Comment by thenerdfiles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenerdfiles | Hacker News Reader

Because many African languages, like Zulu, lack many linguistic distinctions sufficient to produce abstract concepts regarding Time (Past/Present) and Rules (Obligation/Promise). So descendents of Africans and people who are closer in proximity to practical use of those languages are seen as lacking subtlety, lacking conceptual grace, less capable of exploratory thought and critical intellectual maneuvering — notwithstanding the Media Machine which primes expectations for cross-racial and cross-cultural interactions.

As a Black (and Native American, mind you) person myself, I constantly battle on a personal level with criticisms such as this, and through my own limitations with language. I am but one person. At the same time, I have read from the works of Samuel Beckett to the works of Wittgenstein to Galileo, Aquinas, Maimonides, Aristotle, versed in Spinoza's Ethics, trained with a B.A. in Philosophy. And I still find myself each day pitted against the installed social strictures present in all Blacks' lives; even with my Classical education, I often find myself barking up the wrong tree more often than not.

Each day I grapple with my tools, sometimes mystified by my own capacity to become conceptually paralyzed. And this becomes a circle of a vicious nature. Language itself becomes both a fortress blocking acceptance and a prison prohibiting liberation, as constantly, despite whatever linguistic finesse I might muster, it simply falls upon deaf ears.

We call this Structural Oppression. It does not disappear over night.

One important point MLK made during his campaign is that, and I paraphrase, equality will not exist until Blacks are able to fail at the same rate as Whites. I am quite sure the same goes for women; hence, why Miley Cyrus serves as a Debordian "Spectacle".

Georges Bataille says something I believe is relevant[0]:

    A man who finds himself among others is irritated 
    because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

[0]: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-...

Regarding languages lacking certain features therefore limiting the cognitive space of their speakers, everybody should remember the English has no future tense: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.h... and just personally as a native speaker I have to wonder what it is I'm missing.

I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit.

I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?

Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.

As an example, in the USA 13.6% of Americans are African American (born in America and of African descent): (http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/black.htm...)

While the Computing Research Association reported that only 6.9% of the population of computer workers in the USA are black. (http://cra.org/resources/crn-archive-view-detail/expanding_t...)

Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.

> I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?

I'm largely speaking from Gedaliah Braun's "Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit"[0] which speaks to the lack of "abstract entities" like the Future, the Past, and things like Obligations. It would be problematic to compare horizontally across languages (Spanish, French, English, Zulu) strictly in terms of their actual evolutionary maturity. But "English" as the Mother language of programming does introduce a vertical stricture; however, evolutionarily this stricture might be negligible since English's dominance is a societal pressure.

But it must be stated that even authors/researchers like George Lakoff to Pinker and onto Physicalists believe in things like "Language Centers" of the brain, or "mentalese". I am trying my best to speak in line with racialism while still acknowledging that all humans alive today exist with roughly the same Human Potential. Environment is important; and so, socioeconomic structures are important.

My assumption is Wittgensteinian, or let's just say Constructivist-about-Cognition: If your native language lacks linguistic world building capabilities (even a world of abstractions), programming will be tougher to grok. That said, those who have mastered the conventions of the Computational World (think Mathematical Objectivities) will be less welcoming to those who have not.

> Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.

Yes, structural oppression is a real thing. I want to reiterate my point about MLK's biggest contribution to this debate: There's no equality until Blacks are able to fail at the same rate as Whites. Generalizing from this: There's no equality until all members of the species are able to fail at the same rate. This would be a true homeostatic structure of social norms.

> Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.

My immediate naive response? Computers are less economically viable in our country. Surely Blacks could roll and build their own. But where are the parts? Re-sale shops, pawn shops, etc. — and can there be an explicit aesthetic and obvious need to engage in hardware hacking of this sort when considering the aforementioned structural oppression?

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Racism-Guilt-Self-Deceit-Gedaliah-Brau...

Stop worrying about computer science specifically -- it's no different in engineering fields, and worse in the sciences. The reasons are not specific to CS.

With CS it's a more concrete problem because both the Tools and the Results count as linguistic artifacts, and there is a clearer correlation with languages and linguistic praxis.

EDIT: Removed "Conceptual Tools", etc.

I'm addressing CS because it's relevant to me. It's a community that I participate in so I'm addressing this issue in my community. Honestly though, the gap between women and men in CS is far greater than other fields.

You're replying to a reply about blacks' presence in these fields, not women's.

Yes you're correct, I honestly don't know what the achievement gap is for other science fields - so I don't know if it's worse in CS for people of color.

Thank you for providing an example of what a bigot pretending to be smart sounds like. Now we all know what to look out for and combat.

Do you actually have an argument ? Do you actually have a contribution to make to the discussion ? Can you not see the claims being made here ? Can you actually argue one way or another, or is this discussion simply off-limits because anyone has any opinion whatsoever?

Is it essential that I add "I read this from some place" ?

I deal with this issue on a personal level; the least you can acknowledge is that it hurts for me to have internalized assertions I clearly did not dream up or produce myself.

relax, calm down down. Yes, so magically you managed to provoke a troll out of his slumber. Ignore him. Don't feed the troll.

That said, I am actually confused why someone would doubt your intellectual brilliance based on your mother-tongue :/

    ... sometimes mystified by my own capacity to become conceptually paralyzed.

    [...] are seen as [...]

Like, are you actually reading what I wrote ?

Who pretends to be smart by admitting their own capacity to become conceptually paralyzed by their own tools ?

What are you even talking about ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com