One thing puzzles me. Even if it does not occur to someone that a young black woman in a CS building might actually be a CS student, why are they asking if she is lost?
We are talking about Stanford, not Hogwarts. I would expect that the floors and the rooms are numbered in a fairly straightforward way that comports with the geometry, and that geometry does not change. I'd further expect that there is a directory or some such device that tells visitors what people are in what rooms.
These should be sufficient to allow a visitor, even a first time visitor, to find their destination. So as long as the person is not gazing about confused, clearly having no idea how to proceed, isn't the natural assumption that they are fine, and so you should leave them alone? If they need help, presumably they can ask someone.
Some people look lost? I am not sure what facial expression would convey that, and if there is a possibility of having them unconsciously, but on a similar note had a roommate who used to always have blood shot eyes, and a perpetual expression of looking drunk. He was a teetotaler. He complained quite frequently about being asked if he had drunk a lot last night.
I have no idea how the Stanford CS building is laid out, but my default assumption of anyone in the building would be there for a reason, not that they're lost. Even if I didn't think they were a CS student for whatever reason, I'd figure they knew what they were doing.
Slightly tangential, but sometimes people I can only describe as "tourists" walk around in the publicly accessible areas, so it's not totally unprecedented.
For what it's worth, I tend to tell these people apart from the people with business in the building by noting where they're looking (tourists seem to be looking all over the place like they're taking it all in; people with business at Gates seem to be looking for numbers and other navigational indicators in line with tzs's comment).
And, as it happens, "Hey, are you lost?" can be a polite way to tell a tourist that they've wandered in to an area that they aren't really supposed to be.
She thinks the "are you lost" thing is because she's black; but I suspect the real reason is that she's an attractive female who cares about her appearance.
Purely visually speaking, that image doesn't say "I'm a computer science nerd" --- but that has nothing to do with race!
Take away the makeup, mess up the hair, add 50 pounds, add glasses with unfashionable rims, change to a ratty old T-shirt, and nobody will ask, "are you lost?"
(Stereotypes are a problem regardless; just saying that perhaps it's misidentified.)
Even if true, that doesn't mean it's not a problem. People shouldn't assume that someone isn't a programmer just because they care about their appearance. And other parts of society pressure women to look nice more than men, so it's still pointlessly exclusionary.
> Take away the makeup, mess up the hair, add 50 pounds, add glasses with unfashionable rims, change to a ratty old T-shirt, and nobody will ask, "are you lost?"
This is utterly ridiculous. That description matched about 10% of my 100-strong CS class.
White and/or male, on the other hand, matched about 98% of it (so if she really wants to "fit in", gender reassignment surgery & skin lightening would be far more effective).
I think sometimes it is a race issue. Sometimes it is not an issue. And sometimes it is partially a race issue.
The problem is it's impossible to perfectly separate the three scenarios except for in the worst cases. People guess based on their life experiences. So it's not surprise when certain groups are less likely to think it's a race issue.
At the root of the whole problem is that we collectively have an idea in our heads about what a "computer science nerd" looks like, and then we make judgements about people based on whether or not they fit that image. In cases like this the overwhelming factors are being black and being a woman -- if she were a white man who cared about her appearance she wouldn't face the same difficulties.
It's true people have perceptions but they exist in all places all the time. A guy walking into a gender studies class could get treated differently too. I had to go into such office once and it was a bit strange.
Walking into a restaurant in a barrio-like location gets me weird looks. It'd be better if things were not this way but these actions are not extraordinary nor typically directed personally.
I don't think anyone is saying that we can completely eliminate the gut reactions we collectively have -- but it's precisely because they are so pervasive that it's important to talk about them and be aware of their existence and implications so that we can take actions to reduce and mitigate them.
Sure, that's commendable. But let's state these in less divisive terms. We can all enumerate this experiences. We've all had them, in varying degrees.
Do you think if a non Latin walked into a Latin recording studio that someone would not look at it as not ordinary, or an accordion player walking into a rock studio?
The way to eliminate these tendencies is to make them not exceptional. There was time when Asians were not a majority in science majors... But now they are expected there.
In a perfect world we would not make wrong assumptions, though we'd like the right assumptions.
A fat person might not be presumed to prefer an elevator or a diet soda over a full soda. Or presume American Republicans to be bigots or democrats spendthrifts.
You're not wrong, and I think we're coming at this from a very similar place. I hope I'm not coming off as divisive.
There is a fundamental difference between the experience of being prejudged against when you're a member of a powerful group in society vs. a member of an oppressed group. The difference is difficult for a member of a dominant group to fully understand, partly because they don't have to be aware of their position in a dominant group every single day, whereas members of oppressed groups are constantly reminded of their position.
This isn't to say that men don't have their own issues that they need support with -- issues like (I think) higher rates of unemployment, depression, suicide, drug abuse, imprisonment, lower graduation rates, problems with custody and child support payments, etc. Some people do go too far in saying that if you're a member of a dominant group then you cannot claim to suffer from discrimination in any way, and that's not what I'm trying to say.
I totally agree that the long-term goal should be to make e.g. women in CS programs unexceptional -- and to get there we need to recognize the ways that we make it harder for those women who are in CS programs today to stick it out.
Following this line of thought, some could also argue that it is then 'micro-sexual-harassement'? There`s always a way to twist a minor issue into a positive, or negative spin ... which one will we feed?
People make subconscious determinations based on appearance. It's built in to our decision making process, it's integral to our self-defense / self-protection calculations, and nothing can ever change that. There's no amount of conscious effort that will prevent you from making all sorts of automatic judgements about people based on their appearance. You'd go insane before managing to turn that off. I don't think there's any argument for it possibly being sexual harassment, most professions have appearance stereotypes that have more than a little reason for existing.
"The term “microaggression” was used by Columbia professor Derald Sue to refer to “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”"
Like when they say white male. Oh, nevermind that does not qualify because it is against whites and males, so it is ok. Sorry a little confusing here... :)
Anecdotally speaking I used to think microaggressions were utter BS.
Then I got into an interracial relationship (I'm white, she's black) and the way I was treated when with my girlfriend and alone were very noticeably different.
I noticed being physically tired after going somewhere with my girlfriend as well as many looks, weird tones people took with me I'd never experienced, and generally ruder people.
> Like when they say white male. Oh, nevermind that does not qualify because it is against whites and males, so it is ok. Sorry a little confusing here... :)
I experienced microagressions as a result of being in a relationship with a black female, so it is possible.
On a near-noise level, virtually all conversation or interaction can and mostly does contain shades of meaning expressing things that when verbalized explicitly would be considered rude or inappropriate. From that POV, the term appears meaningless or redundant. Otherwise we'd communicate like Vulcans.
EDIT: I find it also peculiar that the explanation you've cited only mentions "racial slights", despite neither "micro-" nor "-aggression" containing this meaning. But it's comforting to know that one is at least safe from committing such things across all the other social boundaries! /s
> Like when they say white male. Oh, nevermind that does not qualify because it is against whites and males, so it is ok.
The kindest way to interpret this is that it is your opinion, and if it is, it is wrong. It is not ok to harass white males for being white males. A more likely way to interpret it is that you're putting words into other people's mouths, then sneering at those words.
I feel like this is obvious enough that it's not worth commenting about. Do these wasted words qualify me to downvote you?
The difference is that white males are rarely a minority in their schools and workplaces. So no, it's not just small expressions or aggressions, there's an overarching social-structural context.
But your logic suggests that racism is not the dictionary definition but it has to do who is in minority or who is in majority. That is wrong. The definition "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races." Until you change it in the dictionary this will be the definition and it has nothing to do with who is in majority and your "social constructs".
"Racism, however, describes patterns of discrimination that are institutionalized as “normal” throughout an entire culture. It’s based on an ideological belief that one “race” is somehow better than another “race”. It’s not one person discriminating at this point, but a whole population operating in a social structure that actually makes it difficult for a person not to discriminate."
Racial slurs not backed by institutionalized racism are just laughable. For instance if someone called me "Cracker" I'd laugh about it since there isn't a huge past history of people lynching, raping, and harming my race while they chant "Cracker".
> It’s based on an ideological belief that one “race” is somehow better than another “race”.
I would actually think that the belief is, or at least used to be, scientific. Note that this is not a statement about the truth value of the claim, but the claim itself was or used to be posed in a way that referred to certain broadly quantifiable phenomena such as intelligence. That in itself is hardly "ideological". "Intelligence is good for a proper society", now that is ideological.
Comments like this one and "Your logic is so broken I don't even know where to start" break the HN guidelines. Please read and follow them when commenting here:
Funny that you never asked the other guys who did the exact same thing to me publicly to stop.
I like how HN just like Reddit is turning into a propaganda machine where you remind everybody who does not support your agenda to follow the rules while all the guys who support your agenda can happily do against the rules, regardless how big lies they are spreading.
Thanks for proving to me that you are no different, double standards for the win!
I guess I will just stick to commenting outside HN.
It's not only possible but certain that we don't chastise all violations of the HN guidelines equally, simply because we don't see them all. There are overwhelmingly too many comments for us to read. That doesn't matter in most cases, though, because commenters on HN are required to follow the guidelines even when others are not. Especially when others are not.
There's no agenda that I'm aware of, other than to have HN threads be civil and substantive.
I frequently try to explain this to my mother. She's had a major house rebuilding project over the course of last year, which caused frequent interactions with various builders / contractors.
Whenever someone would try to bilk her over (or not grant the respect she feels is deserved) her automatic reaction is 'It's because they think I'm an immigrant'.
My take is that these guys would try to pull this over anybody else. But most people would feel that this happens because of something particular about their identity (black, gay, immigrant, disabled, whatever).
> Both male and female mystery shoppers requested quotes to fix a common fault - a malfunctioning clutch on 2011 Ford Focus.
> The study found that only six per cent of garages gave the same quote to men and women, with the repair costing men an average of £571 compared to the £616 it cost women - an eight per cent increase.
> The female premium was highest in Birmingham, where women could be paying up to 31 per cent more than men for the same repair. This was closely followed by Manchester, where there was a 28 per cent premium for female drivers.
With two towns giving higher prices to male callers.
To me that's a 'knowledge premium'. Garages expect men to be more knowledgeable about car repair and less likely to be intimidated about going for another quote.
Likewise if I go to the market to buy veggies, a less than honorable seller might push inferior product to me as a man than a woman who he expects to be more discerning.
> Today the culprit is an amicable looking Indian girl I’ve seen from class.
Student not recognizing another student? A minority in the space trying to help another minority in the space? I wouldn't be able to draw too many useful conclusions from that.
>Being a woman of color who has graduated CS107 is almost like being a unicorn, and that’s pretty f'd up.
Yes, but it's also entirely consistent with the last 200 years of western history.
In the end, yes, I can entirely imagine this happening, and understand why it's happening, and see that it's not going to change any time soon. That said, I hope it changes sooner than later and lovely little slice-of-life articles will help that happen.
For sure, and I don't believe the problem is very well known right now either. Many female friends I've talked to had no idea that software engineering was such a white male dominated space.
I personally think its in a rut right now. Both college students and working professionals will look at the space as being male dominated and passively choose to go a different direction if they are female. When the problem gets brought up in circles like HN, many rush to defend the space as if nothing is wrong.
A cultural shift needs to happen and unfortunately that is going to be extremely difficult to do without a lot of people interested in making it happen. Why do CS when you can just as easily get into other fields that are more accepting of women and minorities?
Women complain about a lot of things that some men don't understand. Minorities complain about a lot of things that some whites don't understand. A lot of these ungrokkable issues attack our self confidence. And when we complain about them, we give people a reason to dismiss us.
Being treated like you don't belong sucks. When I am asked "Where are you from? Where are you born? Where are your parents from?" I have to ignore it. She needs more life experience if she thinks the average person will have sympathy because people ask us these questions.
Universities have been spoiled for decades by a large number of computer hobbyists, so they rarely bother to teach students how to program. I grew up programming, born of two programmers, so although the "Intro" was a class where they handed you a book and said "learn this", it was a blow off class for me (and the other hobbyists.) I felt really sorry for everyone else, and watched them leave for majors where they didn't expect you to know 50% of the job coming in, like electrical engineering and economics (as to not waste all of the math classes.)
People who haven't grown up with a computer in the house, or with good AP classes at their HS are at almost an insurmountable disadvantage IMO.
> Being a woman of color who has graduated CS107 is almost like being a unicorn, and that’s pretty f'd up.
The real question is to ask "Why don't more women take CS107?" Only about 20% of the Stanford CS department is female. If I assume that a CS107 class is 100 people (it probably isn't--CS107 is not a beginner class--it has data structures as a prerequisite). 20 are women. Stanford racial data suggest that 7% of it's enrollment are African-American.
That means that you get at best 2 "women of color" per year in CS107.
Even if all of these women pass, you're still looking at 10 out of about 10,000? students, at best.
Her experiences may be completely valid, but this is hardly the fault of CS107 or its teacher.
"At Stanford, computer science is the most popular undergraduate major--220 students declared
CS during the 2012-2013 academic year. The introductory CS106A class is 40% female, but
that drops to 30% in the subsequent CS106B and 20% in CS107. The major is approximately 12
percent female."
It would be interesting to see real survival analysis of Stanford CS majors sticking with it.
That's a very interesting downward progression. By just the 3rd course only half the percentage of women, which implies more than half the women quit (assuming the whole class shrunk as well).
Why?
I guess it could be a culture of exclusion, but for it to work that fast it seems like it would have to be exceedingly toxic.
I wonder if Stanford does exit interviews when people leave a major. I had to have informal talks with my advisers (at a different college) when I changed majors, explaining my reasons. I wonder if that data is collected at all? And if not, why not?
> I guess it could be a culture of exclusion, but for it to work that fast it seems like it would have to be exceedingly toxic.
It's a failure of experience.
How many people can bake a cake? More on this later ....
My first assignment in data structures is simply: "Here is Eclipse, here is a project, here are directions for checking that project in, do it. Now use that to create a second project to print "Hello, World!" exactly."
1/3 of the class CANNOT DO THIS and drop. I'm serious. Following directions exactly appears to be a learned skill that not many learn.
Back to baking a cake. This is the same problem. Cakes have some exact directions occasionally. If you get them wrong, something goes wrong. I cannot give out several of my cake recipes because people accuse me of giving them the wrong recipe when the problem is they don't follow it.
And, yet, these recipes were directly out of women's magazines in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. So, it's not an anti-female bias to this characteristic.
It may be more of a fact that women who can follow directions exactly get pulled off into different areas/fields/hobbies before they reach computers.
It seems obvious to me that not having "enough" women in Stanford's CS program isn't Stanford's fault. There's an interest gap that's in place by the time children are in high school, and the numbers I remember reading suggest that it gets slightly better through college and in the workforce.
Not a very convincing article. Some girl tried to be helpful, a guy tried to start a conversation because he probably thought she was cute, and she experienced a bunch of "micro-aggressions" that she doesn't want to bore us with the details of.
So what's the solution? More affirmative action? Make it taboo to offer a stranger help if they look lost? Make it taboo to make any sort of assumptions about anyone?
Teaching about the common racist stereotypes[0] would help. Perhaps communicating that not assuming minorities belong in specific places can be demeaning, and it's best to be mindful of stereotypes when talking to minorities.
All that said, I do enjoy being a computer scientist at Stanford. I love learning how to become self-sufficient when it comes to building out my ideas into actual products and apps. In addition, the race and gender demographic for computer science majors here appears to be slightly more balanced compared to peer institutions. And the Stanford name comes with a ridiculous amount of power. It is a luxury to be able to drop it in conversations whenever I need to immediately be taken seriously. It is my hope that, with some of the projects I am working on this summer, I can put that power to good use by creating more spaces for minorities in technology to thrive and feel welcome.
I LOVE the fact that you sound like an enthousiastic cs student. I LOVE to read that it is in fact possible to be a CS student first, and black and female is just some detail about you that's pretty much irrelevant when we're talking about Stanford education and programming and javascript.
I was traveling abroad in Japan and was asked by a Japanese woman if I was lost or needed help.
I was looking at the station map looking for how many stops until the station I had to get off at. I'm fluent in Japanese though - and don't think I was giving off a "I'm lost" look. She simply assumed I was lost because I don't look Japanese and was staring at a map.
Instead of assuming she was racist, intentionally or unintentionally, I assumed she was trying to be nice and offer me help because she thought I looked lost.
But extending hospitality or a helping hand is now seen as a microaggresion against a person.
It's gotten to the point that I let doors slam into peoples' faces less I make them think I'm being sexist for holding the door for them. After all - if they want me to hold the door they can ask me to hold it for them. Otherwise they're fully capable of opening the door themselves.
Once-upon-a-time it was polite to keep a door held open for someone. Not anymore.
People can have misplaced feelings. If they feel the world is out to get them and everyone around them is racist - they'll only ever see actions towards them as racist.
It's called offering alternative points of view that are more likely than them being a victim of some form of implicit racism.
Perhaps, maybe it isn't the person is racist, but that the person is a nice person who wants to help.
God forbid someone wants to help you without you having to explicitly ask for help.
Sorry if my post came off to you as more about my feelings than about nice people not being racist. Nice people will see a person crying and ask them what's wrong?. Not wait for the crying person to ask for someone to talk to (crying people will almost never ask a stranger for someone to talk to).
Likewise - nice people will ask if you need directions if you appear lost.
The world would be a better place with more nice people willing to help others without having to be asked. I think most people, not just me, would agree with that sentiment.
But turning everyone who's just trying to help into some aggressor is exactly how to make the opposite world.
You responded to a post about a person feeling alienated in their school by reminiscing about a pleasure trip to Asia while lamenting the death of chivalry. You missed the point while claiming that a person's opinion in invalid because you can't relate to it. You remind me of the guy I had in an econ class who said, "I don't understand why people hate airport security so much. If it's that bad they can just charter a private jet."
Not only does she feel like she doesn't belong there, she's not even allowed to feel like she doesn't belong there because you know better than she does about how she should feel.
And this is not about asking if you can help. This about the assumption that the person you see before you must be lost because they don't belong there. It's about the fact that most white CS geeks aren't used to seeing black women in their midst. I have a feeling that you picked up on this point (she makes it pretty plain) but the implications make you too uncomfortable, so you've taken the pedantic position of 'they're just trying to help' to avoid confronting the idea that maybe, just maybe, this boys' club we've built for ourselves ends up excluding some pretty talented people.
Also, the question I asked you wasn't rhetorical: why did you read this article and immediately decide that your experience, which doesn't relate to this person's at all (she being asked several times in her school if she's lost, you being asked once in a foreign country) deserved to be heard? Why do you insist on covering up someone else's experience with yours? Why do you feel like you get to dictate whether someone's emotions are correct or not?
I was asked if I was lost consistently for the 6 months I was in Japan on multiple occasions by multiple people. I shared one occasion because the number of occurrences for my example does not matter. I could see the laughing one mattering a bit more if it occurred regularly, but that is a different example.
Luckily the concept of being lost was shared context for the given example and number of occurrences is irrelevant so long as they don't come multiple times from the same individuals.
>Not only does she feel like she doesn't belong there, she's not even allowed to feel like she doesn't belong there because you know better than she does about how she should feel.
Feelings don't change reality - and yes. I believe that the world should have more positive beliefs in one another than negative beliefs in one another. People get along better when they aren't assuming the worst in one another.
Imagine a scenario where a friend tells you they are too busy with work to go see a new movie with you. Depending on whether you believe them or not - your feelings will differ. They've been busy for weeks! The movie is now out of theaters entirely. Have your feelings changed? Sure. Most people would, at this point, suspect their friend of lying to them. So you feel like shit, you think your friend is avoiding you, and are sad. Other people have tried to convince you that your friend was busy, but you refused to listen to them because your feelings told you otherwise.
Turns out they were simply busy like they claimed to be. But now you're pissy at them for "avoiding you" and refuse to talk to them because you've convinced yourself, contrary to any evidence, that they were lying to you because your feelings told you so.
They feel like they don't belong because they feel like they don't belong. Because they feel like they don't belong they see other peoples' actions as affirming that belief. It's a matter of perspective that they feel this way. So yes, feelings can be wrong and assuming the worst will always result in the worst being visible.
The world needs less negativity - not more.
>This about the assumption that the person you see before you must be lost because they don't belong there.
Statistically true, so it's likely a safe assumption to make that will likely benefit more people than it "harms". The fact it is asked at all shows that it is true more often than not. The same reason why I'm not asked if I want a fork or chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant: more often than not, people request a fork.
Now - I could assume the Chinese restaurant is racist for giving me a fork instead of chopsticks. It's a microaggression against me! Why assume I want a fork? I'm capable of using chopsticks!
But that viewpoint is pessimistic, self-centered, self-victimizing, and feeds negativity into itself. I prefer to shift my perspective: most people ask for forks, so they gave me a fork. I don't give myself a victim-complex, I see how it benefits other people of society (less people have to ask for a fork!), and it's a rather neutral viewpoint to hold that is just as reasonable and probably more likely than the former.
So to answer your question: I don't give a shit for their feelings - because their feelings come from their pre-determined pessimistic viewpoint. They're looking for a negative reasoning behind an action and found it. They got what they were looking for, and just like their truth-telling friend, they believe their friend to be a liar.
You continually emphasize your personal experiences, as if they were relevant to this conversation. I am asking you now to pretend like you are the person in this article and explain this:
>their feelings come from their pre-determined pessimistic viewpoint
Reach into what you know about computer science departments and the decline of women in that field. Reach into what you know about developing professionally in mathematics as a black woman. Imagine what it's like to have everyone who you meet assume you don't know what you're talking about or that you only got where you are because of affirmative action. Imagine having to prove yourself every day in your chosen field because "statistically" there aren't very many people like you in this field.
This is 'evidence' you're ignoring.
Now justify:
>their feelings come from their pre-determined pessimistic viewpoint.
You're correct in that the pessimistic viewpoint is predetermined. It's predetermined by experience.
No one's asking anyone to feel guilty about asking the woman if she's lost. We're being asked to understand the underlying implications of this recurring speech event.
I recall a group of coworkers. Some had been there a while, some were new. One of the new ones was trying to do something but was having some difficulty understanding the systems.
A couple of the workers who'd been there a while were having a conversation and apparently something funny came so they giggled and laughed. Their laughter coincided with the new person's struggles...
The new person took offense at the laughter asking, are you laughing at me? You all are laughing at me!
It was furthest from the truth. It was just coincidental timing but that new person fully believed they were being laughed at.
So, just because someone thinks something is being directed at them or is being malicious doesn't make it so.
Both you and the other user have brought up examples of things that happened one time. The article is about something that happens repeatedly. So in order to make your comparison apt, let's pretend the coincidence of laughter happened every day for a week.
Do you see how this person might mistaken that laughter for being at their expense?
I can also tell you about having to walk thru a working class neighborhood on my way to class --it was the only place I could afford sharing rent with other classmates.
On more than one occasion, I had people in front of their buildings casually spit towards me but always managing to just miss. Other times they might pump their chests up as one might walk by...
Do I go ahead and write on that all so and so are a bunch of baddies, look at what I went thru?
Most people get similar or different shit from other people. We don't all feel like it's worthy of traffic driving blog posts.
I agree with you entirely. And the thing is, it is a microaggresion. How convenient is it that it is something that most reasonable people would consider to be not consciously noticeable. Awfully convenient to be able to sling around these terms that a person cannot reasonably defend themselves from. This is on the same level as trying to prove that something doesn't exist eg I am not a --- (fill in the blank) is akin to Unicorns don't exist. You can't do it! But, hey, I guess people who just want to assume the worst in everybody are winning these days?
Wow, how times have changed. Not even a few decades ago seeing a woman (let alone an African American one) in a university as a student of cutting edge technology, would have been impossible. Shouldn't we also think of the progress that is being made? Of course she is frustrated, but I for one see it as a sign of great evolution on many fronts.
Whenever somebody doesn't like something, they can just roll out their discriminatory flag and wave it around. Just as they are complex humans, the individuals offering help are complex humans. Sometimes I feel like people really just need little caps on that ticker tape print the motivation behind the words they are speaking before we will finally be out of this mess of "my feelings got hurt". I mean it is supposed to be about motivation after all right? If somebody is actually trying to be nice that should be ok right? Or are they just as damned as a racist? In which case maybe the campaign should be "don't talk to me unless I give signals that indicate that I think you are attractive/potentially helpful to me". What bullocks.
Its is like the social sphere is splitting into two entities: those who are approachable and those who fancy themselves so special as to not be approached.
I think it's important to keep in mind that stereotypes about women not being as intelligent as well as black people not being as intelligent as non-black plays a (large imo) part in this as well.
Add the two together and there's an even higher likelihood the next person you see will think you couldn't possibly have the same major as them, are incompetent, didn't earn your way to your position, or generally don't belong.
The people doing it haven't committed some individual sin, but if in aggregate you observe a massive number of people asking if you are lost...that does indicate a problem somewhere in some system.
Well, how do you know for sure? None of us can conclude if it's truly a Big Racist Thing by her fellow Stanford-ians without more data. We're not physically her. And, dismissing her feelings is an invalid reaction - they are her feelings.
From her words, she's basically feeling confirmation of being stereotyped for her race. She's talking about her feelings in this article. Read the article for how it's intended. The tone is emotional, not scientific - she says some speculative exaggerations "[not a day goes by when I'm questioned]" and doesn't back up the racism conclusion from A/B testing, or any investigation of why she is being questioned daily.
It's undeniable there exists racism, and she's apparently experienced enough of fallout from it to have the phrase on hand, "stereotype threat and feelings of isolation."
Now, should her feelings of being underrepresented in society be:
A) ignored and dismissed
B) accepted and discussed
B. Next step could be instead of dismissing, to reach out to her and say, "We are concerned and upset your personal experience is unpleasant in the STEM education world." Everything else, the reconciling / realizing it's "not a big deal" is up to her to decide. She's not at the point where she's publicly rationalizing yet - I guess she's rolling in the emotions currently. So join in with her. That's a first step to helping balance out the unfairness of being a minority.
Google "microaggressions." Yes, people might be trying to be nice, but that niceness is from the assumption that you don't belong. When it happens multiple times a day, everyday, it surely can be disheartening.
"but that niceness is from the assumption that you don't belong"
That is a load of crap along with this whole "microagression" movement.
I see a girl that seems interesting to me, screw up my courage, and try to say something that sounds helpful to start a conversation. Then you come along and classify that contact attempt like a KKK rally and I'm a racist?!? No wonder studies are showing that male students are starting to steer clear.
With all these social apps, we pretty much have destroyed anything social in person.
Now, I should say that my life experience is not white-suburbia, so save time on the name calling.
The thing is, it really isn't about you. Microagressions, as the name implies, are small everyday interactions that as a whole give a person the feeling that they are not part of the group.
That once was called insecurity. It happens to everyone, and if the cure is making sure no one interacts with anyone else, then we are done. Without the interactions of random people we never will find the group of people we feel comfortable with and we cut down on our learning potential. Its bad enough people believe that it is assault when they are exposed to thoughts or beliefs that make them feel uncomfortable or challenge something they believe. They need safe zones because something a speak says could be contrary to their own thoughts.
If you are not offended from time to time in college, you should ask for your money back because you didn't learn a damn thing and cannot deal with life as it happens.
Aren't people entitled to start a conversation with anyone they want? (Outside of some very traditional pre-modern societies where certain people are not even allowed at all to talk to certain other people, mostly by kinship.)
Yes, sometimes. Because "approaching women who are strangers, especially in environments where they are trapped or not expecting approaches, is high stakes for both of you, and best attempted very casually if at all, with a strong awareness that any approach may be unwelcome."
Do you go up to men and start random conversations? Does that sound like it might be annoying to deal with?
> Do you go up to men and start random conversations? Does that sound like it might be annoying to deal with?
I start conversations with people all the time, yeah. No, it doesn't sound annoying. Funny thing about people, they LOVE to talk about themselves. Try it sometime. Er, not talking about yourself, trying to get to know a stranger. You'll learn a lot.
> approaching women who are strangers, especially in environments where they are trapped or not expecting approaches, is high stakes for both of you, and best attempted very casually if at all, with a strong awareness that any approach may be unwelcome.
a.) Asking if someone is lost is about as "casual" and "low stakes" as you can get in a damn college lecture hall/classroom building. Are you being serious?
b.) If someone feels vulnerable and not expecting "approaches" (whatever the fuck that means) in a college building containing lecture halls, prof. offices, and classrooms, perhaps the problem is with the college or the person, not the "approaches" as you call them.
> Does that sound like an experience the woman just has to deal with because the OP feels entitled to talk to every girl that makes his heart flutter?
When anyone approaches me, I could ask myself "will this man/woman kill me?" Do I let it run my life, no.
The OP is as "entitled" to talk to someone as you are to judge them for it. Your argument is really, really weak.
Also, I didn't click your link. No context was given besides the word "also."
> Do you go up to men and start random conversations? Does that sound like it might be annoying to deal with?
Yes, I do. I've met lifelong friends that way. In fact, I seem to get approached by a lot of strangers and told a lot of things. Learned about the history of rocks in Sioux Falls that way.
> So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?
If that's the first thought then society has failed this person with fear mongering and bad statistics. Crime has gone down since the 70's, but we act like the world is much more dangerous. We need to work on that instead of forcing an inhuman social isolation.
I do, I do start random conversation with muslims, christians, blacks, whites, females, males, Chinese, Korean and even with animals. Most of the time it is welcome, but more recently I discovered that some people in USA are considering this micro-aggression, so I am dialing down wanting to talk to here at all. I hope you are happy.
"Cause you're entitled to start a conversation with every girl that seems interesting to you right?"
Yes, because I'm human, and yes, a women is entitled to start a conversation with anyone they want since they too are human. There are some cultural rules depending on place, but yes, this is how humans meet each other.
So, in your world, guys cannot go talk to a random girl, and since we are for equality, girls cannot go talk to a random guy. Everyone marches to class and leaves class without interacting with anyone. What kind of horrible world is this for the social creature that is human? Some of my best friends were met through random hall conversations. I can only imagine the feelings of isolation of a person in this world.
It is not entitlement, it is the human way of communicating. You are not the other side, you are just representing the anti-intellectualism that is not too popular on HN.
It is funny how people who try to help somebody who they assume lost are displayed racist and sexist. What about their motivation? This is why I do not want to help females anymore, it is not worth the risk here in California.
As someone who is an office with 30 men and 1 woman, I hope she sticks it out. Diversity of experience and perspective matters. I've been in IT for 20 years.
Our office is pretty good, but you can see how without strong leadership and good men it might go all brogrammer and hostile.
First two comments come right out the gate and cast doubt on the authors experiences. One goes on and says women and minorities, particularly blacks, are not smart enough to make it through difficult CS classes.
I don't doubt her experiences - I have no trouble believing that people are more likely to ask black women if they're lost. IIRC, this kind of stereotyping is well-documented.
I do take issue with her blaming the CS107 professor for contributing to sexism. She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out. She notes that women seem to drop out disproportionately often, but this might not be something the professor has the power to do anything about - she certainly doesn't say anything the professor does which might be part of the problem, other than just making the class hard. Watering down core classes in the name of increasing diversity doesn't help anyone.
The biggest barrier I've run into while mentoring lower income kids is time on a computer. They don't know how to type. They haven't had time to explore or play around.
It does take some privilege to have a computer. Maybe the kids who are dropping out haven't had the time. Maybe they just need a longer runway to get up to speed.
There are many informal ways study groups organize that leave various groups behind. They can form around extracurriculars, and freshmen in computer clubs tend to have significant previous exposure and some experience. Groups can form around independent living groups, which often are gendered and often have large libraries of past class notes. And, of course, social circles often bias themselves based on race.
Connecting students with upperclassmen in their majors, assigning study groups, creating additional projects or courses to help newcomers learn are all ways to counteract the negative effects of study group bias without watering down the material at all.
Someone can still be a great engineer and struggle through an early class - there's plenty of reasons for this to happen and universities/colleges need to address these problems.
For example - someone who has never coded before in their life - there shouldn't be some expectation that you had a computer growing up, built a website for peers in middle school and are already an expert by the time you hit your first class. There's plenty of capable people who a) never had the advantages/wealth to support some of these things b) haven't discovered their interest and "weed out" core classes don't help with that. You may take longer to get up to the same place as someone with the advantages above, but that doesn't rule you out from being an effective engineer/computer scientist.
Friends who majored in music theory (not performance, which is worse) tell me that you have to pass a competency test to be admitted into the school as a college freshman.
(At least, at the good schools; this may not be true at third rate schools, I wouldn't know.)
This requires that someone spent years playing an instrument, typically with lots of instruction, both of which are very hard to do with no money.
Some may get this free in high school, but the high school I went to had performance exams to get into those high school freshman classes.
There was no music at all at my junior high.
I got 6 months of instrument training in 6th grade, and that was all that public schools offered me, and I know that some people had even less than that from the schools in their area.
The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.
It definitely does need fixing, but not by simply admitting/hiring more minorities until the statistics are agreeable (easy) but by actually making those deep structural changes to enable true equality of opportunity for all (much harder).
Yes; I really dislike adjusting statistics, because it's off-target, whether it's easy or not, but I definitely agree that opportunity is the desirable thing to equalize.
Each racial group has subsets that trend towards different desires; e.g. as a white guy I knew lots of other white guys in high school who were anti-intellectual, and thought that going to college inherently meant you were a snob.
I don't know how to change subgroup attitudes like that, but at any rate it sure would be nice to give opportunity to those who want it.
The primary way that that is hard is that it costs hard money. In my example, money for student instruments and money for music instructors (typically far more than for the instruments, although both are nontrivial).
(In my areas public libraries have been cutting hours (and days) for decades. This is part of the ridiculously negative trend that we, as a society, must stop being foolish about, like these other issues.)
Statistics, OTOH, averages together those who don't want, along with those who do want, which is clearly unfair to those who do want.
Yes, there's definitely more that needs fixing. My stake in this fight is coming up with things that can happen so my industry (and really, the organizations I work for) can get great talent - and that involves training more & recruiting diverse engineers.
> The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.
> I do take issue with her blaming the CS107 professor for contributing to sexism.
If the professor doesn't have the responsibility to make the class accessible to a diverse group, who does?
> She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out.
She does not say that. You implying that she says that or that that is the reason is BLATANTLY racist and sexist. The reason that there are not enough black women making it through that class is NOT because they are stupid or lazy.
I find your attitude offensive.
EDIT: I'll take your downvotes with pride. Care to actually indicate how I am wrong?
> One goes on and says women and minorities, particularly blacks, are not smart enough to make it through difficult CS classes.
No, the commenter said many of them were weeded out because the classes were hard. If you have affirmative action helping people get into university with lower test scores, isn't that exactly what you'd expect to see?
When you don't have logic on your side, just call people names, right?
> If you have affirmative action helping people get into university with lower test scores, isn't that exactly what you'd expect to see?
Ah, and here we have uncovered the elephant in the room.
Damn elephant.
I'm sure this woman has a legitimate complaint, I'm sure at least two people have asked her if she was lost before. I'm also guessing she may be bloviating a little bit. Nobody in college gives a damn if you're lost, lets be honest. If you're lost, you ask for directions. Happens all the time. Unless, of course, you actually look lost. Even then, people usually don't give a damn.
I went to UMD, College Park, and the weed-out classes were damn hard. UMDCP is only a top 15 program, I can't imagine how hard Stanford would be.
The incessantly being asked if you are lost is the most unrealistic part of this story. My wife and I were looking for a room in Stanford last year - we really were lost. No-one gave a s..t.
At UMDCP people asked me for directions all the time, and I was happy to help. Not once did I ever ask anyone if they were lost. Nobody gives a shit. They really, truly just don't. Anyone who "does" care actually doesn't, they're just trying to break the ice or whatever.
I'm not assuming she got in on affirmative action. I'm stating that affirmative action, as a policy, has consequences. One consequence is that certain demographics who initially benefit will suffer from it later.
Please learn to separate demographic differences from individual differences before calling someone ignorant.
Can you comprehend how there are other factors that could effect minority achievement besides your assumption that they're letting in people not smart enough? Does your "consequence" have any backing or did you just make it up?
That's nice. The rest of us are saying that racism, as a problem that exists rampantly in this society and this very valley, has consequences. One consequence is that certain demographics don't benefit as others do.
And you wanted to assume "affirmative action" had some part in this without knowing a thing about this woman. Horrible.
Please learn to stop perpetuating racism by blaming the victims. It's ignorant, disgusting, and cowardly.
The woman is still in the class, so obviously affirmative action hasn't affected her. However it is a fact that Stanford uses affirmative action (see https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic... for example). I think jquery was pointing out that this affirmative action might explain the reduction in diversity after the "weeding out", which the article author mentions. It's nothing to do with racism or assuming that black people are stupid.
This complaining about 'first [two] comments' is getting tiresome. The comment ordering swings around a lot, especially when the article is fresh, and doesn't necessarily reflect number of upvotes - for example, right now in my feed, the top comment is '0 minutes' old and your comment is 36 minutes old.
Clearly there's more to comment ordering than karma - I find it hard to believe that in less than 60 seconds, a comment is posted, then the page is refreshed enough times by enough viewers to find the fresh karmaless comment, who then upvote it in time for me to load it on my pageview.
In short, stop it with these "top comment(s) = HN hivemind" whines.
I don't think I've ever seen a top-level comment complaining about the top comment actually be referring to the comment that's at the top when I read it. In fact, the complaint is usually either downvoted to negative or above the comment it's complaining about.
As an aside, it could be a small indication that this community is a.) growing a bit via reddit, and b.) reaching a critical mass where maybe StackOverflow rules should be considered.
Something like, not being able to reply to the "root" of a comment tree without some paltry number of karma, like 10.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care about karma scores, but as you point out, it isn't very hard to "farm" karma if one so chooses.
Absolutely agree. Reactions like this make it that much harder for folks in the industry to recruit talent through the pipeline because we're discouraging and reducing the ability of potentially qualified people from getting through.
I'm not sure exactly which comments you're referring to. However I think the comments are casting doubt on the author's interpretation of her experience, rather than her experience itself. Nobody doubts that people asked her if she was lost. There is just some doubt as to whether it happened because of her skin colour.
Initially when I read this story I was gobsmacked. How could there be so many racist idiots at Stanford? Then I thought of other possible explanations: perhaps she was just looking around at the architecture and just looked lost?
I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I don't think it's fair to automatically assume racism. Could she not just politely ask one of the people "no, I'm not lost, why do you ask?"
[edit] please a comment explaining what you disagree with, rather than just downvoting.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Anecdotally and in my area I can confirm racism and sexism (usually in the form of "harmless jokes") is pretty rampant in tech.
I think the downvotes are due to the fact that we haven't seen any evidence of actual racism or sexism in the tech industry. We see lots of stories like this where it seems open to interpretation.
And yes, I myself have some personal experience of real racism. If this is the worst that is happening in the tech space then things are pretty good.
Anyway, this is an important topic, so if you do have any experiences with racism/sexism it would be good to write an article or blog post about it.
"Stereotype threat and feelings of isolation are huge obstacles many students of color face in my major"
Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?
"Too often, however, this means that by week six in the ten week quarter system, the class enrollment makeup drops dramatically from being optimistically diverse to being exclusively male, white and Asian."
It's because the classes are difficult. I took these classes when I went to school and if you don't really know your stuff, you will fail.
I don't know the person that wrote the article, but it seems she wants to be taken seriously immediately. Nobody gets taken seriously immediately, even if you are white or asian. Everyone has to put the work in.
"I can put that power to good use by creating more spaces for minorities in technology to thrive and feel welcome"
Why don't you just say African-american students. Asians and Hispanics are also minorities.
When I went to school, I had many African-american students that were my classmates. As the classes went from 100 level to 300 level and above (major-level and weeder classes), many dropped out.
They were never treated any differently in class. We also need to remember that many universities have quotas for minorities and give extra points on the SAT for just checking a box.
This however, does not guarantee that a person has the knowledge to actually pass the classes once they get in.
You really check all the doesn't-want-to-understand boxes with this post. It's like a textbook in attempting to discredit through non sequitur.
Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?
Second-guessing lived experience (it turns out that people subject to racism are actually quite good at telling when it's happening to them), check.
It's because the classes are difficult.
Seriously, think for even one second about the implication you're making here.
Why don't you just say African-american students. Asians and Hispanics are also minorities.
"All lives matter!" It's not the author's responsibility to tackle the perfect at the expense of the good.
They were never treated any differently in class.
You have no idea how they were treated. They do. Let them speak.
> Seriously, think for even one second about the implication you're making here.
Seriously, read the article before commenting. The author said that the class in question is Stanford's CS "weed out" class.
A "weed out" class is a class designed to be (1) difficult, and (2) come early in a major. The idea is that if you can get through the weed out class, you should be able to get through the rest of the classes in that major.
The theory is that by putting one of the hardest classes first, you avoid students ending up in the terrible position of spending 3 or 4 years majoring in one field and then have to give up and either drop out or switch majors when they hit a difficult required class that they just cannot get through.
Despite your numerous edits, you've missed the point entirely, which is that the GP posited that the reason the class tends towards homogeneity is its difficulty. The implication is that minorities are not as smart. I really didn't feel like I had to spell this out, but here we are.
The implication is that minorities are not as smart.
Or that they have some other reason to have not learned as much (say, worse primary schools? differing cultural values?).
It is very well known that affirmative action tends to take the form of lowering standards for the groups being favored. If this is in fact true, running into a non-biased filter would tend to undo some of its effects. As noted towards the end of the post you're calling offensive (We also need to remember that many universities have quotas for minorities and give extra points on the SAT for just checking a box.). If this is not true... a weed-out class would not be observed to change the class demographics.
So the question then is, if an institution has a policy of affirmative action as part of an effort to address structural imbalances in access to opportunities prior to college, don't they then owe it to those students to not then use 'weed-out' classes to weed them out before they have a chance to catch up?
There are reasons besides differences in smartness and racism that can lead to some people not making it past a difficult weed out class, especially one in a STEM field.
For instance, students from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to have had serious prior exposure to computer science before coming to Stanford, such as through high school computer science classes with well equipped computer labs. Students from much poorer backgrounds might not have had these pre-college opportunities.
This can make their first CS class harder for them--especially when it is a weed out class at a top CS school.
So you might have four kinds of students.
1. Those who had significant CS experience before Stanford, and came to Stanford with the intent of majoring in CS.
2. Those who had significant CS experience before Stanford, but came intending to major in something else, but are taking the intro CS course to see what CS is like.
3. Those without a significant pre-Stanford CS background, but came intending to major in CS.
4. Those without a significant pre-Stasnford CS background, and came intending to major in something else, but are taking the intro CS course to see what it is like.
Those in group #1 will have the best chance of not getting weeded out.
Those in #2 will also have a good chance, because of their background.
#3 is more iffy. Their school background lacks CS, but they intended to be CS majors, so many of them will have self-studied CS to make up for their poor formal education.
#4...these people are going to have a seriously hard time. They are much less likely than the #3 people to have done anything to make up for their high school's inadequacies in CS.
I'd expect the distribution of minorities among these four groups to skew towards #3 and #4, and so I'd expect them to get hit more by the weed out class. This is not because they are not as smart--they are just not as well prepared coming in due to inequalities in pre-college education.
TL;DR: the pipeline problem doesn't start at college.
Say you have a class that starts out with 30 students. 18 white, 10 asian, 2 black.
Say the course is very hard and it cuts 2/3rds of the total students. If the cuts were proportional by race, we now have 6 white, 4 asian, and 0 blacks.
There was no racism involved in the class, the fact that no blacks remain is a result of the class brutally weeding out 2/3rds of the students and that the initial number of blacks was very low.
You can quibble over numbers, but the basic idea remains that large percentage cuts in an unbalanced population can make it tend more toward homogeneity.
That's a good numerical analysis. However, you also have to account for the fact that, on average, black children in the US get a poorer education. There are studies and statistics and on and on. Is it controversial to think that somebody might be less smart because they got a worse education? And then is it so surprising that when they get into Stanford due to affirmative action, they can't handle the course load? The whole system is a mess.
You may not like the implication, but it's there. It's a fact. Even when brought in via affirmative action, minorities are consistently weeded out at higher rates than, say, whites or men. No implications needs to be made because the statistics are there for everyone to see. And this is a bad thing, but not like you think.
This is where I mainly take issue with the contemporary SJW/PC types. The fact that some minorities (for the sake of argument let's take white men v black women) are underrepresented in the number of, say, CS graduates is a bad thing, a problem that needs solving. The way to go about this, in my view, is not, and I repeat, not, by just admitting/hiring more black women to universities/companies despite being lower qualified than white men. We could do this, and pat ourselves in the back for a job well done and leave with our outstanding moral fibre confirmed, and be very politically correct. But that changes nothing.
The fact is that to solve this complex issue we need to look into the root causes of the problem that causes black people to perform statistically worse in tests, or women to be less likely to enroll in a CS degree. And that takes a whole hell lot more effort than superficially sweeping the issue under the rug with affirmative action et al. It would be a massive undertaking that would involve shakeups at the core of our society. Naturally the champions of the politically correct aren't so inclined, and prefer to simply sit and be outraged by, and offering as only solution to simply "cheat" until the statistics seem agreeable. And that, I stress, alters none of the core societal problems that caused those twisted statistics in the first place.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer to see these problems rectified and true equality of opportunity be established rather than just shrugging it off and twisting the statistics until they are "good enough".
It would be a massive undertaking that would involve shakeups at the core of our society.
Maybe.
If the main issue is cultural attitudes (either of the people in question, or of the people running the schools), sure.
But if it's mostly about access to resources (as suggested in another post here, time-at-keyboard), that's merely a large undertaking and doesn't need to be coordinated as well. In this case, the greatest requires resource would probably be patience.
A very anecdotal example is that my white parents were very lenient and I very few chores or responsibilities growing up so I spent my extra time on the computer, whereas my black friends were always shocked at how much free time my parents gave me.
All I have is my personal experiences to go on but as a white guy I was never asked that question while a CS undergrad - and that was in Texas where people are extremely polite and helpful to strangers.
It's fairly simple. Young students are often spotted trying to find some location on campus. There aren't as many women taking CS. Even fewer black women.
Therefore people's expectations upon seeing a young black woman in the CS department is that she's lost.
That does not make those people racist and I didn't think the author was claiming any such thing. It may mean the system as a whole is racist or perpetuating older racist policies through societal inertia. When those problems are solved we would expect the percentage of black female CS students to roughly track the general population... Then they won't be unicorns and people's default expectations will change.
There are plenty of studies that show that underrepresented minorities are, in fact, treated differently. Did your African-American classmates affirmatively tell you that they didn't feel like they were treated differently, or was that your own inference? (I notice you qualified that they were never treated differently "in class".)
And contrary to your implication, people don't have to be "racist" to treat people differently. It may just be unfamiliarity, but the net effect is still to give those subject to it a feeling of not belonging.
Everyone has to put the work in.
Maybe. But the amount of work needed to prove that you are "one of the team" is certainly not the same for everyone, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
> We also need to remember that many universities have quotas for minorities
Quotas for minorities have been bright-line illegal for decades (at least since Regents v. Bakke in 1978). So, if you are going to argue that many universities are outright breaking the law, you probably should support that with something.
What is amazing is that it's a mainstay in American entertainment that an underdog fights against oppression and proves the naysayers wrong and ascends to the top.
Yet so many Americans apparently believe that people are so fragile that a few offensive comments, or even statements meant to help (!) (albeit possibly in a clueless fashion) are ultra-damaging and a huge societal problem.
Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?
That brings up another point: if she really was lost but no one took notice of and asked her, would she also think they're racist?
The University of Michigan used a 150-point scale to rank applicants, with 100 points needed to guarantee admission. The University gave underrepresented ethnic groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, an automatic 20-point bonus towards their score, while a perfect SAT score was worth 12 points.
"Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?"
Have you ever thought you might just have difficulty emphasizing and people are trying to tell you something valuable? Why do you immediately think anybody would "look lost" in general?
"It's because the classes are difficult. I took these classes when I went to school and if you don't really know your stuff, you will fail."
Right... Actually, this is where this ends with me. Mr Hauggis, you have definitely crossed the line.
"They were never treated any differently in class."
Do you really enjoy such confidence in your own ability to observe, feel and emphasize with people? Because from my experiences in the US, this sounds like a very strong claim.
I don't think the OP is denying that people "could" be responding to her based on a stereotype. I think it's more about giving people the benefit of the doubt rather than automatically assuming they are racist.
When I say "give the benefit of the doubt", I mean trust but verify, i.e. ask the person why they're asking if you are lost. Saying that we should just automatically assume bias is intellectual laziness and is just perpetuating the problem rather than solving it.
I can confirm it comes off as aggressive even when you try to apply a lot of touch since this is how I handle these things.
I find that a sometimes simple questions like this can turn into people calling me a SJW (then dismissing everything I ever say), "your the racist for accusing me of being racist", people thinking that I'm being mean to them, etc.
So the solution is to just automatically assume people are racists when they ask if you're lost? Nice.
Also, what exactly are you saying? I can't see how "no, why do you ask" said with a smiling face in a friendly tone could be construed as either aggressive or SJW, but then maybe I don't live somewhere where people are incredibly touchy.
You are acting as though 'being racist' is a massive crime that people need to be protected from even thinking that they might be complicit in.
The evidence shows that almost all of us, including members of minorities, are conditioned to have racial prejudice.
The reason this is a problem is that it systematically puts some people at a disadvantage based on their appearance, even though the evidence also shows that within group differences are greater than between group differences.
Unconscious bias can be overcome by making it conscious.
We are all racists. We can overcome the problem if we face it.
Trying to protect people from having to consider whether their actions arise from unconscious bias is actively working to perpetuate the problem.
We are talking about Stanford, not Hogwarts. I would expect that the floors and the rooms are numbered in a fairly straightforward way that comports with the geometry, and that geometry does not change. I'd further expect that there is a directory or some such device that tells visitors what people are in what rooms.
These should be sufficient to allow a visitor, even a first time visitor, to find their destination. So as long as the person is not gazing about confused, clearly having no idea how to proceed, isn't the natural assumption that they are fine, and so you should leave them alone? If they need help, presumably they can ask someone.