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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

#391

Post by dgellow »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #248
greenhatglack wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of money to be made in "anti-racism" and "gender-science", especially in tax-heavy countries. No one ever dares to question it, and it's "good" causes that could use some of the workers income. I'll be contrarian and recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" instead.

I'm skeptical of any American "Libertarian" especially when it comes to race. Sowell is a class-reductionist, which would make him a terrible pick for this topic.

What is a class reductionist?

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

#392

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

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:…

You make it sound like when those programs and patterns were ended, that the black community recovered overnight. Your post also acts as if the driving ideas of racism that lead to blacks being excluded from or vulnerable to the things you listed ended overnight also. And your post mentions how racism made the social landscape far more adversarial to blacks with things such as the War On Drugs used to target the black community.

Honestly to make such a post, one would have disregard network effects and intergenerational wealth transfer to a malicious level.

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

#393

Post by busterarm »

gowld wrote: post #343
busterarm wrote: post #270

I used to work for a regional ILEC and everyone in the company was required to do regular ridealongs with the installers to get a better understanding of the customer base and their needs. Me (a white guy) would frequently do ridealongs with some of our black installers and I would see this kind of treatment from customers regularly. I wasn't dressed like I was doing install work (business casual) and was clearly you…

Did you learn anything from the customers? Isn't it obvious what phone customers want when they ask for phone service? It's not a complicated custom product for the user.

It's not about learning from the customers.

It's about learning the disconnect between what the customers report and what the actual problem is. It's about learning what the field technicians have to deal with and how the service actually works.

Cable, DSL & Fiber internet are much more complicated services than anyone gives them credit for.

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

#394

Post by quadrifoliate »

throwaway711477 wrote: post #327
thex10 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-cent…

> Think highlight rather than promote. Think shared experience rather than shared interest. No, not identical experience, but think overlapping parts of a venn diagram. A relevant example in that overlap, assumed criminality, is mentioned in the very comment you are replying to. How much shared experience does a professional class recent immigrant from Asia actually have with a working class African-American? For ver…

> How much shared experience does a professional class recent immigrant from Asia actually have with a working class African-American?

Not much, but the shared experience they have is as a basis of the color of their skin is what is visualized when calling them a person of color. And historically, that has been a big deal (e.g. anti-miscegnation laws in the US and huge amounts of racial discrimination in India's colonized past) – big enough that a lot of people think it's important enough to have a shared label.

> And, might not recent immigrants from Asian countries have shared experiences in common with immigrants from Europe?

Sure! And using the term "immigrant", we would classify their shared experience as such. A recent "professional class immigrant" could be a person of color having something in common with a working class African American, and something in common with the Italian immigrant.

It's like Gmail v/s traditional mailboxes with folders. An email can have multiple labels in Gmail. So can a person in real life.

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

#395

Post by sabujp »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #57
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #21

I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment/defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who "just wanted to get the hell out of there" after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO. I've recently been reading/watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic raci…

I'm skeptical about Robin Diangelo, I read her book a few months ago, and it only seems to be an advertisement for her services as an anti-racist instructor. Her entire argument frames race relations within the context of the workplace which is problematic because her approach is coercive, not educational. It's more a guide on "how not to get fired for being racist" than anything. There are much better books for foun…

did you generate this reply from hncynic?

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

#396

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

pessimizer wrote: post #156
pdonis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first? Are the only important problems universal ones?

>...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people?

Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

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

#397

Post by sabujp »

I was once working at a startup in the south bay area, where "white developer" was not one of the people who was able to do what we wanted, as an engineer, for a startup which had a tech foundation. This was a big problem for most companies.

The thing is, this group had really terrible problems in the first place.

Most startups are very different from the valley because of the nature of technical talent. But the people who come from the valley are pretty good at what they do.

The problem is the lack of culture.

In most companies there are only a few minorities:

* There are enough great tech people that want to start their own companies.

* Some have to get a job as a software developer, because there's a strong market saturation of smart people right in the first place.

* There are few places a tech founder can get to start a startup.

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

#398

Post by FilterSweep »

gowld wrote: post #350
0zymandias wrote: post #213

It seems like people from other ethnicities/countries have done well in Silicon Valley, e.g. India, China, Iran. Notably, CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Uber and others are brown-skinned. Would they have done even better without the racism? Or what accounts for the difference?

Asian immigrants largely pass through a selection filter of wealth and education before they can immigrate (in tech at least, thanks to H1-B), so the ones you see have largely been preselected and show up in a large peer group. The Chinese or Indian person next to you at work who came to US on an H1B or education visa was much more elite in their home country than you are in yours, on average.

Anecdotal but this is what I have seen across multiple companies and startups.

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

#399

Post by thisiszilff »

neonate wrote: post #223
Thorentis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism absolutely does imply intent. The attempt by progressives to recharacterise racism as something that it is not, is the reason why they are making less progress in their objectives than they would like. It is not racist to assume that the person in the room most like the other CEOs you have met, is also the CEO. If I was in a foreign country, I would assume the CEO is the person most like the other people in th…

I don't see anything here that contradicts the idea that people are systematically discriminated against because of their race. That's the problem people are worried about.

I suspect it is the difference between the VC realizing they made a mistake and moving on (for a reason related to race) vs speaking to the white guy because they are racist and they would refuse to deal with a black CEO (ie, 'we don't serve your kind here'). The latter is very much intent, the former is rooted in biases from living in a world where there are few black CEOs. The question is to what degree do the biases in the former hold those people back (in the form of expectations, etc.).

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

#400

Post by stevula »

benmw333 wrote: post #67
anewdirection wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I flagged it because it is an article written to promote further bias, while under the guise of 'exposing racism'. If you think promoting race politics is the goal of HN, I will find a different forum. My time in SV could not have been more different than what this boased article proports. Fuck identity politics and fuck bloomberg, and fuck you for promoting this drivel.

What I find interesting among the woke crowd (white leftys): they believe any claim a black person makes - especially when it is "their experience." They don't question what that person says - because they are black. It is particularly interesting that the education system is actively teaching our youth - especially black youth - that racism is prevalent today. Teaching young people that they are hated by others (alb…

It’s remarkable that some people would rather believe an entire race has a victim complex than that they might be facing a legitimate injustice.
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