Hacker News Reader

The problem you’re describing is extremely rare in tech. The industry is full of immigrants and people of color; I’ve personally never worked on a team with more than 30ish% white people, although I’ve interviewed for a few and I hear they’re more common in different specialties.

But of course one of the key goals of diversity initiatives is to frame the discourse so people don’t think this way. How often do you hear the Google diversity office talk about how proud they are to have a PoC as CEO?

Thanks for your response. I meant the question to be more broad than just tech.

It’s less egregious in other contexts and other industries, but I still haven’t ever seen e.g a college whiter than the state it’s located in. I’m sympathetic to affirmative action as a solution to break up a true monoculture, and I’m sure there’s some institution somewhere that would be 100.0% white if not for their valiant efforts to fight it. But I don’t see any indication this is a common problem.

A big part of the problem is that it's not really a problem for companies to solve. Or, put another way, it's nearly impossible for most companies to address the problem in a non-ham-fisted way; arguably they end up doing more harm than good.

Opinions vary wildly on how much of a problem still needs to be solved, but to the extent that it's still there, it's a societal problem. The most effective ways to address it are going to be in the education of each new generation, both formally (in schools), but also informally (in family discussions, in media, etc.).

Ultimately, anything that boils down to judging people based on something like the color of their skin has great potential for being harmful and counterproductive.

>(For those of you wondering, a lot of Americans are born in highly segregated communities, where there are few (or even zero) poc, like many suburbs, and it’s not by choice or fault of their own)

I was born in West Virginia. Growing up there were like no black people. My high school had one dude who was half black. Coincidentally he ended up being a coworker and my roommate after high school. I think it's true that racism has to be taught. I was never taught to be racist. Who would I be racist to? Or about? Everyone in my community was white. There was more contention about Ford vs. Chevy than race.

So if racism is taught, isn't the solution to not teach it? And to judge people by their character and not their skin? The more people talk about race like it's important, the more new people (kids) are going to think it's important, and that we're more different than alike, which just isn't true. There's so much racebaiting in the media these days its ridiculous. Imagine you're a kid growing up and the media is constantly highlighting race. You're going to think race is an important distinction to think about, and make decisions based on it. If it wasn't important to distinguish race, why is everyone talking about it all the time?

Basically, instead of being target fixated on the problem, focus on the solution. What would a racism free society look like? Would they talk about race all the time? Or would they look at you funny if you brought up race? The least evil option, IMHO is to simply be the person that looks at someone funny for bringing up race. To quote Morgan Freeman: "Stop talking about it." https://youtu.be/RosCZkH5uTI?t=25

> That if the govt hadn’t done something to intervene, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to know any poc until I was an adult.

Your greater comfort with the differently skin coloured members of your social class came at the expense of the people who would have gotten in under a colour blind system. That’s fine as long as people are ok with the fact that different groups are being held to different standards. (Asians famously have “bad personalities”.) But it’s considered déclassé to mention it. This is bad. Lying to people is bad. It leads to children believing the bullshit and then they grow up and believe the bullshit still.

The system in place at my university was color blind. The top 5% of students were automatically accepted.

> Asking bc I went to a good school that had affirmative action.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34678203

Which was it? Was your school colour blind or did they practice affirmative action? They can’t both be true at the same time.

It is both. The top 5% of students from each high school doesn’t mean the top 5% overall. There was even a recent supreme court case over this. Something can be technically colorblind and still be affirmative action.