Racism in Tech

Just to get it out of the way: no one who has ever posted on Hacker News or has ever been even slightly associated with the Bay Area tech scene is the least bit racist. We are all 100.0000% meritocratic, and when we popped out of the womb we were instantly the most color-blind people in history. This is a given, and anyone who would say otherwise is a whiner who's just too lazy and stupid to code. (This, by the way, is also how we know that people here are not at all sexist or homophobic and have highly progressive views on gender. We're just that good.)

Now that that's out of the way, we can talk about the role of race in tech. I think it'd be useful to divide it into four categories.

1) Race as felt through through social structure. Minorities (defined as AA, Native American, and Latinos) have less access to educational resources than other ethnicities. This is a broader social injustice, and tech can't be held responsible for it. Tech is also hard at work to help mitigate this problem, though with varying levels of success.

2) Race as felt through choice of majors. Minorities disproportionately choose not to major in techy fields. This is in large part due to a combination of 1) and 3) (to follow). Even to the extent that minorities do have access to high quality education, it tends to be more liberal arts and non-techy. Minorities may also perceive that the tech scene tends to be less friendly toward them.

3) Race as felt through network effects. This, I think, is probably the biggest cause of the recent complaints. Everyone knows here how valuable having their social community overlap at least somewhat with the tech community is. Knowing someone who knows someone is how you get jobs and get involved in new projects. And you learn a whole lot through these informal interactions (having no CS background, I only learned about Lisp on a date).

People whom we know are usually of similar racial and class backgrounds. Not through any conscious decisions, but because of shared interests and the fact that people make friends through other nodes in their own social networks, nodes that have the same tendency of showing race and class similarity.

4) Racist prejudice. Examples of this are the null set, because no one here is at all racist.

In the end, though, 3) builds off of itself. You start out as an isolated island, and if you don't break out of it you'll never achieve your full potential. Once you do get pulled into it, though, the sky's the limit.

The question we should be asking is how to deal with 3).

I know hacker news crowd is different and most you have not worked in traditional companies so to those who will say racism is practiced by minority, here is my one of the favorite anecdote. I understand anecdote is not data but I have a personal collection of self-experienced anecdotes ,spanning multiple years and client.

I work as an outsourced contracted consultant on a client which outsources to 2 outsourcing firms A(Indian) and B(Native). I work for firm A. Client had a seemingly untraceable problem which was not solved for more than a year.CTO personally used to come to my manager’s desk and express his frustration of not able to resolve the issues. End users were constantly complaining to him. So task force was prepared to which used to meet every day for hours and talk in circles with no resolution. They were not even able to devise an attack plan. I have some reputation for tackling this kind of stuff so they persuaded my managers and started inviting me to their meetings.

After couple of days of investigation I was able to devise a plan and find out the root cause and resolution to the problem. Actual was hilarious and sad at the same time. It was a bigger issue with overall design of the datacentres which was originally designed by vendor B. Millions were wasted because someone failed to understand how TCP/IP layers interact with each other.

I know communication is important so I kept everyone updated and prepared a detailed analysis in doc and ppt format. The moment my analysis was out, guess what Vendor B tried to blame internet for not behaving to make his solution work and client rallied behind him. When I shot down his bullshit argument , me and my firm were taken out of loop and separate meetings with vendor B started to propose potentials solutions. After couple of months of proposing bullshit they again came to us and we provided the solution. Guess what ? We were out of the loop again and solution implementation started by hiring a third vendor C(Native again!!) along with vendor B.

I would ask people not to take the test immediately, but rather first spend time on the authors' distinction about implicit racial attitudes. Racial bias in this sense is entirely different than overt racism, but still as important. Admitting that you've unintentionally learned the statistical biases present in our culture is not admitting you're a racist. When you're ok with that statement (which can be difficult given the charged USian history of race!), take the test.

> I think racism is about as far from a relevant issue as you can get. Honestly, the people who get bent out of shape about it are just as backwards as the few people who are still actually racist.

Haven't you just killed your company with this comment? Good Luck with any job interviews your company gives in the future. You appear to have left them open to claims of racist discrimination.

One of my coworkers is black and I don't see any racism here.