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For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

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Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#301

Post by TeaDrunk »

refurb wrote: post #235
tomp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's stereotyping, not racism. People make inferences. Like, if there's two folks, one dressed in a suit, the other in baggy clothes with thick glasses, most people (including VCs) would default to the former as the MBA CEO, and the latter as geek CTO Even though it might be the exact opposite! If you make a wrong inference, just accept the correction and move on, no hurt feelings. Similar for old vs. young.

This is what my concern with the focus on race is. You may commit an act that appears racist, when in fact it wasn't at all. An example: - I run into a white friend and call him Dave (another white guy I know), when his name is Mark. It happens, I apologize as I'm terrible with names. - I run into a black friend and call him Dave (another black guy I know), when his name is Mark. It happens, I apologize as I'm terrib…

In the second instance I’d only find it racist if Dave and Mark were the only black people you knew, and also if this mistake isn’t extended to everyone but only the black people in your life.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#302

Post by triceratops »

mynameishere wrote: post #98
throwaway713 wrote: post #65

Whoa! I didn’t realize Leland Stanford was racist. And blatantly so. Makes you wonder if the university should be renamed.

Did you realize that Abraham Lincoln was a racist? Did you realize that almost everyone who hasn't undergone a lifetime of "anti-racist" propaganda is a racist? Anyway, as to the subject of the article, I think it was covered in an episode of "The Jeffersons".

> Did you realize that Abraham Lincoln was a racist?

I think signing the Emancipation Proclamation, prosecuting the Civil War, and ultimately paying for it all with his life, give him a pass for his personal views that would be considered "racist" by today's standards. In Lincoln's case, actions really spoke far louder than words.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#303

Post by OzzyB »

commoner wrote: post #228
OzzyB wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP isn't weak he's simply pointing out that a simple "opps sorry" isn't enough for radicals like you.

badrabbit specifically used the word "weak": > Rule #1 of negotiation is never negotiate from a position if weakness. As the original comment suggests, this is indeed fragility, you feep weak for being wrong and you would feel a lot weaker if you said it out loud. In my comment, I said that an apology would have been the proper resolution: > In this type of situation, the empathetic resolution would be to apologize f…

[flagged]

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#304

Post by charlesu »

wottamap wrote: post #205
jgwil2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job. > Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed. Do you have any evidence for these assertions? I would be surprised if so, particularly with respect to the second, since police killings are notoriously difficult to gather data on, but I would certainly be interested to…

No, not on this specifcally. But there's plenty of psychological research that shows (for example) that if you tell kids they are gifted, they perform much better. Whether this psychological effect is more or less damaging than the racism is probably undeterminable. But because society widely believes the racism is the bigger problem, and my instincts run the other way, I'm taking the other side.

You're right, telling people that they are good at something may very well lead them to perform better at it.

But what if society subtly, almost subliminally suggested that some kids are gifted in, say, sports but not school, while others are gifted in school, but not sports? Or what if society suggested that some men are more prone to violence than others? What if those embedded in our media and even our language? Do you think that would have some kind of effect on teachers and students, police officers and citizens? There are studies that suggest that this actually happens. Psychologists have found that young children are aware of gender and race stereotypes despite receiving no explicitly instruction whatsoever.

I'd ask you to reconsider being contrarian for the sake being contrarian. Obviously, you should interrogate society's assumptions as well as your own. But you should do so from the standpoint of neutrality to the extent possible, rather than knee jerk contrarianism, which isn't always useful. Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers are contrarians too.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#305

Post by TeaDrunk »

pdonis wrote: post #144
lukev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress. Meanwhile, a central point of the book is one that should be self evident. Talking about racism makes white people[1] uncomfortable. I know this to be true from experience. And we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations a…

> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism. I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody…

But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#306

Post by fzeroracer »

pdonis wrote: post #144
lukev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress. Meanwhile, a central point of the book is one that should be self evident. Talking about racism makes white people[1] uncomfortable. I know this to be true from experience. And we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations a…

> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism. I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody…

We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#307

Post by bsanr2 »

twybriny wrote: post #220
zasz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systematic exclusion of black people from social programs, like the GI Bill and Social Security, and redlining, which prevented black Americans from building up wealth through homeownership the way white Americans were. "The Color of Law" is a good book on redlining. To expand on the bit about Social Security, farmworkers were excluded, since farmworkers tend to be not white. It was a nice sneaky way to be racist wit…

One of the things that confuses me quite a bit is the focus on laws that expired or have been abrogated 50-60-70-150 years ago and make it as if everything wrong with contemporary American society is caused directly by such laws and nothing else. * GI Bill: adopted in 1944, expired in 1956. * Social Security: adopted in 1935, unclear what the impacts were at the time. Unclear what the impacts are today. * Redlining:…

>As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history.

Well, it's not. In living memory:

>The wealth of black Americans was halved by the 2008 financial crisis, in part because of predatory lending practices which specifically targeted them by race and misrepresented their creditworthiness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/t...

>A million black farming families essentially had their wealth-producing land stolen from them: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-la...

https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/losing-ground/

>Multiple black activists pushing for more advantageous policy have been imprisoned and assassinated, with allegedly some incidents as recent as the last few years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luth....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...

>Black students have become subject to levels of segregation - and associated disparities in educational quality - at levels rivalling those of pre-Brown v Board America

https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text

https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation

>Because many black workers were exempt from the initial impementation of Social Security and the GI Bill, their children (Silent Gen and Baby Boomers, currently in the process of passing on their inheritances) and grandchildren (Gen X and Millennials) are suffering the consequences in lost wealth-building opportunities

>Countless black Americans have suffered from poor healthcare based on apathy and stereotypes

https://features.propublica.org/diabetes-amputations/black-a...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-american...

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/02/20/why-are-black-women...

>Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-h...

https://thewitnessbcc.com/crack-epidemic-opioid-crisis-race-...

>Marijuana, long a a drug whose sale and use was the pretext for the overpolicing of black communities, and which provided off-the-record income for many marginalized from the mainstream economy, was legalized in several states, under schemes that made sure that the overwhelming majority of those who profited were white.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/marijuana-...

https://qz.com/1194143/even-after-legalization-black-america...

https://psmag.com/economics/the-green-rush-is-too-white-hood...

>Historical atrocities were buried until after those afflicted were unable to see justice in their lifetimes

https://tulsa.okstate.edu/news/shedding-light-local-history-...

And, of course, bare-naked discrimination exists across aspects of American life, including employment, compensation, educational opportunity, freedom of movement, criminal justice, real estate, and on and on and on. When these and many more injustices were not directly impactful, they served as poignant examples of the extreme apathy, if not antipathy, American society has had for black Americans. On top of it all, black Americans still live under the specter of police departments nationwide, which have been allegedly infiltrated by white supremacist organizations, and which assuredly indoctrinate officers with racist training and policy, and root out anti-racist individuals.

I'll leave you with

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/...

a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' seminal work, The Case For Reparations (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...), which reopened the intellectual debate on racial justice with a focus on the subject above: racial injustice affecting living black Americans, however rooted it may be in the events of 50-60-70-150 years ago.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#308

Post by shrubble »

cheez wrote: post #251
scarface74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asian women being taken as an authority figure? Heck, anecdotally they can’t even be seen as developers . I have an Asian friend/former coworker. Anytime that we would all go to a local conference they would assume she was QA.

I have a friend who runs a team and hires according to these lines: - Management: Europeans - Coding: Russians - QA: Indians He will not consider that he might be wrong here.

How successful is his team? He might be suffering from confirmation bias if he is good at interviews/choosing people.

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#309

Post by [deleted] »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #47
olivermarks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's BIPOC?

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 separat…

[deleted]

Re: For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

#310

Post by thex10 »

throwaway711477 wrote: post #211
quadrifoliate wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 separat…

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.…

> 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?

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