When A Black Female Scientist Gets Called An 'Urban Whore' | Hacker News Reader

When A Black Female Scientist Gets Called An 'Urban Whore'

talkingpointsmemo.com

5 pointscredo4 comments

It's a shame that even after women have attained such lofty positions in society, they are dogged by such damaging and carelessly thrown phrases. As a woman of color myself, I have experienced the same sort of sexism, and at times, racism (sexism easily prevails). I suppose the only silver to this is that when I succeed, it will be that much sweeter.

Well, it was certainly an offensive and horrifically stupid response that no doubt will go down on "Ofek"'s permanent record. But while it's safe to assume that he new that the person he was writing to was female, we have no evidence that he knew she was also a person of color:

This offensive slur reinforces the notion that women of color should be thrilled with the meager scraps they are thrown, and that they should smile and nod while doing so.

Now do we?

The circumstantial evidence that "Ofek" knew Danielle N. Lee was a person of color is rather strong:

* He offered her the blog position based on her current blog contributions, meaning he read them.

* There's a photo of Dr. Lee at her blog: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/ and an even clearer nice photo if you click on it, with a very complete CV, including her Doctorate in Biology.

* Her CV includes her 2009 Black Weblog Best Science or Tech Blog Award

* Dr. Lee's "Urban Scientist" blog title was a conscious and clever choice. "Urban" has been used as a code word for African-American for a long time. It's used by radio networks to refer to their hip-hop and rap stations, by blog networks to categorize podcasts and blogs, it's just everywhere. Very hard to miss, unless one never reads the popular press or, say, teh internets.

* The blog subtitle is "A hip hop maven blogs on urban ecology, evolutionary biology & diversity in the sciences"

Conclusion: "Ofek" likely knew Dr. Lee was a person of color. IMHO "Ofek" wouldn't have responded to a female person of caucasianity (I know, not a word) with a Ph.D. with such a slur.

Anyways, whatever color "Ofek" thought Dr. Lee was, his response stinks of petulant entitled male outrage at being turned down by a female. Yeah, the sting of rejection hurts, but it's no excuse to engage in any sort of attack.

"Urban", "hip hop" -- got it -- those are dead giveaways.

So looks like you're right, unfortunately.

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