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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

#421

Post by newacct583 »

Thorentis wrote: post #189
Pfhreak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stereotyping and racism are not mutually exclusive. In this case, people are making inferences that the BIPOC is not the CEO. Racism doesn't imply intent either. It absolutely can be the case that someone unknowingly makes a racist inference even with the best of intentions.

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…

> Racism absolutely does imply intent. The attempt by progressives to recharacterise racism as something that it is not

Sorry, what? "Racism" is not a word with a clear definition over time. It didn't exist at all in popular usage until the past few decades.

I think what you're trying to say is that "racism" is supposed to connote direct discrimination, like support for segregation, slavery, stuff like that. And sure, lots of people use the word that way. Most of those people are the same people who want to argue that "racism is a solved problem", so it's easy to see why this definition is attractive to mostly-male, mostly-white, mostly-conservative people.

But it's not the way a lot of other people use the word, where it connotes broader injustice in society and not just individual opinions.

Basically: you're making a senseless semantic argument. Even if you win the dictionary war about what "racism" means, you're still not responding to the actual concerns being expressed.

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

#422

Post by dash2 »

wolco wrote: post #252
chongli wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the trouble here is the double meaning of the word racist. When some people hear the word, they think of cross-burning fanatics and mass murderers. On the other hand, the current big conversation is about how everyone is racist and that society is rife with systemic racism. That creates a catch-22 for anyone who commits a faux-pas (like mistaking the black CEO for a subordinate). Either admit to racism and ca…

The whole thing makes white people subconsciously want to avoid minorities because of the risk of mob punishment if they fail to follow new rules being created for conduct. Same thing happened after me too where many men were afraid to risk power for a real life hookup with the risks involved and have opted out for paided (where legal) risk free transactions. Which in turn has reduced the amount of relationships in g…

Interesting idea, but is there any evidence for it?

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

#423

Post by pdonis »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #305
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…

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

> 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?

Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it.

But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.

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

#424

Post by greenhatglack »

r0s wrote: post #264
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.

On the contrary, there's not a lot of money to be made, and people constantly question it. Would-be spoilers get educated about their own unrealized bias, racism continues to be a huge problem in this country, activists are vindicated and the world moves on.

What would convince you otherwise? Like what would suffice in order to convince someone like you that massive sums are spent on this?

Should be in relative terms to other aspects, like health care or should it be in absolute values?

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

#425

Post by taurath »

new2628 wrote: post #300
agar wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't weigh in from personal experience, but I look at it like a marathon. One set of runners face a first half of the race with mud, crushed glass, vertical climbs, and other obstacles, while other racers had a nice tailwind and extra drink stations. Regardless of the obstacles faced in the second half (which are still more numerous than the competition's), can't you understand why runners would still look back at…

This analogy would work if it weren't for the immigrants who arrive with no connections and resources, and successfully make it through hardships within one or two generations. A more apt analogy may be a marathon where there are bystanders who latch on to half of the runners and keep telling them, "you cannot make it, you need us to help you, the race is unfair".

Immigrants tend to have a high amount of education or resources relative to the societies they come from. Those immigrants come with their own sets of biases. Social infrastructure for, say, Indian people moving to Bellevue, WA in terms of social connections and wealth is better than Black american's have just ever had.

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

#426

Post by dash2 »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #374
twybriny wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

I agree that poverty and inequality in general is the real problem. But one must be able to point out that the shitty situations African-Americans are in today is the result of a whole bunch of dominos that fell over and if you follow them backwards they lead back to red lining, slavery etc. Everybody is a product of the past. Hell, Anglo-Saxon’s are still worse off then Normans in the UK 1000 year after William the…

Have you got a cite for that Anglo-Saxon claim? It sounds like Greg Clark, but I think his finding was a bit less black-and-white (sorry) than that.

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

#427

Post by GuiA »

dang wrote: post #233
haecceity wrote: post #219

In this thread hacker news proves the article right. Head desk.

HN reflects the society at large, so of course it proves the article right in that sense. Otherwise the article wouldn't be about the world. Any divisive topic is going to show up as divisive in any large-enough population sample. But there are at least as many comments pointing the opposite way—more, in fact, but we tend to notice the ones we dislike, and to weight them more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRang…

Some message boards solve this issue by letting posters specify their location as a field in their profile (and displaying a flag under the username, etc.). Not advocating this for HN, just pointing out how that gets solved by other communities (weak profile differentiation is part of the appeal of HN, but also a magnifier for these issues).

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

#428

Post by seppin »

fermienrico wrote: post #272
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 was with you until > Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not I’ve always noticed the opposite. Americans are a lot more forgiving of race than any other country. Even places like Sweden has serious problems with racism whereas US has lead so many positive changes and civil wars about racism. Growing up in US white suburbs, we were taught by parents…

I've made the simple statement that the US is farther along fighting racism than most of Europe and was downvoted for it.

There are places in Europe (mostly southern) where racism isn't even discouraged, still.

America draws the headlines because of it's violence, but it's progress on integration put Europe to shame. Not to say that both places have a lot of work to do, they do.

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

#429

Post by taurath »

phaus wrote: post #351
bsanr2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/201…

>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-... . Great post and you brought up a few things I hadn't considered. Just curious about this…

> How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?

Most of society now empathizes with drug addiction because its hit white society a lot and the race of users can't be used as a political scapegoat. As long as you're white, the richer you are, the less likely you are to go to jail for it. Rehab is for rich people.

We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.

> is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?

Given a huge percentage of the "response" is police and prisons, and police and prisons dramatically discriminate against people by race, yes.

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

#430

Post by catalogia »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #206
birdyrooster wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try approaching someone in denial about their alcoholism and talk about alcoholism they will act very similarly. These people need rehab.

I think that's a reasonable analogy but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. If you divide the world into alcoholics who need rehab and normal people who don't, you end up with a lot of people who refuse to admit they have a drinking problem because they don't want to pay the social costs of doing so.

Something many alcoholics and nearly all non-alcoholics have in common is they deny being alcoholics.

P(Alcoholism|Denial of Alcoholism) = P(Denial of Alcoholism|Alcoholism) * P(Alcoholism) / P(Denial of Alcoholism)

Pop in any reasonable numbers for those terms and it becomes readily apparent that denial of alcoholism does not constitute meaningful evidence of alcoholism.

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