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 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.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...