OK. I'll weigh-in on this. I identify as an African American, developer, and aspiring entrepreneur. I'll post here the message that I give to my kids and will continue to hammer as long as they will listen. IT DOESN'T MATTER if it's a meritocracy or not. Go succeed. If there was an envelope that had a provable answer as to whether things are harder/easier for me to succeed with a new venture...I'd rip it up without opening it. What I love about Silicon Valley is the number of people who don't care to be told by other people what's possible.
Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
41–50 of 126 posts
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#42People, for the most part, want to work with people that are “like them” or that fit a pattern that appeals to them. I see this argument made a lot. But this argument has a huge hole in it - Chinese and Indians are also not "like them". And yet, Chinese/Indians are not underrepresented. If Hank William's theory were correct, they should be. Any theory concerning the underrepresentation of blacks which does not distin…
I'm Chinese. There is way more to me than just being Chinese, and there is way more to the white people I meet than just them being white. I can usually take it for granted that they're like me, and it's obviously not for the race; I can usually take it for granted in the Valley that the other people I meet are college-educated. In general, I do not make this assumption for black people; hence, black people are not like me.
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#43I am more interested in who that 19 year old guy with the millions is
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Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#44I believe Silicon Valley is meritocratic for the most part. I don't buy the minority argument since there are many asian minority presence in the valley. If you look at music industry or sports (such as basketball), you will see many black people. You rarely see any asian people doing sports or music. And we don't blame it on race. If black people are not discriminated in music or sports, I don't know why they would be discriminated in other industries. They succeed in music and sports because they are really good. If black people are really good in tech as they are in sports or music, I can't imagine how the tech industry would turn them away just because of their color.
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#45I skimmed through the comments and was surprised to not see anything about Project Implicit being done at Harvard. This is a research project that is being done using actual, real science. We don't need to armchair speculate about this stuff; we have science for a reason.
The researchers have found that our minds make subconscious judgements of people base on their appearance. No shock here, of course. It turns out that they can measure the effects of this with simple experiments, and can thus measure how a person subconsciously response to images of people from all different races. It is absolutely fascinating, rigorously scientific work, and if you are at all interested in race you should read about it:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/
Here is a mainstream article about the project:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27067-2005Jan...
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#46It's not surprising NewMe didn't get coverage.
Taking part in a race-selected accelerator, instead of a quality-selected accelerator, reflects badly. "If their product is so good, why couldn't they get into YC or TechStars?".
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case, why do Indians/Chinese "fit a pattern that appeals to them" and Blacks do not? I focused on "like them" because that's a lower entropy theory than "fit a pattern" - it's a claim that VC's thought process is x -> cultural_distance(self, x). "Fit a pattern" is basically just an assertion that VC's have a table of values in their mind, { "asian" : +1, "white" : 0, "black" : -1 } without explaining either w…
Because the perceptions of African-Americans are still conditioned by the economic devastation inflicted by 242 years of slavery, followed by an additional 103 of legal disenfranchisement and discrimination, followed by only 57 years a criminal justice and militarized police force that continues to inflict disproportionate harm on (yes, even innocent) African-American men living in the areas where until 57 years ago…
A bit pedantic, but there are a few African‡ startups wich have garnered attention from the Valley --most form South Africa though (Fundamo, Thawte, etc. A). Google has opened a tech incubator too. [http://www.google.co.za/intl/en/umbono/index.html]
‡Maybe you mean black Africans, but blacks are not the only Africans -there are south Asians, whites, Chinese, Arab, etc.
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#48There are relatively few black startup founders, there are also relatively few female startup founders.
But both of these have the same underlying cause, both of these groups are under-represented in the software development profession as a whole.
Those minorities who are well represented in the software development profession are those that are well represented in the startup community.
Being a successful startup founder means that you're an outlier, and bigger populations have more outliers. It's as simple as that.
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#49Arrington's response > this post. He may or may not be wrong for saying he bends over backwards for black entrepreneurs. You're saying he's wrong because of one instance, I'm sure he can point out times he has lived up to that statement. You should be mad at Soledad, not Arrington. And what was the point of this post? If you're going to raise an issue, do it in a constructive way and talk about how to fix it, don't focus on someone whom you believe is contributing to the problem, and then give a weak argument. As a black entrepreneur, I'm mad I wasted my time reading your post. And it doesn't help that Angela doesn't agree with you: http://www.blackweb20.com/2011/10/28/drama-why-arrington-is-...
Re: Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You only covered the "like them" aspect, what about the "fit a pattern that appeals to them" part? Chinese and Indians fall into "model minority" stereotypes, which have their own set of evils (you are X so you must be good at Y is it's own kind of dehumanization). So someone making a gut call might have underlying prejudices for Asians and against blacks. In other words, when is the last time a white person has cros…
You know what immigrant population, statistically, is even more successful than the stereotypical "model minority" Chinese and Indians? Immigrants from actual Africa.
How many of them are white African immigrants (i.e. from RSA, Rhodesia, etc.), or are from Arab North Africa (Egypt), though?