining and the bitching.
When anyone takes a minute to turn a stranger into a person they fight racism, or any -ism by delivering social proof of how to behave.
I am a black programmer...
I have no college education, came from single family home blah blah womp womp.
I have launched 10+ projects for clients this year alone. I have 1 failed contract where I left because it just didn't work out.
When I had success it was not because I was black and when I failed it was not because I was black. Both when I have succeeded and when I have failed was never been treated like anything but an equal by my peers.
I personally thing that the NewMe accelerator is total crap and should not exit. What strategic advantage comes from going to a "black" incubator? I dont have a black startup because I dont have all black customers. The one thing this has managed to accomplish is to distract people from finding and solving huge problems and instead focus on some BS issue that has no value.
My only advice to "black" and other entrepreneurs is shut up, go code and make something awesome. The rest will take care of itself.
This entire issue is being exploited to get attention for Angela Benton and her new accelerator. I dont think its fair to cast a shadow over the awesome people I have had the opportunity to work with over the last 12 years in this field simply because someone wants to get some press at the expense of others.
... now back to coding ...
Unfortunately some people take a fairly legitimate gripe (lack of easy communication) and pre-judge an entire group rather than investigating the skills and attributes of a specific individual.
On the other hand, we would often have people call in who had strong accents, and the tech support agents would often judge the callers as 'dumb'. I earned a reputation of being a genius, not because I was a genius but because I'd actually listen to people and try to understand them (sometimes they were hard to understand) rather than being an asshole to them.
In short - it was very common for people on both ends of the phone to rationalize racisim with a hard to understand accent.
Put someone with a deep southern mountain accent and someone with a Brooklyn accent on the phone and they'll feel at odd with each other. Surveyed afterward, they will both probably feel the other is stupid and didn't understand them on simple things.
I myself remember my first experience with someone at a call center, who I can only assume wasn't in the US. I was calling Network Solutions in high school about a domain registration. The person on the phone I recall as having an Indian accent, which I didn't mind so much, but I did feel at odd with them when I needed to spell my first name (David) out to them using the NATO phonetic alphabet. It just struck me as so incredibly odd at the time that someone would potentially mishear or misspell the name David. However, I quickly realized that it was simply a cultural difference. I myself would probably get a common Indian name like "Sita" wrong. Was that Seeta? Seta? Seata? Site? Its only 4 letters, but I could screw it up for sure. I've since been more understanding of people at support lines.
Just as people often say that racism is ignorance, I do have to feel that this wasn't me being against anyone from India (as I actually knew very few people who maintained much Indian culture, language or accent where I lived at the time), but being ignorant and impatient with what was normal for them vs what was normal for me. Thankfully I learned.
Did you just say "Delta Alpha..." or "D as in Delta, A as in Alpha"?
I can assure you the first one would confuse the hell out of most of the Indians(I am an Indian living in India).
Some of the NATO phonetic alphabets would complicate matters even further - Quebec, Zulu, Yankee. Zulu is a special one, considering Z isn't pronounced "Zee" in India(G is "Gee" and there is no "Zee") - it's called "Zed". So when you say "Zee" as in "Zulu", the support staff is going to have a hard time figuring out what on Earth was that. This is pure speculation - most likely support people undergo some training and they have a basic understanding of western accent and pronunciation.
The safer bet is simply saying the alphabets "Dee a vee eye dee", or better still use short, widely known words as mnemonics "D as in Doll, A as in Ant, V as in Van..."
I often have to resort to phonetic alphabets. Though sometimes it becomes problematic when the mnemonics I come up with confuse the support staff even more:
Me: "Dee..Ummmm Dee as in Dumbledore"
Support Staff: "????"
It was chosen specifically to work through bad communications channels and diverse accents, especially if you use the specific pronunciations required for the words (kay-beck for quebec, etc.).
That's as a caller though, I've never worked in a position that requires me to take calls from the public. I've often been met with pleasant surprise by call-centre staff when I use it to clarify non-obvious spellings, and always request a read-back check.
They understood it well enough, but from my POV I was shocked, because never in my life did I have to spell my first name. I know in the US to always make a clarification of the spelling of my last name.
The normal line I give people in the US when they are looking up my account (perhaps at at bank) is, "My name is David Fisher, with no 'C' in Fisher" (since some spell if Fischer) and that normally does the trick.
You do make a good point however that just because the NATO phonetic alphabet is standard for NATO, doesn't mean it is something understood worldwide, anymore than I'd understand Kanji.
As regards to lunch, many Indians are very selective about eating habits (for religious reasons). That prevents them from eating in meat-'contaminated' areas.
None of this excuses them from socialising however.. But, socialising with people you already know is easier than making new connections. Which is just lazy, IMO.
So don't blame them entirely.
I've never lived out of a city with a population of less than 100,000 so I suspect that the social dynamic might be somewhat different there.
So long as big brother isn't enforcing it; another person's stupidity can always be turned to your advantage.
It's more complicated than that. Substitute legal framework with 'cultural normative behaviour' and we end up at a different position.
I just highly doubt there's a lack of women or black people physically capable of being engineers.
I agree. Anyone who would hire a worse employee because they don't like the other's {race,color,nationality,gender,sexual preference,...} is an idiot, and I wouldn't bet on their success.
That said, we definitely need some short term solutions too. "Evolution" isn't particularly helpful to those being discriminated against right now.
There are many funnels in immigration and education but talking about them like they shape people is missing the point. It's a selection process and the kind of people that can jump though the right hoops are the people that make it to the other side. In 20 years you will see plenty of Indian middle management but you can expect to see yet another round of 'glass sealing' debate not because people can't get their but because so few parents knew how to set that trajectory in motion.
Well I think you're right...but this "culturism" that you talk about has something to do with the fact that Indians from India are not inherently very good at managing people or software projects.In fact I would say that statistically Indians who have been educated in India are not good managers period.
I am myself an Indian and I have a bachelors degree from an Indian University.
In my experience working for corporate america,one of the things that irritates me most about Indian managers is that they will talk completely from their asses.They wont write a line of code and yet will make very heavy technical decisions and then when I disagree they will resort to micro-managing me instead of making an effort to understand my arguments.
I have repeatedly asked them to actually read the source and understand what I am talking about but they will relegate it back to me and ask me to send an email with a lengthy explanation later(They know I am not going to do that).
I have repeatedly pushed for DVCS adoption but apparently IBM Clearcase is a much better solution than github firewall.None of them (my Indian manager and his Indian manager and his Indian manager) have actually made an effort to understand DVCS till date.
Sometimes my manager has actually tried to argue that just because he has 13 years of experience in software he obviously knows more than me about iOS development and therefore his decision is obviously the right one.(The fact that he has never really written a line of Objective C is completely irrelevant.)
In fact when I apply for new jobs I try to make sure that I am not assigned to an Indian manager.
India is a high-PDI country. If you're taking orders from an Indian manager, for the most part they will expect you to keep your head down, shut up, tow the line, and do what you're told. This also partially explains Westerners' complaints about Indian subordinates: that they don't speak up, don't take responsibility, don't innovate. They have been very thoroughly taught not to. On the other hand, this also explains the at times amazing attention to detail -- if details are all you are allowed to control, you will control the living crap out of them.
(PS: "toe the line" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line )
I've been working around people from India for 17 years now. I've known guys/girls from India that came here in the US in the early 80s. I've been in tech lead positions and have given evaluations for people from India on my team that should have been moved into leadership positions and they've been overlooked. This is how I know first hand that there is some kind of bias in many work settings.
I've seen this in the medical, defense, education, financial, and utility fields on the east coast, mid west, and in the southwest. FWIW I've not seen this at software companies.
It's not racism if it's true!
In a large corporate setting with lots of dumb management, a majority of those Indians are going to be contractors, and a majority of them will be on work visas.
Why is that relevant? They are hired guns, who are supposed to go when the project ends. And they are exploited to the hilt by their staffing agencies.
Racist? I don't think so. Exploitive and amoral? Absolutely.
There are many examples of Indians leading technology businesses and managing technology departments in the US. In many ways, the Indian immigrants who get green-cards or citizenship are probably the best example of the mythical "melting pot" in today's society.
Then, of course, there are those who go out and take risk to do extraordinary things, like starting companies. There is no dearth of famous companies founded by Indians, is there?
I also don't think its true that "This entire issue is being exploited to get attention for Angela Benton and her new accelerator." This issue would exist regardless of whether the NewMe accelerator existed, Benton is just bringing some press to the subject.
This is a false issue that is being propagated by someone to garner attention to their accelerator. This whole idea of a race-based fund for high-tech is repulsive to me. If there are black entrepreneurs out there in high-tech, what is wrong with applying through YCombinator and other established incubator programs if they need the coaching and funding to go to market? It's insulting to think that blacks cannot compete for whatever reason in a normal fund and have to go make their own one and then blame it on perceived "racism". Big cop-out card there.
Even though I speak better english and command a larger vocabulary than most. English is my first of four languages.
I also dress well, drive well, dine well, know my music, have friends from many countries.
I once heard a saying you have to be twice as * to be * enough. Fill that in for any group.
"Racism is just not a thing in the high-tech industry." I beg to differ. Saying racism is "just not a thing" in any sense isn't really realistic. Are there people using the n-word all the time? No. Are there people with bias they might not even understand or be aware of? Yes. . Also there is a huge difference between the world of strictly programming (doing it for other people's businesses) and the world of tech entrepreneuring. Those are two different worlds,they overlap a great deal but they are still different worlds. You encounter different issues and different sets of people you must interact with in different ways.
That said I don't think NewMe is necessary and agree Black start ups should apply to traditional programs. I think some sort of formalized mentoring network would be useful but aside from that I don't really see the point...it's also not an accelerator that invests money in it's startups from what I understand, so I don't really get the point. I still applaud Benton and the others involved for trying to do something.
A programmer's job is to observe constraints and find a solution given those constraints. Racism is just another constraint. It is a constraint that is not fair. It is a constraint that we should not have to deal with. But, given it does exist, should it stop a good programmer from doing well in the industry? I'm not so sure.
This industry in particular comes so many unique options for work environments. And there is presently so much demand that you can basically write your own ticket. We should definitely be working to stop racism, and all kinds of judgements of others, completely, but in the meantime there are options for those who find themselves affected by it.
{German-austrian 4th-generation Iowan.}
As a white male living in a rural area as a kid and in metropolitan areas as an adult, and having a black best friend, my anecdotal evidence supports a more limited effect than is commonly claimed in pop culture. That is, to the extent that there is willful, systemic, malicious racism, an individual's self-reliance (why this is becoming a dirty word in our culture, I do not know) is significantly more powerful.
I respect people who think the system is flawed and want to dedicate their lives to making it more ideal, but otherwise I think it's healthier to believe your success comes from your own decisions. That's not literally true for ANY of us, but it's best to believe it. It's similar to the recent study which showed that children do best when they believe success is more dependent on how hard you work rather than what your IQ is...which is not the same as it actually being true that success is more dependent on how hard you work rather than what your IQ is.
...some BS issue that has no value.
My only advice to "black" and other entrepreneurs is shut up, go code and make something awesome.
This entire issue is being exploited to get attention for Angela Benton and her new accelerator.
It's easy to tout self-reliance when you're a white male. It's easy to overlook all the tiny advantages you get that accumulate in an invisible, insidious way. It's easy to see people bringing up the issue as whining.
It's hard to understand what it is to be someone else, what it means to struggle with others' perceptions every waking moment of every day in such a pervasive manner as to be incorporated into your very identity. It's hard. But we should all try.
Sometimes, self-reliance means putting your head down and doing the best work that you can do. Other times, it means finding other people with a common experience and taking collective action to actively change your circumstances. Sometimes it looks like a minority-focused startup accelerator. Sometimes it looks like the Civil Rights Movement.
If it looks like whining, probably the best thing to do is to try to refrain from meta-whining, and deeply consider whether the issue could be a real one, even though your own experience is different.
"This entire issue is crap. I am a black programmer..."
My selective quoting was in response to ellyagg's position that I was not accurately representing d3x's original comment in my original reply.
If the conversation is hard to follow, then you should read more carefully.
However, generalizing racists and saying racism exists based on these extreme edge case doesn't make logical sense.
I've lived in the US my entire life. I'm East Asian. I've encountered racism.
Given two persons of minority descent, one who claims to have first-hand experience of racism, and another who claims that racism is largely a myth, why would I believe the second over the first?
I've lived in Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, and now SF - all diverse places by American standards. And I've experienced racism at every. single. one. Not of the pitchfork-and-lynching variety, but racism nonetheless.
I want to live where you live, where racism is an extraordinary edge case.
Some people don't have the intelligence however to rationally overcome the natural inclinations toward whatever bias we may subconsciously harbor. This has been true for the entirety for human civilization.
What I CAN tell you though, is that reverse discrimination by creating "black only" beauty pageants, television stations, and now incubators is not the solution to the problem and will only cause further division.
Edit: nothing like a good race discussion to bring out the lurkers and trolls.
I've seen it, some sexism actually. However those who are sexist/racist are easy to spot, they are just aholes in general. The one I knew was very easily spotted as every female member of the team complained about him in a month, followed by every male member just complaining how much of an ass he was.
Almost my entire point was that your own experience is not universal. No one's is.
You admit that you've seen discrimination and that it's easy to spot. Why, then, would you assume that it's not a problem? And why would you assume that all discrimination is easy to spot?
If you've witnessed discrimination, but you're trying to stifle the voices that are trying to raise awareness of their situation, then you're part of the problem.
I am also a black programmer, yet my experience has likely been a bit different. I've found considerable social and professional benefits to working and networking with people who look like me.
This reminds me of Ellen Spertus's argument that certain women might get a better CS education from an all-girls school. The idea is an all-girl environment completely removes such impulses as "I don't want to answer this question and be 'that girl'" or any external signals that link being female with being non-technical.
Projects like the NewME accelerator exists because even if you "make something awesome" in a normal environment, getting attention is hard. You add to that being a minority and the road gets a little rougher. Not in every case but in a lot of them.
This isn't about black and white. This is about humans having natural prejudices even if they don't intend to. Nobody is claiming that the valley or the high tech field in general is full of racists. In fact the opposite is true. It is probably one of the more progressive job fields you will find. But that does not mean there is not a problem. There are biases in the field and one of them includes racial. Pointing it out does not mean everyone in the field is racist. They are just presenting one more problem for geeks to try and solve.
I'm black as well and though I haven't experienced racism in tech directly I understand why NewMe is a great option for some people. To the poster I would say respect other people's journeys and experiences.
> Just to remind all of us that racism is alive and well in the US and in tech. [...] The customer site is a government owned military installation.
This doesn't make it any "better", actually much worse, but this is not "in tech".
What I find both shocking and curious about racism is that it is a much more widespread problem throughout the world, not only limited to white racism - there is very strong racism throughout history in a lot of different cultures and is still prevalent there today. Why do humans even care about where someone was born or where they are from? Where and why did racism start at all?
Technically it is because it's in their profession. If you're involved in major tech company there is a likelihood that you're going to have to deal with the gov't.
>What I find both shocking and curious about racism is that it is a much more widespread problem...
Many, if not most people, need to feel some sense of superiority over another individual. It starts with race but does not end there for them. Had Nazi Germany removed or killed Jews, gays, socialists, Christians, etc. they would have found some reason to hate each other.
So, that specific rabbit hole goes much, MUCH deeper than you think.
Logically, we might not care, we might not want to care, but there's now research that's pointing out (the studies have been too small so far for real conclusions to be drawn) there's a strong possibility it's wired into our brain at a subconscious level.
http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-same... https://webapps.utsc.utoronto.ca/ose/story.php?id=2135
Before someone accuses me of justifying racism: I don't think racism is justifiable, but I think this research is important. If we understand the physiological causes, we can consciously make an effort to avoid being biased.
Humans have accumulated (recorded) vast sums of knowledge, and have become more efficient at building things using that knowledge, but human nature has not "evolved". The human brain has remained about the same for the last 20,000 years (give or take a few thousand years). There have been no quantum leaps here. We are exactly what we were 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, etc.
That's the real problem... That people think that somehow they are "evolved" because the year is 2011. And hence the segmentation begins again... Always seeing your-group as different from other-group, segmenting everything.
A person that pretends that they are not racist, is one that pretend that they are better than the racist... The problem is they are doing the exact same thing as the racist, just on a higher level.
Mostly just some spare arms and legs, but that's ok, because programmers don't take off their shirts very often, so the effect isn't that noticeable.
Edit: Since davidw is claiming that I think victims of racism are backwards, I'd like to clarify. I think that all victims of crimes and discrimination should be treated with respect and dignity by polite society (which far outnumber racists). It's my opinion that getting upset about a rude military contractor (like the one in this article) is backwards and is giving his point of view way more attention than it deserves. He should be disregarded entirely because his worldview is irrelevant.
This issue clearly touched some nerves.
Downvoted for trolling. Equating the victims of, and/or people upset about racism, which is indeed an ever present factor in the US and elsewhere, to those who actively perpetrate such backwards ideas, can be nothing less than either the fruit of a sick mind, or someone playing a troll in the internet.
I can accept people saying "luckily, in this day and age, I think it's not so much of a problem" as something up for debate, but to state that those angered by discrimination are "backwards" and "just like the racists" is one of the most vile comments I have ever read here.
Racism is irrelevant. Racists are irrelevant. Society doesn't take them seriously. Racists would have zero power over anyone if nobody took their actions or words seriously. Someone doesn't want to give you a job because they are racist? Their loss. Move on. Would you really want to work for someone like that anyway?
If you'd started with your comment above saying that "racism is irrelevant", perhaps I'd have called it a bit naive, but taken no offense. To make the connection between people incensed by discrimination to those who perpetrate it is very, very offensive.
Racism is very much relevant as long as people have power over other people (which is part and parcel of all complex societies), be it political or economic. You can't disregard someone not selling you a house or giving you a job or letting you marry who you wish, or burning a cross on your lawn.
Are things better these days? Certainly! Is racism a non-issue? I don't think so. Are people like Brad Feld, who get angry about discrimination "backwards"? Hell no!
There was a day when people thought witches necessarily worse than the people who spotted witches. Go look at how that turned out.
But of course you and yours wouldn't be so stupid and unfair.
HELLO DOWN-VOTERS. Why bother framing a response when you can just misuse a forum moderation tool? It's intelligence of a kind . . .
I was talking about whether people who get offended at actual, real cases of racism are "backwards" or not.
I agree with you that racism is still a real problem and that k33n's comment seems somewhat out of touch. However, what you say is tantamount to "shut up because you're white", and that's not cool either.
You actually went to the trouble of looking up his race in order to make your point. Think about that for a second. You looked up his race in order make a judgement about what he wrote. Didn't your irony detectors go off at that point?
I don't know how to spell this out further. Are you really this obtuse?
> People who get bent out of shape about a rude military contractor acting like an ignorant ass ARE backwards.
People who don't stand up and say "not on my watch" in the face of injustice are part of the problem, and not part of the solution.
So yes, a person's race is entirely relevant to considering the quality of their opinions on racism. For basically the same reason that I will happily weight a person's opinions on software development based on whether they're an experienced coder or a non-technical manager. Experience matters.
When dealing with issues of discrimination the point is to treat everybody equally, to treat people based on their merits and not based on the color of their skin or the statistics of their demographic. If we conclude from research that one race is more intelligent than another, or taller than another, or has more aptitude in some domain, then a rational agent would reason: "well, this person is from domain D, and people from domain D have less aptitude in Y, and since I am hiring people for that aptitude, I am less inclined to hire this person.". Logically sound, but still discriminatory. It's discriminatory because the person is treated based on the demographic he belongs to, not on his or her individual merits. So even if the research points out that one demographic is inferior to another demographic on one axis that still doesn't justify treating an individual based on his membership of a demographic. To put it bluntly, if research shows (it doesn't) that white people are absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt better at programming than black people discrimination against black people would still be wrong. The differences in aptitude between the individuals always trump differences in aptitude between large groups.
So when you say "a person's race is entirely relevant", I think you're completely and terribly wrong. Because it's irrelevant whether a typical white person understands less about racism than a typical black person. What matters is whether the specific individual understands. Again, the individual is not to be judged based on his membership of a demographic.
Yes, a typical white person understands less about racism than a typical black person. And a majority of the prison population consists of black people. And if you apply those generic traits of the demographic to the individual you're racist. When you judge a black person on his statistical likelihood of having a criminal record then that's racist. When you judge a white person on his statistical likelihood of ignorance on race issues that's also racist.
Both of you are incorrect. We have two hypotheses: racism either is or is not a relevant problem. And, we have that k33n does not observe much racism. We (and k33n) should update our beliefs based on the ratio P(k33n does not observe racism|racism is not relevant)/P(k33n does not observe racism|racism is relevant). The value of this ratio depends on k33n's race. If k33n is white, he's unlikely to observe much racism in either case, and the ratio's value is close to 1. If k33n is black, he's much more likely to not observe racism if racism is not prevalent, so the ratio's value is high and useful for updating beliefs.
You're also arguing that we ought not conclude that someone cannot understand racism simply because they are white. I agree with you, but I don't think that's the issue here. The issue is that k33n is white and seems to glibly conclude that racism isn't a real problem. He couldn't have reached this conclusion by looking at statistics because, as you know, the statistics push you toward the opposition conclusion. So, he probably came to this conclusion because he observed that racism isn't a problem for him personally. In doing so, he was being unreasonable and somewhat callous.
Racism does of course exist and is a problem. There's a ton of research on this. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.projectimplicit.net/media.php http://www.projectimplicit.net/articles.php
But one great example is a study where they sent out the same resumes with different names at the top; some sounded black and some sounded white. The "black" resumes got significantly fewer callbacks, and on "black" resumes increases in skill and experience mattered significantly less:
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...
The research on what people name their children shows very little racial correlation after controlling for wealth. Though it does show high correlation with wealth and status. So showing a bias against names poor people choose regardless of race then claiming it is about blacks is poor form.
If we fail to hold them to as near that standard as possible, then we are giving acceptance to the idea that racism is OK in larger society.
Haven't you just killed your company with this comment? Good Luck with any job interviews your company gives in the future. You appear to have left them open to claims of racist discrimination.
Guys, this is HACKER NEWS. I thought we were supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard of conversation over here?
Could I just post one thing?
http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html
If you disagree with what someone writes, then you should reply simply and without embellishment. To conclude that someone has a "sick mind" or has "killed their company" is a bit much of a conclusion to draw from a simple online debate at a tech/startup discussion site.
If Hacker News offered the ability to lock discussions, then I am quite sure that this one would have been locked.
Can't we all just calm down and get back to coding?
However, there are times when one's blood boils for a reason. I reread this a few hours after my initial comments and... yep, I'm still angered when I read that those who call out someone for being racist are "backwards" and the equivalent of racists.
If someone wants to argue that racism isn't that big a deal these days... fine, whatever, that's debatable, and people deserve to be able to air their opinion without being shouted at. However, to stand up and say that those who denounce racism should shut up is despicable.
Sorry you don't value free speech, or the rules here at HN.
Imagine the company not hiring a non-white interviewee, and that person doing thorough research.
That comment is findable in search engines.
k33n has left himself open to accusations of racism, and put his company at risk of lawsuits.