While this is true in some cases, and you do point out that "discriminiation is also still present", I can strongly recommend "Reflecting on the Color of My Skin" by Marques Brownlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-_WXXVye3Y
Regardless of the material differences between black and white people, I think white people (including myself) tend to underestimate the effect of constantly being treated as "the first black guy who..." -- that's racism too, and while not always toxic, it holds up a lot of other discriminatory practices by being the foundation of differentiation.
That being said, poor black African Americans (and Aboriginal Australians) have horrible life outcomes, far worse than any I could expect. Second generation black immigrants from Nigeria and Ethopia have better life outcomes than the general US population so it's not just about skin colour. I feel that there is a whole host of intergenerational related issues impacting the African American community. In addition, I feel that mainstream culture is quite hostile to African American culture.
But people working on this problem already know this at a deep level. This does not take away from the importance of understanding how race fits into the systems of oppression.
i.e. I just googled it [1]. The fourth link talks about the relationship between usage of White Privilege and how it impacts peoples view of poor white people. There is so much emphasis on skin colour that the guy in the Youtube video literally won the privilege lottery at birth (compared to ~95% of other Americans) and still feels oppressed enough to make a video about it.
If his video had of been purely about solidarity for the Americans born porn and black I would have supported it since that demographic needs solidarity to help get out of the hole they were born into. Instead, he made it about himself and his rich boy problems.
This is also not new information. Again, this is the basis of intersectional analysis. Activists have been talking about this and working on this for decades, yet people use this as some sort of argument that modern analysis is broken. "White Privilege" only means "being born white is a ticket to a silver spoon" to people who haven't been involved in this discussion before.
See this interview https://youtu.be/3RG5pXTpLBI 18 minutes in. He was short and was failing out of spacewalk training so he figured out a way to make it work.
What do you mean by this more specifically? If you're a part of a minority with a history of oppression, which I hope we can all agree is true for black people in the US, are you saying there's zero things questionable about constantly pointing out that someone is black when they enter a "typically white" area of sports or other activity?
I have always taken for granted that the definition of "racism" is not necessarily the same as "hating someone due to their race", but more generally "defining someone primarily by their race in a situation that does not call for it and only secondly by individual attributes". Examples of where it may be "called for" is obviously up for debate, could be highly relevant in medical trials for example.
The first is the person or people who is/are potentially the first of a particular ethnic group to achieve a position. If you are that person or people, you will need courage to not let that dissuade you. I don’t see any discrimination there. If you are dissuaded because there is no one before you, then you need more determination because for most people bad things happen in life and you need to deal with it.
The second is everyone else. It would be discriminatory if others defined the first by their race in that situation. But that discrimination doesn’t necessarily happen.
Surely it is annoying and may make achievers to prove themselves over and over again, I don't think that it is big enough of an issue to dismiss programs that are designed to tackle real issues in the society. It's just that people should know where to stop and don't try to implement these in communities where less than perfect but good-enough status is achieved.
It's well known fact that kids of alumni traditionally get accepted in their fathers ivy-league alma matter, but god forbid if few minority kids get an easy way in, then you have viral videos about how it's impossible to get into SOMETHING unless you are black asian gay.
Apple makes a summer coding camp for girls, and you have men crying all over the internet that it's now impossible for men to make career tech anymore.
I mean, I myself have some macho pride(in a sence that men should have some qualities, like not crying when something is not happening the way they want and so on) and makes me cringe when I see an able bodied man crying about how a school girl got an easy way and she is not better than him but he got left out. I think Greta Thunberg struck a cord there, it was hard to watch grown up men having their egos crushed by a teenager.
Probably still easier to pretend that you come from nothing than being successful while actually coming from nothing.
The downside is that we lack a sense of nobless oblige. the idea that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given doesn't mesh well with our values of universal humanism - people born to privilege on this side of the pond seem to have more of a sense of guilt than duty about that fact.
If you have nothing, and if your parents have nothing, you can't risk it on a new venture.
For at least 10 years all big companies have "equality & inclusivity" departments that are taking care of giving equal opportunities to "oppressed minorities" members. Is that just PR or something substantial?
The conclusion ("one generation lives in the environment without discrimination") doesn't come from the premise (that affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago).
Yes, affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago. But it hardly put an end to discrimination (among other reasons, because even if affirmative action was great, well applied and totally effective, discrimination is not constrained in the domains that affirmative action affects).
The issue is that D&I had no power to do things that actually matter. I've complained to D&I teams before and they really exist to placate people internally because leadership will never change. When something gets out that seems like a bad PR problem ("twitter"), then the leadership team will take acute action and fire someone and pin it on inclusion.
It's a bad system for everyone but it's born out of cyclical system where white people do nothing about racism until it reaches some breaking point, then they insist on taking immediate action to "fix it" for a month, then they go back to the same old.
What about immigrants that arrived to the US with a suitcase and $100 in pocket?
The trouble is that the way out is not easy. We can no longer keep talking about "you're at a disadvantage because you're born into x." Even if it's true, mentally it paints a victimization culture that brings people down. If you tell someone the major of their problems are due to their class, or the history of their people, or police or some other bogeyman (both real and imagined), how are people going to see a way out?
We can't keep blaming. Maybe the narrative needs to be, "Yes, the scales are not as fair as they could be. Maybe they're super unfair. But fuck em. Show them what you can do, and don't stop until you beat them at their game!"
I don't know if that's naive or overly simplistic, or if it's just some form or noble lie or noble truth.
A lot of it is luck too. My father grew up during a war, his family lost everything and had to start from scratch. He made it through University where his two brothers struggled to learn English. They all grew up in the same situation, and he's told me he didn't know what made him different. Higher IQ? Stronger drive? Who knows.
Yeah it is. But if you model it as a statistical likelihood and you start two populations at different distributions you would see how long it would take for them to "catch-up" as a group.
What you're telling people is "keep at it, you'll get there in a couple decades". Meanwhile the disparity continues, leads to more prejudices (because yeah, statistically they're poorer/underrepresented) and counteracts some of the "pure luck" gains.
We do. All the time. It's why half the shit we work on is covered in a thick layer of technical debt and the other half is written in self contained microservices.
A software stack from a company that's been around long enough is going to be more random, redundant and glued together than the processes in our evolutionary biology.
One guy I had to talk down from having his car detailed (150 bucks) vs paying the 2 month late car payment. He literally did not think of the idea of they will take the car away from you if he did not make the payment, until I pointed it out to him. He was very fixated on the 'clean the car'. That is but one small example. I have hundreds of examples like that.
That short term thinking is absolutely acidic long term on you, your family, and friends. It can create a spiral that is very hard to get out of. Being poor costs substantially more long term as well. I as a wealthy person can buy things ahead of time when on sale because I know I will use them in the future. Being poor means you buy in the 'now'. You do not buy for the future because you do not have the means to do so. So on average simple things cost you more. But being in the 'now' can hurt you even worse by giving you fun vs not fun choices. But not being able to see you have been give an bit of 'luck' to make your future better.
Those immigrants also didn't have seggregation laws against them until the 70s...
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/shoag/publications/long-run-caus...
Hardly the same as 400 years of slavery, and 150 years of Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, racism, seggregation, and so on...
Arguably untrue, ask a Trump voter of your choice about whether they think Chinese or Latino looking people are inferior to whites...
> seggregation laws against them until the 70s
All the SV hiring we are talking about is people born in the 80s and 90s. How are those worse off than the SE Asian or middle eastern first/second generation immigrant who also possibly gets racially stereotyped in some places but doesn't have preferential privileged college admissions and special scholarships?
They are not. There you have your answer.
I would posit you have created a 'hallucination trump supporter' that does not exist.
What about them? You haven't given the reader anything in the way of argument yet; you've just pointed at another group.
* have the ability to pass the legal immigration process of the US if they weren't citizens
* have the courage and drive to fight for a better live by abandoning their status-quo situation and move to another country
In any case, you’re acting like this is a sure path to a good life. It’s not. It’s a cultural trope.
>Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
What is needed is to break down issues caused by racism from issues caused by poverty and fix each on their own. Fixing an issue caused by poverty (which itself may be a result of racism) as instead having been caused by racism means the solution is not correctly targeted.
If we target the problems caused by poverty based on poverty instead, you would have a solution that will help minorities more as they need more help, but at the same time help non-minorities who are in poverty and prevent resentment from building that ends up harming the attempts to fix those inequalities.
For issues directly caused by racism, solutions would be based on race (but race should likely be replaced by race and ethnicity, as I've personally seen racial equality initiatives forget that Hispanic whites face injustice very similar to racial minorities, despite the technicality of being racially white.
Last, fixing issues of race, class, and gender (which I haven't mentioned but which should work the same) discrimination should be seen as the starting point, not the goal. These are the big three that cause people the most discrimination, but are not the only three. As they are big three, they should have priority, but others shouldn't be forgotten. For example, discrimination based on LGBT+, on disability, on looks, on height, on neurotypicalness, and other factors still exist in our society: in private life, school life, and professional life. The goal should be that once the inequality from discrimination on the big three are reduced to the size of the level of discrimination these other factors cause, they too become a focus (and to be more pedantic, it wouldn't occur all at once as these other issues are by no means equal, such as LGBT+ discrimination being one of the largest forms of discrimination once you take race/gender/class out of the comparison).
For example, unequal understanding of career possibilities is a common side effect. I had a favorite class in middle school where a professional (in my case an accountant) would come to our class every two weeks to teach us about their profession.
I think many more members of the tech community should do the same. Furthermore, they should serve as ongoing contacts for the kids such as providing opportunities for internship, for tech presentations, etc...
We need to do this not just for the urban poor but increasingly for the rural poor as well.
This is not particular to companies either. People most affected by offshoring will support offshoring by buying cheap goods produced by offshored work ensuring a positive feedback loop that will come and get them.
If companies were forced to develop local talent because they cannot short circuit the labor market, they would.
Where I stand right now even my own race, asian females prefer to date white males over their own race. If you don't believe me watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8LzkIfmxw. That's just one aspect of the extent of racism we suffer from. It's so bad that females of our own race are disgusted with males of the same race.
I've seen a lot of racism, I've had to battle a lot of the challenges of simply being an asian in a white dominated country, my parents had an even harder time with the language barrier when they first jumped off the boat with literally a dollar in their pocket.
Despite all of this, from my own personal experience I will say this:
The lack of diversity in tech is mostly a pipeline problem. Certain races or cultures or sexes simply don't want to go into tech or aren't willing to put in the effort. You don't even need to go to college anymore to get in, the financial barriers of entry for tech are extremely low.
That is not to say racism is not a problem in tech, but it is by far a pipeline problem by a huge margin. As a member of a minority who has experienced a lot of racism, I will say that for tech specifically, the racism/sexism problem is overblown. If you don't trust my anecdotal experience then google which race has the highest average income in the United States: Asians.
However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
The racism I've seen against Asians from whites is primarily mistrust, not fear. A racist hiring manager is likely to look at you and think you'll do good work for the company, but they'll have to keep an eye on you. I think it's rare that racist idiots look at your skin and think you're dumb, lazy, and violent.
I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
If you're smart, went to a top school, and have a good job, most Asian cultures will tolerate a lot of nerdiness out of you.
I agree this exists but I think most white people in general are just really afraid of being called racist and would never consciously do something racist. Overall, I think the racism that is most prevalent in Tech is subconscious. White people have a bias towards white people that they aren't aware about... that's all. Most white people keep friends that are also by majority white and likely they did not choose that outcome deliberately. So yeah, a "racist" hiring manager might keep an eye on an Asian, but they will likely not be aware they're doing it based on race. Again, not saying this is 100% the case and there are definitely people who consciously discriminate, but I believe that for the majority of white people, it is subconscious. I don't know your opinion on that, as a white person I'm sure you may have a better perspective.
>However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
Racism is prevalent for sure, but again, I was just emphasizing a very specific thing: the lack of diversity in tech. I'm not saying racism doesn't exist. But for diversity in tech I believe it's mostly similar to the pipeline problem for ballerinas. There is an extreme lack of males trying to become ballerinas... I think we can both agree that the disparity exists not due to extreme sexism by females trying to put a complete stop on all males from entering the industry.
>I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
It is different, no question. However I would say that the a great portion of the differences in treatment actually stem from a generalized reputation that is an exaggeration of very real statistical difference between races. You may look at a random Asian stranger and a random African American stranger and predict the Asian stranger is more affluent. This assumption isn't just a baseless stereotype... it stems from an actual statistical reality. Asians are statistically more affluent than African Americans. Is it racist to make predictions about individual people based off of probabilities? We use probability to predict all kinds of outcomes for all kinds of things... but it becomes immoral when we use it on race? I have no answer for what's the right way to deal with this moral conflict, but I feel it is important to pose the question nonetheless.
>As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
There's a very real race thing going on here. Just watch that video I posted, those women are clearly talking about race, not height. There's other videos as well...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52dQSX-DCN0
While most women do have a huge bias for height and white males tend to be taller than asian males I do believe there is a separate phenomenon going on here in terms of race.
>Not everyone enjoys the luxury of being able to focus on school and extra curriculars from 14-22.
Be
"Most people don't get to enjoy the luxury of being able to focus on school and extra curriculars from 14-22." ?
That being said, a lot of that is probably due to attitude of the guys. I live in Japan and even here I hear things like "it’s easy for you to get a girlfriend because your are white". This is dumb for a lot a reasons, including the fact the sheer majority of Japanese girl wants to have local boyfriend, not a foreigner they can’t even communicate properly with. Now, when I ask them about the last time they did nanpa (street pickup), or set a date with a girl they like or any action whatsoever towards the opposite sex the answer is zilch. I asked my own girlfriend when she was once teasing me about the important number of guys who would like to have a relationship with her why did she chose me over the others... answer was something akin to "oh, I know they like me, but noone told it nor invited me to a date". I suspect a lot of angry Asian guys who are alone are also in the low side of taking action.
The Japanese race is considered positively in many cultures/countries. So your point is not really accurate.
And in the context of dating and sexuality, it might well be the biological differences that are relevant.
Few people care about sex but not gender.[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_to_transgender_peop...
I don't think your sources support that statement. For example, [2] says:
> Surprisingly, among the 127 participants open to dating a trans person, almost half selected a trans person of a gender incongruent with their stated sexual orientation. For example, 50% of the trans-inclusive straight women and 28% of the trans-inclusive gay men were willing to date a trans woman, even though one wouldn’t expect either straight women or gay men to be attracted to women. Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man, even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women.
This suggests that for between 28%-69% of people, it is the persons sex rather than their gender which is important for their sexuality. This result is unlikely to be due to transphobia as these are people have specifically indicated they would be interested in dating trans people.
The article says "even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women". It seems to me that this presumption is simply wrong. For many people, their sexuality is defined by sex and not gender.
29% of lesbians said they would date a trans person. 38% of 29% only said yes to trans men and 31% of 29% said yes to both.
The article doesn't have the same information for straight people but only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men said they would date a trans person at all. So 0% of gay men, 11% of lesbians, maybe 0.9% of straight women, and maybe 1.7% of straight men would consider sex but not gender. Probably the real percentages are lower. Probably some straight people said yes to both. Many straight men attracted to trans women wouldn't date one.
Porn with trans women is much more popular than porn with trans men. The primary demographic for porn with trans men is gay men[1] even though at least 10x as many men are straight.
The other studies also found few men only attracted to trans women and cis men.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/transgender-porn-best-seller-it-good...
Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...
Discrimination is also still present and different ethnic groups are affected differently.
The negative effects of poverty and discrimination compound over time such that when you get to a tech company's hiring process, the pipeline would have shrunk massively. The students in this pipeline are competing against upper middle class kids who have been groomed their entire lives to compete in the system designed by people like them.
As to the recruiting pipeline, there is class elitism/narrow mindedness in tech companies that does narrow recruiting. Some interviewers don't countenance views or attitudes other than their own just as some recruiters favor certain universities far more than others. This seems to be changing at least at the recruiting level.
As to why some ethnicities still succeed or fail despite discrimination, that is at least partly cultural and partly selection bias and these in turn have also been affected by discrimination past and present.
Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
I hope that we come up with a just system for everyone.