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Reflections on the color of my skin

haydenplanetarium.org

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Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#11

Post by birracerveza »

camillomiller wrote: post #2

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/peo…

This kind of claim is ridiculous and hurts your cause. If you are going to hire people based on the color of their skin you are actively being racist, even if it is in order to promote diversity.

EDIT: I would add, if you think that I'm wrong I encourage you to reply to me to let me understand why. If you just angrily push the downvote button I'll not understand your point of view.

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#12

Post by nindalf »

jpxw wrote: post #7
camillomiller wrote: post #2

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/peo…

I come to HN to get away from political discussions, I’d rather it stayed like it is now.

I like a space free of politics too. However, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. There are folks out there who can't ignore politics because their lives are made worse by those very politics.

It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#14

Post by hanselot »

nindalf wrote: post #12
jpxw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come to HN to get away from political discussions, I’d rather it stayed like it is now.

I like a space free of politics too. However, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. There are folks out there who can't ignore politics because their lives are made worse by those very politics. It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.

The privilege of ignoring politics. Imagine something like that needing to exist. Certainly all ER's should have a cognisant and healthy debate about politics as part of their discourse. How about air traffic controllers, perhaps they should discuss the guilt associated with their skin colour before attending to their privileged professions?

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#17

Post by tangue »

camillomiller wrote: post #2

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/peo…

I would separate the board issue with the disconnection from reality. But yes, as some tech leaders are expressing themselves on twitter, each time I log into HN I have the feeling I can hear "Whitey on the moon".

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#18

Post by ReticentVole »

In New York city, the portion of Black people killed by police gunfire is perfectly aligned with the portion of Black people firing on police officers:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan...

52.6% of murders are carried out by African Americans:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

49% of Black children live in single-mother households, which is double the rate of Hispanic children and 5x the rate of White children.

The problems of the African-American community are mostly their own, and mostly cultural. If there was significant systemic bias, then African migrants to the USA would not outperform African-Americans so significantly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Nigerian immigrant median household income: $60,000. Ghanaian: $66,000

African American: $41,000

There are ways to help African Americans, but presenting an endless narrative of victimhood is not it.

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#19

Post by ganzuul »

bzb4 wrote: post #6
camillomiller wrote: post #2

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/peo…

I’m mostly happy not to have too much politics on hn. Discussions on politics are usually uninteresting and many times too heated; a net negative most of the time.

It is difficult to solve people-problems with a clever hack.

Re: Reflections on the color of my skin

#20

Post by Traster »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #8
camillomiller wrote: post #2

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/peo…

What are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about the second. Do you think that black people have not had equal opportunity?

Equality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve.

However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken.

In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.

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