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Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549654 .
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On the contrary, I'm choosing my words and considering their meaning very carefully. This topic is too important to "play loose". 100% of white people are advantaged by racism. I didn't claim that all experience that advantage equally, and I didn't claim that the advantage negates any other disadvantages each individual white person experiences due to the specifics of their lives, their class or social status, any nu…
"100% of white people are advantaged by racism." No, this is an extraordinary claim without evidence that you are asserting. "You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists," isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
There are libraries worth of literature on the subject. I encourage you to spend some time seeking it out and understanding it better.
> isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
It was carefully worded, but you don't seem to be interested in coming to the discussion to understand. You seem determined to fight. The wording was intended to give you the grace that maybe other challenges in your life make it difficult to see this particular advantage. The words chosen were intentionally placed in the same comment with other words giving that grace explicitly.
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> what do you mean by integrate? […] what the German in the pub seems to think Don't you have sociology classes or political education in school? I just looked up the word to make sure and it turns out its meaning is almost the same to what I remembered, and it certainly is not a complete erasure as you allude to. Nice straw man, though. Man, must it be satisfying to topple it over!
> Don't you have sociology classes or political education in school? yes, I've had an overly technical education but I fail to see how that's relevant. > I just looked up the word to make sure I feel like you misread my argument. "seems to think" means that I don't agree with him. Some people, including the person that this thread-tree is about (in my opinion) use integration when they mean cultural erasure. (aka ass…
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Because people tend to generalize and if you represent 50% of the experience they have with that minority it's very easy to label everything, especially negative aspects, as generally applicable to "all of them". So you bear the burden of representing your whole minority to the best of your ability. Members of the majority rarely need to do this or even be aware of this.
So the feeling of being judged may be an internal feeling that does not match reality. I'm not sure what the answer is to that but I say just be you. You are where you are, hopefully, because of the person you have become and that is something that you should be proud of and be able to act on. You can also look at it as that you have already been judged in a positive light in order to be in the place that you are.
Should have left it there, mate.
Many people who are members of a minority group feel pressure to do everything "perfectly" because people will naturally use them as a reference for the whole minority group. That's just how human brains are wired - we use patterns that we observe to predict the future. If we don't have much data, we form crude stereotypes.
It takes active effort and learning from people like you and I to help overcome those biases so that members of minority groups aren't exposed to this pressure and can feel safe in making mistakes (or at least, as safe as members of the majority feel).
In general, if you don't know what you're talking about (at least you were honest about it), it's best to do some more learning rather than to add noise to the thread. I'm not claiming that I know much here, but I know enough to know that a solution like "just be you" is not going to be helpful here.
I usually choose to believe in "the honest mistake". It happens, two people walk in, one of them is the CEO, you assume it is the one on the right. And then when you realize it is a mistake, you apologize. We are only human. But when it happens over and over and over, you can't help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techc…
Over the past few years I've been on numerous hiring events with my company for dev/ops jobs and I would say that the percentage of candidates that were black roughly matched your team...maybe 2-3% (and most of them were not US citizens). Of the remaining i would say about half were Asians (east/west) on visas, a third were US citizens (mostly white) and the balance were mostly Europeans on visas...super rough number…
The examples[0][1] of humiliation from the article, and the many examples from black folks in this thread don't paint a picture of an industry that is particularly appealing to a student thinking about their career options. That's if they've even considered the industry in the first place - the dearth of visible/powerful black faces in tech is very likely causing a "can't be what you can't see" effect in the minds of many young black kids.
The fact that the industry is currently doing some introspection is great, but real-world, noticeable progress on these issues will probably take decades.
[0] > That message hit particularly hard in 2015, when Givens and his co-founder Eric Williams, who is also Black, brought some of their employees to Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby. They were at a VIP suite to celebrate the first big installation of one of their bartending machines. Guest after guest walked past the pair of executives to greet their White employee, offer their congratulations and ask how he got the idea for the product. The mood dimmed once the well-wishers realized their gaffes. “It went really quickly from ‘I have a drink in my hand, and I want to network’ to ‘I just want to get out of here,’” Givens recalls.
[1] > His first two fundraising rounds were challenging, according to Hayes and his apparent doppelgänger, Messick. The recurring confusion about who was CEO, and the embarrassment and apologies that followed, certainly didn’t help. “I usually remember the room and the look on the face,” Hayes says. “The energy would drop dramatically.”
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> there are a lot of Turkish immigrants This exemplifies my point perfectly. Even though you go on to write that some were born in the country, they are still "Turkish immigrants" not "expats" or [that country's] citizens. Some may be considered expats by you now but walking down the street I can assure you people see "immigrants". Say "British immigrants", or "US immigrants", or "German immigrants" and see how that…
> English has this distinct connotation for the word "immigrant" and it's associated with individuals overwhelmingly based on their country of origin (the poorer the country, the more "immigranty" the person). I was born in Australia, my mother was born in Scotland. In my mind, that makes me a second generation immigrant. I never thought of my mother, or her parents, as "expatriates". A lot of Australians who immigra…
But in rich countries that are old enough to have a population that already forgot they probably also came from elsewhere (populations have always moved around, replacing, killing, and/or mixing with the locals), recent waves of immigration are always from poor countries with a very different culture/language (so that they have trouble assimilating, getting jobs, contributing and so on... and many end up giving up and start to feel marginalized, causing some to appeal to crime) which made the word immigrant have a very negative connotation... hence the need for people from other rich countries to distinguish themselves from those poor people and call themselves something more respectable like "expats".
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> I didn't accuse, I simply asked a question. Yeah, in exactly the kind of snooty passive-aggressive way that climate-deniers are just "asking questions". I didn't want to come out all hot at you and gently encouraged you to consider having more empathy, but here we are, down a spiral of your increasing defensiveness and hostility. This is now totally about how you feel slighted for being challenged on your victim-bl…
> Yeah, in exactly the kind of snooty passive-aggressive way that climate-deniers are just "asking questions". I didn't want to come out all hot at you and gently encouraged you to consider having more empathy, but here we are, down a spiral of your increasing defensiveness and hostility. This is now totally about how you feel slighted for being challenged on your victim-blaming. Will you listen to yourself? You're c…
This is what you wrote. "Did you ever think" is a hell of a way to start a polite conversation. It's a condescending, accusatory and downright shitty way to basically call a person an idiot and completely invalidate what they are trying to tell you.
I mean, it could be just fine....but how could I know that?
You see how absolutely rude it is to talk to people like that? Can you imagine if your TV got stolen and you went to the police and the first question out of their mouth was not about the facts of the case, not things like, "When did you first notice it missing? What kind of TV was it? How long have you had this TV? Has anyone suspicious been around your place?"...but not those questions, but the cops came up with a completely alternate, dismissive theory like "Have you ever considered that maybe you never owned a TV at all? I mean, it could be burglary, but how could you know that? Next!" You'd be apoplectic, because that is not asking questions, it's downright incredulity.
People who experience racism get gaslighted like this all the time. But of course you don't want to understand the emotional context and frustration of those people, you want to "ask questions" and find a way out of your emotional discomfort as quickly as possible. Jumping in like this makes nothing better. Nothing. Like I said three times already, Listen to people who experience racism.
/out
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> Yeah, in exactly the kind of snooty passive-aggressive way that climate-deniers are just "asking questions". I didn't want to come out all hot at you and gently encouraged you to consider having more empathy, but here we are, down a spiral of your increasing defensiveness and hostility. This is now totally about how you feel slighted for being challenged on your victim-blaming. Will you listen to yourself? You're c…
> Did you ever think it might be the way you dress or your demeanor? This is what you wrote. "Did you ever think" is a hell of a way to start a polite conversation. It's a condescending, accusatory and downright shitty way to basically call a person an idiot and completely invalidate what they are trying to tell you. I mean, it could be just fine ....but how could I know that? You see how absolutely rude it is to tal…
No it's not. It's just an expression, it means none of those things. And yes, I think maybe he could be misinterpreting things. Is that really so bad? Pardon the expression, but everyone's shit stinks, no one is God, and infallible.
> You see how absolutely rude it is to talk to people like that? Can you imagine if your TV got stolen and you went to the police and the first question out of their mouth was not about the facts of the case, not things like, "When did you first notice it missing? What kind of TV was it? How long have you had this TV? Has anyone suspicious been around your place?"...but not those questions, but the cops came up with a completely alternate, dismissive theory like "Have you ever considered that maybe you never owned a TV at all? I mean, it could be burglary, but how could you know that? Next!" You'd be apoplectic, because that is not asking questions, it's downright incredulity.
That's really not like this at all... He's just being frisked a lot. Could be for a lot of reasons.
> People who experience racism get gaslighted like this all the time. But of course you don't want to understand the emotional context and frustration of those people, you want to "ask questions" and find a way out of your emotional discomfort as quickly as possible. Jumping in like this makes nothing better. Nothing. Like I said three times already, Listen to people who experience racism.
Gaslighting is not the same as disagreeing.
> /out
Bye, then.
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>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. // Any sources to support this, that equally wealthy people go to jail in higher proportions - for the same [drug] crime - if they're non-white?
I couldn't find one for drugs specifically, but this link is a decent one: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/the-race-g... The probability of being jailed for more than a year is over 20% for the poorest 20% of Blacks, and just over 10% for the poorest 20% of whites.
Obviously the impact of the later is felt more if a particular grouping by skin colour are poorer, but the problem and solution are different to if the cause of this is directly racism (assuming our aim is justice for all regardless of skin colour; that's certainly my aim).
I'm not personally too concerned with complete wealth equality (I'd probably go for heavily garnishing large wages). For example, in the UK I gather immigrants contribute more to taxes than the average; suggesting they fit in middle-income brackets (not super wealthy, not abjectly poor; on average). Penalising immigrants for succeeding would be harsh, and wouldn't account for the massive biasing of averages for the endemic population through inherited wealth.
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>usually the black person will happen to be the one pulled over // Which country are you in? Have you checked that statistic or did you assume it?
US, and no, I didn't need to check the statistic. Do you also think people shouldn't be protesting because they haven't proven black people are being targeted disproportionately by police to a 95% confidence interval?
I gather statistics show USA police are not targeting black people ("damn lie and statistics" though, so I'm Caruso's about that result), contrary to how I imagined it. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it possibly means the problem is more concentrated - ie in general the police are doing well, but specific groups/officers are being highly discriminatory.