51–60 of 212 posts
Why are there so few white people in pro basketball?
Maybe because there were 300 years of systemic natural selection in this country called "slavery" where black Americans were bought/sold and bred based solely on their physical attributes?
For the same reason there are so few poor whites in STEM. America's dysfunctional education funding. Make education funding federal, and have a nationwide push to have small classes and well funded schools for everybody, and this would be fixed in 10 years. As it is, rich districts pay more taxes and get better schools. Funny that.
Why is that the first thing people think of when it comes to explaining black behavior is that they must be poor? Not all black people are poor. Stop it with the stereotypes.
But, we also have to look at statistics and think longitudinally instead of anecdotally.
I came from a middle class family in a small town in the south. But my mom being a well connected high school math teacher did give me some advantages.
When I graduated from college, I had a choice between taking a job in a slightly larger city where I could have afforded to take care of myself or move to Atlanta where I could get a job as a computer operator based on a previous internship. But the pay was crap.
I wanted to move to Atlanta because I knew I would have more opportunities. My parents had already bought me car, they subsidized me for the first year, and the rest is history - I was able to network my way into getting a software development position. This was in the late 90s.
My classmate couldn’t afford to make those choices. He was stuck taking a COBOL programming job in the 90s - the same job I turned down and still is doing that to this day in the same city.
I could venture a guess, and its probably why i'll never go from my current job as a diesel mechanic to junior python programmer no matter how badly i want to: criminal record. in the US you can discriminate against employees who have any sort of criminal record. I've served jailtime for possession of cannabis, so that automatically rules me out for a lot of white-collar jobs. Black people tend to get the brunt of po…
> for possession of cannabis... I got 3 years Sorry if I ask, but how much? Three years seems an awful lot of time. Second, for how long can companies access this kind of record? Isn't it unacceptable to discriminate candidates based on something that has nothing to do with the qualification for a job?
Until you get your record expunged, assuming you can (some states, e.g. Washington, make that impossible). It's not like a credit report there's no 7 year filter on what shows up in a background check.
> Isn't it unacceptable to discriminate candidates based on something that has nothing to do with the qualification for a job?
Unacceptable, or illegal? It's [mostly] only illegal to discriminate against a protected class, everything else is fair game. Whether it is acceptable is an opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because there were 300 years of systemic natural selection in this country called "slavery" where black Americans were bought/sold and bred based solely on their physical attributes?
The Jews must have transcendent superhuman athleticism then. Basketball used to be dominated by immigrant Jews before World War 2.
For the same reason there are so few poor whites in STEM. America's dysfunctional education funding. Make education funding federal, and have a nationwide push to have small classes and well funded schools for everybody, and this would be fixed in 10 years. As it is, rich districts pay more taxes and get better schools. Funny that.
I struggle to see how this is wrong. It's not any different than rich people buying private education, though it makes it easier for non-rich folks to try and find the cheapest place in that district so they can benefit from the well-funded schools.
It seems popular to think that people should have equal opportunity, independent of any other factors. But from the perspective of a parent, why should I be disallowed from providing my own kids every possible advantage I can afford?
I wonder how many people on HN have experienced being the only person of their race in the room. In my case I was put into a French public school where I was the only Asian student. It took me a bit to realize why I found that experience so shitty. The language and culture barrier was definitely a factor. But also it just sucks standing out. Sometimes this difference manifests as racism. Sometimes it manifests as sim…
No. Most Black people don’t feel any more of a calling to “combat larger social issues” than anyone else.
Yes, I worked at one company where I was the only Black person out of maybe 200 people until another one of my friends got hired based on my referral. They constantly mixed up our names when talking to us.
We were on a conference call once and my friend “John” was talking and one of our coworkers in another state mixed us up and said we “sound a like”. My friend was from up north and had a Boston accent. I have a southern accent. We sound nothing a like.
I am not saying that the company didn’t have any Black peoples because it was racist. The company was based in another state that was about a two hour drive. I would go there and not see any other Black people. We worked in a satellite office.
I was also in the awkward position of being in the city of the main office during Election Day 2016. As the only minority it seemed like in the entire city where people were driving around in their pickup trucks with their confederate flags and MAGA bumper stickers.
Occam's Razor says that they aren't a lot of black people in STEM positions because companies aren't hiring black people in STEM positions. There are plenty of black candidates applying to FAANG companies only to be rejected because "they don't fit in with the culture" or they "weren't Google-y enough", or "they couldn't write a depth-first-search algorithm in less than 2 seconds in front of a whiteboard ("white boar…
I know some of the first Black software engineers at Facebook and none of them have kids (they're early 30s). The rest of it is true, people are discouraged both by bias in interviews and internal promotion/politics.
For the same reason there are so few poor whites in STEM. America's dysfunctional education funding. Make education funding federal, and have a nationwide push to have small classes and well funded schools for everybody, and this would be fixed in 10 years. As it is, rich districts pay more taxes and get better schools. Funny that.
Why is that the first thing people think of when it comes to explaining black behavior is that they must be poor? Not all black people are poor. Stop it with the stereotypes.
Of course not, but what's your point? The stereotype is accurate. Go read the very article this discussion is about, and it says black families average about 2/3 the income of non-black families. That is reality, and wishing it away won't make it less true. If we want to figure out a long term solution, we can't deny uncomfortable truth.
People insinuate this is some sort of racism, but it actually has more to do with the incentive. People tend to be heavily influenced by their environment as they grow up. And if the majority of your peers see X as being "cool", that's what a lot of people will try to achieve. For example, during high school years, the "popular kids" are the jocks who play sports, not a geek who plays with code all day (although this…
Who are these people that keep blaming everything on racism. Can you point them out or are you just creating a boogeyman to protect your fragility? Subliminally racists? WTF? All white Americans are racists. You can choose to be anti-racist, or you can pretend to explain away racism like OC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's not racism, it's a lack of positive thinking?
As they said, racism is still an issue, but lack of role models and exposure is possibly a bigger issue. Lack of exposure and role models is a symptom of long term systemic racism though, but it doesn't manifest in the same way many people think of racism. Lack of positive thinking isn't quite the right term here, because it assumes that if Black kids just believed in themselves and thought differently it would fix a…