I usually choose to believe in "the honest mistake". It happens, two people walk in, one of them is the CEO, you assume it is the one on the right. And then when you realize it is a mistake, you apologize. We are only human.
But when it happens over and over and over, you can't help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techcrunch (I was in 2017), where you have clearly introduced yourself. You get off-stage, they greet your colleague and ask him the questions as if he was on stage.
I was often in the interview room waiting for my interviewer, only to have him show up, and tell me I must be in the wrong room. A simple "Hey are you XYZ?" could have avoided this frustration.
I've written an article about my experience working as a black developer, I'll post it here in the near future. You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
Over the past few years I've been on numerous hiring events with my company for dev/ops jobs and I would say that the percentage of candidates that were black roughly matched your team...maybe 2-3% (and most of them were not US citizens). Of the remaining i would say about half were Asians (east/west) on visas, a third were US citizens (mostly white) and the balance were mostly Europeans on visas...super rough numbers obviously.
It's strange because we have a bunch of older black folks in IT roles that have been around for a long time. I've worked with quite a few black folks in my career (boring city not near the coasts) and the overall demographics are actually fair to middling (racially anyway, male/female is still a mess). New hires though? Not not so much. I don't see how we fix this overall situation without understanding what's causing that discrepancy.
It's not a quick fix but personally I feel we have to do more to inspire young kids to dream about this type of career and visualize it as part of their future. Part of that is (probably?) going to be seeing folks that they can identify with in those roles. Another part is (probably?) to make that resources are available for them to test the waters and develop those skills and refine their interests. I'm white, i don't know what it's like to grow up going to school in the setting most young black kids find themselves. I went to a mostly white school in the suburbs in the midwest and it treated 'nerds' like dog shit back in the day. Something tells me the story doesn't get better in metro public schools. Pop culture really seems to hold sway in those settings, maybe some help there wouldn't hurt.
+1 We definitely need to work on this from a "grass-roots" education-system level, but it's also a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation, because we also need to make the tech industry appealing to young black students who are in the process of forming ideas about the sort of career they want.
The examples[0][1] of humiliation from the article, and the many examples from black folks in this thread don't paint a picture of an industry that is particularly appealing to a student thinking about their career options. That's if they've even considered the industry in the first place - the dearth of visible/powerful black faces in tech is very likely causing a "can't be what you can't see" effect in the minds of many young black kids.
The fact that the industry is currently doing some introspection is great, but real-world, noticeable progress on these issues will probably take decades.
[0] > That message hit particularly hard in 2015, when Givens and his co-founder Eric Williams, who is also Black, brought some of their employees to Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby. They were at a VIP suite to celebrate the first big installation of one of their bartending machines. Guest after guest walked past the pair of executives to greet their White employee, offer their congratulations and ask how he got the idea for the product. The mood dimmed once the well-wishers realized their gaffes. “It went really quickly from ‘I have a drink in my hand, and I want to network’ to ‘I just want to get out of here,’” Givens recalls.
[1] > His first two fundraising rounds were challenging, according to Hayes and his apparent doppelgänger, Messick. The recurring confusion about who was CEO, and the embarrassment and apologies that followed, certainly didn’t help. “I usually remember the room and the look on the face,” Hayes says. “The energy would drop dramatically.”
Man, I feel you, I have worked in the valley for 10 years and am yet to work closely with a black developer. I have felt the loneliness at times - I seem to oscillate between all white teams and teams with many Asians (I am Indian). When you are a minority in a group, I think you tend to overthink things, feel very judged, and may be put in to an uncomfortable position to speak for your community. It can be weird and I try my best to stay aware of myself in such situations.
By the way, I did read your blog post "The Machine Fired me" when it first came out - it was fascinating and extremely disturbing. Hope life is more boring now!
> When you are a minority in a group, I think you tend to overthink things, feel very judged, and may be put in to an uncomfortable position to speak for your community. It can be weird and I try my best to stay aware of myself in such situations.
You nailed it. At times, I definitely felt like I had become my own worst critique. Before I make a commit, I feel the weight of an invisible black committee that I represent and speak on behalf of.
> I feel the weight of an invisible black committee that I represent and speak on behalf of.
I am sorry that we do this, as I now know how it makes you feel. For some perspective, many white people do this because they don't see the world from your vantage point. It would be akin to me being blind and you being able to see and me asking you what does a tree look like. We think it is an innocent question, one that only you will have perspective on and therefor we don't see the harm that it actually does. We (not all of us) see it as akin to asking a guy who can see for his personal perspective, not as asking a guy to speak for all people that can see.
I have a good friend who just so happens to be black (I know that's a white thing to say but I don't know how else to express it) and he is frank with me and helped me to understand why this question is so alienating and degrading.
I regret that I have been guilty of this and appreciate that I have a friend that we have very little racial barriers due to our friendship so he can check me when I do asshole things not realizing it. Apparently passing cop cars with a black friend in the car is also an asshole move, I learned that one as well so I am guilty of a few, but at least I gain perspective.
> When you are a minority in a group, I think you tend to overthink things, feel very judged, and may be put in to an uncomfortable position to speak for your community.
Because people tend to generalize and if you represent 50% of the experience they have with that minority it's very easy to label everything, especially negative aspects, as generally applicable to "all of them". So you bear the burden of representing your whole minority to the best of your ability. Members of the majority rarely need to do this or even be aware of this.
So the feeling of being judged may be an internal feeling that does not match reality.
I'm not sure what the answer is to that but I say just be you. You are where you are, hopefully, because of the person you have become and that is something that you should be proud of and be able to act on.
You can also look at it as that you have already been judged in a positive light in order to be in the place that you are.
Many people who are members of a minority group feel pressure to do everything "perfectly" because people will naturally use them as a reference for the whole minority group. That's just how human brains are wired - we use patterns that we observe to predict the future. If we don't have much data, we form crude stereotypes.
It takes active effort and learning from people like you and I to help overcome those biases so that members of minority groups aren't exposed to this pressure and can feel safe in making mistakes (or at least, as safe as members of the majority feel).
In general, if you don't know what you're talking about (at least you were honest about it), it's best to do some more learning rather than to add noise to the thread. I'm not claiming that I know much here, but I know enough to know that a solution like "just be you" is not going to be helpful here.
The majority of people of African decent alive today have either lived through, or have parents/grand-parents that lived through the civil-rights movements(US)/decolonisation(Africa).
Some have lived without the right to speak their native language, to go to the school of their choosing, to vote, or had to give up their seat to a white person if the bus was getting full, considered second class citizen in their own land. So they either experienced it, and/or heard stories of how only the color of their skin stripped them of what we would consider basic rights, and the pain it caused people they know and love. Some (until 1990) have been born a crime[0] for being "mixed race".
You may think it's history but for many alive today it's their life story. And what I mentioned is but a small part of it, and I'm only talking about people of African decent. Had she lived 3 more years, Rosa Parks would have been able to see Barack Obama becoming president. And today, some get gentle[1] reminders[2] that they don't belong here[3], or just get threatened[4].
When you have more people, it gives everyone more data points to separate the individual from the group.
But when you are a single data point that represents a group, any personal characteristic can be easily construed/extrapolated as a characteristic of the group you are supposed to represent.
This leads to the feeling of "Am I being judged for myself or for my group?". This cuts for both the good and the bad stereotyping that your group might have.
>You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
Almost a decade in the industry and I have never worked with another black developer. One time I was on a team with a black project manager who use to be a developer but that's it. For all the pushback on diversity recruiting I appreciate events like Google sandbox that remind me that we do exist and present opportunities to network.
I knew a black developer once on the job, but he was a contractor and not on my team. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't find it :-) I've gotten so used to it that it simply never occurs to me any more.
Some companies are genuinely concerned. When I left a major corp, the VP of Software Development called me into his office and said (paraphrasing) "since you're leaving I can count on you to be honest with me. Are our diversity programs doing anything useful or are we just kidding ourselves?"
The company I went to after that (another large corporation) hired a consultant to interview a set of women and minorities to try to understand how comfortable they felt in their day-to-day roles. Again, knowing the HR people there, I felt they were genuinely trying to foster a pleasant environment, but that's also the company where I came across that one black developer.
Then again, I do recall travelling across the country to be my company's Expert for a deposition for a lawsuit over a project I was on and having the opposing party think I was the cab driver...
> Almost a decade in the industry and I have never worked with another black developer.
Working in technology in the public sector, where women and racial/ethnic minorities underrepresented in technology as a whole are generally less underepresented than is generally the case, I've worked with...two others, in a similar time frame.
People really should know better. It's not that hard to just be polite and avoid assumption. But I think you're doing the right thing by giving the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the reason for their behavior, a helpful and non-judgmental correction is more likely to get them to reevaluate their prejudices and maybe do better next time. As much right as you may have to be indignant it would only make them defensive.
There is a passage in Catch-22 where Colonel Cathcart accidentally makes a sexual reference when speaking with the chaplain.
At first he is embarrassed. But the more he thinks about it, the more he gets pissed at the chaplain for being present when he embarrassed himself. And when he remembers that the chaplain is only his subordinate, he gets furious. The chaplain suffers the colonel's wrath because...
For me, working in tech feels like being the chaplain.
"well-meaning friends—mainly other Black entrepreneurs who faced similar challenges—suggested that Givens add a White man as a co-founder."
I'm not black, but I'm also not white, and I've been suggested this numerous times as well by well-meaning people after our startup not being able to fundraise for several months but some of our white-male-founded competitors had successfully raised. One friend was even joking about a "white-guy-as-a-service" to help minority startups get funded -- i.e. hire a white guy to show up to your VC pitch (or maybe pitch it for you) and your chances of funding would probably astronomically rise.
This reminds me of a Nairobi-based startup who tweeted a job posting in which they were looking for a white male to join their team to act as a face for the business. I don't know if it was in jest but it was hilarious and sad.
This is basically what DJI did. Sad world but I bet they wouldn't have gained so much traction and investment if their marketing wasn't always full of white people using them (they did this right from the very beginning).
Yeah this is real man, but products win in the end of the day, beat them, it makes the competition harder, so what? I am in the same boat, work twice as hard, racism won't give you time, this can take decades to fix. Best of luck
> You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
This is a huge part of the problem isn't it?
I believe these painful interactions would be much less common if tech culture were more diverse in the first place.
Women share a similar fate. Whenever I hear some of these stories I cringe. Some of them are surprising/shocking even.
But this seems important. Hearing those stories including the ones you mentioned. Not necessarily to point fingers (although sometimes we should) but rather to fight this common, widespread ignorance.
> I believe these painful interactions would be much less common if tech culture were more diverse in the first place.
I have this bias that people who get into programming as kids tend to end up as the strongest developers. My own personal effort to try and help tech diversify is support and promotion of https://www.blackgirlscode.com/
When I've worked in London I've been often surprised at how diverse QA teams are, especially compared to dev teams. I wonder if that's related.
> I have this bias that people who get into programming as kids tend to end up as the strongest developers.
I don't think this is true. I think that this bias is pushing away a lot of people who could be those strong developers, but think it is already too late for them.
This should definitely correlate. If you want to be strongest in sports you have to start early. Same with programming. You will not only have more experience timewise, but also brain is more malleable in the young age to make the person naturally have the correct mindset.
I just want to point something out -- it's not clear that you're making the mistake I'm referring to, but it's a common bone of contention.
Your second sentence is an "ought sentence". It's about how we would like the world to be (a world where everyone who has the potential to be strong at something doesn't get discouraged)
Your first sentence is an "is sentence". It's a statement about how you think the world is.
Putting the second sentence after the first makes some people think that you're confused about the relationship between "is" and "ought". This is a criticism often levelled at the more daffy left-wing/liberal/progressive extremes -- that they refuse to confront the distinction between how the world is and how we would like it to be.
People who want liberal/left political thought to be rescued from dumb 21st century "progressives" find this sort of thing upsetting when it comes from someone who, as in your case, obviously is expressing a worthy sentiment.
Say a black guy with gold teeth, tons of tattoos and colorful dreadlocks and a middle aged white guy walk in. One of them is a rapper. Who is it?
Based on experience, most people will certainly assume the black guy is. What if it turns out it’s the white guy?
Are they unconsciously racist against white people or are they just following experience-based heuristics? Would they have decided differently if rappers were commonly middle aged white guys?
I say for sure. If black people in tech become more common this particular problem will solve itself.
It certainly makes sense to assume (in your head) the black guy is a rapper, and the white guy is a tech CEO.
But when you know how it makes people feel when you make your assumption visible, you understand the need to act like anyone could be the CEO, the developer, etc. Same goes for women devs who at tech conferences who are too often "assumed" to be girlfriends, recruiters or other non-tech participants.
Yes, the problem will solve itself if black people in tech become more common - but:
1. it's not going to get solved if we make them feel out of place in tech by always assuming they're "the wrong guy".
2. let's try not to make the life harder to the very few black people (and other minorities) who are already in tech?
> But when you know how it makes people feel when you make your assumption visible...
How people feel depends on their own assumptions on why you made the mistake. Say that yours was a perfectly natural mistake based on innate heuristics, and there is no value judgement implied. If this is the way your mistake is interpreted, no feelings are hurt. But if you spread the idea that this is racism and a value judgement is implied, then feelings are hurt, and it becomes a serious issue.
So the way you frame the issue actually ends up creating the issue.
I’m not arguing that you should make your assumptions visible (I agree it’s better to just ask), I’m just saying racism isn’t the root cause here and any attempts to fix this issue assuming that it is are going to be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. We should work on fixing the actual issue.
There is the idea that all people are unconsciously racist based on cultural inheritance of the last centuries (imperialism). It is just assumed by everybody that white people are superior in some way. Evidence based reasoning ( few black CEO => it's unlikely to meet a black CEO => this black guy there is not a CEO )is welcome (defensive) argument. Yes, it would help to increase the number of black CEO's, developers, ... But it's only a part of the problem.
> Are they unconsciously racist or are they just following experience-based heuristics?
Both! Today's discussion about racism isn't (mainly) about critiquing the motivations in peoples' deepest heart. It's about acknowledging that the outcomes of this kind of assumption can be racist, regardless of whether any harm was intended.
The person who is assumed to be subordinate, or less educated, or more prone to criminality will be given fewer opportunities. Society will systematically fail to recognize and utilize their talents, and can ultimately do them great harm through neglect - even if the individuals involved were "just following experience-based heuristics".
Acknowledging your potential to participate in racism doesn't mean admitting you have a cartoonish hatred. It means recognizing that it requires a proactive effort to keep assumptions from becoming self perpetuating in harmful ways.
In general people who never suffered from this kind of profiling have a hard time understanding what's the problem. "I just called him a rapper". No, you just profiled someone who is sick and tired of being profiled. So the examples meant to convey the message better have to be a bit exaggerated.
Imagine calling every white, bald guy "a neo-nazi". A reasonable person who just didn't get the problem suddenly finds the heuristics explanation as no longer appropriate. An unreasonable person probably doesn't want to understand anyway so any effort is wasted on them.
> In general people who never suffered from this kind of profiling have a hard time understanding what's the problem
I'm assuming you're directing this towards me since you mentioned my example. I am myself a minority. Do you realize that you just racially profiled me based on my opinion?
> you just racially profiled me based on my opinion
This argument makes no sense. I based my words on your statement not your person and it wasn't even addressed to you. I picked up your argument and from personal experience explained why those people that you described see it like that. Making a very wobbly assumption based on criteria that puts one in a protected group is profiling and it gets old when you keep hearing it again and again. Moreover the same reasoning can lead to far more offensive conclusions then calling someone a rapper.
I never mentioned your race and it would make no difference to the argument: a black person in Africa will have just as little experience being profiled as a white person in the US. My "prejudice" wasn't towards you but towards the people who think making such assumptions is normal. Pulling this absurd "you racially profiled me based on my opinion" card now suggests to me that minority or not perhaps you also do not understand the real issue.
I would have thought that people who suffered this kind of profiling understand why it's a problem and actively steer away from doing it or even condoning it without the need for further explanation. And I get it that some are doing it without realizing it's a problem. I'm not assuming bad faith, just lack of understanding.
You were imlplying people who "don't understand the problem" (as in, they share my opinion) are generally lacking certain experiences, which is fundamentally nothing different than profiling them based on superficial attributes, which is exactly what's being criticised.
I'm not taking issue with you doing that, I was just aiming to illustrate the fact that everyone does this constantly. It's easier than thinking - it saves energy, we evolved to do it. It'll be hard to get rid of this and therefore maybe shouldn't be in the focus as much as it is.
> Today's discussion about racism isn't (mainly) about critiquing the motivations in peoples' deepest heart. It's about acknowledging that the outcomes of this kind of assumption can be racist, regardless of whether any harm was intended.
Words have meaning. If an act wasn't done with a racist motive then it isn't racist.
As the previous commenter said, it's just heuristics : they can be more or less in tune with reality. The only way to make someone change his heuristics is when reality and his map of reality become too different from one another.
> Acknowledging your potential to participate in racism doesn't mean admitting you have a cartoonish hatred. It means recognizing that it requires a proactive effort to keep assumptions from becoming self perpetuating in harmful ways.
So now people have to go against an evolutive and efficient process that enables them to not spend 1h thinking about how to behave in front of a lion or a boss ?
The self-perpetuation will stop by itself when people's experience will change.
With such wishful thinking are you conscious you could then ask people to believe anything you want, regardless of reality?
Most of this thread - and the entire concept of "systemic racism" - is about outcomes that impact minorities, not about what drives specific individuals to stereotype.
For what it's worth, I agree that people shouldn't be villified for having evolved heuristics. Many people who care about - and especially many that have been directly harmed by - systemic racism are extremely realistic about how common these heuristics are. But, once you are aware that some of your heuristics harm others, you do have a revealing choice to make.
People go against evolved heuristics all. the. time. Often to make society work, which is itself an evolved impulse. Our layers of evolved reasoning are in constant conflict. Should I eat this thing that's tasty or impress that potential mate? Should I stay home and lie on the couch or keep my job and the respect of my family? Should I punch the guy who cut me off or stay out of jail? It's disingenuous to say, "I manage all of those things, but I'm helpless about my assumptions based on race."
We talk about things like anger management and racism in order to develop new heuristics that let us thrive together efficiently. You don't have to suppress your internal guess about whether someone is a rapper if you learn to invite people to introduce themselves. You can invest in confronting your biases in high stakes situations like performance reviews and project assignments, when you should be engaging your cognition anyway.
> The self-perpetuation will stop by itself when people's experience change.
This is a literally saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves". What makes it self perpetuating is that people can't disprove stereotypes with a boot on their neck.
Yes, it is experience/learning/environment based heuristics. And to me, there's nothing wrong with that. As humans, that's what we are programmed to do. It's completely natural. I would argue that it's pretty much inevitable.
Let's take your example and let's make it realistic and say there are 2 people in suits, one black and one white. Which one is the CEO? Heuristics say it's the white male. What is the difference between experience based heuristics and unconscious racism? It has to be internal to the person who is making the call. Because from any other perspective there is absolutely no difference.
As the parent said, these are honest mistakes. Based on what we learned from our parents, our culture, our peers. Based on our observations. We all have these prejudices. I certainly do. You call it experience based heuristics. I call it racism. Maybe it's not the technical definition of racism, but to me, if the only determining factor is the color of someone's skin, to me that is racism.
So is there a problem? I think we all agree there is. You even mentioned in your comment that this is a problem. Is it your fault? No. So if we agree there is a problem, the question you are asking is... should we do anything about it?
I am an optimist. And I do believe that eventually it will solve itself one way or another. But we can help. We can make it happen faster. This is a spectrum. One end is saying that it will happen anyways so why do anything about it? You could say a similar thing about any effort. Why contribute to cancer research? We will figure it out eventually. The reason is that we want it to happen faster. Because people are actively suffering, people are dying. This is happening to Black Americans right now and for centuries! The other end of the spectrum is equally ridiculous. Should you feel guilty and spend all your time on this cause? No.
I want to make one more point. I used to argue for experience-based heuristics. So. What is the argument in favor of experience-based heuristics? Well, the argument is that it's useful. It's a tool for making quick decisions that help you. It's most useful in situations where your safety is at risk. And yes, it's racist, but I'm not going to deny that it's useful for you to use heuristics to decide to walk quicker when you are walking through certain neighborhoods. I certainly would. But is it useful for you to assume that one person is a CEO? Or even a rapper? I'm pretty sure your safety is not at risk or there is an urgent need for a quick decision. I would argue it's actually starting to become harmful in today's environment to make these assumptions. And that's a great thing. Yes, it does suck for the people who were inadvertently caught between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. And I genuinely empathize with that and feel sorry for those people. And I wish we could all be more empathetic to that and seek to help those people rather than punish them. The new paradigm is better for us. For our society and for the majority of people. We are making progress. And we can accelerate that and make it happen faster.
Do you wonder if at least a few people are nervous? Some members of my family are straight-out racist. But then a few have said they prefer not buying goods from British Indians in my hometown because they feel somehow uncomfortable, yet bode no ill-will. How the British social awkwardness relates to American culture, I don’t know, however.
> You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
One of the strangest realizations I've had in my adult life is that when Silicon Valley people talk about improving workplace diversity, they don't mean black people. There are virtually no black people in Silicon Valley. Two on your team of 150 under-represents the population but not nearly as much as in places with a larger black population.
Has anyone ever pitched you on Atlanta? Tech here has a long way to go to match the local demographics but being a black developer (or manager, executive, founder, VC, whatever) isn't nearly as novel. Tho, our casual and not-so-casual racism outside the workplace is probably worse than Silicon Valley.
They also don't mean more Middle Easterners (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt,..) or Asians or Muslims or Sikhs or Natives, more diversity basically means more white women.
I think it's a noble cause but unfortunately the biases are deeply rooted in SV culture.
I mostly know California, this is where I learned to navigate the system. People often recommend the tech scene here or there, and it is tempting to just move.
But to tell you the truth, I don't want to start over. The devil you know...
First, I wanted to say congratulations on having that Techcrunch experience! That is very cool :)
I am white. I am often talking among my white colleagues who make statements like "I just want to work, I don't understand all the focus on diversity. Racism isn't something I consider when I go to work to make software." I understand this. I don't go to work trying to increase or lessen racism, it's simply not in the viewfinder.
However, I've talked with some of them about how it subtley changes your perspective and erodes your peace of mind to go to work among peers you don't outwardly identify with. We hope people go to office parties and learn finer details of those they work with and bond. This doesn't always happen. What helps immediately is being able to look around the room and see people who look like you.
I've been really happy to see how discussions about diversity have changed in the last 10 years. When we sit down with HR and do a workshop about diversity it is NOT about race at all. The emphasis has been on appreciating and drawing from diverse life experience from people who may appear commonplace. I've watched the language change into something more constructive and it pulls people away from simply thinking "I'm the one Asian dude in this department". I remember at my last job I started learning a fair amount of Tagalog because 3 folks around me came from the Fillipines and wanted to share awesome homecooked meals. I really valued that experience.
I have always lived and worked in California. I've been cautiously optimistic seeing people grow curious about others' upbringings and cultures, especially with oversharing from outlets like Instagram.
My personal strategy to avoid this is to just ask the person I think is least likely to be the CEO or whatever. If you are wrong, often the recipient feels flattered.
I am Jewish. This gives me no insight into what it is to be black in America. But it does give me some insight into what it is to be a minority in America. I have an inkling of your loneliness and you have my profound sympathy. I wish everyone could experience what it is to be a minority in some, any, aspect of their identity to the extent that it might provide them some empathy for others.
(I also never realized what it must feel like to be a Christian in America until I visited Israel for the first time and had a sense of being among "my people", which didn't really make any sense because I'm not Israeli, but at the same time it felt comforting being among so many Jews in a greater way than when I'm at temple.)
Of course, unless I announce I am Jewish, I know I'm not being judged by it. I can only imagine how difficult it is that whenever you are slighted, you don't know for certain whether it is due to being black. It must be very hard not to start assuming that it's always the reason.
I'll watch for your future post. I look forward to reading it.
> I wish everyone could experience what it is to be a minority in some, any, aspect of their identity to the extent that it might provide them some empathy for others.
You would be surprised at how pervasive and long-lasting majority privilege can be. I live in Southeast Asia where foreigners are a very distinct minority and they experience all kinds of hardships. Difficulties making (local) friends, difficulties dealing with government bureaucracies, difficulties finding "their" food. Very few of them ever gain any empathy from it.
On one occasion I was at a bar talking with a German guy telling me about how there are some areas in Germany where you get off the train and it "doesn't even feel like Germany". All the immigrants dress differently, talk differently, eat different food. They don't even try to fit in!
Meanwhile, he hasn't learned the local language, has no local friends, lives in an apartment building that is mostly German expats. He actually said "I love my building because there are so many Germans." He doesn't even like the local food; I've never seen him eat it.
You'd think the entire experience would build empathy. "Hey, living in a foreign country as a minority is really tough. No wonder they like to hang out around their own people. I did it too!" But nope. Completely oblivious.
The very fact they find it necessary to use a different word to describe themselves, "expats", than what they call foreigners who live in their countries, "immigrants", shows that they do not at all consider themselves to be in any way similar.
I've lived as part of a minority in other countries for half of my life. I try as much as I can to blend in, not because I think they are superior, but because I want to learn from their culture. But I have no illusion they will ever treat me the same way they treat their own. I can speak the local language perfectly and lots of people will still address me in English (not the local language) just because I look foreign. The locals never invite for anything. It's quite frustrating. I don't even have people from my own culture to socialize with, so I am mostly alone with my wife (who has another culture as well). It's frustrating for sure, but we learn to rely only on our own and enjoy life like that.
> The very fact they find it necessary to use a different word to describe themselves, "expats", than what they call foreigners who live in their countries, "immigrants", shows that they do not at all consider themselves to be in any way similar.
I was taught these are two words for different concepts. An immigrant expects to take permanent residence in a foreign country, an expatriate – temporarily. The former doing it nearly always out of his own volition, while the latter could very well be sent for duty, to varying degrees.
I do not have any sympathy for immigrants refusing to integrate, but I don't think that an expatriate should necessarily come to be held to the same standard.
After living for many years in another country and being called an "immigrant", while hearing other foreigners being called "expats" I realized that people just create a mental rule for what each word means: coming from a rich country = expat, coming from a poor country = immigrant.
So an American permanently living in the UK will be considered an expat. A polish will be called an immigrant. Despite the actual definition of the word, "immigrant" has a negative nuance artificially attached to it so people use it to this effect.
In Europe I noticed that skin color makes less of a difference than "source country". Many British people will still treat African-American individuals as expats, and an Albanian as an immigrant, once they find out where they came from.
> I was taught these are two words for different concepts.
These are stories we tell ourselves to persuade us we're not "like them".
Unsurprisingly, it's a term invented by the British Empire, when people with no prospects in the motherland (like George Orwell) would move to the colonies to make their fortune but wouldn't dream for a second of ever "going native". The amount of time they ended up spending there, or whether they even came back at all, was irrelevant.
I think he refers to self isolation. Those immigrant communities mentioned tend to never marry any locals (not for lack supply, but because they reject western values) or attend local social events, despite speaking German.
> what do you mean by integrate? […] what the German in the pub seems to think
Don't you have sociology classes or political education in school? I just looked up the word to make sure and it turns out its meaning is almost the same to what I remembered, and it certainly is not a complete erasure as you allude to.
Nice straw man, though. Man, must it be satisfying to topple it over!
> Don't you have sociology classes or political education in school?
yes, I've had an overly technical education but I fail to see how that's relevant.
> I just looked up the word to make sure
I feel like you misread my argument. "seems to think" means that I don't agree with him. Some people, including the person that this thread-tree is about (in my opinion) use integration when they mean cultural erasure. (aka assimilation)
if people speaking/dressing differently in a train implies that they are not integrated (according to him). Than integration (according to him) implies that people do not speak/dress differently which I see as cultural erasure.
And from my own experience, I've been told by a Turkish friend that he received cold stares and was yelled at for speaking Turkish with his daughter in public transportation (out of concern for her integration). Although, it's a common technique for each parent to speak a single language when you want to raise a bilingual child.
and honestly, it's not that novel of an idea:
- "In fact, integration has become a code word in some circles for intolerance and discrimination" - The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the "model Minority"
De William E et al
- 'the older völkish notion of German national identity lurks behind calls for acculturation as a condition for social acceptance.In contemporary Germany, "integration" is a codeword for cultural assimilation,
with a strong emphasis on learning the majority language and history.' - From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification. Jeffrey J. Anderson. Eric Langenbacher.
Expat = white/pale skin immigrant. Racial entitlement continues to this day. Notice how only white people ever choose to consider themselves to be "expats"
That's certainly not my experience, as someone who relocated to a European capital for work. I work with people from all over with various skin colours, and pretty much everyone everyone self-identifies as an expat.
The main difference seems to be whether they're people moving there to make a new life in a new place, and the work is secondary vs. it's the work that gets them to move (and if you move for work, it's probable that you're being paid more, so have the luxury to have the option to move somewhere else in a comparatively short time.)
Of course they do. The question is how does everyone around you see you.
It does make a bit of a difference if the job lead to switching countries (mostly "expat"), or switching country lead to getting a job (mostly "immigrant"). But this detail is buried pretty deep, people will most likely first find out where you're from (by asking, or accent, etc.) and that will determine their first and longest lasting opinion.
Black Americans in the UK are considered expats while white Bosnians are considered immigrants.
I was addressing the original point which was "Notice how only white people ever choose to consider themselves to be "expats"", which in my experience is not true.
> people will most likely first find out where you're from (by asking, or accent, etc.) and that will determine their first and longest lasting opinion.
Perhaps. Where I live there are a lot of Turkish immigrants, for example (mostly they/their parents moved in the 60s/70s.) At the same time I work with people who are Turkish who moved here for work, often in the past several years. I suspect that given the situation, the latter would still be considered expats and the former immigrants.
This exemplifies my point perfectly. Even though you go on to write that some were born in the country, they are still "Turkish immigrants" not "expats" or [that country's] citizens. Some may be considered expats by you now but walking down the street I can assure you people see "immigrants".
Say "British immigrants", or "US immigrants", or "German immigrants" and see how that rolls off the tongue. Now say "Polish immigrants", or "African immigrants", or "Mexican immigrants".
English has this distinct connotation for the word "immigrant" and it's associated with individuals overwhelmingly based on their country of origin (the poorer the country, the more "immigranty" the person).
I am a white male coming from a reasonably developed and civilized second world country (literal and figurative definitions apply) to follow a high end job. Yet the second I open my mouth I am very much an "immigrant" in the eyes of most locals.
> This exemplifies my point perfectly. Even though you go on to write that some were born in the country, they are still "Turkish immigrants" not "expats" or [that country's] citizens. Some may be considered expats by you now but walking down the street I can assure you people see "immigrants".
Yes, they're definitely not expats by the definition I gave earlier - those who move for work. Considering second+ generation residents as immigrants was really a mis-edit on my part, though they are seen by "natives" here as immigrants, often.
But you're kinda focussing on a point I wasn't making - that (in my experience, where I am), it's not only white people who self-identify as expats. Russians, Bangladeshis, Kenyans, USians, etc. are all generally expats if they moved for work.
> English has this distinct connotation for the word "immigrant" and it's associated with individuals overwhelmingly based on their country of origin (the poorer the country, the more "immigranty" the person).
I was born in Australia, my mother was born in Scotland. In my mind, that makes me a second generation immigrant. I never thought of my mother, or her parents, as "expatriates".
A lot of Australians who immigrated from the UK and Ireland identified themselves as "immigrants" not "expatriates".
Australia is different from most other rich countries now receiving immigrants (and "expats") because its mainstream culture (not the native culture, which would be aborigine) is itself founded by immigrants from the UK in the relatively recent past... and there has been continuous immigration from many parts of the world since then... I guess that's the reason Australians still see people coming to Australia from rich countries, including the US and European countries, as immigrants... it's not a dirty word over there, as the majority of Australians are only third or fourth generation at most and therefore consider themselves descendants of immigrants. It would be kind of absurd to think of their grand-grand-parents coming to live permanently in Australia as "expats" (though I don't doubt some of them coming today might call themselves that)!
But in rich countries that are old enough to have a population that already forgot they probably also came from elsewhere (populations have always moved around, replacing, killing, and/or mixing with the locals), recent waves of immigration are always from poor countries with a very different culture/language (so that they have trouble assimilating, getting jobs, contributing and so on... and many end up giving up and start to feel marginalized, causing some to appeal to crime) which made the word immigrant have a very negative connotation... hence the need for people from other rich countries to distinguish themselves from those poor people and call themselves something more respectable like "expats".
> It does make a bit of a difference if the job lead to switching countries (mostly "expat"), or switching country lead to getting a job (mostly "immigrant").
Does this distinction actually exist in how people use the words "expat" and "immigrant"? A lot of the time, immigrants will have accepted their job offers already before entering the country, and if they did not switch countries, they would have the same kind of job in their home country anyway (e.g. immigrant nurses recruited by the NHS).
The dictionary definition (OED) talks about the immigrant being a person who enters a country to live there permanently, but in reality, even those who enter with the intention of leaving after a few years are considered immigrants by everyone around them if they are from a third-world country.
> Does this distinction actually exist in how people use the words "expat" and "immigrant"? A lot of the time, immigrants will have accepted their job offers already before entering the country, and if they did not switch countries, they would have the same kind of job in their home country anyway (e.g. immigrant nurses recruited by the NHS).
Right, but the point is people who are generally called expats get a job offer in another country, and move because of that job.
People who are generally called immigrants want to move, and so try to get a job in another country (or maybe don't, depends on the relationship between the two countries and the status of the person.)
The expat causality is (typically) "job -> move", the immigrant causality is (typically) "want to move -> job".
The actual ordering of when the move happens and when the job is got aren't that relevant.
Also notable that there are plenty of exceptions, grey areas, regional differences, etc. involved. Which is why I don't like sweeping statements like the one I was originally replying to, because they're invariably wrong in some situation.
Yeah, you don't get a tourist visa and then get a job in a country. That's illegal in almost all countries. Usually, you get a job, get a work visa sponsored by the company, and then eventually get permanent residence, then citizenship.
It's not that uncommon to get a tourist visa to scope out a country, apply for a fixed term working visa to get a job, and then where possible transition that into residency and onwards. It's definitely not an easy path, but I know people who have done it.
Both those you label as your "immigrants" and your "expats" ofter entertain the notion that they will eventuelly move back, but in reality often they don't.
Meanwhile, the "expat" gets a free pass for being a general douche.
Anecdotal but I've lived in different Asian countries for the last 15 years and my experience is that expats who live in compounds geared toward their nationality, never eat local food and never bothered to learn the local language tend to also be very racist. You'll hear them non-stop complaining about the locals or making sarcastic comments about them, about them having no manners, not speaking English properly (ironic considering) etc...
And often enough, they'll say things like, "you know how Chinese/Malaysians/... are" as if that statement actually made sense...
I've even heard one express profound admiration for a British family that had been involved in the Opium war and had been in HK for a long time. He admired them for staying "pure" despite staying so long in HK...
It's really anecdotal but I've rarely seen a more toxic and racist culture than the Western expat communities in countries I've lived in...
As a migrant myself (although white-on-white, so to speak), I understand where they are coming from. I think I've actually come to value my "original culture" more highly, after more than a decade abroad, despite having integrated pretty comprehensively into local customs.
Nostalgia is a powerful and irrational sentiment. It doesn't excuse the racism, of course, but I can understand why it would reinforce it.
There are many possible reasons. For example lower cost of living, retiring in a place that has both lower costs and perfect weather or moving for business reasons only etc etc.
It happens even on a very micro scale when people move from cities to villages or the other way around. I quit a city life and moved to a village (~1200 inhabitants) but I also changed as many habits as I could to enjoy this life style. I met a lot of people early on and got to know them, developed some friendships, helped out and got some help. They are (edit: I would dare to say: we are, I feel part f the community now) very open, honest and inviting if you are as well. However there are people who move purely because property is way cheaper, but they want to maintain their city lifestyle and then try to contest the aspects of rural living that interfere with their idyllic vision of peaceful and silent sanctuary away from all civilization. There are noises and smells, tractors and cattle. Infrastructure is not up to par. Shops close early. And, worst of all, some treat the locals as uneducated dirty mass that is below their middle-class level. They tend to isolate and only seek company of other "expats". And in consequence are treated as suspicious, or even unwanted, element by the locals. It builds tensions and happens on the scale of ~50km between a village and the nearest city. On international or intercontinental scale it is probably amplified by orders of magnitude.
Have you ever tried pointing out the obliviousness to your German friend?
I'am an ethnic Chinese living in Japan and essentially blend in. I've also spoken with a lot of other expats, often white who complain a lot about (sometimes positive) discrimination and just once, rather offhandedly, I replied that now you know what it feels like to be a minority. The instant reaction is to become defensive, but after a while, the bulb lights up.
This is - sadly - the norm for many British retirees who move to Southern France, Spain, or Portugal and then complain bitterly that the stupid backward locals can't speak English properly.
As a German, that seems to a somewhat German stereotype. And as stereotypes go, there is little bit of truth to it.
Points in case: Your friend. A couple of my friends back the day during holiday (Asia, Spain, you name it), same thing about food. My grandparents from what is now Tchechia. Born and raised there, never spoke anything else then German, only stayed in there social group.
Generally speaking, that Europeans have a tendency to not take a lesson from that looks like white privilege to me. Your an expat, but still can feel better because of it.
Counterpoint: Another friend of mine, lived in Bangkok for a while during and after his studies, lived in an upscale Appartment block, mostly under Thais. Learned the language as much ad possible, ate at local places. Unless it was a special occasion, then his girlfriend and him went to a European place.
Some folks travel to experience the world and be a part of it. Some travel to be like a visiting royal, to be treated their due of all of the exotic experiences.
It is pretty normal that you hold onto traditions of your original country as an expat, you can observe this everywhere in every culture. Sometimes that loyalty goes far beyond that of people still in their home countries.
That said, someone has to be the majority and I think minorities in general have no problem with it. It isn't necessarily a "privilege" or a problem. If it is too hard on you, perhaps relocation is a better option. Most people just don't give it a thought after a while and no society can adapt to every whim, it is on minorities to adapt to the present culture.
It’s weird judging him condescendingly by saying he’s oblivious when at the end of the day, he’s happy.
Maybe it’s his happiness in the situation that leads him not to ponder it like you do. He’s not missing anything that makes his life richer.
I’ve been in both the majority and minority many times in my life and I like you have pondered it, but I also have the capacity to observe myself from the third person in a cold clinical way so I’m neither oblivious nor unhappy.
Given four choices: aware and content, unaware and content, aware and uncontent and unaware and uncontent, I would never choose the last two, awareness isn’t worth it for contentment.
Where do you live? I have no idea what it's like to be Jewish but I have Jewish friends and have had Jewish bosses. I couldn't tell them apart from any other white people in the area. If they hadn't told me they were Jewish I'd never have known nor cared. I certainly didn't treat them different.
At what point are we all just different? I can't meet people that are into my particular hobby. I also go to clubs and bars from time to time and never feel like "these are my people". Even going to game dev events (since I do game dev) a rarely feel like "these are my people".
I am also Jewish, but people don't know unless I tell them 99% of the time. The only time I feel "different" is when from time to time people say incredibly anti Semitic things to me not realizing what my background is. It's usually near strangers and really jarring. This also happens with my sexuality (gay), so I've just sort of accepted it. I do code switch, I don't use any "jewish" words in random situations and I shift my natural speaking pitch down to sound "straight". It's been my reality for so long that it just automatically happens now. I think we are all different, but certain differences have a lot more stigma attached to them and it shapes the way you view and interact with the world. I also do not feel like I'm with my "people" in interest groups.
I think it's very subtle stuff, an example may be having kosher food being the default.
When living in Singapore, I used to make the faux pas of mixing together Muslim food (no pork), Indian food (no beef) and Chinese food (lots of pork/beef) together.
You meant you mixed them on your plate? Or you just confused them?
I don't think the former is faux pas. Just a bit weird. The latter seems like a hard mistake to make (I live in Singapore), but I guess it's possible, especially if you have no local guidance.
I live in NC. Judaism is more than just a religion. For many jews, it's part of their identity. That makes it different than going to clubs and bars or game dev events. It's a sense of exclusion that I feel at times, especially being in the bible belt.
I've never had any particularly anti-semitic things happen to me, just a few minor incidents. But anti-semitism still happens to jews, and that affects me. For example, after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting a couple years ago, my temple had to hire an off-duty police officer during our high holiday services so that temple members would feel safe. I have family members who attended the Pittsburgh temple.
My mother experienced anti-semitism growing up in NJ that is part of her psyche to this day such that she's not comfortable wearing any jewish symbols.
This is nothing like the black experience, and I don't mean to say that it is. But it gives me some empathy for what it must feel like to be marginalized, to be different.
So in America in the 21st century, white Jews are treated pretty much like any other white person. I would say that there are some subtle cultural things that make me feel a bit "other", though. For example, sports teams called the "Crusaders": In the Jewish collective memory, the Crusades were an awful time. Crusaders rampaged through many Jewish communities, murdering many thousand of Jewish people and destroying the Jewish communities in several cities (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres, among others). There are historical records of Jews committing suicide in anticipation of the Crusaders reaching their cities. Hearing about basketball teams called "The Crusaders" really surprised me -- did these people not know what the Crusaders did?
The Crusades were also a response to Arab invasions into Europe, during a time when Vienna, practically the center of Europe, was besieged twice by the Ottomans, and the entire Iberian peninsula was conquered and held for more than half a millennium by Muslims (and Constantinople/Istanbul still is). Many border countries had children regularly kidnapped into slavery by Ottoman raids (or had to turn them over as part of the blood tax), then turned into child soldiers and made to participate in those same raids, so try to understand when not everyone shares your black and white view of crusaders.
Look at it this way - complaining about the Crusades makes as much sense as complaining about Purim, which celebrates 75 thousand Persians being pre-emptively killed for being "enemies of the Jews".
The Ottomans existed centuries _after_ the crusades, timing the raids and the Vienna sieges after the crusaded. Does time work different where you life?
I mean no offense by this, but the jewish experience in America doesn't compare to the black experience. In 99% of cases you are just another white person.
What do you mean by "black experience"? I'm not used to American culture and I have heard this expression several times. Is it only a skin-color thing or does "black" mean a different culture/tradition? I mean, if a black baby is raised by white parents on a 100% white neighborhood, will he live the black experience? Conversely, if a white baby is raised by black parents on a 100% black neighborhood, will he live the black experience? I honestly do not understand some of the anti-racist discourse (which I generally agree with), because sometimes people speak as if "black" was a distinct culture, not a race (and thus, independent from the racial issue, allowing for people of any skin color to be part or not of this culture).
It has to be said that, by all accounts, this didn't use to be the case until about WWII. But yeah, like all "white" minorities, Jews were eventually freed of the stigma. Obviously that's not the case for others.
I'm certainly not trying to compare the two at all. But I can think about times I've been treated as an "other" or not catered to because I'm not the majority and draw empathy from that.
Well, it's about the Messiah being born, be it was culturally appropriated (ceded?).
Despite what social media and talk radio says, most Christians are fine others enjoying a non-Christian Christmas as long as it's being used in an uplifting way. Definitely no need to feel excluded.
I'm a white British guy living in the Netherlands. I'll never forget shortly after moving here, I was sat in the garden with our Dutch neighbours and my Dutch girlfriend, and the man started complaining about "immigrants" and all the problems they brought to the Netherlands. My girlfriend said "you know Dave is an immigrant?" and he just waved it away, "Not you, you're not like them". Obviously he wasn't talking about well behaved white guys like me with his sweeping generalization, he meant the brown skinned guys.
White privilege is very much a thing in the Netherlands. Even if someone knows you're not Dutch, as long as you look northern European it's fine. If you look like Zwarte Piet though, well, many Dutchies would much rather you went back to where you came from. Except when it's time to bring presents to the white Dutch kids. Then we love those adorable blackfaces!
Actually things are changing in the Netherlands, some of it for the better, but there's still a significant, stubbornly racist population here. Much more than you'd think when hearing about "tolerant Netherlands" from outside.
It does look like it's improving at a rate of knots though. Hell, even Rutte got on the bandwagon recently which is not something I thought I'd see.
A friend of mine was talking about it recently (her family are from Egypt, but she's born and raised Dutch) and she said she probably notices more issues from being a woman than looking "Arabic." This is Amsterdam though, and it's hard to generalise from here to the rest of the country.
If you're from Britain you should know it is about stereotypes, not race. The Asians make your food, the Polish fix your pipes and the Romanians build your houses.
I’m a white Catholic. The first time I experienced being a minority was in Korea. It was definitely unsettling how many people seemed openly or somewhat unhappy we were there. I can’t imagine living my entire life with that sense! If you just normalized it and moved on, I imagine you’d have deep psychological effects and chronic career challenges, etc. So, yeah, pretty much what we see minorities face around the world. I don’t know the solution, though.
It seems to me pretty much impossible that a white person would ever fully feel like part of the group in Korea, even if 100% of the hostility was replaced by genuine love. You’d be different.
spent half the last decade in seoul, my impression is that it's both far easier and far harder to fully feel like part of the group in korea as a non-korean. the first hurdle, which most foreigners (including me) never fully make it past, is the language. after that, it is down to the specific people that make up the group around the foreigner, and i think this is true of any humans anywhere. my impression was that the most cruel forms of exclusion/discrimination in korean society were reserved for other east asians/asians who speak korean as a fluent L2. this will probably come to a head, hopefully with positive results, in the next 15-20 years given that there is a large (non-trivial) subgroup of children in korea now, mostly outside seoul, with a parent (usually the mother) from a south east asian country.
on the topic that kicked off this subthread (i think--about stubbornly non-adaptive western foreigners in very different cultures than their own), when i was doing ~25 hours a week of korean language classes and study in addition to a full time job, i used to tell that particular subtype of Complaining Expat that if they wanted to level up their complaining about the host culture, they should learn intermediate korean, if only for the sole purpose of unlocking a whole new ocean of complaining material. this was obviously bait/a joke, but there are no jokes: it's one thing to have someone make basic hand gestures like "eating" etc to you when they know you absolutely don't really know what you are saying; it's another thing to have someone do it when you have been conversing with them in their language for the last five to ten minutes.
i could do like fifty posts about race and foreignness in korea but i always think of the model who has appeared in a lot of korean shoe and clothing ads recently. his parents are nigerian and korean and he grew up in korea with korean as his first language, and in an interview he once expressed goodhumoured frustration about ethnic-korean people speaking English to him by default when his english is, by his own admission, not that great at all.
> I wish everyone could experience what it is to be a minority in some, any, aspect of their identity to the extent that it might provide them some empathy for others.
Being in a minority is not enough. I'm a 'minority' where I live, but nowhere near oppressed. Just the opposite as far as I can tell.
You're right. It's way too late to edit my comment, but it's the sense of being excluded or being seen as less-than because of my Judaism. It's the knowing that Jews were and sometimes still are hated just because they are different. It's not just being a minority.
> I also never realized what it must feel like to be a Christian in America until I visited Israel for the first time
I'm pretty sure white atheists in America feel equally among "my people" as Christians do (unless they're in a church or other highly religious surroundings).
It's also an odd comparison as religion is a choice, where race or ethnicity is not.
It's not clear to me what aspects of religion would be obvious candidates for being described as a 'choice'. Personally, the fundamental aspects seem to operate as primal psychological forces, and overt action in contravention to them rapidly erodes things like confidence and self-esteem, while increasing things like anxiety. Every once in a while, people will definitely work against those pressures, but I would expect that behaviour to be unsustainable in the long term for the vast majority.
I'll agree that Christians do not feel among "my people" unless they are in their particular church culture. Even going to a drastically different type of church can feel out of place. Put a Pentecostal in a traditional Greek Orthodox service and ask if it felt like home.
I'll also ask that atheists stop referring to religion as a choice. Atheists have as much of a say in whether God exists as anybody else. It would be patronizing to tell firm atheists that they chose atheism when clearly in the atheists mind, they are just reacting to reality. Likewise a theist doesn't have a say in whether an almighty creator exists and has opinions or not.
Technically, religion is a choice; but in practice it is usually as much a choice as one's native language. People who are lucky to grow up with access to scientific education and varied cultural awareness are more easily able to choose the religion they want (if any); but many people (I would dare say the majority, on the global scale) are only exposed to a single, often very narrow mindset heavily defined by "religion" (to which one can include formally non-religious mindsets, like anti-vaxxers for example). For them, it takes a lot of effort to change their initial programming, assuming they ever get a chance at it.
As for ethnicity, while again technically it is not a "choice", I'm not really sure it can be clearly defined. A friend was mine was born in Italy to British parents, his wife was Bosnian and two of their children were born in the US -- what is their ethnicity?
For most Jews, Judaism is more than a religion. It's core to our identity for many of us. All of the Jews who died in the holocaust didn't have a choice to just stop being Jewish.
To be clear: I'm not trying to compare being Jewish to being Black. I'm saying that I can draw empathy from the Jewish part of my identity toward other people who have been mistreated because of part of their identity.
Also, even if it were a choice, I would no more give it up than anyone else should have to give up their race or ethnicity or any other part of their identity just to fit in.
Most people do not know about the different Jewish peoples enough to recognize them. If you ask me to distinguish between Sephardim and Spaniards, or between an Ashkenazim and broadly European people, I will probably fail at that task.
Most people will be unsuspecting that you are Jewish, and even if they realize that you are Jewish, they will not think much about it. Perhaps they will ask you if you have any dietary restrictions and that's it.
Then, most Christians today see Judaism as another Abrahamic religion that is close to Christianity, not as a fundamentally different thing (even if in practice, it can be substantially different). Also, most people in the West are becoming increasingly secular and non-religious.
Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Sure, I don't know if I ever worked with jewish people in my life. Reason being, that religion never came up ever.
But as soon as jews don't blend in, either by traditional hair cuts or clothing, or by virtue of being at a synagoge, things are different. We still have enough anti-semitic incidents in Germany to actually be worried. I once worked with a guy who insulted a co-worker behind his back for being a jew (based on the family name, no idea if it's true or not). So yeah, you do get discriminated against if you are a jew. Not the same level as blacks in America, or muslims in India (add other example of extreme racism), but you do.
Only valid for Germany for lack of reevant insight and experience in other countries.
I guess you're mixing up the religion vs ethnic origin? I mean, if we put the religion aside, can we say the same about e.g. Irish or Italian Americans?
The Jewish experience is multi-faceted. And yes, as far as Irish or Italian Americans were treated as non-white in the early 1900s, and that they remember that experience, and that it gives them empathy to what it must be like for other minorities, then yes, we can say the same thing.
I'm only trying to draw empathy from my Jewish experience, that is all.
Being the same race as someone else is one more thing you may have in common with someone when getting to know them. It's not that every white person or every black person has had the same life experience but when trying to connect with a new group of peers, you may be subconsciously drawn to approach someone that looks more like you before you approach someone that doesn't. Humans are still very tribal animals so we should be trying to make more diverse connections to others, to be more inclusive. Diversity in this sense doesn't just mean race but can also mean different genders, age groups, faiths, socio-economic classes, personalities, and physical abilities. Making more inclusive connections (other than based on appearance) can be hard because it requires actually getting to know someone first.
I'm sure the parent comment doesn't mean that they only like the company of other black people. It's more likely they feel like an outsider on their team simply due to looking different and having a different cultural upbringing than their other teammates. A more inclusive team would have likely made the parent comment not feel this way.
If you were on a team of 148 people of another race and there was only one other person that was the same as you, would you feel a little out of place?
It happened to Sundar. There was an incident at a tech conference where he was walking through the booths and some people started asking for selfies with him. The "booth guy" who had condescending look grabbed Sundar's nametag slightly tugging on his neck without requesting his permission to see who he was. People were shocked at how rude the physical contact was. More ought to have been made of that. That booth guy should have been at least reprimanded for doing that to anyone, let alone Google's CEO.
Multiple of these incidents have happened to Sundar.
""What are you, press?," asked the Samsung representative. After being let in - Pichai was inquisitive about Samsung's new smart fridge. The profile reveals similar incidents happened multiple times over at CES."
"Even after looking at the name on his badge, the rep had no clue that this curious, friendly inquisitor was one of the most powerful people in technology. "
It sounds like a lot of these are just people being clueless who Sundar is, not necessarily biased to thinking "he's Indian, so he can't be one of the most powerful people in tech".
I don't know Sundar well enough to recognize him in the streets or at a press event if I haven't spoken to him first. Same goes for a lot of CEOs of various ethnicities.
For everyone arguing "honest mistake" or "just chance", think about the person at the receiving end. For the person making that mistake, it could be their first, but for the person at the receiving end it could be the hundredth, and that too, not without consequences. The first 3-4 times I got "randomly selected" for additional screening at the airport, I was like whatever. But years later after my probably 100th "random selection", I am mostly just upset. Watching traveler after traveler go around you, staring at you, while you're being subjected to additional search, your baggage laid out open in front of everyone, while being asked questions like "have you recently been in contact with any chemicals?" and so on. It is humiliating. And this is just one aspect of their life. Imagine having to face "honest mistakes" everyday in all kinds of different aspects of your life.
This is a common theme in a number of stories in this thread that I don't understand.
How and why does being a victim of racism translate into shame? When I am subject to injustice, my emotional reaction has always been fury and frustration.
I imagine the feeling of humiliation is a normal human reaction, no matter if the cause is racism, domestic abuse, rape or what have you. The first few times it happens you might get angry, but when it's the 100th time you'll instead feel tired, sad and humiliated.
I understand sad and tired, but still not humiliation/shame. Is it because the recipient is warn down starting to internalize the narrative of the aggressor?
Fury and frustration are part of the experience, but that doesn't exclude humiliation. From a quick Wikipedia search: "It is an emotion felt by a person whose social status, either by force or willingly, has just decreased."
Ahh yes, the good ol' "how you dress", "how you carry yourself", "your personal hygiene", "how you talk" or one of the other hundred responses I get from people immediately when I talk about the unfair treatment I've seen in my life. All I can say is no it has nothing to do with how I dress, because half of those "random checks" were during my business trips when I worked for a major consulting firm. So I doubt my suit and tie had anything to do with it.
You might be suffering from confirmation bias. You have a forgone conclusion (it's all due to racism), so you see racism everywhere.
It's just really farfetched that all black people are being frisked at airports as much as you are, simply because they're black.
Maybe it could be your face matches some known terrorist or something. Or maybe you're flying out of the same airport a
lot and the staff has it out for you for some reason. Who knows?
I feel based on your arguments, it is you who has more of a confirmation bias. In your opinion, the probability of my face matching a terrorist or that the airport staff has it out for me is higher than a simple "people can be racist". You are just convinced that people just cry racism for no reason.
You are being downvoted because this is a soft form of victim blaming [1]. As tone and context are difficult to transmit in such a short reply, it might be a good idea to phrase things in a more empathetic way in the future.
And for the record, no, no this isn't because of how they dress.
I disagree with the premise of “victim blaming”. If we can't look at all sides of an issue for fear of being publicly shamed for going against a narrative, we'll end up with wrong conclusions a lot of the time.
I did acknowledge racism could also play a part, but I don't see how we are supposed to be able to accept that one can read the minds of those that affront him.
I also don't give a damn about the “monkey no like, hit 'you are bad' button” people seem to care about.
Well to honest your post was the textbook definition of victim blaming. It was hardly a "premise." With absolutely zero evidence you flat out accused them of wrong behavior (dressing wrong, acting wrong) instead of considering their situation on the facts they presented. That is victim blaming.
But now you try turn the tables around. Your feelings are so important. Painting yourself as the victim is the all-too-predictable next step in that logical chain. Congratulations on making this all about you.
Instead of being pissed off and trying to fire another salvo to get other people pissed off and concerned about you, you should try to listen to people instead. You came out of the gate with the over the top with "your lived experience is invalid, here is my completely context-free flat denial that anything is wrong, I don't want to hear what you are saying". This whole chain originated out of your lack of empathy, and here now we completely forgot about the people who are actually victimized.
> Well to honest your post was the textbook definition of victim blaming. It was hardly a "premise." With absolutely zero evidence you flat out accused them of wrong behavior (dressing wrong, acting wrong) instead of considering their situation on the facts they presented. That is victim blaming.
I didn't accuse, I simply asked a question. How are you so sure that it must be racism? Why are you trying to shame me for suggesting there might be another explanation?
> But now you try turn the tables around. Your feelings are so important. Painting yourself as the victim is the all-too-predictable next step in that logical chain. Congratulations on making this all about you.
When did I ever say anything about my feelings whatsoever? Can you at least quote me when you attribute motives?
> Instead of being pissed off and trying to fire another salvo to get other people pissed off and concerned about you, you should try to listen to people instead. You came out of the gate with the over the top with "your lived experience is invalid, here is my completely context-free flat denial that anything is wrong, I don't want to hear what you are saying". This whole chain originated out of your lack of empathy, and here now we completely forgot about the people who are actually victimized.
Empathy is not the same as agreeing with him as to what caused his situation. You are adding a lot of emotional context in what I say, which isn't present.
I'm just trying to get people to stop jumping to conclusions everytime that everyone is racist. Undoubtedly some people are, but you're immediately jumping to the conclusion that everyone is without evidence.
Yeah, in exactly the kind of snooty passive-aggressive way that climate-deniers are just "asking questions". I didn't want to come out all hot at you and gently encouraged you to consider having more empathy, but here we are, down a spiral of your increasing defensiveness and hostility. This is now totally about how you feel slighted for being challenged on your victim-blaming.
> Empathy is not the same as agreeing with him
It's clear that you don't agree with this person and already have pre-formed judgments, and that constantly surfaces as outright incredulity. It's difficult for you to process how infuriating that is for minorities who do experience racism to have to fight their way through a lack of shared experience and a wall of denial masquerading as "asking questions". Asking questions isn't "listening", it's just pushback. Racism is real. Listen to people to experience it.
> I'm just trying to get people to stop jumping to conclusions
Please, could you just let people who are close to the situation talk instead of putting yourself in there and muddying the waters?
> Yeah, in exactly the kind of snooty passive-aggressive way that climate-deniers are just "asking questions". I didn't want to come out all hot at you and gently encouraged you to consider having more empathy, but here we are, down a spiral of your increasing defensiveness and hostility. This is now totally about how you feel slighted for being challenged on your victim-blaming.
Will you listen to yourself? You're creating this enormous fiction out of a few innocent questions. I even said it could also be racism.
> It's clear that you don't agree with this person and already have pre-formed judgments, and that constantly surfaces as outright incredulity. It's difficult for you to process how infuriating that is for minorities who do experience racism to have to fight their way through a lack of shared experience and a wall of denial masquerading as "asking questions". Asking questions isn't "listening", it's just pushback. Racism is real. Listen to people to experience it.
All I wanted was some more information. Yes, it does sound kind of odd, doesn't it? Aren't there a lot of black fliers around? Does it really happen that they are being frisked that much? Maybe he's flying out of one airport much of the time and the staff doesn't like him for some reason.
> Please, could you just let people who are close to the situation talk instead of putting yourself in there and muddying the waters?
I'm not stopping anyone from talking. I just put forth my point of view, same as anyone else. Why are you so upset about me sharing my thoughts?
Is this really all that serious anyway? I've been frisked, too, multiple times. Why does it have to become some giant emotional cryfest?
> Did you ever think it might be the way you dress or your demeanor?
This is what you wrote. "Did you ever think" is a hell of a way to start a polite conversation. It's a condescending, accusatory and downright shitty way to basically call a person an idiot and completely invalidate what they are trying to tell you.
I mean, it could be just fine....but how could I know that?
You see how absolutely rude it is to talk to people like that? Can you imagine if your TV got stolen and you went to the police and the first question out of their mouth was not about the facts of the case, not things like, "When did you first notice it missing? What kind of TV was it? How long have you had this TV? Has anyone suspicious been around your place?"...but not those questions, but the cops came up with a completely alternate, dismissive theory like "Have you ever considered that maybe you never owned a TV at all? I mean, it could be burglary, but how could you know that? Next!" You'd be apoplectic, because that is not asking questions, it's downright incredulity.
People who experience racism get gaslighted like this all the time. But of course you don't want to understand the emotional context and frustration of those people, you want to "ask questions" and find a way out of your emotional discomfort as quickly as possible. Jumping in like this makes nothing better. Nothing. Like I said three times already, Listen to people who experience racism.
> This is what you wrote. "Did you ever think" is a hell of a way to start a polite conversation. It's a condescending, accusatory and downright shitty way to basically call a person an idiot and completely invalidate what they are trying to tell you.
No it's not. It's just an expression, it means none of those things. And yes, I think maybe he could be misinterpreting things. Is that really so bad? Pardon the expression, but everyone's shit stinks, no one is God, and infallible.
> You see how absolutely rude it is to talk to people like that? Can you imagine if your TV got stolen and you went to the police and the first question out of their mouth was not about the facts of the case, not things like, "When did you first notice it missing? What kind of TV was it? How long have you had this TV? Has anyone suspicious been around your place?"...but not those questions, but the cops came up with a completely alternate, dismissive theory like "Have you ever considered that maybe you never owned a TV at all? I mean, it could be burglary, but how could you know that? Next!" You'd be apoplectic, because that is not asking questions, it's downright incredulity.
That's really not like this at all... He's just being frisked a lot. Could be for a lot of reasons.
> People who experience racism get gaslighted like this all the time. But of course you don't want to understand the emotional context and frustration of those people, you want to "ask questions" and find a way out of your emotional discomfort as quickly as possible. Jumping in like this makes nothing better. Nothing. Like I said three times already, Listen to people who experience racism.
Some of the most successful blacks in tech had to 'hide' their blackness to achieve success. Robert Smith, the wealthiest black man in America, specifically didn't put up a photo on his investment firm's site to avoid any possibility of bias (now that he's a multi-billionaire who's "made it", this is no longer a concern).
Calendly, who's CEO is black, and is one of the top performing black led tech startups curiously doesn't have an about us page (and though I don't know the exact reason, I can only suspect why).
A very good friend of mine, a black woman in finance, had to have drinks with and entertain obnoxiously racist jokes from a potential white client to close the deal.
Black folks don't get the presumption of competence. You're assumed to be mediocre (or worse) until you can prove yourself exceptional.
I've tried a strategy like that in various contexts. e.g. not uploading a photo of myself on a Slack workspace. How differently might people read what I'm saying if they assume that I'm white versus knowing that I'm black?
I thought it wise to try this strategy when looking for employment, but I think it actually works against me in that case. If the employer knows I'm black then they can filter me out from the get-go and save both of us time rather than be dragged through a pointless interview process. It's hard to really quantify the exact degree to which my race is a detriment to how I'm perceived, but I sense it often enough to know that it's there in some capacity.
> You're assumed to be mediocre (or worse) until you can prove yourself exceptional.
And to make this personal, feeling like you have to be the best in every group in order to be respected enough that you can't be ignored leads to overwork and burnout.
Very true. There is less tolerance for middling black people in general, I jokingly refer to it as the Obama effect. Mediocrity in black people is often viewed as a function of their race rather than as the quality of an individual with flaws. If you aren't living up to the Obama standard you're sometimes thought to be a net negative compared to what might have been if there was a white person in your place. Mediocre white people are just assumed to be the best available option for the organization at the time. I've heard coworkers literally refer to other black people as "the price of diversity" (and just to be clear, their point was that the price was "worth it" in the name of diveristy). It sucks.
Growing up, my grandmother would often tell me I needed to be "twice as good as the next best white person" to be taken seriously. I resented the premise behind that statement but she was not wrong.
It's a feeling that doesn't go away & often compounds on imposter syndrome.
From Peggy McIntosh's list:
"If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether
it had racial overtones."
I used to work for a regional ILEC and everyone in the company was required to do regular ridealongs with the installers to get a better understanding of the customer base and their needs.
Me (a white guy) would frequently do ridealongs with some of our black installers and I would see this kind of treatment from customers regularly. I wasn't dressed like I was doing install work (business casual) and was clearly younger and would tell the customer in advance that I worked in X department and was just learning from the installer.
People would talk to me like the installer wasn't there. It really didn't matter what demographic either, it was pretty universal. Except for one older lady. She didn't even want me in her house if I wasn't there to physically work on her service. I liked her.
Did you learn anything from the customers? Isn't it obvious what phone customers want when they ask for phone service? It's not a complicated custom product for the user.
It's about learning the disconnect between what the customers report and what the actual problem is. It's about learning what the field technicians have to deal with and how the service actually works.
Cable, DSL & Fiber internet are much more complicated services than anyone gives them credit for.
There was a presentation from the Black Diversity group in my company where they described an incident where they gathered for an ERG meeting. They were a collection of engineers, managers, legal, etc from across the company. The front desk security, who also was black, assumed they were cafeteria staff and directed them to the cafeteria without even asking. It was eye opening how deeply unconscious bias occurs.
My Asian friends say that especially Asian women have problems being taken as authority figures as well. My friend was a senior manager at an accounting firm and went to visit a client with a fresh grad who was a tall white male. The client instantly greeted the fresh grad first and assumed he was the manager and she was the subordinate.
Asian women being taken as an authority figure? Heck, anecdotally they can’t even be seen as developers. I have an Asian friend/former coworker. Anytime that we would all go to a local conference they would assume she was QA.
Also, therere 100s of millions of ppl at these places so not that hard to find good ppl for those work tasks even if you restrict yourself: eg qa only India, like they did
I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment/defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who "just wanted to get the hell out of there" after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO.
I've recently been reading/watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic racism - here's a great starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7mzj0cVL0Q. She also wrote the book "White Fragility".
Thinking about that, I'm just wondering how different it would be if one of those people who mistook the employee for the CEO instead turned to the CEO and said "I'm sorry, please excuse me for the instance of racism I just perpetrated against you, I promise it won't happen again." I realize how outlandish that may sound writing that out, but I'd propose that the fact that it does sound outlandish is the main problem. Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not. We can't address them if we're so embarrassed by their existence as to pretend they don't exist.
I'm skeptical about Robin Diangelo, I read her book a few months ago, and it only seems to be an advertisement for her services as an anti-racist instructor. Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. There are much better books for foundational education about race.
Even within her book she claims that no amount of training will solve the issue, it seems that "White Fragility" is just another way for White people to tamp down the anxiety of race relations in the United States, rather than take any meaningful action towards changing it.
If your goal is to truly understand the Black american experience, it's best to start with actual Black authors. The House That Race Built by Wahneema Lubiano is a great set of essays about race and class structures.
There was a very interesting article by Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker last year untitled "The fight to redefine racism" which contrasts the work done by DiAngelo with the positions taken by Ibram X. Kendi. [1] Sanneh is not convinced either.
> This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else. At least, that’s my interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo will be grateful to hear it. After all, I am what she would call a person of color, and whatever I write surely counts as “feedback.” Maybe that means she is, indeed, doing well.
I was trying to remember where I’d heard her name before and this was it. I’ll toss in my recommendation for the piece and its conclusions too. I remember finding the article balanced, humble, and reflective.
If a man says the earth is flat i'm not going to waste any time listening to what his other opinions are.
I had never heard of this guy before so I gave him a chance, turns out he's just another in a long line of contrarian for the sake of being contrarian conservatives.
It's really telling how during this entire BLM revival, white people have been recommending this particular book - written by a white author. Even in the midst of a racial awareness campaign, black voices are muffled.
Your post highlights something I can't grasp; your post is explicitly and openly racist, yet you are complaining about racism. Why is that?
"People are recommending a book by an author." Fixed that for you.
I'll give you the BLM, that's an instance of necessary discrimination. The rest ... if the authors advice is wrong, criticise it, if the book or person does something bad, criticise it. Don't just pick out the skin colour of the author, or of someone recommending the book, and use that as a reason why it's bad. That's racist.
[Please note I haven't read the book, and do not know the author, and am categorically not promoting either.]
You can most usefully talk about a topic you have extensive personal experience with and which forced you to think about the topic deeply.
I can usefully talk about MySQL because I used it in a multi-year project that pushed its performance to the limit. I cannot usefully talk about Cassandra - the most I have done with it is install it.
Similarly, I can usefully talk about the experience of a male Russian immigrant to the US. I cannot usefully say much about the experience of a black woman who lived in the US since birth - I have not lived it, all my sources would be second-hand; my listener would be best served by referring to the sources directly.
I may suggest that to find out about the experience of black Americans, it's best to refer to the words of actual black Americans.
>"I may suggest that to find out about the experience of black Americans, it's best to refer to the words of actual black Americans" //
Absolutely.
And to say "this opinion is not grounded in experience" is a worthy note, but doesn't make their conclusions wrong.
As a generality people suffering a situation aren't able to take a measured approach - emotion gets the better of us - so it's not just a case of experiencing a situation. Not being subject to something doesn't discredit your viewpoint.
If you tell me I need to do sharding to improve my database performance, or whatever, and I say "this is a database of Chinese people, your opinion is invalid as your not Chinese" then I'm just being xenophobic.
People can have way more in common with others of different skin colour than they have with someone of the same colour. It's a people issue.
Focusing on segregating people's arguments by skin colour, rather than by validity of their arguments is so antithetical to the whole object of removing unnecessary discrimination that's why I felt I needed to comment, and I stand by that comment.
> Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational.
It's also problematic because the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions" and various forms of otherings that effectively sow more division than actually get non-whites anywhere.
The author is particularly clever for writing a book for the target of anti-racism, because the market for "look who's racist" media is thoroughly saturated.
Since race is becoming a greater and greater issue, I imagine it will continue to become a get-rich-quick scheme for some adept to the English language, or the language of CorporateSpeak.
> It's also problematic because the workplace inherently has an underlying adversarial quality that can provide a never-ending supply of "microaggressions"
Its also the only place in adulthood where people willingly or unwillingly must work together with people different than them and not necessarily of their choosing to reach a common goal.
Even that common goal often ends up being an IRL McGuffin when the real point for most people is to get paid. For some, reaching that goal may be counter to their employment or workplace comfort. The common goal may not actually be so common, especially if the means to reach that goal elevates some over others, which almost certainly will happen in any hierarchy.
For me it is. Everywhere else I choose who I do and do not interact with, I go to stores where only “my people” go, I live in a neighborhood where only “my people” live.
None of those places is a literal requirement for sustenance, but you do need to work somewhere, and for most people, that somewhere is anywhere that will take you.
I think poster was referring to the fact that workplaces are naturally fun of microaggressions regardless of race or sex, so it's easy to point the finger. It's analogous to how everybody's speeding, so everybody's guilty, and anyone can be pulled over (but usually the black person will happen to be the one pulled over).
US, and no, I didn't need to check the statistic. Do you also think people shouldn't be protesting because they haven't proven black people are being targeted disproportionately by police to a 95% confidence interval?
I prefer to base my views on facts. You need to check the statistics because it's very easy to be wrong - we all have biases and limitations.
I gather statistics show USA police are not targeting black people ("damn lie and statistics" though, so I'm Caruso's about that result), contrary to how I imagined it. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it possibly means the problem is more concentrated - ie in general the police are doing well, but specific groups/officers are being highly discriminatory.
I find it CorporateSpeak to say that race is becoming a greater and greater issue. It's long been a great issue. Wars have been fought over race, and the concept of race.
Your skepticism is well warranted. Unfalsifiable theory, dogma you can't question, purity tests, good vs evil, original sin, heresy, excommunication, self-flagellation and so on... It's a religion and Kafkatrap, but not yet widely recognized as such.
Newdiscourses seems to be a website dedicated /entirely/ to taking down the author and the book. A sampling of their articles over the past 2 weeks:
"In Defense of the Status Quo"
"White Silence is NOT Violence"
"A Principled Statement of Opposition to Critical Race Theory"
"Eight Big Reasons Critical Race Theory is Terrible for Dealing with Racism"
Further investigation shows the site owner, James Lindsay makes his entire living being an activist against gender studies and critical race theory. There's an extraordinary amount of resources dedicated to pushing back against the Robin Diangelo. Having heard her speak and having read at least a bit of her book, most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance. Its insisting that you do something actually about it rather than patting yourself on the back for doing what you think is the right things. It takes a great amount of twisting about to ignore the main points, and all of the writers you linked have done so.
What you call the "dogma" of dealing with a racist culture I call people lived experience. Its heartbreaking to me how very conservative-minded and flat out defensive on issues of inclusion and race the HN community has been when the subject of race is allowed to be a thread.
Casting those who question dogma as the other (conservative or "alt-right", commonly) is an effective silencing and compliance technique. "You're not one of us if you don't stay in lockstep" has a real chilling effect and is doing serious damage to the left. Obama warned about this too, but unfortunately wasn't well heeded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification.
And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJbrLs_8_0
I don’t necessarily think that everything needs to be put on a left to right scale. But you’re also ascribing things to me that I haven’t said.
Conservative just means you want things to stay the same or have things to back to how they were when you decided it was good enough to “conserve it”. In this case the fight is about frustration over lack of progress and lack of acknowledgement that police violence and systemic discrimination both very much exist and are actively harming black people. Most of the working world just sees it through a tiny keyhole in that there’s maybe 1 or 2 black software developers in a company of 1000. We need to get better as stewards of society and the companies we work in.
In order to have a complete picture, one also has to ask which "foo/bar dominated" cultures are inclusive if white/male dominated ones aren't.
As far as I'm aware, the majority population in any country, irrespective of skin color is intolerant to various degrees toward minorities, ranging from genocide and internment camps to harassment and minor discrimination.
The US is certainly not leader of the pack, but not exactly terrible either, when one looks at the constant amount of outrage. It seems to me that a group of people in the US concerned about the topic of race in their country is projecting its distorted view of things on the planet and has furthermore chosen an approach which is doomed to fail. Good luck with that, but maybe this time the US could try to not also damage the rest of the world in the process of fighting a war on abstract nouns.
Edit:
Someone in a nuked comment said "Why on earth does one have to make a broad comparison of cultures to rank badness at racism before dealing with this instance?
And are you saying 'inclusion' is quantitative or something? "
Because by doing this comparison one can check if the problem of bias is universal (yep) and ingrained (yep), therefore suggesting that focusing on black vs. white in the US is counterproductive. Instead we should do research into individual and systemic biases and see how those could be kept under control.
Punishing individuals is hilariously bad. In fact there's a direct parallel between this and safety engineering, where clueless organizations will punish an employee which made a mistake while they continue to lumber from incident to incident.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. The US literally imported slaves against their will from Africa and had slavery endowed into the constitution via the 3/5ths compromise. Then for literally 4 centuries they were beaten and oppressed and denied rights - literally jim crow laws were taken down only decades ago.
Its literally just talking about the US here. There's no projection elsewhere - this isn't just "minority rights", this is attempting to break away from a culture of systematic oppression that half the country up until last month didn't believe was a thing!
You said "most of it is showing white people that all the things that we've tried over the past 10, 20 years are clearly not working. There's little improvement in inclusiveness in traditional white/male dominated cultures, such as the engineering teams at FAANGs for instance."
The US is an immigration society where many white people from countries which weren't involved in US slavery and now they're all painted with the same brush. It's not reasonable for someone from say Russia to be attacked for the deeds of American slave drivers hundreds of years ago. And as far as I know white immigrants were strongly discriminated against in the US in the past two centuries.
We as Americans live in a society were responsible for. We as managers, owners and employees are responsible for the culture of the companies we own.
A Russian who moved here in 1998 certainly didn’t have anything to do with racism. But he is participating in a society that claims to be a just one, in which he will get preferential treatment over a Black person just because the color of his skin. Is that his fault? No. Is it his moral responsibility as a participant in society to help create a more just society? Yes.
That sounds like some cult thinking. Collective responsibility by just doing nothing? By virtue of your genetics at birth ?
Then you're responsible for the climate problem, the extermination of native Americans, the Vietnamese death, the Iraqi deaths, etc... ?
From what you preached you can only answer "yes" to all these. Then : what do you do to make amends for all those horrible crimes?
The US has a deeply unjust society and with with the exception of some periods after WWII always has had. The US does not have any moral authority to tell other countries or people how they should deal with racism and very limited moral authority in general in the past years of the Trump presidency.
Other countries and people need not and should not accept sharing the blame for US sins against black people.
To be clear, I don't think Anti-racism isn't a kafkatrap or "religion". I take issue with the polite white-centric material made to further coddle and remove liability from future racist incidents.
Don’t forgot literal washing of feet and prostration in public gatherings! Some of the scenes from these protests bear an uncanny resemblance to Easter services.
Using a kafkatrap against an opponent you can't beat in debate when they have just pointed out the tactic is probably ill advised; perhaps try something else; Ad hominem or motte and bailey for example.
"Kafkatrap" is a meaningless term, beyond "stop calling me a racist just for saying racist things".
Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.
Well lets see... oh that's odd, that meaningless term appears to have a real meaning https://debate.fandom.com/wiki/Kafka_Trap . Now why would you be willing to lie about that?
Seems it's a perfectly accepted logical fallacy; and the only people who deny it are the sjw crowd largely because it is such a favoured tactic within their ranks.
Yes those are dictionary's for definitions of words not a repository of debate tactics; if you'd checked you'd also notice that there's no entry for "motte and bailey falacy", "Appeal to Ignorance" or "appeal to authority"; funnily enough it doesnt prevent those existing either.
Well yes if you purely limit yourself to a single college of liberal arts list of definitions then you won't, however search engines are your friend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
And desperately clinging to any page-not-found of whatever website you can find to display it isn't exactly the most secure display of debate.
> Using a kafkatrap against an opponent you can't beat in debate when they have just pointed out the tactic is probably ill advised; perhaps try something else; Ad hominem or motte and bailey for example.
It describes a fallacy and have no idea who coined it. First learned of it on HN, actually.
You don't know who coined "coined", but they may well have been a racist. Are you going to stop using it if so? Does that mean it's no longer useful for communication? Are you going to investigate every word on the chance it might've been and strike those from the lexicon?
It is, in fact, not useful for communication, because it does not honestly communicate anything. It exists only to undermine people who try to call you out on making bigoted remarks. It was coined by ESR, and is popular mainly with people with a strong affinity for bigotry, like him, and also libertarians.
There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income.
I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.
On the contrary, there's not a lot of money to be made, and people constantly question it.
Would-be spoilers get educated about their own unrealized bias, racism continues to be a huge problem in this country, activists are vindicated and the world moves on.
I found this book review [1] to be spot-on with my reading of the DiAngelo book, and this is also where I learned of the above estimate from the Washington Post.
> As a business journalist, however, I’ve chronicled the slow progress people of color have made in the corporate world, even as companies spend, by one measure, more than $8 billion a year on diversity initiatives.
i don't think we're at the diversity training incorporated stage yet, so while there may be a lot of money to be made and more to come currently I assume what is being made is a lot of very comfortable livings.
That said while I haven't read the DiAngelo book the scenario I imagine for situations like this is generally not someone waking up and saying I will write something to get some money out of these people but rather I will write something about this situation, later getting offers of more and more money and then behaviorism takes control of the journey.
It is difficult to get someone to change what they're doing once they start getting paid for doing it.
This is of course all separate from whether I might agree with the book if I read it. I can still agree 100% with someone and think that their perspective is constrained by how they have begun to profit from it.
Nitpick: the $11B is US domestic ticket sales only. The US film industry is much bigger than US domestic ticket sales, however. (International ticket sales, cable licensing, etc.)
This is more or less obvious given that the top 10 grossing movies in 2019 took in ~ $13B in global ticket sales and < $2B of that went to non-US studios. (Also nuts is the percentages of 2019 global ticket sales attributable to the Avengers franchise and Disney.)
In 2017 US film industry revenues were ~$43B according to
The executive coaching industry is $16B/year. (And the film industry is in the hundreds of billions. That's just ticket sales, which are a tiny fraction of revenue.)
Damore worked at Google, i.e. in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has a certain political bent (left), and running counter to it has real consequences.
But other places in the country have a different political bent (right). Chick-fil-A's anti-LGBT stance actually increased its sales (for a time, anyway). [1]
You can see this effect play out similarly when Trump says something that rankles the Twitters of Silicon Valley and New York, but which gets him even bigger approval ratings in the red states. All this to say - your points might feel like activism in the Bay Area, but that doesn't make the above poster's claim that it's mainstream conservative discourse false.
Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. They’re is getting paid.
And for some strange reason, for equal-rights activists it is abad thing to make a living and earn money fighting for these rights. The usual argument is always "they are paid to further an agenda", indirectly undermining the message, the messanger and the issue at hand.
This doesn't seem to aplly for the otherside. People like Alex Jones make a load of money representing the opposite opinion. For him, making money all of a sudden isn#t a problem anymore.
No. It's perfectly fine (and even amazing) to make a living from a cause that is important to you.
But it's disingenuous to believe that activists 1) will not see what "obsess" them everywhere (that's a common psychological bias) and 2) will not try to make their cause as important as they can by inflating the numbers.
I'm skeptical of any American "Libertarian" especially when it comes to race. Sowell is a class-reductionist, which would make him a terrible pick for this topic.
Class reductionism is basically saying that disparities that appear to be due to race, gender, orientation, etc. are really just economic differences, so if you can "fix" the economic bit the rest just solves itself.
The term is, somewhat ironically, often applied in a reductionist manner.
Robin DiAngelo explicitly said "Biologically, race isn't real. But socially, race is a very real set of socialized worldviews shaped by segregation and superficial anatomical features. The white experience of both the majority and systemically powerful is one which normalizes a rejection of the existence of our own bias and enables us to ignore the existence of radically different lived experiences."
A bias towards normalizing whiteness and being blissfully ignorant of the lived experience of others is being blamed, not genetics.
So it's not really about race, then, but about politics all along? I think you'd agree with Sowell a lot more than you imagine in that case!
Sowell has the advantage of being black, which makes his view closer to home than the vast majority of anti-racism activists, who seem to frequently be white people telling other white people what black people find offensive (see: comments on the GitHub master/main discussions).
Sowell also ends up on the receiving end of genuine racism, at least according to his own claims, in particular racism of the form "why are you conservative and telling black people to solve your own problems when you're black?", as if being black actually requires him to be on the left, or makes him some sort of race traitor if he isn't.
Relax, I was contrarian in contrast to the parent, why bring your political baggage into the mix?
I doubt your definition of "right leaning libertarian", belongs to someone who adheres to pragmatism, meritocracy, multiracialism and Asian values or communitarianism, right?
That is my point. People were having a discussion with content and you dropped into a stock political response.
Leave your baggage out of it with your claim that people espouse anti-racism for the money, your shots at high tax countries and your need to link to political dogma.
I get that it's free karma on HN, but it lowers the quality of the discussion.
lol are you kidding me? If "anti-racism" was actually accepted, then we would have much less racism. If gender-science were actually accepted, then we would have less discrimination against trans folks.
Not discussing the content, but you picked a 3 minute clip out of a 36 minute long videos as if the clip was pre-made to discredit him, I understand certain people fear a black man with a contrarian point of view as it disturbs their senses, but this is a bit too much.
I didn't even watch the clip, but if a THREE MINUTE clip is discrediting, you're either discredited on your ideas or catastrophically bad at presenting them in the format.
Right, and nothing can be ever taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative in this day and age?
Seriously, I have to argue that context is a thing?
Nothing about his political denial of science is out of context. If the video was 30 min of him denying climate change or 3, that doesn't change anything.
> Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything.
I admit I only just started reading her book, so can't comment on that, but I would say that's not the takeaway I got from any of the online videos or interviews I've seen of her, most definitely not from the youtube one I linked.
The video you linked espouses the same ideas. To be anti-racist isn't to simply understand the things one can and cannot say. To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power.
It's akin to just memorizing a list of microagressions like curse words and never saying them for fear of being fired. Anti-racism provides the tools to contextualize and understand why certain phrases are racist or biased.
> To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power.
I thought “fundamentally understanding the lived experiences of the black community” was impossible for non-black people. What white person has achieved this goal? If none, is it impossible for a white person to be “anti-racist?”
I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.
> I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.
I’ve always been a “treat others as you would like to be treated” person. But a lot of this anti-racist concept is appearing on all my pod casts. And now I have to see race?
I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts. Frankly I wish we’d stop importing US culture. Australia isn’t perfect but we largely agree on things like universal health care and getting rid of guns. So I think we can combat racism without having to look at the US for guidance.
> I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts.
Based on that statement alone I think I can accurately conclude you are not an indigenous Australian (aboriginal).
Seems they share quiet a lot in common with native Americans from stealing of their lands/displacement, mass killings, enslavement By colonists, to ongoing racism that continues to carry on today.
I’m not indigenous. I said we have to combat racism. I never said there are not similarities with what indigenous people went through.
But it seems racism in the US has a lot of deeper cultural implications so they came up with anti-racism. Australia needs to figure out what equality means to us and make our own cultural changes. Not copy the US.
Excuse me if I except the Australian solution to be "ignore it" for a few more decades. How can the cultural implications be worse than they are in Australia?
I'm surprised there are any natives left there at all, the way they have been treated.
American concepts around these things are not based on native Americans history, but on African American history. It is true that Americans tend to project own culture and history into other groups and then get offended when those tell them "wait our history and prejudices are different".
Even more, Americans assume that sexism elsewhere must be the same as sexism in America. They just seems to be completely confused about other countries having somewhat different gender stereotypes and different expectations on genders. The end result is that local sexism is combined with American version of sexism - end result is not more equality, it is less of it.
Yeah. It's funny how the pro-diversity, pro-egalitarianism, etc don't see their ideological blind spot when they use the same tools (propaganda and medias) to propagate their views of society, and what is Good and Wrong, in the same imperialist way as their conservative ennemis ...
I don't think that's the best example. How does one separate:
"They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person"
and
"They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person"
You just made his point. "They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person" and "They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person" translate to "They're treating me poorly because of the color of my skin".
Fundamental being the key operative here. Understanding the Black lived experience is an approximation of the actual experience. Of course there's no singular Black experience, but there are fundamentals underlying all, which can be understood and approximated by people with non-Black lived experiences.
What does understanding one community extremely well have to do with anti-racism?
Anti-racism is being against making judgement based on race. Nothing more. No laundry list of buzz words or actions.
Understanding 'the Black community' doesn't even make sense at all. Like all Black people are part of this community where if you truly understand and experience the worst pain only then you can start to find racism in society and yourself.
Racism can come from anyone and be directed to anyone or group.
Exactly.
And the irony is that by saying such things, they essentialize black people, denying their individual qualities, merits and experiences...like you know...back in the slavery days...
Baldwin said that the only way for a black American to know the racist or anti-racist stance of white America is by the state of their institutions. There is something to be said, from our perspective, for people simply exemplifying anti-racist behavior, because I can never know what's truly in your heart; I can only know you by what you do.
If you learn anti-racist behavior and perform it only to manipulate, eventually you're caught, with ramifications for your life or your legacy.
In any case, white America certainly needs to try to understand black America better, but also of great importance is that they begin to understand themselves better. Their history (e.g., "The Lost Cause" is a myth), their personal and communal psychology (e.g., white fragility and guilt), and their behavior (e.g., white flight and opportunity hoarding); and to square that with what they claim are their higher ideals.
I think the trouble here is the double meaning of the word racist. When some people hear the word, they think of cross-burning fanatics and mass murderers. On the other hand, the current big conversation is about how everyone is racist and that society is rife with systemic racism.
That creates a catch-22 for anyone who commits a faux-pas (like mistaking the black CEO for a subordinate). Either admit to racism and cast oneself in with the cross-burners, or bail out of the situation ASAP.
We have the same kind of problem with the label of "sex offender." It's a category that runs the gamut from "guy who got arrested for public urination while walking home drunk from the bar one night" all the way to Jeffrey Dahmer.
Scott over at Slate Star Codex has a fantastic piece that covers this phenomenon [1]. The core idea has to do with the tension between central and non-central examples of a category:
Remember, people think in terms of categories with central and noncentral members – a sparrow is a central bird, an ostrich a noncentral one. But if you live on the Ostrich World, which is inhabited only by ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, then probably an ostrich seems like a pretty central example of ‘bird’ and the first sparrow you see will be fantastically strange.
I'm glad we're having this conversation in society. I honestly don't know what to do about it though.
Yes - perhaps if the current big conversation was rephrased as "everyone is biased and that society is rife with systemic bias" - people would be more willing to agree that its a problem and agree that they are part of the problem and would be more willing to be involved in solving it.
To be honest - everyone, no matter who they are, makes judgements and has biases.
Well, there are people that are racist. They are easy to spot because they make no apology about that. There is also systemic, or institutionalized, racism and the current state of law enforcement in the US is a prime example of that. What is interesting is how the systemic racism bleeds into everyone else's minds to form or reinforce their biases. If we can eliminate systemic/institutionalized racism then I would expect that most people's personal biases will eventually disappear.
Yes definitely there is a group of people who are outright racist in the typically defined sense. And the group which can self-identify as racist is probably very small (unfortunately).
The group which can self-identify as biased is probably much larger (fortunately?). The challenge is that by naming/labeling the big discussion systemic racism, its possible for a much larger (and perhaps more influential) group of people to blissfully ignore the big discussion being had about both systemic racism and systemic implicit bias - the latter of which to a certain extent the original article seems to be about.
Racism is a form of bias, propably the nastiest one. And that is why you pick one particular for f bias when you start fighting it. Just lumping racism in with other forms of bias, while not factually wrong, is only helping the status quo.
And it seems that majority of people is supporting the current protests and BLM movement.
the deep problem, to me, is that nuance and complexity are self-censoring.
any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation.
this ultimately favors certain corners of the anti-censorship crowd, for you can be vocally against censorship while knowing full well that it is the most overbroad, reductionist and populist strains of messaging that prevail under such conditions.
Somehow you proposed a "double meaning" of racism and missed the actual meaning that's being addressed by our society. Racism isn't about personal prejudice, although it's certainly a participation trophy for them. Racism is not about who is burning crosses, or about who is born into privilege. Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status. The advantage can range from "more likely to be taken seriously in a board meeting" to "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all", with a ridiculous amount of "more likely to end up prison labor" in the middle. Not everyone experiences the system exactly the same way, but even the most privileged POC are likely to point it out, and even the most unprivileged white people are likely to dismiss it as nonexistent.
It doesn't take a single prejudiced person to enact it. It's built into the laws and the systems and considered "neutral".
> Racism isn't about personal prejudice, although it's certainly a participation trophy for them. Racism is not about who is burning crosses, or about who is born into privilege. Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status.
Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
> Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
It's not a change of definition. It has always been systemic. Slavery abolitionists and civil rights activists were not fighting to get white people to stop calling black people the n-word, they were fighting to end institutions that treated black people as subhuman. Black Lives Matter isn't trying to end people's personal prejudices, it's trying to end an endless stream of black lives being taken.
Racism is, and always has been, about power and control. It certainly intersects with, and is bolstered by, individual feelings of racial prejudice. We can certainly call those individuals racists. But they are invariably helping to reinforce a system, not atomically expressing personal hate in a vacuum.
> You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
> There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds like you were predisposed to treat me as an enemy already. I didn't personally attack any individual. Describing a system, and who is disadvantaged or advantaged by it, is not a statement about any of the people affected by it.
>Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status.
Can you give any specific examples of these rules and laws? I assume you mean rules and laws that are actually written down.
I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.
(Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)
> Can you give any specific examples of these rules and laws? I assume you mean rules and laws that are actually written down.
The 13th Amendment is a pretty big one, worth starting there.
> I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.
If your criteria is that it must be "explicit", you're dismissing the entire concept without considering it. These laws and rules take advantage of context and produce predictable outcomes without needing to put on a white robe and state their intent.
> (Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)
I can't get past the paywall, but it is actually true. What I can see above the paywall fold doesn't even represent your claim. And even if it did, "in comparable situations" isn't the criteria. Cops can (hypothetically) behave equally violently in all situations, and still be more likely to kill black people because they police black people and communities more.
What you write is generally true. You're taking it to an unjustified extreme, though, and glossing over the fact that the advantages diminish rapidly as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, to the point where the "white advantage" for impoverished folks looks more like regular fluctuations in the noise than it does a clear above-the-noise signal. That is to say: the poorest whites might on average have some advantage over their peers in some contexts, but as a matter of practice day-to-day living isn't that different.
I know there is a lot of well-deserved focus on the ways our racist systems do more damage to blacks. That doesn't mean we should exaggerate, simply because the ground truth is horrific enough.
Hi. My extremely poor white brother in Appalachia told me today about his most recent encounter with a cop. The scenario was disturbingly similar to scenarios where traffic stops have ended with black people dead. My brother got cut slack, allowed to leave with his car out of compliance with state law. Advised by the cop to take back roads to avoid further scrutiny.
YOU might not see white privilege, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If my brother had been black, in his words... “I HOPE I would have been treated the same way”. But he knew that’s a false hope. If my brother had been black, would he be just one more statistic to debate here?
Your brother's anecdote doesn't erase my lived experience, okay? You have an extremely poor white brother; I grew up an extremely poor white guy in a mixed-race neighborhood. I know, better than most, what privilege being white buys me in this society. It exists. But existence is far from universal, or uniform.
My brother and I grew up in a world that sounds similar to yours. I’m not negating your experience. The fact that you and I have privilege doesn’t negate our own hardships.
You’re playing a bit loose, here. When you write that 100% of whites are advantaged, you are engaged in exaggeration that erases the practical reality. It is true that our system is structured to advantage whites. It does not necessarily follow that all whites are equally advantaged (other things being equal) or that all whites live a life in which they experience these advantages.
On the contrary, I'm choosing my words and considering their meaning very carefully. This topic is too important to "play loose".
100% of white people are advantaged by racism. I didn't claim that all experience that advantage equally, and I didn't claim that the advantage negates any other disadvantages each individual white person experiences due to the specifics of their lives, their class or social status, any number of other systems of identity-based power, or even countervailing individual prejudices.
You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists.
"100% of white people are advantaged by racism." No, this is an extraordinary claim without evidence that you are asserting.
"You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists," isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
> No, this is an extraordinary claim without evidence that you are asserting.
There are libraries worth of literature on the subject. I encourage you to spend some time seeking it out and understanding it better.
> isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
It was carefully worded, but you don't seem to be interested in coming to the discussion to understand. You seem determined to fight. The wording was intended to give you the grace that maybe other challenges in your life make it difficult to see this particular advantage. The words chosen were intentionally placed in the same comment with other words giving that grace explicitly.
Have you considered that you are making assumptions (e.g. that I have not done reading on this subject) or that you are making personal accusations (e.g. that I may not recognize advantages) based also on assumptions? That perhaps my interest isn’t in fighting but merely challenging your assertion and assumptions?
It appears to me you take the position that you are correct, and that any challenge is necessarily one coming from a position of ignorance or malice. I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.
> Have you considered that you are making assumptions
Always, and always open to reconsidering my position or approach.
> (e.g. that I have not done reading on this subject)
You're not demonstrating familiarity with the subject. Your questions have come from a perspective that is addressed in the subject matter.
> or that you are making personal accusations (e.g. that I may not recognize advantages)
That wasn't an accusation. It was a fig leaf. Your positions have rejected your advantages as a white person. "You're off the mark. Way off."
> That perhaps my interest isn’t in fighting but merely challenging your assertion and assumptions?
Your interest increasingly seems to be defensive.
Edit:
> I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.
Thank you, but no thank you. You don't seem to be interested in actually discussing the topic, or reconsidering your own positions. I'm 99% certain that I won't make any headway with you regardless of my approach.
How so? I’ve engaged in numerous conversations about race and its suffusing everything in this country with non-white close friends and casual acquaintances alike who’ve never made the suggestion you make. This isn’t an issue of them being hesitant to challenge me (lawd knows they don’t show any hesitation to challenge in other areas of race-related conversation we engage in: I’d be surprised if this were the one issue that weren’t true for).
" I honestly don't know what to do about it though."
That's a major criticism I have of the crusaders against "systemic racism." While I think the term is intended to capture the accumulated, "death by a thousand cuts" set of disadvantages that are faced by marginalized groups, it characterizes the problem in such a way that it makes it seem intractable. This is a perfect framing for politicians and activists, whose focus (IMHO) is on getting people mobilized by describing/raising awareness about problems, rather than actually solving them.
To me, when somebody describes specific examples of "systemic racism", I am immediately able to suddenly identify specific actions that can be taken to address each tractable problem. Replace "America is inherently racist" with "End Qualified Immunity" and "ensure public schools share funding across regions", etc. I think framing things like this makes the problems more solvable and far less politically useful for the demagogues.
This point of view is out of line with my experiences surrounding discussions of systemic racism. My experience has included detailed demands with qualitative and quantitative targets made at my place of work, codified changes in the structure of the police department in the city I live in, and new state laws regarding use-of-force passed in the last few weeks alone. I think there’s lots of discussion going on around what will enact effective change (and what won’t), which is fair, but I feel your painting with a very broad brush to say people are crusading and assuming the problem to be intractable. Hard for me to imagine all this effort coming from people who think there’s nothing to be gained.
I’m not sure I fully appreciate the point your making with breaking down the idea “America is inherently racist.” Outside of Twitter I’ve encountered exactly zero conversations that start and immediately end with such a statement. Of course things like qualified immunity and equitable education come into play - these topics have been heavily discussed in the public sphere for decades! To link them in this case to speak to a community’s broader experience seems both reasonable and necessary.
For a light hearted analogy — say I get a burrito from a taqueria on Monday and shit my pants and then go back Tuesday for tacos and shit myself again. When I’m retelling that story on Wednesday over sushi, you’d better believe I’m using the name of the restaurant.
Now that you mention it, it reminds me of another big "movement" that has a very nebulous problem statement with no clear instances of the problem to solve: Climate Change. Well, at least no problems + solution combinations that people are willing to do.
The problem you describe, of the double meaning of the term “racism”, is very real, but only among white people. When communicating with a Black CEO, you can safely assume that they understand the true meaning of the term, from experiencing it every day. And as a result will appreciate the admission and apology. The second mistake to avoid is to not expect a medal, so to speak, for doing the bare minimum. In my experience that is a common pattern: demonstrating a basic understanding of systemic racism, then expecting to be treated as a hero for it - then being disappointed when we’re (understandably) not. Sometimes this can be quite exhausting to someone targeted by racism, because it adds to their mental burden instead of lightening it.
If it is a faux-pas, an immediate excuss is the solution. At least for mature people. There is no explicit racism involved in the CEO example, as long as you treated both persons decently and politely and only misjudged the ranks.
The sex offender thing looks a lot like a straw man argument, so. When I think about racists, yes KK Nazis and so on come to mind. But more often I think about the daily, systematic racism white folks show towars people of colour, migrants, other religions. More often than not accompanied by discriminating women and the LGBTQ community.
The whole thing makes white people subconsciously want to avoid minorities because of the risk of mob punishment if they fail to follow new rules being created for conduct.
Same thing happened after me too where many men were afraid to risk power for a real life hookup with the risks involved and have opted out for paided (where legal) risk free transactions. Which in turn has reduced the amount of relationships in general and made everyone lonely.
I can assure you that many older professional white men are conciously avoiding 1:1 interactions with women (moreso those under 40) and minorities in the workplace today.
It would be dumb to assume this doesn’t impact managers hiring decisions, conciously or unconciously. Olds can just think of it as culture fit.
Oh : acting in your best interests is "telling", so?
Strange : society and "systems" are responsible for everything when it's about certain people but individuality and personal responsibility are the reason when it's other type of people...
I think that's a reasonable analogy but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. If you divide the world into alcoholics who need rehab and normal people who don't, you end up with a lot of people who refuse to admit they have a drinking problem because they don't want to pay the social costs of doing so.
Something many alcoholics and nearly all non-alcoholics have in common is they deny being alcoholics.
P(Alcoholism|Denial of Alcoholism) = P(Denial of Alcoholism|Alcoholism) * P(Alcoholism) / P(Denial of Alcoholism)
Pop in any reasonable numbers for those terms and it becomes readily apparent that denial of alcoholism does not constitute meaningful evidence of alcoholism.
Robin Diangelo’s work doesn’t seem to me very good or well informed on what anti-racism actually constitutes. It seems mostly like a schtick to sell to HR managers. The way that she essentializes race seems like a bizarre, inverted reification of whiteness (and by extension white supremacy), than any deconstruction or attack on it.
Anti-racism is about taking on the powers and material structures that reproduce racism in our society to put an end to that reproduction. It’s what the multiracial coalition is doing right now, in the streets, forcing changes to laws and policing.
All of this has little to do with your boss paying someone to lecture you about why you’re bad/biased/ignorant. In fact, it’s contrary to anti-racism, because it positions your boss, who controls your life and buys her classes, as the arbiter of what is and isn’t racism.
People would be better off studying the life and work of Fred Hampton.
Agreed. I found her work to be devoid of any attempt at connecting her theoretical claims to any form of data and/or measurements.
As if two human beings who both happen to be white are the same, when one was born in a trailer park and the other a high-rise in Central Park West. I was pretty irritated to see her book getting promoted by my HR department, who is filled with people who proudly brag about "math not being my thing."
What exactly are the powers and material structures that contribute to the perceived racism in our society?
From my limited understanding of this position, it sounds like the goal is a dismantling of police and courts which form the backbone of a civil rule of law society.
Systematic exclusion of black people from social programs, like the GI Bill and Social Security, and redlining, which prevented black Americans from building up wealth through homeownership the way white Americans were. "The Color of Law" is a good book on redlining.
To expand on the bit about Social Security, farmworkers were excluded, since farmworkers tend to be not white. It was a nice sneaky way to be racist without coming out and doing so explicitly.
One of the things that confuses me quite a bit is the focus on laws that expired or have been abrogated 50-60-70-150 years ago and make it as if everything wrong with contemporary American society is caused directly by such laws and nothing else.
* GI Bill: adopted in 1944, expired in 1956.
* Social Security: adopted in 1935, unclear what the impacts were at the time. Unclear what the impacts are today.
* Redlining: created in 1934, illegal since 1977.
As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history. Much more stringent appear, in no particular order and not pretending to be exhaustive:
* the whole F1/H1B situation, which depresses the domestic labor market in technical jobs, especially software, but also research at large
* global competition, especially with China
* the over financialization of the economy
* the profits accumulating at the very top since the 2008 Great Recession
* the explosion of real estate market in big cities, way above what we pretend the inflation rate is
* manufacturing decline
* offshoring of entire industries to East Asia
* right now, the covid19 lockdowns which are destroying the service economy, which was supposed to be the future of jobs
* the decimation of small business America due to same covid19 lockdowns.
* specifically for the black community, the lack of academic achievement
* the rise of the gig economy and Amazon warehouse jobs
* the opioid, homelessness and suicide crisis
* the obesity crisis, and the related food deserts
Again, not a young black guy or gal. But if I'd were, there'd be 10 high priority items on my worry list before I'd get to the Civil Rights Era. As a nation we seem to have abandoned the middle and working class of all colors. The public discourse is obsessed with Instagram influencers and race histories half a century old if not older, sometimes much older.
I believe the focus on the expired laws is based on the assertion the effects of those laws are entrenched in their communities still. In SF, historical redlining is still obvious despite some gentrification in much of the southeast and the area around Van Ness north of Market. In these areas, things like smaller (cheaper) units, poorer infrastructure, and less business development perpetuate the segregation brought about in the years of redlining. Social norms further set up expectations about who should be living in certain areas, see the recent incident over a white woman challenging a black man's home ownership in Pacific Heights (rich, white neighborhood).
I can't weigh in from personal experience, but I look at it like a marathon. One set of runners face a first half of the race with mud, crushed glass, vertical climbs, and other obstacles, while other racers had a nice tailwind and extra drink stations.
Regardless of the obstacles faced in the second half (which are still more numerous than the competition's), can't you understand why runners would still look back at that first half to explain their fatigue, anger, and feelings of injustice? Particularly when looking ahead and thinking, "Oh God, this crap /again/??"
The marathon in this example actually spans multiple generations, but even the horrible segregation of the 50's was experienced first hand by the parents of black people still in the workforce today.
Sounds like you came into the race halfway through. As an immigrant you're still facing those unfair obstacles in front of you, but just remember that you don't have the fatigue of carrying the baggage from the first half.
I agree with this, but not all immigrants are the same so you are generalizing here. Some immigrants have faced genocide due to colonialism, and have not been better off (also have baggage).
What are your thoughts on that, because that's A LOT of immigrants
You could also argue that the large majority of black people still alive came in to the race halfway through as well. At some point it just becomes an excuse. Constantly blaming other people is a good way to never have any self improvement.
Obviously the best way to get out of a bad situation is to help yourself first. The hardest part of this problem cannot be solved by outsiders but outsiders can certainly prevent progress if they put their minds to it. If you are a victim of discrimination then you must demonstrate through your own power that you you can succeed despite the discrimination. If you depend on help from others then you may not be taken seriously and you might never learn to help yourself.
This analogy would work if it weren't for the immigrants who arrive with no connections and resources, and successfully make it through hardships within one or two generations.
A more apt analogy may be a marathon where there are bystanders who latch on to half of the runners and keep telling them, "you cannot make it, you need us to help you, the race is unfair".
Immigrants tend to have a high amount of education or resources relative to the societies they come from. Those immigrants come with their own sets of biases. Social infrastructure for, say, Indian people moving to Bellevue, WA in terms of social connections and wealth is better than Black american's have just ever had.
You make it sound like when those programs and patterns were ended, that the black community recovered overnight. Your post also acts as if the driving ideas of racism that lead to blacks being excluded from or vulnerable to the things you listed ended overnight also. And your post mentions how racism made the social landscape far more adversarial to blacks with things such as the War On Drugs used to target the black community.
Honestly to make such a post, one would have disregard network effects and intergenerational wealth transfer to a malicious level.
I don't think you're being fair nsporillo (the GP commenter) asked what societal structures were [currently] a specific hindrance based on race. Noting that it appeared that the entire legal structure of society was the target.
In response someone posted about a load of laws, which it turns out are all historic.
They didn't say intergenerational wealth transfer (which is a poor-person issue not a race issue per se - though it has a non-representative racial profile for sure).
I'm not sure what you're suggesting with "network effects", presumably people in established positions of power can maintain a discriminatory hold on those allowed to join the group?
Maybe you don't understand it because its so obvious to you but your "solution" basically involves all black people becoming migrants (at least within the borders of the US) and starting from scratch again. Now lets assume this is the perfect solution. Why would this method be so effective? What leaves black people and the communities they live in in such a bad condition that they have to get away from it? It takes dedication and effort over multiple decades to create a long lasting bad environment via bad political policies. By that same logic it will take a long time to recover from it if there is no dedication and effort put into recovery. Sure, migration is a quick way out for an individual but it's not a solution that scales to an entire population.
All black people in USA? Or just poor people who haven't been lucky enough to break away from past injustices? Seems like rich and powerful people who are black are doing just fine??
Lots of people in the middle income brackets seem no worse off than other people too.
I agree that poverty and inequality in general is the real problem. But one must be able to point out that the shitty situations African-Americans are in today is the result of a whole bunch of dominos that fell over and if you follow them backwards they lead back to red lining, slavery etc.
Everybody is a product of the past. Hell, Anglo-Saxon’s are still worse off then Normans in the UK 1000 year after William the Conqueror.
There are people who never lived under communism who have to deal with the stain and prejudice of being an Ossi in modern Germany.
> * the obesity crisis, and the related food deserts
> * specifically for the black community, the lack of academic achievement
Those are both related to a history of redlining. A huge factor in the wealth gap is due a lack of home ownership. Even now, real estate agents steer black customers away from the neighborhoods with good schools: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-...
If someone's grandparents were forced to live in shitty housing and were never able to own their own home, that puts the next couple generations at a disadvantage. Most people who are able to afford a down payment on a home get financial assistance from their families. If one generation cannot help with that down payment, the next one sure as hell won't.
That point about the black academic gap is quite silly, because you're either ignoring or unaware of the fact that black students are punished more than white students for similar infractions in school: https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/at-school-it...
I could go on all day finding more examples of other discrepancies that are current.
> As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history.
Yes, my family did that too. However, we are not black, and as a result, we didn't have to put up with banks refusing to give us a mortgage when we wanted to move to a wealthy suburb that had excellent public schools.
You came in on a student visa? That means you had a certain amount of social capital to rely on in your home country. How many people in your original country were too poor to apply for even an F1 visa and shoot for a richer life in America? Your experience is not remotely analogous to the continuing problems of racial discrimination faced by black Americans. You have absolutely not faced the same problems with building up intergenerational social capital that they have. My family made it out of China, but millions of Chinese peasants in the rural countryside, even if they are equally talented and hardworking as my family, will never have the chance. They're too far behind. That's why I chose to focus on the historical legislation. You may think that it doesn't matter, black people should've pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by now, but it doesn't matter if they lack the same headstart.
Well said. For those who didn't net out what he enumerated, there is a long list of things that will bring personal, family, and community suffering long before inequality on a race basis.
>As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history.
Well, it's not. In living memory:
>The wealth of black Americans was halved by the 2008 financial crisis, in part because of predatory lending practices which specifically targeted them by race and misrepresented their creditworthiness
>Multiple black activists pushing for more advantageous policy have been imprisoned and assassinated, with allegedly some incidents as recent as the last few years.
>Black students have become subject to levels of segregation - and associated disparities in educational quality - at levels rivalling those of pre-Brown v Board America
>Because many black workers were exempt from the initial impementation of Social Security and the GI Bill, their children (Silent Gen and Baby Boomers, currently in the process of passing on their inheritances) and grandchildren (Gen X and Millennials) are suffering the consequences in lost wealth-building opportunities
>Countless black Americans have suffered from poor healthcare based on apathy and stereotypes
>Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic
>Marijuana, long a a drug whose sale and use was the pretext for the overpolicing of black communities, and which provided off-the-record income for many marginalized from the mainstream economy, was legalized in several states, under schemes that made sure that the overwhelming majority of those who profited were white.
And, of course, bare-naked discrimination exists across aspects of American life, including employment, compensation, educational opportunity, freedom of movement, criminal justice, real estate, and on and on and on. When these and many more injustices were not directly impactful, they served as poignant examples of the extreme apathy, if not antipathy, American society has had for black Americans. On top of it all, black Americans still live under the specter of police departments nationwide, which have been allegedly infiltrated by white supremacist organizations, and which assuredly indoctrinate officers with racist training and policy, and root out anti-racist individuals.
a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' seminal work, The Case For Reparations (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...), which reopened the intellectual debate on racial justice with a focus on the subject above: racial injustice affecting living black Americans, however rooted it may be in the events of 50-60-70-150 years ago.
>Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic
Great post and you brought up a few things I hadn't considered. Just curious about this one though. America in general has gradually shifted towards a view that drug addicts are sick people that need help. The shift was already taking place before opioids and methamphetamine addiction reached epidemic levels. How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?
I'm not super educated on the opioid epidemic, but is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?
> How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?
Most of society now empathizes with drug addiction because its hit white society a lot and the race of users can't be used as a political scapegoat. As long as you're white, the richer you are, the less likely you are to go to jail for it. Rehab is for rich people.
We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.
> is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?
Given a huge percentage of the "response" is police and prisons, and police and prisons dramatically discriminate against people by race, yes.
>We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.
Legalization and decriminalization of Marijuana is still a relatively recent phenomenon. It seems to me like it will eventually get legalized by the federal government. If that happens, wouldn't we expect this to get better? The right thing to do would be to release everyone that was in jailed on marijuana related charges as long as they weren't also convicted of something more serious (like violence). Maybe I'm being too optimistic.
I think a lot of Americans realize how insane it is that we jail more people than any other country. While progress is always slow, it seems like we're hearing more politicians talk about doing something about it.
While its true drugs won the war on drugs, that doesn't mean the racist and political underpinnings of keeping people locked up for nonviolent drug offences go away overnight. Actual real police reform and breaking the prison-industrial complex is a big goal of the current protests, but once again its conservatives with their decades of fear who are holding up progress.
Thanks, but your accompanying paragraph is not what I asked for. Yes, it's a problem if people's skin colour is affecting their ability to earn - so there being a racial factor to wealth is an issue. But it's a separate issue to "is it 'just' that justice is reserved for richer people".
Obviously the impact of the later is felt more if a particular grouping by skin colour are poorer, but the problem and solution are different to if the cause of this is directly racism (assuming our aim is justice for all regardless of skin colour; that's certainly my aim).
I'm not personally too concerned with complete wealth equality (I'd probably go for heavily garnishing large wages). For example, in the UK I gather immigrants contribute more to taxes than the average; suggesting they fit in middle-income brackets (not super wealthy, not abjectly poor; on average). Penalising immigrants for succeeding would be harsh, and wouldn't account for the massive biasing of averages for the endemic population through inherited wealth.
>He concludes, “[T]hese disparities are primarily driven by our racialized class system. Therefore, the most effective criminal justice reform may be an egalitarian economic program aimed at flattening the material differences between the classes.” In other words, while building a more progressive economy won’t end the horrors of racism, it may be the pathway to a less discriminatory criminal justice system. //
I don't think I'm disagreeing here. Economic justice would go a long way. Still though, for the time being a black person is absolutely going to be profiled and have more police contact, and even if they have a lot of money. People don't stop doing that overnight. Its a cultural thing.
Adolph Reed has written on the Social Security exclusions that you're referencing, and the issue is not so clear cut: [1].
The initial iteration of Social Security excluded many types of temporary and informal labor. Although black workers were disproportionately impacted by these exclusions, the large majority (about 75%) of people who were excluded were white. One possible reason why these exclusions were in place is that getting accurate payroll figures for informal jobs is difficult. In any case, these exclusions were lifted between 1950 and 1955.
Keep in mind that Social Security was not the only New Deal program, and things like the Public Works Administration disproportionately benefited African Americans. The New Deal was extremely popular among African Americans, and is one of the major reasons why most African Americans switched over to voting for the Democratic Party. That's what makes the recent narrative that the New Deal was racist (and to blame for today's disparities) so strange.
If a publicly traded company is not doing well, the CEO gets canned and no one bats an eye. If one department is not doing well, it's very common to just fire a bunch of people or get rid of the department completely.
The idea of "dismantling of police" does not mean we do not offer protection. It just means that the current organization "police" is not providing the services it's customers want. Years of "tweaking" the police orgs have failed to provide results. It's time to create a new way to protect citizens.
> In a poll conducted by ABC News/Ipsos on June 10-11, 34% of US adults supported "the movement to 'defund the police'" and 64% opposed it. Support was higher among black Americans (57%) than among whites (26%) and Hispanics (42%).
The people who have faced the discrimination, know people affected by it, or have educated themselves about the discrimination will vote yes and the people who have not faced the discrimination and want to believe its mostly made up because they have never been personally effected by it will vote no.
20 years ago its easy to see how the vote would have ended up, but now with tons of cell phone footage and large scale protests its interesting to see which side people will land on now.
> people who have not faced the discrimination and want to believe its mostly made up because they have never been personally effected by it will vote no
So, you think that only people who do not believe in discrimination will vote "no"?
People who faced discrimination often like the police and stability instead of mob justice. Since there is a problem with racial profiling there might be some skewed results.
Many parents of black children tell them to be wary of police. Police sees more crime in these areas and we have a self reinforcing problem of distrust. Additionally there are clueless white people talking about being their personal savior.
> The idea of "dismantling of police" does not mean we do not offer protection.
Who offers the protection? Ultimately the are going to be people tasked with stopping criminal behavior, with force if said criminals resist. This isn't a dismantling of the police it's a rebranding.
Camden NJ rebuilt their police department overnight a few years back. Cancelled the union contract, fired everyone and started over. Rehired some of the same cops I believe as part of the new structure.
Murders are down 50% from then, it's still not a nice town or anything but it's not the worst town in America anymore.
The police department wasn't dismantled. Camden's police department very much still exists: https://camdencountypd.org/
Restaffing he police is a vastly different measure than dismantling the police or abolishing the police, which is what many activists are pushing for.
Furthemore, the idea that this was an instance of dismantling the police to reduce police abuses doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny [1]:
> With the city under duress, over the objection of Camden community members, local officials partnered with Christie to enact a plan to disband the city’s police force and replace it with a regional county force. The goal was to dissolve the local police union, which would allow for a cheaper force that would enable more policing, not less.
> The new force embraced broken windows policing. In the first year of the new force, summonses for disorderly conduct shot up 43 percent. Summonses for not maintaining lights or reflectors on vehicles spiked 421 percent. Summonses for tinted car windows similarly increased 381 percent. And farcically, summonses for riding a bicycle without a bell or a light rose from three to 339. It was straight out of the Giuliani handbook.
> Unsurprisingly, these moves provoked tensions between the community and the police producing a parallel rise in excessive-force complaints. These tensions were still bubbling in 2014 when a particularly harsh and disturbing arrest was caught on video with officers using violent techniques similar to the ones that killed George Floyd in Wisconsin. When pressed about the incident, Camden County Public Affairs Director Dan Keashen said that an investigation showed it to be “a good arrest.”
Defunding would move those roles from public jobs to private jobs.
In the end the only the rich would have protection. Probably not the best path. For an example see the private police in London. They answer to no one.
I don't understand how you make the conclusion that the money must go to private jobs? Can't the municipality reallocate the funds and spend it elsewhere in the public sector?
Perhaps if the funding is used on alleviating the sources of petty crime - poverty, mental illness or social disaffection, joblessness or purposelessness or apathy - the only people who would need protection would be the rich. And you can fine them out of their wealth if they transgress.
I would agree with you that there would be the same if it's the same people running. This is the systematic part that needs to change. When companies fail, there is a new CEO, new board, new executives. Let's do the same with failed police departments.
There is 0% chance that all police departments will all change in 2020. I'm happy to voice my support that some cities are willing to try new things. If it works great. If not, back to the drawing board.
With what, exactly? You can pass more laws, but laws don't matter if the police don't obey them anyways. You can enforce things like bodycams, but then the police cover up the cams or conveniently turn them off.
At what point will you be convinced that you need to start over? Because removing corruption is like removing an invasive species: you don't solve it by taking a half-assed attempt with trimming and call it a day.
The ruling elite don't obey the laws either, USA have let the President flout the law on the international stage; if "so long as you can subvert the 'courts' it's fine" goes for the President then how are you ever going to have a strong Rule of Law?
Not sure I agree. The concept of meeting mental illness or crimes of poverty / lack of education with escalating violence is really uneducated at best.
Violence being the language folks use after all else fails.
Starting with violence means you don't really care about solving the problem and just want the incident to go away
Only someone that has never lived in other countries with serious crime problems could claim that the police here are not providing a service people want.
Almost no one lives in fear of organized crime like the mafia in Italy, PCC, Comando Vermelho or Terceiro Comando in Brazil, the FARC in Colombia, the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, etc. this list is very very long.
Americans life very safe lives with relatively low crime and this is largely the result of very effective law enforcement. Is it perfect? No. But to claim it isn’t providing a service people want is pure ignorance.
Law enforcement in the US is so effective at stopping crimes that we aren’t even aware of the value they provide.
> it sounds like the goal is a dismantling of police and courts which form the backbone of a civil rule of law society.
It's not. The goal is to demand equal protections under the law for all, eliminate racial bias in policing, judging and sentencing, and make police themselves follow the law.
Don't be misled by the "defund police" mantra. It's just a way to divert resources to community engagement programs and/or get out of contracts with police unions. It doesn't literally mean "shut down the police department and courts".
> From my limited understanding of this position
At least you're honest about it. I'd encourage you to educate yourself instead of just relying on soundbites and scare-mongering media headlines (not saying that's what you've been doing so far).
It's more complicated than that. There's a debate about what it means among the people advocating for it, with (as far as I can tell) the people who originated the phrase strongly objecting to the suggestion that they didn't mean it literally.
>It doesn't literally mean "shut down the police department and courts".
This doublespeak, which reminds me of the whole "Kill All Men" issue, which itself was quickly followed by a rush to say "Noo you stupid man, we don't mean kill all men, just some men", makes my skin crawl.
Let's take a quick look at the dictionary:
Defund:
verb
prevent from continuing to receive funds.
If you are failing to use the language correctly, correct yourself. Don't attempt to gaslight people and twist the meaning of established terms.
If it helps, I think "kill all men" is reprehensible and illegal. "Defund police" even taken literally, is neither of those things, so you're drawing a false equivalence.
If you eliminate funding for an existing police department, firing all of the employees, and divide all of its functions, including dealing with violent criminals, and performing investigations, up among other departments (both existing and new), isn't "defund" accurate? That's the most extreme position on the spectrum along which police reform plans lie. "Defund police" is a pithy catchphrase, an opening position for negotiations. I don't think the language is what needs "correcting". It's important to educate oneself on the issues instead of assuming the worst about anyone you disagree with.
> If it helps, I think "kill all men" is reprehensible and illegal.
Why would that help? Did you start the meme?
> isn't "defund" accurate?
Yes. That's the whole point. "defund the police" is wildly unpopular, so people have started to change the very meaning of those words so the other people won't hate them quite so much. It's not working.
> an opening position for negotiations
I can't tell if you actually believe that or if you're arguing in bad faith now. Nobody believes the people saying "defund the police" aren't extreme and serious. Killing people and burning down their homes and businesses is not the beginning point of a negotiation. It's a hostage taker's demand.
Given that this whole thread started with a strawman ("dismantling of police and courts ..., civil rule of law society), a motte-and-bailey seems appropriate. Thanks for introducing me to that term btw, TIL. It's a nice one.
The reply by cmdshiftf4 was an example of tone policing - criticizing the words and attacking a simple slogan, instead of addressing the meat of the issue. You yourself have engaged in an ad hominem argument by calling me (indirectly) "an intentional deceiver" or "a parroting crony", rather than talk about the issue.
(See, I, too, know the names of some logical fallacies. I also like dropping them into online debates to show that I alone have developed my opinions using solely logic, reason, and facts, whereas everyone else is biased and relies on emotion and personal history. :-P)
The backbone of the rule of law is its legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Police brutalizing journalists on camera in clear violation of the law (and presumably with no rectification in court to come) probably does more to dismantle that legitimacy than anything a protestor could do.
> I realize how outlandish that may sound writing that out, but I'd propose that the fact that it does sound outlandish is the main problem.
That doesn't sound outlandish to me at all. For what it's worth, it doesn't have to phrased in a stilted manner like that. A quiet "That was racist and I have no excuse. I am sorry, and will do better in the future." is fine.
I suspect that most people who want to "get the hell out" rather than apologize for racism have little to no experience with making sincere apologies and trying to genuinely mend fences in general. This probably has a significant overlap with people who claim that you should immediately leave your employer rather than speak out about any of their policies that you disagree with.
> I suspect that most people who want to "get the hell out" rather than apologize for racism have little to no experience with making sincere apologies and trying to genuinely mend fences in general.
I would honestly suggest watching the video I linked by Robin Diangelo. I think that level of embarrassment/defensiveness would be common to the vast, vast majority of white people of a particular social class in the US, regardless of their broader experience making sincere apologies. Putting the frame of reference of "Look, only people so inexperienced with socialization that they can't make sincere apologies" in my opinion takes away from the more likely reality that the belief that "only bad people can be racist" is what is limiting forward progress in these areas.
"I think that level of embarrassment/defensiveness would be common to the vast, vast majority of white people of a particular social class in the US"
Interesting. My response to your recommendation of Dr. DiAngelo's work elsewhere in this thread was critical of her treating "white" as a monolith.
Which particular social class of whites do you think this applies to?
This also brings up another criticism I have about what I view is an absolute lack of scientific rigor: "White Fragility" is a phrase that can't be generalized to humans as a whole who are members of the dominant ethnic group of their respective societies. One would expect an urban, ethnic Han Chinese person to react in a similar pattern when confronted with their privilege in their own society. Think Japan as well.
Again, no measurements, or attempts to quantify. Which is convenient, when you realize that her workshops on anti-racism training feature an approach that has never been scientifically validated for efficacy in solving the problem.
I really hate to harp on this so much, but I am deeply interested in ACTUALLY SOLVING THE PROBLEM, and that makes me extra wary of people who sell snake oil cures to absolve HR departments of liability.
This is what happens when you make your country hyper profit driven.
It's evident by "who" make these movements trend and then de-trend them. Language now is controlled by a small minority group. It's always the rich white people that it's not funny anymore.
I think this follows a general rule I have found in my professional life.... people react WAY more forgiving when you admit a fuckup than you think they will before you admit it. It is amazing how quickly people want to forgive you and help when you admit failure openly and without excuse.
Exactly this. I have a coworker who I used to like personally, even though I had a lot of problems with his actual work. But, he would never own up to making any mistakes, and now no one likes him personally or professionally.
While I completely agree that the stories in this article are hugely problematic and represent issues that need to be solved, I think books like "White Fragility" are not helpful in solving them. This is due to a focus on group identity, and describing "White" as if it's a monolithic group of people, all with the same culture, emotions, and reactions.
Another interesting aspect I identified while reading the book was it's description of the emotions that one can expect to see when confronting white people about race issues: the description could have been used to describe any human being you will ever meet when you accuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do. It really does read like a horoscope in that sense.
I find it ironic that people on HN, who are typically super data driven, get on board with works like "White Fragility". Diangelo is one of many academics from the humanities departments who are incredibly pseudo-scientific. Data is incredibly scarce, measurements and studies even less so. Statistical knowledge isn't present in the vast majority of these folks. Typically, the "scientific method" is reading and writing essays/novels. When you don't attempt to quantify a problem, you can't propose solutions and then measure their results. You instead just keep yourself busy finding ever more ways to describe the water to the drowning person.
I think the trend you're describing comes down to post-modernists' general rejection of objective truth, which the scientific method relies on. This excerpt from the Chomsky-Foucault debate sums it up well[0]. I like the idea as a progression of philosophy but it's been applied in some pretty terrible ways[1].
That's a weird box to put it in. I think the reason the fragility concept has caught on with (US) black people is because we each have far more experience dealing with white people than they have dealing with us (on average.)
It's difficult to design a study around. Calling it post-modern is just a slur. It's easier to say that you don't believe it.
If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress.
Meanwhile, a central point of the book is one that should be self evident. Talking about racism makes white people[1] uncomfortable. I know this to be true from experience. And we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.
I don't see how you need "statistical power" to recognize this or adopt this strategy.
Also, this:
> ccuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do
That's not what the discomfort is about. Of course none of us are _personally_ responsible for the systemic racism in the US. But if we can't even talk about it without getting uncomfortable, how are we going to fix it?
1: If this doesn't apply to you, great, I wasn't talking about you [2]
2: Except if this topic makes you annoyed enough to disagree then yes, I probably am talking about you.
> Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable.
When the basic premise of the argument is that white Americans are born irredeemably flawed[1], you're unlikely to win many white supporters other than the most guilt-ridden.
I suppose the tactic is to impart as much guilt as possible. But that doesn't make the argument a good one.
That is not the starting premise of all who oppose racism. It's not even the starting premise of the majority. It's the starting premise of a few loudmouths who unfortunately were given a microphone. They're doing their cause more harm than good by saying stuff like that.
Why are they doing more harm than good? Because, after a claim like that, the conversation is over. There's absolutely no point in talking to someone who makes claims like that. And it makes you less likely to be willing to talk to the next person, either. So the net amount of whites willing to learn and talk about race and racism goes down when people say stuff like this.
(It's also factually untrue, blatantly unfair, and bigoted...)
I think just about all white people would do well to look around the neighborhood that they grew up in and think about the politics of how it got to be that way. I went to a high school of 1400, and in 4 years there were all of 3 black kids. Turns out this is because no black family was allowed by any bank to get a loan for a mortgage in the area until 1974. White blindness to their privilege is a huge impediment to change - people have literally no idea how different people are treated when there's a different skin color.
The tactic is to get people to actually listen so that they might agree its an actual problem and then actually do something about it.
You identified a legitimate issue that was corrected in your area in 1974. That's good. However that does not impose decades or centuries of penance on an entire race of people, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with it.
To do so is scapegoating and white Americans have every right to resist it.
Imagine playing monopoly for 400 years with someone, and they got to go around the board for the first 300 years without you making a move, buying up all the property. Then for the next 50 they allowed you to start to make moves, but every time you started to gain just about any money they would push you over and rob you (see: sundown towns, lynching, the tulsa massacre, segregation, jim crow, redlining, police brutality, poor neighborhoods and absolutely awful schools).
There's been no penance. There's been no justice. And people aren't even asking for that, they're asking for a seat at the table and a chance to play the game, which is STILL constantly being denied. Its not scapegoating, its fighting against systematic oppression that you yourself continue to support.
Van Jones was right (even the best intentioned are conditioned by forces beyond their control), and you added the word "irredeemable". No one said there isn't a fix. Culture racism is learned, it can be unlearned.
Making white people uncomfortable, by itself, does nothing to improve anything for black people.
Hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, making police accountable for how they treat black people, are all ways we can help black people.
The only thing that "making white people uncomfortable" accomplishes is making more money for white women like Robin DiAngelo selling their books and consulting services.
Unfortunately, many white people feel uncomfortable about hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, and making police accountable for how they treat black people.
Buying some books can feel like the lower friction option.
> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.
I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.
Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first?
> Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption.
And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.
No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.
>...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people?
Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it
No the "go-to move" is to refuse to realize that we as a society have been trying to "fix" racism for decades now (arguably centuries), and it's not helping. The very people all the landmark civil rights laws and court decisions were supposed to help are worse off now than they were in the 1960s when those laws were passed.
So instead of continuing to do this not-working thing, maybe we should ask whether the root problem is something else, and work on fixing that instead.
But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer
> isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights?
Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it.
But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.
Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).
Fixing racism hasn’t garnered significant traction with significant capital support for a while. Additionally, I would argue that attempting a 50 fix for systems that are multiple centuries old (and have had that much time to work their way into every part of society) seems short sighted.
> We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.
You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem.
> You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.
We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.
Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable because whether it's talking about a specific individual or not, there's an implicit undertone that they're also white and part of the problem.
This is particularly grating when considering that white people are a very diverse group and the experience of a white male in Iran is completely different to the one of a white upper-class female in the US or a lower-income white male in the US.
The US media and social-media have infected Europe with this us-vs-them attitude and are ironically fueling racism against white people.
Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world.
And if you really want to put a strawman for anti-white-racism up there, use some of the actually happened atrocities against white land owners in some Africna countries after de-colonisation. Obviously without the historic context, because it wouldn't work otherwise. Don't pick Iran, besides being the current boogey man for conservative circles, it really is a bad example for racism. Unless you want to go deep into the shiit-suunit conflict in the Arab World. Which would obviously totally off-topic for this thread.
Attacking people because of their skin color (even verbally) is the very definition of racism.
This is exactly what's happening these days as white people are all put into one bucket and blamed for all the injustice in the US.
Iran is a good example. Turkey too or any country that has a different religion/political system but where a part of the population is in fact "white".
- Percentage of adults affected by hate crime by ethnicity 2015/16 to 2017/18: White 0.1, Mixed 0.5, Asian 1.1, Black/African/Caribean/Black British 0.6 and other 1.0
- Same, by religion: Chistian 0.1, Buddhist 0.1, Hindu 0.7, Muslim 1.5, other 0.5, none 0.1
All adults: 0.2
Conclusion: White christian are by any number underaffected by hate crime in the UK
Additonal numbers form London's MOPAC for victims of racist hate cimes in the 12 months up to June 2017: 56% male, 30% black, Asian 25%, White-North European 25%. Obviously, percentages cannot be summed up here. Again, whites are underaffected. perosnal view: Numbers in London might be higher than elsewhere for whites, I don't have a source for that, so.
Anyway, both numbers are an order of magnitude away from the 50% you mentioned.
The figures you quote are the percentage of victims by ethnicity. So, for example, the number of black people who have been victims of hate crime. I was referring to the total number of victims by race. I suspect the latter number was in my memory because of how these, and similar, figures have been reported in the past. E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/oct/22/ukcrime.race.
Some back of the envelope calculations suggest that my 'roughly half' is correct given the figures you provide. Of 1000 people in the UK, 920 will be white, and 80 non-white. Given the rate of white hate crime victimisation you gave, .92 white people in that 1000 will be a victim of hate crime. If we lump all the non-white people together and use the highest rate of victimisation (Asian:1.1%) that gives us .88 non-white victims.
The comment I replied to claimed that racism against white people does not exist in the western world. That claim does not appear to be true.
I go with official government numbers first in cases like that. period. And what makes you think police forgot to include the murders you mentioned in the official numbers?
Not some calculation I cannot follw. Not press reports. And unless you go and read the official report (there is even a spreadsheet, so you can use prime sources directly), I gonna stop now.
The police did include the murders in the official statistics . I think the problem here is that you don't understand the data you quoted and how it relates to the demographics of the UK.
> Statistical knowledge isn't present in the vast majority of these folks.
This seems like a key moment to... cite data? Since you are broadly making pseudo-mathy sounding claims while complaining that others aren't as mathematically/statistically/factually rigorous as 'people on HN'.
> Another interesting aspect I identified while reading the book was it's description of the emotions that one can expect to see when confronting white people about race issues: the description could have been used to describe any human being you will ever meet when you accuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do.
I've heard this before and don't understand it.
Why should talking about racial issues make people feel like they're being accused of something? I am a man. I have not be catcalled or threatened for rejecting someone's advances. I can't recall any prominent examples of witnessing a woman being threatened for rejecting a man's advances. But when a woman tells me that it happens to her, I don't feel guilty. So I don't understand how someone telling you about their experience leads to feeling like being accused or blamed for something you did not do.
You've never catcalled. You've never been catcalled. You've never been threatened for rejecting someone's advances and you've never threatened when yours were rejected.
That same woman comes to you and says "All men are sexist and do not respect women, and that includes you. You are horrible. You deserve to know how I feel."
How would you respond? I would think "favorably" would not be high on your list.
THAT is the type of discourse being used about race. It is not helpful. It doesn't identify the problems. It doesn't empower people to fix them. It doesn't inspire them to. I'm truly not sure what people think they are accomplishing to be honest.
I think instantly feeling uncomfortable about a term like "White Fragility" and writing an entire comment about being uncomfortable about the term instead of a comment about the racism Black people face in all walks of life is a perfect example of white fragility.
Yes, that's exactly the problem with the concept of white fragility. It's a Kafka trap [0]. You either agree with the concept and its implications/assumptions or you are accused of exemplifying it. It's a clever bit of rhetoric if you're fan of argument by denunciation.
That's incredibly convenient, don't you think? If I was a human being who happened to be black, and made the same criticism, would you have a different response?
You think that my response epitomized the thing I was complaining about. You are welcome to that opinion.
I think that your comment epitomizes the problem I was talking about, which is that this philosophy espouses that every thought in my head or word from my mouth is impossible to separate from my ethnicity. My ideas are beholden to and a product of my group identity in this worldview. I find that to be dangerous and regressive.
I should also add that "White Fragility" didn't "instantly" make me uncomfortable. I purchased and read the entire book. I was open minded about it, until the complete lack of scientific rigor and opinionated, essay-type qualities became clear.
That's stereotyping, not racism. People make inferences. Like, if there's two folks, one dressed in a suit, the other in baggy clothes with thick glasses, most people (including VCs) would default to the former as the MBA CEO, and the latter as geek CTO Even though it might be the exact opposite! If you make a wrong inference, just accept the correction and move on, no hurt feelings. Similar for old vs. young.
Some inferences are perfectly fine. If someone shows up in your office wearing the outfit of a cleaning company, you're fine in assuming they're a cleaning person.
In some circumstances, it's not harmful to assume the person wearing a suit is the CEO, though you might not always be right. The person in the suit might also be head of sales, while baggy clothes is CEO. Generally, it's better not to assume at all unless you're forced to. Just ask.
But inferring that someone isn't the CEO because they're black? I'm sorry, but that's racism pure and simple. Stereotyping is one form of racism (not the only one). You have no reason to make the inference, and it's highly insulting if you make a mistake. And to assume that feelings wouldn't be hurt is... tremendously naive and blind to the reality of racism.
> But inferring that someone isn't the CEO because they're black? I'm sorry, but that's racism pure and simple.
If I were to meet/know/whatever 100 CEOs and 99% of them were not black and for example wore an expensive suit in a specific setting/environment, then is it racist to assume (based on my past experiences) that a particular black person wearing an expensive suit in this particular setting/environment is not the CEO? I honestly fail to see how making assumptions based on personal experiences and whatnot is racist. This is not equivalent to claiming that someone who is black cannot be the CEO, there is the possibility, most definitely. Denying this possibility based on race or skin color is what I would rather have a problem with.
You’re making a value judgement based on skin color. That’s racism. Even if you don’t have bad intentions, the black person in your example suffers because of it.
That's newspeak.
Racism is treating people based on their skin color intentionally and hierarchizing them based on their race.
There is an intention.
What a person feels is subjective and has nothing to do with what the other person intended to do.
As you can't be in other people's head (except if you have that pretension ?) the only thing that matters is what your intention were.
Because of the reason given in the article. It starts the meeting off on a bad note by making the VC aware of their bias and embarrassing them. Often they just want to get the hell out ASAP to save face, which means the black CEO doesn't get a "fair go".
> If you make a wrong inference, just accept the correction and move on, no hurt feelings.
If you're a VC coming to a first meeting with a startup CEO and their team, none of whom you have met in person before, making an inference at all is simply unprofessional. You should be asking. The fact that the VC's inference was that the white person must be the CEO just adds the further insult of racist stereotyping to the insult of unprofessional behavior in this context.
My main takeaway from the article was not "lots of people in the startup world are racist" but "lots of people in the startup world are unprofessional assholes". I think the latter problem is what needs to be fixed.
Racism absolutely does imply intent. The attempt by progressives to recharacterise racism as something that it is not, is the reason why they are making less progress in their objectives than they would like.
It is not racist to assume that the person in the room most like the other CEOs you have met, is also the CEO. If I was in a foreign country, I would assume the CEO is the person most like the other people in that country. I never made any assumption about competence. Half the time I think the least competent person in the room is the CEO. Sadly that's how business works. There would be nothing racist - intentional, or unintentional - about my assumption.
> Racism absolutely does imply intent. The attempt by progressives to recharacterise racism as something that it is not
Sorry, what? "Racism" is not a word with a clear definition over time. It didn't exist at all in popular usage until the past few decades.
I think what you're trying to say is that "racism" is supposed to connote direct discrimination, like support for segregation, slavery, stuff like that. And sure, lots of people use the word that way. Most of those people are the same people who want to argue that "racism is a solved problem", so it's easy to see why this definition is attractive to mostly-male, mostly-white, mostly-conservative people.
But it's not the way a lot of other people use the word, where it connotes broader injustice in society and not just individual opinions.
Basically: you're making a senseless semantic argument. Even if you win the dictionary war about what "racism" means, you're still not responding to the actual concerns being expressed.
I don't see anything here that contradicts the idea that people are systematically discriminated against because of their race. That's the problem people are worried about.
I suspect it is the difference between the VC realizing they made a mistake and moving on (for a reason related to race) vs speaking to the white guy because they are racist and they would refuse to deal with a black CEO (ie, 'we don't serve your kind here'). The latter is very much intent, the former is rooted in biases from living in a world where there are few black CEOs. The question is to what degree do the biases in the former hold those people back (in the form of expectations, etc.).
I'm sorry, but your opinion here does not match with either practical, common, or academic definitions for racism.
People have internal biases all the time that cause them to be averse to particular racial groups -- particularly disadvantaged racial groups. They may not even realize they are doing it, but that doesn't mean that it's not racist. (For example, resumes with White names are more likely to receive callbacks than those with Black names. There may be no intent by the resume reviewer.)
Another example, asking to touch a Black stranger's hair is othering, which is a type of racist behavior. The person asking usually isn't intending to be racist, and is 'just' trying to satisfy their own curiosity. There's no ill intent, but that doesn't mean it's OK.
Racism originally was based on intent.
That modern US "academics" decided to turn every people into racists doesn't change it.
In your study about hair : was it also done between chinese and indians, indians & eskimos and eskimos and swedish people?
Because what those US academics brilliantly "discovered" is that people are more at ease with people that look like them. If you want to call it racist, at least have the honesty to attribute it to all human beings.
This is what my concern with the focus on race is. You may commit an act that appears racist, when in fact it wasn't at all.
An example:
- I run into a white friend and call him Dave (another white guy I know), when his name is Mark. It happens, I apologize as I'm terrible with names.
- I run into a black friend and call him Dave (another black guy I know), when his name is Mark. It happens, I apologize as I'm terrible with names.
In the 2nd instance, you can guarantee someone will accuse me of bring racist.
Basically, people make mistakes and say rude things all the time. But throw race in there and suddenly everything is viewed in the worst possible light.
In the second instance I’d only find it racist if Dave and Mark were the only black people you knew, and also if this mistake isn’t extended to everyone but only the black people in your life.
So what if they're the only two black people he knows? And so what if he only gets confused by black people? There is nothing racist about it in any case.
Person A has illiberal views on race but is very good at recognizing black people's faces.
Person B has liberal views on race but is very bad at recognizing black people's faces.
From your point of view: Person A is not apparently racist and person B is a confirmed racist!
This is a good example of how mistaken the illiberal left has become on these issues.
Nobody called the paranoid amnesiac racist. He made up someone accusing him of racism, and you're now accusing the imaginary accuser of racism. (The paranoid amnesiac is also a made-up figure)
Everyone just hang out more with people "different" from you and recognize we're all part of the human race.
A better example would be, "women aren't passionate about driving". That's a stereotype, likely a correct one (i.e. substantiated by statistics... I mean, I'm not certain, but that would be my prior, but I'm very open to changing it), and most importantly: not harmful. It's just a stereotype.
I'm not denying that things could be harmful (racism, sexist, ...). But not all stereotypes are. Like guessing that "Alex" is probably a guy.
This is often claimed, but not something that holds up to scrutiny. Women's representation in technology peaked in the US during the 1980s. Are we really going to argue that gender stereotypes are stronger in 2020 than 30-40 years ago? Similarly, countries with low gender equality actually have higher rates of women in STEM as compared to more egalitarian countries [1].
I don't disagree that some my find stereotypes alienating. But you're making a very big leap to claim that it's a "driving factor" as far as gender representation in STEM.
The cross sectional data is interesting and certainly puts a dent in simplistic explanations that only the patriarchy is preventing gender parity in STEM. But then again, variation in male/female average preferences by time and place works overall in favour of arguments that cultural factors like stereotyping influence career choices (and against biological predispositions being the one true explanation for female underrepresentation). It's not entirely impossible that women are simply more inclined to pick professions other than tech as barriers to other careers are removed (I'm sure the stereotypes that women don't belong in finance or law are stronger in the UAE and were stronger in the 1980s US). But once one acknowledges that alienation [and anticipation of discrimination, and role models] probably plays some role in career selection, the question becomes why it wouldn't be a driving factor in [self]selection for a field where US gender gaps were much smaller when it was a non-traditional niche attracting comparatively little attention than when it was a mainstream white collar career choice but one whose male nerd stereotypes are firmly ingrained in public consciousness.
No normal parent has said anything even remotely like that in the last 30 years. Why is it so terrible to accept that men and women on average have different interests? Everyone knows that testosterone makes young men orders of magnitude more violent, why is it inconceivable that they could also be 4 times more interested in more mechanic play? It’s been observed even in almost newborn chimpanzees for Gods sake.
> No normal parent has said anything even remotely like that in the last 30 years.
You haven't been exposed to a very broad range of parents. I've seen parents who very tightly control which toys, clothes, and grooming choices their kids make because they don't align with the parent's gender expectations. It's frustratingly common in the US.
Well I only had one set of parents myself that is true. But do you actually think that the reason 9 out of 10 computer scientists are men is that almost all parents tell their daughters to stay away from STEM fields? How does that tally with the female representation in medicine and biology?
Google's published tech stats suggest the ratio is closer to 7 in 10. Women physicians are 3-4 in 10. Biology appears to be 6 in 10 from what I could find (and is relatively unique in STEM fields, also not out of line with the socialization that animals/horses/veterinarians/marine biologists are often socialized as girls vocations).
And yeah, I think it's a potential contributing factor (one of many). Kids in many parts of the country are socialized that certain things are only for certain genders. It sucks. Let kids like whatever they want.
I think it's frustrating that people make claims to ideas that they are vaguely aware about. The vagueness can lead to repeating incorrect claims which I think is harmful, especially when discussing sensitive topics.
> Everyone knows that testosterone makes young men orders of magnitude more violent
You're using hyperbole but yes it's commonly understood that there's a link between testosterone and aggression, however you extend that claim to something completely different
> why is it inconceivable that they could also be 4 times more interested in more mechanic play? It’s been observed even in almost newborn chimpanzees for Gods sake.
I counter that this second claim is related to the first, is it that testosterone makes young males more likely to play with mechanical objects? There are a few articles that reference this study from 2008 [1]. It refers to rhesus monkeys not chimpanzees and their hypothesis at the end is much more nuanced
>We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.
Furthermore there is at least 1 meta-analysis from 2017 [2] that highlights
> Gender differences in toy choice exist and appear to be the product of both innate and social forces.
> Despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children's preferences for toys typed
Note they do not make the claim that testosterone is the cause of these differences. Scientists try to be careful about the language they use, we should be just as careful.
I’m not saying anything about the cause, just positing that since there are known biological differences that are extremely significant, such as when it comes to aggression, it seems strange to categorically rule out the possibility of a much milder difference in preferences when it comes to fields of study or work.
I prefer the later meta-analysis which looked at studies on humans which says
>Gender differences in toy choice exist and appear to be the product of both innate and social forces.
Gender seems to make some sort of difference but social factors also seem to make a difference. There is no claim to which is stronger, just that there is a difference. Taking this a step further I hypothesize that social forces could be enough to meaningfully change the gender difference.
Is it conceivable that men and women have different average personal preferences [partly] for reasons which are linked to biology? Certainly, though nobody in this thread has suggested that can't be a factor.
Is it plausible to assume that STEM fields and female participation is a case where stereotypes have very little effect? I think I'd need some pretty strong evidence for the idea stereotypes had little effect on any kind of career choice. Even less so for fields where any mention of stereotypes and gender imbalance garners a furious insistence that the stereotype is [i] irrelevant to anyone's advice or decision making [ii] also such an accurate representation of biologically-driven preferences it would be unfair for the gender ratio to change
Perhaps nobody said it explicitly, but when you see a difference in outcome, computer scientists are mostly men for example, and draw the conclusion that there must be discrimination and stereotyping then you indirectly say that it can’t be due to difference in preferences.
Also, I would think that the person that claims discrimination would have the burden of proof.
> Perhaps nobody said it explicitly, but when you see a difference in outcome, computer scientists are mostly men for example, and draw the conclusion that there must be discrimination and stereotyping then you indirectly say that it can’t be due to difference in preferences.
Well yes, if stereotypes or discrimination play any role it at all in career selection, it rules out the possibility that the highly variable ratio of male to female computer scientists is determined solely by biology. This strikes me as a much stronger claim requiring much stronger proof than a statement to the effect that [the well-established existence of] stereotypes is amongst the driving factors in career selection; particularly given that the ratio of male to female computer scientists varies hugely by place and time in ways which would be very difficult to attribute solely to biology.
If stereotypes were a major factor wouldn’t progressive countries like Sweden have more female physicists and programmers than a traditionalist gender role stronghold like Russia? In reality it’s the opposite.
Unless one believes that stereotypes are entirely absent from or irrelevant in progressive countries, not necessarily. It's well established that females in Russia view STEM more positively [not just other possibly more-chauvinist-in-Russia professions more negatively] than in many other countries.
Since it's palpably absurd to attribute this to differences between Russian and other European female biology, I think you've just refuted the argument that biology is likely to be the sole factor determining career choices. Given that we have just proven that cultural attitudes do shape career choices to some extent, perhaps they are even partly influenced by some people's insistence that the only actually problematic attitude towards female participation in their field is considering women equally likely to be suited to the job?
In Russia and poorer countries the lifestyle of a woman working as a nurse or teacher is radically different from one working as an engineer. In Scandinavia the difference is very small, you'll send your kids to the same schools, the same universities, you have the same medical care anyway, so you can afford to work with something you enjoy.
I don't really understand your logic. The biology is the same in both places, but we can all agree that Sweden is 100 times more progressive. Even if you claim there are still stereotyping here, their effect would be much much smaller. How can that be reconciled with the much larger disparities we see in Sweden?
Citation on "Stereotypes like that seem to be a driving factor in why STEM fields are very male dominated".
And citation for that citation, ad absurdum.
At some point, we have to agree on what is actually going on in this world. We can't solely rely on citations, because I can just say that those citations are a result of an oppressive patriarchy and as a result, I don't accept your citation as valid.
Where do we go form here?
The basis for any possible discussion is solidarity - society doesn't work if people are constantly being pitted against each other.
If it doesn't promote solidarity - it's anti society, pro anarchy. If you want guns in the streets and children screaming, we're well on our way. I just don't know if those creating anarchy (all of corporate media including social platforms) are even aware of what they've done - they're undermining the foundation of society that makes their existence possible and they don't seem to care.
It's pretty harmful if you're a woman who likes driving and you keep getting excluded from driving related groups and discussions because the men in these groups assume your interest is not genuine.
But surely it can be harmful? Perhaps women aren't encouraged to get into racing sports and get potentially lucrative careers out of it. Imagine the same sentence with computers - or programming! - replacing driving. Many a heated discussion has been had on these forums about a certain man and his memo.
Not going to get into whether "just a stereotype" is harmful generally, but your example really depends on the context. What if you're a woman applying to be a performance driver somewhere, and the response to your application is "women aren't passionate about driving"? That would be harmful.
That would be an absurd response if the woman in question was actually interested. People only use stereotypes when they DONT have specific information.
I’m over forty and and upper middle class. It’s a true stereotype that we don’t tend to be passionate skateboarders, but someone that met me in a skatepark would not draw the conclusion that I’m not interested based on my age and socioeconomics.
> That would be an absurd response if the woman in question was actually interested.
Of course, and that's the danger of stereotypes. Now it's up to her to prove she's interested.
> It’s a true stereotype that we don’t tend to be passionate skateboarders, but someone that met me in a skatepark would not draw the conclusion that I’m not interested based on my age and socioeconomics.
This is a great example. If they saw you standing there watching, they would draw the conclusion you're there with your kid/working maintenance/etc. Pull a random gamer kid with no skating passion and stand him next to you, then ask people who the skater is -- I'd bet 99 times out of 100 they pick the kid. Only once you prove yourself a skater does anyone correctly evaluate you, and to anyone who wasn't there when you proved it, you have to prove it again next time (or someone from the in group vouches for you). Go to a different skate park and you have to prove yourself again. Every time you meet someone new, you have to do a little dog and pony show to prove you're a Real Skater™ [0].
Now replace skating with programming and it should be obvious why stereotypes can be harmful.
[0] Even Tony Hawk runs into this not infrequently (stories on his twitter) where people even after learning his name can't/don't accept he's the pro skater.
Saying it’s not harmful is your privilege showing. Imagine you’re a 6 year old girl and you love cars but you never are encouraged because “women aren’t passionate about driving”.
How about just not making any assumptions at all and ask and support people, be it white, black, male, female, trans, etc?
> Saying it’s not harmful is your privilege showing.
No, it's my experience showing. I grew up being basically ostracized (and also bullied) for being a geek. Little did I know it would turn out to be an extremely lucrative career. Simply, while other boys were out playing sports, or indoors playing computer games, I was programming. Because I was interested.
Having said that, I think it's also the case that some people are discouraged from doing what they want, because parents/society. I don't think I'm doing that though. If anything, I'd be more curious about someone doing something unusual (not even in an anti-stereotypical way, but like, generally - such as archery, or spear fishing, or (until recently) bread-making).
> How about just not making any assumptions at all and ask and support people
I definitely support people doing pretty much whatever. But experience shows that it's often better to e.g. lead conversations into interesting topics, rather than play a questions & answers game to find a common interest. The more you're able to do that, based on quick inferences, the better conversationalist you are (on average).
Acting on racial stereotypes (e.g. by treating someone as the superior or subordinate because of racially based assumptions) is indeed racist.
It means your behaviour is informed by racial profiling of an individual.
It means that you're not treating someone as an individual, but rather based on membership of a racial group he happens to be born in, which has statistical characteristics (e.g. lower chance of being a CEO) that do not necessarily have any bearing on the individual at all.
We define treating people distinctly like that because of their racial membership, as racist. That's really just the definition. You can have a discussion about whether you think racism is justified or not, and make your own value judgement. You could say that even if membership of a group does not necessarily say something, odds are that it can be a good way to infer things. And that's true, group-membership (e.g. your ethnicity) has many useful correlations from which to infer things. But to say it's not racist simply isn't factual, it is racist according to how we define it. What's left open for discussion is whether racism is okay or not.
Of course as a society we have indeed had that discussion and fortunately decided that racism isn't justified, not okay, and should be prevented as much as possible. I'm happy about that. Because even if group membership (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion etc) has correlations with all kinds of outcomes we may wish to approximate, as a society we agree that it is only fair to judge people on their individual merits, and not on the group that they belong to.
1. We make judgements on “group membership” all the time, and to the extent they’re correlated to the outcome (i.e. true) that’s not wrong or -ist. Example would be, do you avoid stepping in front of a car because you infer that the car might run you over, or do you just take your chances and hope that this individual car will stop. Ok, contrived example. How about this: people generally accept that men are more dangerous than women (e.g. when it comes to rape, stranger danger, domestic violence, courts, jails, ...) even though the vast majority of men aren’t violent at all! Is this sexist? Yes, to some extent, in particular when the state does that (e.g. always arresting men in case of domestic violence call). But at the same time, that kind of “prejudice” might just save your life; how wrong can that be?
2. Even if there’s no correlation to the outcome, not every inference is -ist. Example I mentioned downthread is, assuming that “Alex” is a man. Is that really wrong?
3. Which brings me to, you write that “treating people distinctly” is -ist. But what is treating? Again, people make inferences (that’s literally what intelligence is, short-term prediction engine). Sometimes that’s even embedded in the language (e.g. in Slovenian, you have to assume gender, unlike in English). But as long as we remain open to change, that’s fine! If the woman tells me that actually she’s “Alex”, the only actually sexists way would be if I refused to call her by her (masculine-ish) name.
TL;DR: if everything is racist, then racism cannot be immoral.
It makes me think about how we as a people decide to communicate discrimination.
If a certain type of discrimination of perception arises due to stereotypes, but by and large affects certain racial groups, then is it racism ? It also affects women as it does those who do not abide by personality traits of the valley's cargo cult or the Ivy MBA.
> just accept the correction and move on
Yeah. I think in such cases a sincere apology is at the minimum warranted.
Stereotyping is a distinction without much of a difference. I don't think anyone who has ever been slighted ever felt relieved to realize the person wasn't actually racist, or sexist, or ageist, but just "stereotyping." A few years ago, I had arrived for the final round of interviews and was mistaken for a security guard by one of the interviewers. I received an offer for that position but I declined. The company subsequently contacted me about another position, but I declined that as well. Prior to that incident, I was very excited about working there. It could've been an honest mistake, without any racist intent, but I couldn't shake my doubts about that company. Work already has the potential to create enough stressful situations without any added complications, so why gamble when you don't have to?
It's moronic to make any inferences about who is who when walking into a room where you don't know anyone. When I walk into a conference room to interview a job candidate whose name I know in advance (from their resume), I always open with "John?" instead of "Hi John". Even though they're the only person in the room.
In the situations described in the article (VC pitch, sales pitch), just make introductions like a normal human being. "Hi, I'm triceratops nice to meet you <hold out hand, other person states their name in turn>"
If there are multiple people in the room, follow a fixed, consistent order. Options include nearest-to-farthest or left-to-right or starting from the head of the table.
If you internally take a guess which is the CEO based on race, it may or may not be racist but it generally isn't harmful. If you make it clear that you guessed that? (as opposed to keeping your guess to yourself) That's harmful as well as just stupid.
Isn't this part of a different problem of not being allowed to be wrong? It has major impacts on racism (and sexism and other forms of discrimination) making it worse, but also is a factor when someone is wrong in other areas of life and can have negative impacts because owning up to a mistake is something our experiences have taught us to avoid. Why is it that we have a shared experience that you should flee a mistake instead of owning up to it? Is fleeing, or sometimes just outright ignoring, a mistake seen as a more socially rewarded action than owning up to the mistake?
One area to look is politicians apologizing for being wrong and the extent that is treated a weakness by their political opponents.
I think a society where the better choice of action is to own up to a mistake makes for a better society.
Everyone is flawed. That comes with being human. It would be nice to live in a society that allows for people to make mistakes without burning them at the stake. This is not the world we live in, sadly. We have to change that by being forgiving and not piling on.
Apologies, in 2020 USA, just put a giant target on your head and don’t seem to be making much of a positive impact. Change that, you change the game.
No. A VC is expected to be wrong most of the time. They can be right only once and be an excellent VC. A VC should not have a difficult time owning up to a mistake under normal circumstances. In this case, they should be able to apologize, move on, and be extra attentive during the presentation to try to make up for the wrong.
"Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not."
This is bolder than I think you think it is. It's maybe evasive, too -- which ideas, exactly?
"I'm sorry, please excuse me for the instance of racism I just perpetrated against you, I promise it won't happen again."
There's no doubt the person in question should apologize, but what "racism" has been "perpetrated"? (A) there are and have been few black CEOs in America. (B) the guy/girl in your example does not expect a black CEO as a result. (C) Guy/girl commits extremely awkward faux pas.
Where is the racism? Where is the "inculcated idea" about race, besides an expectation based on ... there being literally very few black CEOs? I'll even grant you that (A) might be the case in part because of historical racist behavior in the US. Surely it is! It still doesn't make the guy necessarily racist. He doesn't tell us that he believes that human characteristics are determined by skin color, for example, nor does he tell the room e.g. that by golly he didn't know blacks could handle being a CEO, or that they were even allowed to do so, or some such actually racist BS.
I think the definitions of a lot of things have expanded since the childhoods of people of a certain age, and they're grappling with those changes. I certainly am. Racism doesn't seem to mean what I've long understood it to mean. Racism exists, and it ought to be fought, but I'm not sure how productive the current mood is going to be for that. I kinda hope I'm wrong, but I'd also be worried to be wrong, if people like Do Angelio are a sign of what's to come.
Racism is treating people differently based on the colour of their skin in a way that will impact them negatively.
> awkward faux pas
Just stop downplaying it. You are judging the "good intentions" here and ignoring the real and serious repercussions for someone who will have to go through this every day. A good intention would be to catch yourself and others perpetrating a "faux pas" and let them know that it is a serious mistake to dismiss someone because of their race.
I am particularly attracted to Kendi's point of view because I am coming from an academic background in which there are people who love to theorize and self-flagellate about sexism and racism and then dump all the service commitments and big first-year classes on women and faculty of color. "Oh, we need you to be a role model to these 450 freshmen; I'll sacrifice myself and teach this graduate class to my six graduate students instead." Academics are wonderful at knowing the right words to say, and just as shitty as anyone else when it comes to actual equity. Kendi has it right: from the article, “We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” This quite closely mirrors the actual phenomena I see in academia and industry.
> Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not
I’ve always noticed the opposite. Americans are a lot more forgiving of race than any other country. Even places like Sweden has serious problems with racism whereas US has lead so many positive changes and civil wars about racism.
Growing up in US white suburbs, we were taught by parents to be cognizant of racism and even small things like “African Americans, not black people”. Always had many immigrants and people of color in school. Race is at the center of America as it is the biggest melting pot of cultures in the world for over 2 centuries.
The Civil War was not about racism, it was about the South demanding that new states be slave states, which threatened the balance of power between the North and South. Lincoln literally only freed the slaves because he believed if would help preserve the Union. In his own words:
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...
Lincoln freed the slaves because it was expedient to do so. But it was a great act and certainly the right thing to do.
You were taught to be cognizant of racism because our country was a racial caste system for hundreds of years. Moreover, Jim Crow was less than a lifetime ago, racial redlining was legal as recently as the 1970's, and the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity existed as recently as 2010. Race is at the center of America because America put it at its center, time and time again.
I've made the simple statement that the US is farther along fighting racism than most of Europe and was downvoted for it.
There are places in Europe (mostly southern) where racism isn't even discouraged, still.
America draws the headlines because of it's violence, but it's progress on integration put Europe to shame. Not to say that both places have a lot of work to do, they do.
I’ve not gone over the background content you have. Why is a simple but sincere apology not enough? Why do I have to make myself feel like a horrible person for this subconscious faux pas?
Yes it’s an embarrassing. But to me, it’s like when meeting someone and you reach to shake their hand using your right hand out of habit but you don’t realize their right hand is full thus creating a awkward handshake interaction (especially if they don’t quickly offer a twisted left and laugh it off).
I’d prefer to focus on the problem (underrepresented black CEOs) instead of a symptom (subconscious “racism”).
Nobosy wants to be branded a racist despite how minor the faux pas may be. The correct attitude is to just apologize and move onto networking. Instead, these VCs are assuming that their mistake is going to anger the black man and that they need to get out of there before it turns ugly. A better understanding of how these mistakes are made would allow someone to realize that it's just better to acknowledge the mistake and work towards not doing it again. I think in this case, the problem and symptom are reversed. The subconscious racism of the VCs caused the black CEO to miss out on vital networking opportunities. It seems like that guy turned out ok but what if that was a critical time for him when that meeting could been the last shot at getting some investors before his company went bankrupt? Simply ignoring the issue and trying to get out of it was more harmful than just acknowledging it and moving past it.
It is stereotyping but not neccesarily racism. I've made the same mistake at a car shop, I thought the small lady on my side of the counter was a customer, i ignored her and talked to the guy behind the counter, but turns out she was the boss+worker and the guy was helping out. I did feel embarrassed, but I know it's not because I think less of women, you just don't see women in those roles a lot. Maybe associative generalization is a better term?
Why would the person on the victim end of this feel humiliated? I suspect,at least in part the body language offense and humiliation contributes to the awkwardness. Now, if they insist on treating the guy with less melanin as the boss even after being corrected...yeah, who wouldn't be pissed.
> Why would the person on the victim end of this feel humiliated?
Why wouldn't they? Being unfavorably stereotyped is almost universally frustrating and humiliating, regardless of any systemic concerns about racism and the like.
Wrt. the case mentioned by parent, it seems clear to me that the person involved should definitely apologize for their social faux pas and mistaken assumptions-- and that seeing them refuse to address the issue for fear of being regarded as racist or whatever would only result in even more frustration.
>> Why would the person on the victim end of this feel humiliated?
> Why wouldn't they? Being unfavorably stereotyped is almost universally frustrating and humiliating,
I'd say because feeling humiliated is a completely wrong feeling but maybe something is lost in translation?
Here is my attempt, note that I'm not a native English speaker and I also haven't been in the US for long enough to understand all American customs but I read a lot of English and write a lot English:
- if someone does a mistake in front of others the perpetrator will normally feel embarrassed
- if this happens often enough the victim will feel annoyed and frustrated
- humiliated on the other hand is when someone tells others about something dumb you did.
> - humiliated on the other hand is when someone tells others about something dumb you did.
The whole point of OP's article is to say nope, this is quite wrong. There's still a lot of unwarranted shame and, yes, humiliation attached to even something as ordinary as being CEO of a business-- if you happen to be Black. It's not an easy problem to solve, and most naïve, even well-intentioned suggestions don't necessarily help.
If someone spills a drink on you by mistake at a restaurant, you would be angry not embarrased. The humility belongs to the person that stepped on the figurative poo.
If you consistently get drinks spilled on you in restaurants, but none of your friends have drinks spilled on them, you might start feeling humiliated for constantly being singled out for that sort of thing... And how your mere presence in a group creates uncomfortable situations for both you, and everyone else involved.
Spilling a drink is not the same as ascribing a harmful and unfavorable stereotype. And being angry/embarassed is not mutually exclusive, you might feel a bit of both.
I don't see why that is stereotyping. I would assume that anyone on the customer side of the counter is a customer and anyone on the other side of the counter works there no matter what they look like.
If you had done that while she was on the other side of the counter or if she was wearing some kind of obvious uniform you'd have a point. However, if she was on your side of the counter and had no obvious signs of working there, there would be no reason to think she was anything but a customer.
The alternative would be to address all the customers as if they worked there, and that's just not practical.
Your example would be a case of sexism (sexual stereotyping), not racism (racial stereotyping). It may have been unintentional, but it was still sexism.
In this type of situation, the empathetic resolution would be to apologize for causing the victim's embarrassment, which most likely exceeds your own.
So, my point is, there is a big difference between intent and subconscious thought process. The latter can be fixed with apologies and education as you alluded. but the former can't and unless you believe someone intended the offense, you should not be offended. And the obvious answer to why I didn't apologize and why in the article they didn't apologize is because it makes them uncomfortable but more importantly,unless you intentionally practiced it, it is difficult to apologize without accepting weakness. Rule #1 of negotiation is never negotiate from a position if weakness. As the original comment suggests, this is indeed fragility, you feep weak for being wrong and you would feel a lot weaker if you said it out loud. The remedy in my opinion is to promote and have a culture where since childhood everyone is encouraged to see accepting social mishaps like this and apologizing as a strength.
It's not easy to say "sorry i was racist to you" and then briefly go on to talk about how you think their offer is bad and proposr something less (is it your racism again? ). It's a two way street is what I am saying, most people would see an apology as a weakness they can exploit.
Some people take the view that racism can't be defined as only coming from an individuals with intent. This is because the outcome of the actions are what hurts people, regardless of intent. So someone being hurt as a result of something subconscious, or a stereotype, are still experiencing racism. From this view racism has a systematic or societal definition. Where the society plays a part in transmitting and perpetuating stereotypes, and building the subconscious.
If you would prefer to withhold a deserved apology to avoid being perceived as "weak", that's your prerogative. However, making a sexual stereotype and then refusing to acknowledge it is a means of perpetuating sexism. It's true that systemic change is needed to eliminate sexism and racism, but society does not change all at once: every action (including every apology) contributes to the solution.
> Rule #1 of negotiation is never negotiate from a position if weakness. As the original comment suggests, this is indeed fragility, you feep weak for being wrong and you would feel a lot weaker if you said it out loud.
In my comment, I said that an apology would have been the proper resolution:
> In this type of situation, the empathetic resolution would be to apologize for causing the victim's embarrassment, which most likely exceeds your own.
And frankly, since you have called me a "radical" and a "commie" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23544865) because I had made two comments stating that an apology would be the correct approach in the situation, your perception of the Overton window needs some serious adjustment.
Assuming the lady wasn't wearing a uniform or name badge, and you didn't witness her interacting with the other staff and giving them instructions, you had no reason to think she was the boss of the shop. Would you have acted any differently if she was a man?
It's great that in your mind you also realized you had an implicit bias ("you just don't see women in those roles a lot"), but it doesn't seem like your implicit bias colored your interaction.
Racism needs not be voluntary to be racism. You just learn to expect some things to be more probable than others, but are those heuristics really based on actual facts or just biases?
If you expect some kind of people to be in charge rather than others, it is a symptom of widespread racism/sexism in your environment. You doing the "mistake" does not mean you necessarily, actively, try to cause harm. But you still do, and this wouldn't happen if not for racism.
> Why would the person on the victim end of this feel humiliated?
For the person doing the mistake, it was one particular case of embarassment, for the victim it was Tuesday. The constant rate of mistakes make it humiliating.
I think you meant to say "doesn't need to be voluntary". "Needs not to be" has exactly the opposite meaning, though it's an uncommon way to put it in English.
I am not a native English speaker and I appreciate being corrected about grammar and usage. I thought it was the same meaning as "doesn't need to", and looking around forums etc. I cannot find confirmation of what you describe. Do you have an example where the expression has the opposite meaning? Thanks.
You're actually correct in how you used it, as a native English speaker, although I think "need not be" is the preferred/correct form. I think this expression is a little less common in the US compared to the UK.
"Needs not to be" and "need not be" have sharply different meanings. "Racism need not be voluntary to be racism" would have been a perfectly clear and eloquent way to make the GP's point. But that extra "s" in "needs" changes the meaning entirely, at least in American English. Are you sure that this is not also the case in the UK? I'd be very surprised.
I agree that those are different, but I subconsciously read it as "need not be" and later assumed it was a mistype of that, not "needs not to be," as it's closer to the former than the latter.
It is racism (or sexism, but we'll stick with racism for the sake of rhetoric and the article) though. Calling it "not racism" is pandering to white fragility because people think of themselves as "not racist". Calling it "not racism" gives people an out to not confront their own internalized racism.
It's humiliating for the "victim" because this probably happens on a daily basis. Tell me that wouldn't kneecap your confidence to constantly have to correct people and massage their egos and reassure them you're not offended just so they give you money. It's forcing the victim to perform the emotional labor of remediating the offense. It's wrong and we let people off the hook far too easily for it.
Those "associative generalizations" are racism, sexism and homophobia in a nutshell. You (not you in particular, but yeah, kind of) have certain associations bound to race. Acknowledge it, confront those feelings, and deal with them. It's your problem, not theirs; yet we constantly give people a pass on their own internalized racism because the people who are systemically oppressed by said racism aren't really in a position to call them out.
I'm not saying you should be fired from your job or anything; just that you should acknowledge that your generalizations do harm to people. Educate yourself on the things they go through to build empathy. Don't make them do the work you should be doing yourself. And don't assume that because they're exhausted from dealing with this daily and so don't act offended that they're not harmed by it.
The anti-racism movement is about white people not giving other white people a pass for casual racism. We have forced marginalized people of color to do the work on this front for too long, when it's a problem within the white community. Expect to be called out aggressively on this stuff from here on out until you educate yourself on why it's harmful.
Risk is a substantial factor in addressing these situations IRL directly/outwardly.
Having faults and making mistakes is part of being a person that happen in life.
However, today, it’s extremely easily to only put faults under a microscope, reach an immediate determination, and then amplify that conclusion to the world.
Beyond a little embarrassment, it’s setting up living in fear of making any mistake and incentivizing avoidance. Suddenly one mistake, even a small one, could be someone’s last. Rather than breaking barriers that’s more like living with the KGB.
Perhaps the model some Koreans adhere to. Had some business contacts with them and noticed something peculiar and funny. They still have pretty tight hierarchies and a case when you can notice this is when you move between rooms or to a restaurant.
For them it seems to be pretty important to enter a room in hierarchic order. That means the boss goes first followed by rank of employees. It was hilarious to see them fall over their feet to adhere to these rules.
If you had a meeting they always came into the room in the same order. I invited them in after the first employees arrived but they insisted on waiting for their colleagues. After the gang had assembled, they entered in the predicted order.
If you visited another place, you should give them some room to reorder themselves. Otherwise it seems chaos ensues.
I know this is probably not a podcast that is frequently brought up here, but Chapo Trap House recently discussing their issues with the book White Fragility and brought up many of the same issues here (it's marketing material for a anti-racism instructor, the author is white, racism is presented as an issue that must be constantly atoned for in perpetuity [because DiAngelo would like to be hired in the future], it's geared towards the workplace which is inherently not a place people associate with emotional openness, it's geared towards what not to do as opposed to what to do, etc etc). I'm a longtime fan but I enjoyed it because i didn't know anything about White Fragility besides it's constant recommendations within the last few weeks.
What is currently causing huge divides and limiting progress is the incredibly flagrant accusations of racism where none exists.
There is nothing racist about confusing two people for each other based on them having the same skin tone. A two year old child might do it. This should be enough proof for anyone that the cause is not racism but the brain's pattern recognition system failing.
Accusing someone of racism used to be a serious charge. Now its used by many against anyone who makes any misstep where race is involved. This is diluting the charge the point of meaninglessness which provides cover for actual racism. It also repels people who see through it.
If someone mistakes two blonde people for each other, no reasonable person accuses that person of being bigoted against blondes on that basis. Their brain simply lumped those two people together using an inaccurate heuristic.
A black person without much exposure to asians might have trouble telling asians apart. A white person without much exposure to black people might make the same mistake.
In neither case is there even a hint of racism. Ignorance is not racism. It's perfectly okay not to have exposure to people of any race. Not living in a "melting pot" does not make someone a bad person.
It's also perfectly okay to have a brain that isn't great at distinguishing between people. This is just how human brains are and is nothing to be ashamed of. It is not grounds for guilt. And it's not grounds to accuse anyone of something as serious as racism.
I have found that the fragility in white fragility exists more commonly than merely racism. Racism, though, I imagine is clearly more identifiable and insulting, but the offending behaviors apply more widely than that. It comes down to assumptions and insecurities.
I really do get tired of dealing with this as a self taught white software developer. People have an expectation of how things should work and when that expectation is shattered or when it puts their reputation in question everything there after becomes defensive or a straw man. This is so prevalent and frustrating that I prefer to write software only as a hobby, discuss software in exceedingly delicate terms, and often desire to hide from it all by returning to the military (military is a part-time secondary employer for me). After a certain point this defensiveness and insecurity defines everything about the work.
As an example try to mention you are writing some fantastic new application that executes in the browser. The very first question, always, is what framework does it use. If the answer is none people have already stopped listening or begin attacking either your credibility or the capabilities of the application. So I have had to learn to tip toe around these sorts of conversations but it completely ignores the problem/solution aspect of the software which should be the center of conversation.
This entire story reminded me a lot of the story of the inventor of the gas mask[1] who had to hire a white actor to play as the inventor during presentations
Scary things don’t change and little progress has been made.
It seems like people from other ethnicities/countries have done well in Silicon Valley, e.g. India, China, Iran. Notably, CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Uber and others are brown-skinned.
Would they have done even better without the racism? Or what accounts for the difference?
The difference is hundreds of years of slavery and institutional discrimination specifically target toward blacks and all the accompanying cultural baggage. Part of that baggage is a deeply ingrained suggestion that black people are intellectually inferior but innately athletic.
That isn't to say that other ethnic groups don't deal with racism too. But it's different. An African American executive in a suit may be mistaken for being a waiter, but he's unlikely to be asked where he's "really from" like an Asian American.
> The difference is hundreds of years of slavery and institutional discrimination specifically target toward blacks and all the accompanying cultural baggage. Part of that baggage is a deeply ingrained suggestion that black people are intellectually inferior but innately athletic.
How can you say this with complete certainty? How could you ever be sure?
That's kind of a non-response isn't it? The way things are is always determined by the events that came before. It doesn't mean you've correctly identified the right events.
I think it's easy to point at something like slavery as the underlying cause, but Europeans had no issue looking down on blacks before they had the idea to import them to the new world as slaves, and Europe adopted similar attitudes toward blacks with no slaves present.
> That's kind of a non-response isn't it? The way things are is always determined by the events that came before. It doesn't mean you've correctly identified the right events.
Then name the events.
I happen to think that slavery shaped American culture and American history. I find it improbable that a country would have race-based chattel slavery for several centuries but no significant cultural baggage. If that were the case, why then did the South fight Reconstruction? What was the purpose of Jim Crow? Those were concerted efforts to undermine the freedom of black people in particular. If there were no baggage, why didn't everyone just let bygones be bygones?
> Europeans had no issue looking down on blacks before they had the idea to import them to the new world as slaves
Even if that were true, it would not negate my claim. Europeans could have generally "looked down on blacks" before and then created specific slavery-justifying stereotypes about blacks as slavery became profitable.
> Europe adopted similar attitudes toward blacks with no slaves present
There were slaves in Europe. In fact, the British empire didn't abolish slavery until 1833. But even if there weren't slaves in Europe, that would not have precluded intercultural transmission of negative stereotypes about black people. There was little black slavery in Asia, but you'll find many of the same stereotypes about black people there. Countries don't exist in a vacuum.
I didn't claim to know the answer, just that your claims lacked support.
Of course slavery shaped American history, and thus its culture, but step back and imagine it never happened. Let's say the first blacks arrived in the US in 1990.
I'd still expect a similar level of racism toward blacks, because that's true globally. Even people in somewhere like rural China who have never met a black person are likely to look down on them.
Some of the Southern goofiness would be gone like you point out, but overall I'd unfortunately expect a remarkable similar situation.
Where is your evidence? I think the null hypotheses, i.e. we don't know, is more probable then what a appears to be an unsubstantiated conclusion that you wrote.
The groups which you mention, most of those Indians, Chinese and others who come to US go through a filtering process in terms of student or work visa. So you get educated, successful and highly motivated people who also have higher incomes compared to the average income in their native countries.
The US is is literally getting "good" immigrants from those countries. You are not getting the poor unmotivated individuals.
These motivated individuals will pass on those characteristics and their wealth to their kids.
The current African American's ancestors had no such filtering process, combine that with systematic racism and poverty its not too hard to imagine why they fall behind.
Asian immigrants largely pass through a selection filter of wealth and education before they can immigrate (in tech at least, thanks to H1-B), so the ones you see have largely been preselected and show up in a large peer group.
The Chinese or Indian person next to you at work who came to US on an H1B or education visa was much more elite in their home country than you are in yours, on average.
This is an interesting and in-depth article that was inappropriately flagged. I've turned off the flags.
I understand the impulse to flag follow-up stories [1], especially on the hottest controversies of the moment, which always produce a flood of articles, most of which aren't very good. Curiosity and repetition don't go together [2]. But it's important to recognize the articles that are higher than median quality and not simply flag an entire category mechanically. Curiosity isn't mechanical either.
For me, the discussion of your action here confirms, even more strongly, that not only is the bias real, but also it is sometimes completely opaque to people who hold that bias.
Thanks for unflagging it, otherwise I would have missed it I'm sure.
The problem is that everyone has his own personal experiences. In my surroundings I've seen black women get funding where white men did not. I've seen minorities preferred in hiring.
The world has changed drastically in the last five years. It is white men who feel silenced in the tech industry, by HR, the press, CEOs and activists.
So the article can be true of course, but it aligns less and less with what we see in the field.
I see it differently, I recognize that my personal experiences are not in any way indicative of everyone's experiences, and so when I talk to others I try to hear their experiences in similar situations. That helps me understand or at least appreciate the variability in the system.
My earliest experience with this was seeing the difference in how people with college degrees from "good schools", "no-name schools", and "technical college" were treated during hiring at all of the companies where a third party put into place hiring policies.
Each of those people has their own "personal experience" about how easy or hard it is to find a job in the bay area. And those personal experiences are very different than mine.
It's strange for mlpgx from talking about how everyone's experience is unique to declaring a universal silencing of all white men (for all white men, some of whom I'm sure wouldn't agree) based on "what we see in the field."
I don't believe the data aligns with your anecdotes. While you may feel that is the experience today, I would be surprised if it represented the wider system as a whole.
His anecdotes is a way of putting what he's saying down.
If it was a minority person saying something about their experiences that you didn't agree with, would you refer to them as their anecdotes?
What you are asking is a diversion -- he's not a minority, he's part of the dominant social group (at least from my reading). I'm not saying his experiences didn't happen, I'm saying they contradict the wider view. It has nothing to do with whether I agree or not -- his feelings are absolutely his feelings, likewise his experiences. They just aren't representative of the wider whole.
dang, I just wanted to thank you for unflagging it. There have been a number of stories in the news over the past few weeks that have opened my eyes to realities I wasn't aware of, and this is one more valuable one. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
I flagged it because it is an article written to promote further bias, while under the guise of 'exposing racism'. If you think promoting race politics is the goal of HN, I will find a different forum. My time in SV could not have been more different than what this boased article proports. Fuck identity politics and fuck bloomberg, and fuck you for promoting this drivel.
> It's not race politics or gender politics. It's simply a fact of life for people who aren't white males.
Or you can simply find a viable business model and remain bootstrapped without running to VCs for capital all the time, which is just like begging to have another boss, when in reality, they're creating a gigantic exit scam IPO or may pull out with their cash at anytime. [0][1]
What I find interesting among the woke crowd (white leftys): they believe any claim a black person makes - especially when it is "their experience." They don't question what that person says - because they are black. It is particularly interesting that the education system is actively teaching our youth - especially black youth - that racism is prevalent today. Teaching young people that they are hated by others (albeit whites) simply because of their skin color (without evidence to the claim) is the reason why we have a race war - not because "the majority whites are keeping blacks down/killing them/etc."
There is zero evidence supporting the claim that racism is prevalent - widespread in the US in 2020. None. Zip. Zero. Racism is not the majority. It is amazing to me that people are getting duped into this race war... all at the benefit of the powerful and political elite.
> This is an interesting and in-depth article that was inappropriately flagged. I've switched off the flags.
Consider that people are not flagging it because "it's a follow up article", but because a) it's Bloomberg, ergo hard to believe b) it's the seven billionth "minorities in tech" story in the past month c) it's not going to create an interesting comment section d) they don't find it as interesting as you do.
It's your site of course, but if "moderators build the front page" is the new modus operandi, I'll be disappointed.
(b) I addressed this point thoroughly in the comment you're replying to.
(c) You probably shouldn't complain about the comment section's interestingness while contributing to lowering it. It remains to be seen how interesting this thread will end up being. One reason we try to focus on the most substantive articles is that they usually lead to better comments.
(d) Plenty of users, to judge by upvotes, find this article interesting. Those who flagged it presumably didn't. The tug of war between upvotes and flags is one of the axes around which HN turns. It works surprisingly well, but it's not perfect. It has failure modes, and human intervention is the only way to address them.
(e) HN is a moderated/curated/however you want to call it kind of site. It always has been. HN's system is built out of three subsystems: the community, the software, and moderation. They interact in complex feedback loops. All three are necessary and all three have their limits.
This article is original reporting. They interviewed 20 black tech leaders. The people they're quoting could hardly be more credible.
There are just as many reasons to dismiss every other large media outlet. You may have a bee in your bloomberg bonnet, but there are just as many bees in NYT bonnets and all the other bonnets. Obviously we're not going to ban all those sites; what we're going to do instead, hopefully, is pick the best articles and discuss them thoughtfully. Shallow/generic site dismissals aren't that, so please stop.
> b) it's the seven billionth "minorities in tech" story in the past month
I would urge people to stop and question that if they are tired of the "billion"s of stories about BIPOC, what must BIPOC be feeling about their systemic erasure from many facets of our society, including journalism and entrepreneurship. This article allows us to think about and discuss those issues.
The article is not hard to believe, is one of substance that I find interesting, and the content of the comment section is not the only arbiter of what should go on Hacker News.
I would suggest that Occam's Razor is a better tool here; a small number of people who want to silence the idea the article presents are trying to silence it.
As a less rhetorical answer, that might help some people if not the OP – as an Asian man in America, I have to worry about people making stupid jokes about my perceived culture, but usually not about getting the police called on me and being shot dead because I'm examining a BB gun that is on sale at Walmart [1] (sometimes, there are exceptions [2]).
BIPOC puts this group of people (Black and Indigenous) as a separate group before POC, since they face these challenges of simply surviving in society while doing what most of the "rest of us" consider normal activities. At first I was puzzled about why indigenous people were included, but then realized, for example, that Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other ethnic group [3].
Adding to this from the BIPOC Project [0]
"We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context."
Not all groups face the same oppression and this term intentionally names the two groups which are systematically the most oppressed in a US context.
Thanks for the explanation. As a European observing from afar, I hadn't come across the BIPOC acronym until I started reading this thread. I was also unaware that police violence against native Americans was such big a problem as described in the CNN article.
I'm black and I haven't come across the BIPOC term either. But it does a good job of encapsulating the differences in how society treats and processes visible minorities. Asian folk have their issues, but there isn't the same aspect of "assumed criminality" that is faced with black and indigenous groups.
Doesn't the "POC" term promote the idea that "people of color" have some sort of shared interests? Yet, is that always true?
Person A is an upper-middle class Indian. They study software engineering at university in India. They immigrate to the United States and get a job working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
Person B is a working class African-American. Nobody in their family has ever been to university. They work in a service job and live in the suburbs of Atlanta.
What do A and B actually have in common? It seems to me, probably not very much. Their life experiences are very different. A lives a much more privileged life than B. Probably, A actually has more in common with, and more commonality of interests, with their Caucasian American colleagues than with B. Given that, doesn't labelling them both as "POC" obscure more than it reveals?
It also completely ignores the problem that India has with anti-African racism and violence, see e.g – https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/24/the-harsh-reality-of-be... – something of which person A may of course be personally entirely innocent, but then again maybe not. If anything, I think the term "POC" is deeply Western-centric (and even US-centric), and presumes that racism and racial conflict is always whites-against-everyone else, when in the wider world it often isn't. (Africans in India, Uighurs and Tibetans in China–and, I think the case of China shows, trying to blame European colonialism for non-Western racism doesn't always work. Or, again, consider how Japan treated Koreans.)
I think the term BIPOC is potentially problematic in that it presents African-American and Native American interests as being more aligned than maybe they actually are. What is the foundational story of US history? The New York Times' 1619 Project presents it as being the Atlantic slave trade. Why that, and not the dispossession of Native Americans? Many African-Americans (and even many Caucasian Americans) seem to want to privilege the African-American narrative over the Native American narrative. Are Native Americans okay with that? I'm sure at least some are not. But lumping them together as "BIPOC" serves to obscure, even erase, these tensions.
(Throwaway because, I hope people can appreciate my comments are an attempt to approach these issues thoughtfully, but in today's climate one has to be very careful what one says.)
> Doesn't the "POC" term promote the idea that "people of color" have some sort of shared interests?
Think highlight rather than promote.
Think shared experience rather than shared interest.
No, not identical experience, but think overlapping parts of a venn diagram. A relevant example in that overlap, assumed criminality, is mentioned in the very comment you are replying to.
And sure, it's probably very Western-centric and doesn't encapsulate the complicated relations amongst many different races, nationalities, and ethnicities. Not sure why one would expect a single phrase to accomplish such.
> I think the term BIPOC is potentially problematic in that it presents African-American and Native American interests as being more aligned than maybe they actually are.
Do you have a similar issue with the LGBT framing?
> Think highlight rather than promote. Think shared experience rather than shared interest. No, not identical experience, but think overlapping parts of a venn diagram. A relevant example in that overlap, assumed criminality, is mentioned in the very comment you are replying to.
How much shared experience does a professional class recent immigrant from Asia actually have with a working class African-American? For very many of the former, the "assumed criminality" is largely a non-issue. (Even the example mentioned in quadrifoliate's comment was presented as an exception rather than the norm.)
And, might not recent immigrants from Asian countries have shared experiences in common with immigrants from Europe? quadrifoliate mentioned experiencing stupid jokes about his perceived culture, but dumb ethnic jokes and stereotypes are something that European-descended ethnic minorities have to put up with too. At school, my half-Italian friend had to put up with jokes about his dad being in the mafia; there is a long tradition of jokes presenting Irish people as stupid; etc. Yet the Italians/Irish/Greeks/etc who have to put up with these dumb jokes and stereotypes are not classified as "people of color", while the same experience had by an Asian person is put forward as justification for classifying them as such.
> Do you have a similar issue with the LGBT framing?
Yes. To give just one example, a number of lesbian feminists have criticised that framing as over-emphasising the commonality of interests between gay men and lesbian women and under-emphasising the extent to which their interests conflict with each other. see e.g. https://we.riseup.net/assets/168538/Sheila%20Jeffreys%20The%...
> How much shared experience does a professional class recent immigrant from Asia actually have with a working class African-American?
Not much, but the shared experience they have is as a basis of the color of their skin is what is visualized when calling them a person of color. And historically, that has been a big deal (e.g. anti-miscegnation laws in the US and huge amounts of racial discrimination in India's colonized past) – big enough that a lot of people think it's important enough to have a shared label.
> And, might not recent immigrants from Asian countries have shared experiences in common with immigrants from Europe?
Sure! And using the term "immigrant", we would classify their shared experience as such. A recent "professional class immigrant" could be a person of color having something in common with a working class African American, and something in common with the Italian immigrant.
It's like Gmail v/s traditional mailboxes with folders. An email can have multiple labels in Gmail. So can a person in real life.
> Not much, but the shared experience they have is as a basis of the color of their skin is what is visualized when calling them a person of color. And historically, that has been a big deal (e.g. anti-miscegnation laws in the US and huge amounts of racial discrimination in India's colonized past) – big enough that a lot of people think it's important enough to have a shared label.
Suppose a new, professional class / university-educated immigrant, arrives in the US from China tomorrow. Should they expect to be discriminated against in the US because of their color of skin specifically? I can imagine they might have good reason to fear being discriminated against becasue of concerns they might have links with the Chinese government – but, suppose they were instead a Taiwanese immigrant, or Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese? In any event, being discriminated against because of concerns about foreign government links is not discrimination on the basis of skin color specifically, any more than the Russian-American refused a security clearance because her brother has a job in the Kremlin is such a case. And, I'm sure they might be exposed to various stereotypes and misunderstandings that immigrants have to endure, dumb jokes, people mocking their accent or infelicities with the English language – but an immigrant from a European country might endure just as many stereotypes and misunderstandings – which suggests that none of those issues are due to their skin color specifically either. And how much relevance will anti-miscegenation laws, that were overturned over 50 years ago, have to the lived experience of a new immigrant arriving tomorrow?
Does a new Chinese immigrant have the same skin color as an African-American? Do Xi Jinping and Barack Obama have the same skin color? Do all "white" people have the same skin color? A Southern Italian and a Norwegian can look as far apart in skin tone as Xi and Obama do.
>(Throwaway because, I hope people can appreciate my comments are an attempt to approach these issues thoughtfully, but in today's climate one has to be very careful what one says.)
Black Lives Matter was a movement started specifically about the policing of black people and black communities. I haven’t read about any people groups taking offense at this terminology except for white people who cannot come to accept that, for instance, “save the rainforest” does not mean you don’t care about deforestation generally but rather is meant to draw attention to a very real issue even if you happen to care about the longevity of all forests.
I saw someone else here arguing with statistics and apparently police kill a lot of white folks, too, and the rates aren't much different than blacks. What does happen, though, is blacks are disproportionately targeted by police in many other non-lethal-but-still-terrible ways.
This is an incorrect reading of the term. BIPOC is US-specific. You'd have to look at teachings from Sami activists to see the most useful framing for indigenous erasure in Scandinavia. Also, it does not place black and indigenous people as not POC, the aim is "undoing Native invisibility, anti-Blackness, dismantling white supremacy and advancing racial justice."[0]. It instead centers the two groups who have been the most marginalized in the US.
Limiting yourself to two seems too stringent when it is just a letter in an acronym. There has been huge anti Chinese and anti Japanese sentiment in the US. I may start thebijpoccproject.com to address the invisibility of Asians in the mind of US anti racism advocates.
I'm trying to be as inclusive as I can be, and I have been told that BIPOC is an inclusive term. If there is a better term here, please let me know so I can use it. I was discussing American society in particular, so the Sami might not be relevant.
Either way, it would be nice if we could look at my comment as doing what I can to not be offensive, instead of nitpicking an argument that is clearly trying. Instead of tearing it down, do you have another suggestion?
I'm not saying I have a problem with you using the term, I'm saying I don't understand why it isn't just "PoCs" any more and what was lacking with that.
I don't buy into this theory that all Bloomberg content must be difficult to believe by default. There have been bad articles but I don't see a reason to automatically discount all articles.
I understand the impression, but the truth is that no one knows how to make a forum that runs without moderation/curation while remaining interesting and surviving growth. I wish we did; it would be awesome. I could work on the code instead of writing tedious comments and getting accused of opposite things by angry people.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm always looking for ways to relax control and intervene less, partly because control and intervention are work, and partly because I like the Tao Te Ching.
dang, as the recipient of admonishments from you, I can only say: thank you. Your work ensures this site retains its high value.
That may read as a suck-up but it's genuine gratitude -- this is my go-to site and the value comes from the dialog here, far more than the articles themselves.
I joined a growing team in South Africa as the only black in ~40; and a foreigner to boot. When I left 3 years later we were only 2 out of 120. In the years that I was there, I probably participated in about 100+ interviews. In that whole time, I never got a single black South African interviewee. Not even for an internship! To be clear, I had phone screens with folks from Egypt, Pakistan, UK, Nigeria etc. I think the black community in South Africa is in a wedge.
My 2 cents: Systemic issues probably cause them to rarely progress to white collar jobs. The kids in the education system don't see any benefit in progressing to higher education because, they don't know anyone in their family/neighborhood who made it. Compound it with schools that have gangs in them [1] and an easy choice appears. 1. Slog through education with probably no chance of a good job (from a young person's view point) or 2. Join this gang, make money, drive fast cars and belong.
This is what shocks me the most about this whole thing. You should ask your clients to introduce themselves and their roles so that you can better communicate and work with them, no matter if they're all the same ethnicity, or completely diverse or anywhere in between.
It's always fascinating to me how the most liberal and progressive areas of our society are the ones who exhibit the most functional racism.
This is the manifestation of the bigotry of low expectations that is so engrained in Silicon Valley. When you live your life grouping people of a certain skin color into a protected class that you the hero white person need to save, you automatically assume that every person you see of that class is of diminished status.
As a non-American non-SV resident, every time I visit there I feel like I've stepped into the '60s. All the developers and managers are white or asian, and all the janitors, cooks, security guards, bus drivers, etc. are black or hispanic. Silly Valley talks the talk, very loudly, but they don't walk the walk.
Perhaps the answer is obvious, but what's the point of such a thought experiment? The issue is how to deal with the world we actually live in. "It would be just as bad in an opposite world" does not sound like a useful finding.
Definitely possible, but unlikely. You’ll find that people of all minority groups make similar assumptions. There were even a few examples in this thread and the article.
That’s a part of why there is such a big push for better minority representation on all fields. VC partnerships, boards, upper management, etc. More diversity means more models of what a successful VC, CEO, Entrepreneur, etc looks like.
People base their beliefs on prior probabilities, before any new evidence is provided.
If all you've ever seen are white CEOs, then it's probably very reasonable to assume that the white guy in a meeting also is the CEO.
It's not racist, but just how your brain works on the priors.
I know that people should strive to not be assuming, but in the end, the brain is an exceptional pattern recognizer, and very much works in subconscious ways.
edit: And before anyone starts claiming racism; I'm just saying that this is how humans work. You collect data all the time, and (hopefully) update your beliefs on said new evidence.
Where I live, it's not that uncommon to found a tech company and step down as the "nominal" CEO a few months later to put in place a white guy—the right shade of white—who fits the expectations of customers and partners. The original founder may still be the one making executive decisions, but he/she is not the public face anymore.
I was once working at a startup in the south bay area, where "white developer" was not one of the people who was able to do what we wanted, as an engineer, for a startup which had a tech foundation. This was a big problem for most companies.
The thing is, this group had really terrible problems in the first place.
Most startups are very different from the valley because of the nature of technical talent. But the people who come from the valley are pretty good at what they do.
The problem is the lack of culture.
In most companies there are only a few minorities:
* There are enough great tech people that want to start their own companies.
* Some have to get a job as a software developer, because there's a strong market saturation of smart people right in the first place.
* There are few places a tech founder can get to start a startup.
Couple of years ago me and few other guys (highly qualified and paid SAP engineers all) have been sitting in beer garden in Dusseldorf. The waiter had been friendly and asks:
- Where are you guys from?
- From Poland
- Oh, you have came here to purchase some old cars, right?
Did you realize that Abraham Lincoln was a racist? Did you realize that almost everyone who hasn't undergone a lifetime of "anti-racist" propaganda is a racist?
Anyway, as to the subject of the article, I think it was covered in an episode of "The Jeffersons".
> Did you realize that Abraham Lincoln was a racist?
I think signing the Emancipation Proclamation, prosecuting the Civil War, and ultimately paying for it all with his life, give him a pass for his personal views that would be considered "racist" by today's standards. In Lincoln's case, actions really spoke far louder than words.
Wasn't one of his primary motives to cripple the Confederacy by signing the Emancipation Proclamation? In other words, he didn't simply do it because it was the right thing to do.
> I’m glad there’s now a vibrant discussion about black tech entrepreneurs and VC. Now might be a good time to discuss an elephant in the room: the systematic pushing aside of Black founders to make way for a White CEO who is “bankable”. Happens more often than not. I’ve seen this happen in two tech bull mkts; I hope those who have newfound interest in Black founders don’t repeat this same mistake
Here's the way it goes: Black Founder has an idea they're passionate about; could be demographically anchored, or just a great idea and they're Black. By some Miracle they raise a seed. They go off, build product, get some revenue even...
Now it's Series A time. Again, by some Miracle they raise a VC Series A. They're now part of the rate 1% of VC backed founders who are black. They add to their board 1-2 VC's from the usual suspects. They start to build a team...
Here's where the move is made. Somewhere between A and going for a B, the VC's on the board call the founder for a "chat". They "strongly suggest" that the founder get some "help" in order to get the company to the next stage. And they know just the guy...
'Cause it's always a guy. I call him "Business Biff". He looks like he's stepped out of central casting for "White Dude CEO". The Board VC's explain that Biff can "help" raise the next round, and "you two should really work together".
Black Founder says: "Ok, cool. Will reach out to Biff on a few things if I need him". VC's give the puzzled, RCA Dog-watching-TV-Look. "You know, we think Biff should really come on board the company to help you out ". "As What?" asks the Black Founder. "I already have a head of Sales/Finance/Marketing/etc"..."Well, we were thinking Biff should become CEO, and you become Chairman" "Sayyyyy whaaaa?" says Black Founder. "Am I being fired?". "Oh, No!" say the VC's. "We want you to stay and guide the strategy, Biff will be responsible for the day to day, and putting together the fundraise"
Not going to go into the details but here's essentially what happens:.
1. VC's realize that having a Black CEO creates financing RISK for the next round.
2. Best way to reduce the risk is to bring in a CEO who "pattern matches"
3. The problem is they still need the Founder. They still need the Founder for (a) mkt knowledge (b) passion so he/she doesn't get fired. But the bump to Chairman is designed to "keep them working, but not in control". It's straight out of the unopened letter in "Invisible Man".
There's a lot more here, but I'm raising the point now so that people realize that downstream of funding, there are still a ton of practices which need reforming. The kicker: The VC's decided to bring Biff in when they did the A. In fact, the seed investors may have suggested it, and backchanneled it to the A rounders. The bottom line is that even the investors realized blackness as a "risk" that needs to be managed down/out.
Bringing in Biff is what VCs always do. Or at least always used to do. I've encountered it personally. The term they used was "seasoned executive". Biff is a better name.
I'm not doubting Timothy's experience, but if he's right, the point would have to be that VCs bring-in-Biff more often with black founders than they do white ones. Which seems entirely plausible, but that's not the argument I think I'm reading here.
Even if they weren't bringing in Biff more often with black founders than white founders, if the pool from which they select Biff is overwhelmingly white men, the effect is still that black founders get pushed aside in favor of white men.
Even if their selection process for Biff was completely gender / race blind, as long as the primary qualification for Biff is "has previously been CEO" then the next generation of companies will continue to inherit the previous generation of companies' demographics.
If all Biffs are white, but not all whites are Biffs, does it make sense to lump the non-Biff whites in Biff's race, for purposes of stereotype/bias analysis? Maybe "white" is too vague.
There are plenty of stories on the internet of this happening to white CEOs as well. The skills to go from start-up to series A are very different from series B to IPO.
Now that's not to say race wasn't an issue in this particular case. I don't know.
The great thing about modern racism is that no one can ever prove race was an issue in any particular case unless you confess it. As long as you don't express racist sentiments out loud, you'll always have some form of plausible deniability.
Serious question: is it legal for someone not to correct an incorrect assumption? Let's say a black CEO invites his white friend to a pitch meeting as a wingman, VC says "oh great to meet you Will" assuming the white man is the CEO. And no one ever corrects him. In this way, perhaps the company would be able to access funds not normally provided to black folks. The white man would probably need to be an executive of some sort (CFO maybe) and both would need to sign whatever paperwork, and only then would it become apparent to the VC who's who.
It's ridiculous that I even need to ask this question, and doing this literally just steps aside the racism problem rather than addressing it, so it might cause more harm than good, but until racism is solved (possibly a multi generational shift) something like this might help some people out.
I feel like this should be the plot of a short film; where the black man is revealed to be the CEO and the viewer is challenged to rethink their assumptions. If I had an ounce of creativity I'd totally make it if it doesn't already exist.
The thing is, it’s things like this that would actively hinder racism from going away - actively concealing black CEOs to VC firms would continue to have destructive consequences.
Five days ago, the National Association of Black Journalists revised their style guide:
'For the last year, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) has been integrating the capitalization of the word "Black" into its communications.
However, it is equally important that the word is capitalized in news coverage and reporting about Black people, Black communities, Black culture, Black institutions, etc.
NABJ's Board of Directors has adopted this approach, as well as many of our members, and recommends that it be used across the industry.
We are updating the organization's style guidance to reflect this determination. The organization believes it is important to capitalize "Black" when referring to (and out of respect for) the Black diaspora.
NABJ also recommends that whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalized, including White and Brown.'
This appears to have been part of what prompted a large number of newspapers to change their style guides this past week, including USA Today, NBC News, MSNBC, the LA Times, the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Washington Post.
> At The Root, we’ve had a long-standing debate over capitalizing the “B” in black. Some of us are adamantly for it, while others (myself included) are grammar freaks who think that if we capitalize “black” we would also have to capitalize “white,” and I, personally, have no interest in that as it would continue to center whiteness.
It's a really interesting story, actually! The question of whether and when to capitalize has been an active one since at least the early 20th century. Here's a (very) recent Columbia Journalism Review article that discusses it from a stylistic perspective:
And I also thought that this article, about the Brookings Institution's decision to capitalize Black in their reports, had some interesting historical context:
Capitalizing White seems extremely weird, though, and somehow emblematic of how we're sliding backwards into a racialized consciousness even while trying (and hopefully succeeding) to step forwards toward equality.
This. The words "white" and "black" are not proper names of places, and they aren't honorifics. To say I'm "White" would be like saying I'm "Fat" or "Tired".
I'm not sure that argument works grammatically because we capitalize things that aren't names of places, but I agree with you in the sense that it's the feeling I got while reading the article, and it was strangely creepy.
FWIW, there is "capital D" Deaf and "little d" deaf. This article provides some interesting discussion [0].
I'm not claiming to be an expert in either area, and I don't mean to draw parallels between them. I think it just speaks to how complicated identity is for humans, not to even begin to mention empathy.
Chicago Manual of Style says either is ok. It's pretty typical to capitalize, e.g. Hispanic, Arab, Asian, but Black and White have a slightly different use and capitalization history.
The AP, I believe, prefers lowercasing both. Some publications will capitalize just Black. Discussions of casing these words go back at least a decade, but I don't believe there's a strong consensus yet?
This is somewhat tangential to the article, but I've written about this previously. I think a big first step would be to stop talking about race for different skin colours.
I'm always surprised that "race" is so commonly adopted in conversations even by campaigners against racism, as a European I always cringe. The term implies a genetic difference where there isn't any and thus contributes to systematic racism/discrimination IMO, words do matter.
Well, there’s at least gotta be the genetic difference that makes black people’s skin black, or Asian people’s eyes narrower. For a biologist, it probably makes sense. In common situations though I agree race is kind of a “strong word” to describe this. How do you avoid it?
I am not convinced about the argument the authors try to make about Silicon Valley, and VCs'. I also see cherry-picking of data to make the point ("...0.4% of people who received venture capital were Black..."), okay so how many Black people applied? How many other races? How many white? Etc. We cannot form the full picture since other critical variables have been ommitted without providing cross-references to the study. That reduces credibility of the article.
As for where should a VC invest, I think it is his/her decision alone, and nobody else has any say that. Including the article's author.
> the simple phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is seen as a political dog whistle, rather than a desperate cry to bring attention to a dire situation that many people choose not to see.”
A little off-topic, but I notice a lot of the "All Lives Matter" people are mistaking the term "Black Lives Matter" as valuing black lives over others. I wonder if "Black Lives Matter Too" would convey its message better.
This has been discussed to death since the group started. The name was intentionally chosen and too was purposefully left off. If the phrase invokes a negative reaction but phrases like "Save the rainforest" or events like breast cancer awareness month don't invoke a similar reaction then it's meant to be introspective. I saw it translated with too in parenthesis in foreign newspapers in the beginning but not recently.
Several years in people constantly arguing all lives matter and disingenuously arguing the point after correction are also a good filter for trolls.
I have found that people replying with "All Lives Matter" are willfully trying to not understand where BLM is coming from. I've seen it so consistently, in so many contexts, from so many different people that I can't consider it a misunderstanding. It's more at the level of "I know you are but what am I."
50% of the US has below 100 IQ. There is literally nothing you can do if some people can’t understand the meaning that “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t mean “Only
Black Lives Matter”. I think it’s a small but loud percentage of the people believe this.
More than a response this seems a rhetorical fallacy: "If they don't agree with me they're stupid". Maybe some of these people want to resolve racism but disliske the BLM methods? Are they stupid?
There’s nothing to disagree with. It’s been explained that “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t mean “Only Black Lives Matter” ad nauseum. If you still choose to say “All Lives Matter” then you’re being purposefully stupid. And that’s well explained by the fact that there are 150 million people with below average intelligence in the US. Of those 150M, there tens of millions that are one standard deviation lower than average. This explains the overreaction to the name.
this article title is so racist. stop normalizing it and represent the success stories.
the whole, "X is so marginalized and victimized," narrative represents negative stereotypes and reinforce a victimhood identity that only disempowers X, and reinforces to the dominant ethnic groups' superiority narrative
few would believe that such psyop propaganda is part of systemic racism, lured instead by the virtue signaling and fake "solidarity" parroting such victimization narratives would seem to yield. but it is.
you'll resist the idea I propose by saying, highlighting how bad everything is, is doing something about it, while pretending there's no problem is part of the problem.
viewing another way you'll see that editorializing to consistently represent a problem is a problem.
but such psyop propaganda is so embedded in the politically corrected social discourse programming that few will be able to escape
you'll most likely dismiss this idea by pretending this idea is just apologizing for racism.
it will be very hard for you to see beyond that but you should try, it's worth it.
> Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.
Statements like this make it clear that this opinion is either highly uneducated or clearly not in good faith.
Time and time again, black people in America will tell you that they have to sit their kids down and explain in fine grain detail what do to if the cops pull them over so they are not killed, a conversation virtually no white people have. People don't have death wishes.
And even when people cooperate to the letter, people who do everything right still get brutalized or killed regularly.
Thank you for this perspective. I was unaware of what you describe. Also, thank you for not assuming bad faith.
This conversation is difficult to have, but I would be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't state what I thought was true and if I was unwilling to be publicly wrong. Downvotes are more instructive than upvotes.
> Society pretending that there is massive racism when there isn't is itself structural racism.
If you believe you cannot succeed due to all this racism, that will be sulf-fulfilling.
Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job
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The grandparent is victim-blaming PoC for not having the "Right mentality". The comment itself is what has been identified as polite racism, but I see this as rather rude.
I'm not blaming the victim, I'm blaming all the white people who are scared to death of being seen as racist and who eagerly point out minor behaviours and scream "racism." I'm not blaming blacks for these beliefs, I'm blaming the society that drills them into their heads.
With respect and goodwill (appreciate that you actually seem to be coming to the comments to learn), it's very hard to read your comment in that way when you say things like:
> Society pretending that there is massive racism when there isn't is itself structural racism
I'm not sure where is best to start here because there are so many things that have to go into actually believing that, and so many combinations, but there are tons of resources floating around so I truly do encourage you to seek those out.
A basic starting point list beyond police brutality: public school funding systems, household wealth inequality and lack of reparations + exponential investment growth, medical treatment differences (go look up the guides for black people in the US to get proper medical treatment from a doctor), the prison industrial complex, the criminalization of drugs in the US + its history, crack vs powder cocaine sentencing laws, parole laws
If you prefer movie format: 13th, I Am Not Your Negro, The House I Live In
> I am saying that the level of racism is low
This sums up why your comment go downvoted so far. The social media world is overflowing with resources showing the opposite right now with extensive evidence and research. It has always been there but it has never been more accessible.
I will indeed find and watch those movies. I'm aware of the drug laws and the powder/crack issue, and I agree that is structural racism and is very wrong. My entire life I've been on the side of legalization of drugs. I'm watching a lot of social media, and I read as much as I can on this issue. There are methodological issues with many of the other topics/claims you mention, but I won't drag us into the weeds.
I am a contrarian by nature; I'm always motivated to find fault with the prevailing narrative, not to confirm it, irrespective of the topic. Contrarians provide a useful service to society, but due to highly inflammed emotions, this particular topic has been nearly unapprochable by contrarians. Most are keeping their mouths shut. The result is IMHO people going too far in one direction because they are not hearing counterveiling data/opinions/reasoning.
I'd also encourage you to learn about how recently it was legal to, e.g., redline districts in cities. It became illegal in 1977, but that doesn't mean that it stopped then.
If you legally forced minorities out from owning the property that has appreciated the most, you've created a generation of inequality -- people in their 30s and 40s today are likely dealing with the setback policies like this caused. It's not some far off history for Americans, it's very much a contemporary problem.
When one side has suffered injustice for 400 years, people who are working to make sure the other side doesn't experience any injustice by something swinging too far and needing correction (at the cost of prolonged injustice for the already suffering side) are making a claim about who is more important. When there is injustice to be fixed, contrarians against it are effectively saying "the oppressed group's rights are less important than the oppressor's rights". You are literally slowing progress and extending injustice. When you argue the minutiae and get into the weeds, while some may be valid, the practical effect is it works to invalidate the full idea thanks to how humans work and generally are not good with nuance.
All of this ignores two central flaws in the concept of a "contrarian":
1. The "going to far" that people seem to be so concerned with has few to no examples, while history is littered with injustices not corrected far enough every step of the way. Literally the story of black people in the United States, at every step, can be summarized by "not far enough".
2. There is an implicit claim here that in order to critique and improve the prevailing narrative, you need to be taking the other side. Constructive internal work while still moving forward is perfectly capable of addressing the same things. A contrarian is always inherently on the side of privilege and the oppressor, it is a luxury of circumstance. That same luxury could do so much more good being used to push forward as part of the change, reforming from within, instead of working against.
> due to highly inflamed emotions
I think you are highly undervaluing emotions, something people "of logic/science" do far too often. If there are this many strong emotions on something, something is causing them. Highlighting and fixing that source issue is likely far more important than any possible value from contrarian approaches.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm tired of dealing with contrarians and hopefully this short and incomplete response compared to the subject will be useful. I suspect this is a longer road I don't have time/energy for, but I truly plead that you examine this "nature" and stop being a contrarian. There are so many better ways to capture the priorities I would guess underly it without, being frank, coming off as an asshole [1] to everyone and devaluing basic humanist ideas of injustice and empathy.
I have no doubt you've experienced being treated based off of that diagnosis or criticized like this before on the internet, and likely in person. I truly am trying to lay this out in a non-confrontational way to say that it should be a sign to examine the underlying actions and approach, not to assume that the people criticizing are "arguing from emotions" or something similar. I'm at this point trying to anticipate responses, and I could be off, so take what you will from some of the extras.
Contrarianism is not a service to society: it is many things, but IMO at its core a misguided application of logic undervaluing empathy and oblivious to circumstantial privilege to be able to act as one. Again, there are many better ways to address small flaws without undermining the entire idea.
[1] I am not using this word to namecall you or contrarians generally but to underscore the reality of how people (understandably) interpret contrarianism.
> Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job.
> Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.
Do you have any evidence for these assertions? I would be surprised if so, particularly with respect to the second, since police killings are notoriously difficult to gather data on, but I would certainly be interested to hear it.
No, not on this specifcally. But there's plenty of psychological research that shows (for example) that if you tell kids they are gifted, they perform much better.
Whether this psychological effect is more or less damaging than the racism is probably undeterminable. But because society widely believes the racism is the bigger problem, and my instincts run the other way, I'm taking the other side.
You're right, telling people that they are good at something may very well lead them to perform better at it.
But what if society subtly, almost subliminally suggested that some kids are gifted in, say, sports but not school, while others are gifted in school, but not sports? Or what if society suggested that some men are more prone to violence than others? What if those embedded in our media and even our language? Do you think that would have some kind of effect on teachers and students, police officers and citizens? There are studies that suggest that this actually happens. Psychologists have found that young children are aware of gender and race stereotypes despite receiving no explicitly instruction whatsoever.
I'd ask you to reconsider being contrarian for the sake being contrarian. Obviously, you should interrogate society's assumptions as well as your own. But you should do so from the standpoint of neutrality to the extent possible, rather than knee jerk contrarianism, which isn't always useful. Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers are contrarians too.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've unfortunately been doing it for months now.
> Guest after guest walked past the pair of executives to greet their White employee, offer their congratulations and ask how he got the idea for the product.
This sort of thing has never, ever happened to me. Nobody has ever suggested that I hire a wingman of a different ethnicity or gender or anything similarly asinine either.
I was a dev lead at my former company. I’m Black. One of the guys I hired was an older white dude. I was taking my team out to lunch - I was the only Black guy. The server came up and asked the table in general was it together or separate. I said it was together and preceded to get my corporate card out of my wallet. No one else reached for their card. She still handed the check to the white guy.
African here, this is common in Africa but in a different way. Often by fellow black Africans will trust a foreign white person over me. The big global consulting companies are making a killing sending over specialists in different fields.
It doesn't happen to me, so it doesn't exist is fallacious. (Or at the very least, anecdotal and not useful.)
There are plenty of things that have never happened to me, despite it being possible/probable that they should. In 20 years I've never been called for Jury duty. It's never, ever happened to me. Does that mean I should disregard the experiences of people who have experienced jury duty?
> This sort of thing has never, ever happened to me
Hm - I have had people look past me to talk to my Indian co-workers when asking technical questions: they just assume the Indian guy is the technical one and the white guy is the business manager.
Not sure about silicon valley but this sort of a thing is common in international businees. Depending on who you are meeting with, ethnicity can help or hurt impressions and negotiations.
So it's ok to post stuff like "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business" when there are literally black mobs looting on the streets, and it's not an inflamatory thing, but it's not ok to say how it looks from the other side? Please just block my account already.
So you are saying that although black people are around 1/8 of the US population, we should hire only around 2% black people, because otherwise we would be wasting more intelligent people on manual labor?
I say you should hire the people who hve the skills and do the work, not trying to hire 1/8 blacks just because. If I would guess, I would say that the reason for that disparity is the average economical status and environment. I've lived among the white trash long enough to know that most of them won't go anywhere, and it's not entirely their own fault. Why should a struggling white kid have it any different than a black kid? That's just pure racism. Trying to make every poverty stricken black successful will have the same effect that trying to elevate all the poor in every other race. Why should it be reserved for some special priviledge group?
Don't put words in my mouth, you sound like CNN "journalist".
> I'm looking at the generation of white males in their 30 and it is just sad. What was done to their dreams and opportunities was a crime.
Does the same not apply to all the black males, females, etc., who were graduating and entering the job market during the financial crisis of 2008?
It is not as though your observations are incorrect, they are incomplete, and this is what the parent comment was alluding to, and what many people just don't have a contextual basis for understanding. The term "racism" in the US generally refers to hundreds of years of systematic prejudice and violence against people of color, that is still ongoing today. Discrimination against people based on their skin color - for example against white people - is morally abhorrent but in a completely different category. It is hard to see white privilege when you are white living among white people, it's just a fact of life. If you really want to understand, you'll have to try to see the world from a different viewpoint. The lack of this viewpoint is why you feel people are trying to put words in your mouth, it's nothing personal, it's a systemic problem in which all of us to a greater or lesser extent play a part.
Can you recommend anything? I do enjoy the content here, and some of the people are really great, but the level of wokeness is just absurd. I got some people chasing me from here on other networks just because I dared to say my opinion. Thanks for speaking your mind btw. Obviously you had to be downvoted as well
What's your public key? I don't want to drop names in plaintext because I don't want my favorite communities to be targeted by anything resembling an angry mob (not a certainty, but stranger things have happened).
First, I don't know what people I belong to in your little fantasy, but please be so kind as to share.
Second, there is a difference between a space in which you can say anything and a place that you can say only the things you are allowed to say. In the first case you have a public discourse, in the second you have public outrage. Essentially HN is becoming a safe space for woke people.
Do you not really see anything wrong with stalking people online, or for that matter even in real life, just because they have different opinions than you?
I would have never even guessed Hayes is black. He looks Middle Eastern to me. He doesn't look like a CEO in these pictures: a constantly worried facial expression sends the wrong message IMO. Givens does project calm confidence, and therefore looks like a boss. I think his experience is more illustrative of the problem here.
That's funny, I'm black too and I used to have white people misread my facial expression a lot. I ended up training myself to use a different, more "neutral-looking" resting face in public.
I'm white and people think I'm angry and unapproachable. It is uncommon in my country of origin to smile for no reason, and if one doesn't do it here in the US, people mistake what I consider my "neutral" face as hostility. I'm still working on it. Worse yet, it's also not common in the Russian culture to maintain constant eye contact with strangers, not doing which in the US means that one is trying to mislead and they're not trustworthy.
HN reflects the society at large, so of course it proves the article right in that sense. Otherwise the article wouldn't be about the world. Any divisive topic is going to show up as divisive in any large-enough population sample. But there are at least as many comments pointing the opposite way—more, in fact, but we tend to notice the ones we dislike, and to weight them more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
You're probably experiencing the problem I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. The fact that HN is a non-siloed site causes people to run into things here that they don't run into elsewhere, and it creates a shock reaction.
I bet you're particularly running into the international aspect, which is so much more influential on these perceptions than anybody realizes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438403. The way people approach this topic in other countries is not at all the way Americans approach it. In particular, arguments that would make Americans wince (or "head desk", as you put it) are obliviously unobjectionable to users in other places, and those users have zero idea about the conventions they're breaking in an American context, or how inflammatory they are. It pains me to see these misunderstandings, but what can we do. "Excuse me, but the person you're disagreeing with is actually posting from $country, to judge by their IP"? Out of the question.
Would HN ever consider possibly adding location as an optional profile field? That may actually be useful in a lot of discussions and avoiding misunderstanding. I realize you can easily add this in your bio, but the explicit field will encourage more people to add it who may not yet understand the reasoning.
I'd say a tooltip could be added for context, but that seems even farther from the HN profile philosophy that exists currently.
Sure, we'd consider it. But in a community that cares a lot about privacy and getting more so, I wonder if enough people would turn such a feature on to make it worthwhile. Also, would we show it by default on every comment? I think probably not, but then it would be less useful for preventing misunderstandings, since most readers won't click through to a profile.
Some message boards solve this issue by letting posters specify their location as a field in their profile (and displaying a flag under the username, etc.). Not advocating this for HN, just pointing out how that gets solved by other communities (weak profile differentiation is part of the appeal of HN, but also a magnifier for these issues).
We wouldn't display flags—textiness is a core principle here—but if people felt like a location field in profiles might help ease misunderstandings, that's something we might do. Would most users fill it out though? I'm kind of doubtful. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547013
This is the sort of issues that some kind of "unconscious bias" training should help you overcome. It is really frustrating for the victim but those who are perpetuating are not racists or evil. It is a social mental conditioning that they will overcome if they realize how much damage they are doing.
My wife joined an ecomm company recently. Since entire joining was remote, it was little hard for her to get onboarded with the team and her manager would assign her documentation and testing issues. Few weeks later when she told her manager that she would like to write some real code he was surprised. Because of her gender he had thought she was a tester.
How is it racist to assume that in a country of mostly white people, the CEO would be white? That isn't racist. Unless you consciously thought the black person in the room was less competent just because they were black, it isn't racism.
If I was in India, and walked into a company meeting with a diverse set of people, I would assume the Indian looking person is the CEO. If I was in Japan, I would assume the Japanese looking person was the CEO.
This isn't racism. This is the human brain using pattern recognition to evaluate a situation and infer information as best it can under the circumstances.
You're effectively claiming the following: if two people who both "look like CEOs" (setting aside exactly what that means for now) walk into a meeting with you, you know one of them is indeed the CEO, and one is white and one is black, you are going to assume that it's not a sign of even subconscious racism to assume that the white person is the CEO because the population of the country is mostly white.
So. One immediate problem, from statistics alone, is that the people you are meeting with are not drawn from a random sampling of the population. There is clearly a 50% chance that one of those two unknown people is the CEO. (If it were 3 people, a 33.33% chance, 4 people a 25% chance, and so on.) So I don't think your reasoning is sound.
Also, the end result of your argument is "the black person in this group isn't likely to be the CEO because they are black," and, well. I get that you're trying to arrive there through what you think is pure mathematics, but it is nonetheless the kind of conclusion that I believe the kids call "problematic."
Easy to say that, but the human brain does this - to its advantage - multiple times daily. It's how humans learn and adapt. It is a central part of what makes humans better than other species as adapting to environments and performing well in unfamiliar situations. There is nothing racist about making an unintentional mistake. This whole premise assumes that being a CEO equals competence and a higher level of ability - a claim which I thoroughly reject anyway.
If it makes it easier for you to understand, think of it as small-r "racism" rather than capital-R "Racism". It's not equivalent to lynching somebody, but it's still an assumption based on race that harms someone. One doesn't have to harbor ill intent in order to exhibit racist behavior.
One shouldn't think of oneself as the center of this situation. Your dubious appeals to evopysch relate to what's going on (or not) in one's brain, while one's behavior that is observable to others just says "black people are subordinate".
It is racism. There is no need to pre-judge the situation at all. Merely being in the moment and letting the people in front of you tell you all you want to know is sufficient. Pre-judging the people instead of waiting for them to tell you is using prejudice as an unneeded shortcut. It seems obvious because the person so doing is racist. To change, that person would have to acknowledge that it seemed obvious to them because they have a subconcious "rule" CEO cannot = black. Once they see it, it'll be gone.
There was no conscious prejudgement to remove from your behaviour. Humans like to fit in, and like to be informed. The human brain is fantastic at adapting to new situations because of its ability to infer information from past experiences. Put me in a high pressure meeting where the stakes are high and multiple people I don't know, and my brain will be working overtime to help me out. And that may involve my brain using my past experiences to feed me information that it thinks will help me. Such as identifying the roles people play. If I have only ever met white CEOs, or perhaps even if most people in my social circle are white, it is not unreasonable for my brain to infer that the CEO is white. Nothing racist about it. It would be racist for me to then consciously assume that the black person is less qualified to be the CEO purely based on their skin color, but that's not what would've happened initially.
So I get there are not a lot of black CEOs. Unsure what this means or the cause. As a board member I want the smartest and most talented person to run my business with low risk. Quantify that. Also, I'm confused when I hear that only 7% of tech jobs are black people, but 70% of basketball and football teams are black. Yet regardless 10% of population is black. Scientifically speaking... Given facts on IQ, we are probably most racist against Asian CEOs in US as they have the highest IQs on avg (106), followed by Jewish people, then Caucasian (97). This group is supposedly enlightened and factual - so...
Even assuming mean IQ is significantly variable among different populations, it would still be normally distributed. We would thus expect to find many millions of geniuses from all corners of the globe, with powers of reasoning possibly far exceeding your own.
You are not making an argument here. Regardless of what you are trying to say, proven test results and would not skew percentages to have a larger black workforce for technical jobs.
By my back-of-the-napkin math, white America owes black America about 10 trillion dollars in stolen wealth.
The are roughly 50 million black Americans out of a population of 330M. Americans own roughly $100T in wealth. So black Americans should own about 50 / 330 * 100T or $15T. But they currently only own about $5.5T.
We could start by allocating some our our Federal tax dollars to making black Americans whole.
But when it happens over and over and over, you can't help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techcrunch (I was in 2017), where you have clearly introduced yourself. You get off-stage, they greet your colleague and ask him the questions as if he was on stage.
I was often in the interview room waiting for my interviewer, only to have him show up, and tell me I must be in the wrong room. A simple "Hey are you XYZ?" could have avoided this frustration.
I've written an article about my experience working as a black developer, I'll post it here in the near future. You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.