4 ms·

> Something the author hints at is that the big discrepancy is geographic in nature, not racial. It's not an either/or proposition; it's both/and. According t

by vec 10y ago

> Something the author hints at is that the big discrepancy is geographic in nature, not racial. It's not an either/or proposition; it's both/and. According to the article, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all ~2% black. The population of Silicon valley is just shy of 8% black. The national number is about 18%. Silicon valley is an unusally white area, and the staff demographics are skewed even relative to that baseline. For what it's worth, I am originally from a small industrial town in rural Arkansas, and I am white. Getting hired in a tech firm was actually quite easy for me, given that I was willing to move away from where I grew up to an urban area with a thriving tech sector. I'd like to think that would still have been true even if I were black, but...

tzs 10y ago
> The population of Silicon valley is just shy of 8% black. The national number is about 18%. Silicon valley is an unusally white area [...] Unless you are counting Asians as "white", that is not correct. The nation as a whole is between 63% and 77% white (depending on whether or not "hispanic" and "white" are considered disjoint). In Silicon Valley, whites are only about 35%, and are not even the largest racial/ethnic group, having been surpassed by Asians.
JPKab 10y ago
I live in Arkansas. I'm in the little bubble of prosperity surrounding Bentonville. I'm moving to Denver in 2 weeks because my job is requiring me to. Some of the poorest people in the country (most of them white) surround this little bubble all through the Ozarks, extending east into Appalachia. You're from here, and you know that. Moving to an "urban area with a thriving tech sector" isn't exactly cheap. Getting into a good college is a nice precursor to that, and that is radically helped by having a decent public school system. I don't think it's a stretch to say that these are very difficult obstacles for people, no matter there color. In fact, I'll say it now: a black kid who attends school in Fairfax County, Virginia is going to have a better shot at a tech job down the road than a white kid who attends school in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity.
- vec 10y ago
  So I agree with most of what you're saying. I turned a state-funded boarding school education into a scholarship to an engineering university, and I'm acutely aware of how much luck is involved in that story, and of how much would have been difficult if not impossible if my family hadn't been at least middle class to start with. We do have a very real class problem in America, exacerbated by a deep urban/rural cultural divide, and it is a disgrace how little we're talking about it. Unfortunately, we also have a very real racism problem, and I don't think it's helpful to say "the real problem is classism". The very real problems include both racism and classism. It's too hard to get into tech as a poor white man. It's too hard to get into tech as a middle class black man. For that matter, it's too hard to get into tech as a middle class white woman. And it's way, way too hard as any combination of those. In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. It derails the conversation from a very real problem into arguing about who has it worse. And the worst part is that most of the changes that would help the racism issue would also help most of the other -isms. Blind hiring, more support for remote work, and less dependence on specific universities in hiring pipelines helps everybody. And even very targeted interventions help indirectly to the extent they erode the stereotype that only upper-middle-class 20-something white guys need apply.
  - tzs 10y ago
    > In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. What if the classism problem is a significant cause of the racism problem? Race and class correlate, so if someone has a problem with a particular class they are going to learn to associate certain races with that class, and their classism issue becomes a racism issue to the outside observer.
- tzs 10y ago
  > These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity. I think that is one of the big impediments to actually solving many of the current problems that involve race. For instance, take the issue of people getting shot by police. It is a fact that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites in the United States. It is also a fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. Most people get hung up on one of those two facts and won't go farther. The liberal side (I'm going to be doing some broad generalizations from here on...) gets hung up on blacks getting shot at a higher rate and attributes it to obvious racism on the part of police. They don't want to consider that the police may be shooting blacks at a higher rate for non-racist reasons. The conservative side points to the higher crime rate among blacks, takes that as a satisfactory explanation for the police shooting data (and they are probably reasonably right, at least for the proximate cause of police shootings), and then gets hung up on that. They don't want to consider that there may be some factors that are disproportionately pushing blacks into conditions that tend to foster higher crime rates among people in those conditions regardless of race. In particular, there is a pretty solid correlation between race and wealth in the US. Black people are disproportionately in poorer cites and states, where schools are worse, prospects are dimmer, and there is high population density. Those kind of areas tend to produce higher crime rates regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people that live in them. (Well, to be accurate, that should be "higher crime rates for the kind of crimes that often gets you shot by police". White collar crime tends to be a lot safer during the arrest, because those arrests tend to come at the end of a long investigation and the arresting officers know your movements and can put a lot of planning into your apprehension. When you get arrested for robbing a liquor store or shooting a rival gang member, the arrest tends to be a more hastily organized affair, with a lot more improvising). I've seen dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines that have looked at the police shooting data, and heard numerous stories about it on my local public radio station, but none that I've seen/heard have looked at how this relates to wealth levels. I realize that would be harder to do because that's generally not something that is directly in the data. But without that analysis being done, we are just going to be stuck at the "police are racists"/"blacks commit too much crime" level, which is not productive.

by vec 10y ago

tzs 10y ago

> The population of Silicon valley is just shy of 8% black. The national number is about 18%. Silicon valley is an unusally white area [...] Unless you are counting Asians as "white", that is not correct. The nation as a whole is between 63% and 77% white (depending on whether or not "hispanic" and "white" are considered disjoint). In Silicon Valley, whites are only about 35%, and are not even the largest racial/ethnic group, having been surpassed by Asians.

JPKab 10y ago

I live in Arkansas. I'm in the little bubble of prosperity surrounding Bentonville. I'm moving to Denver in 2 weeks because my job is requiring me to. Some of the poorest people in the country (most of them white) surround this little bubble all through the Ozarks, extending east into Appalachia. You're from here, and you know that. Moving to an "urban area with a thriving tech sector" isn't exactly cheap. Getting into a good college is a nice precursor to that, and that is radically helped by having a decent public school system. I don't think it's a stretch to say that these are very difficult obstacles for people, no matter there color. In fact, I'll say it now: a black kid who attends school in Fairfax County, Virginia is going to have a better shot at a tech job down the road than a white kid who attends school in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity.

vec 10y ago
So I agree with most of what you're saying. I turned a state-funded boarding school education into a scholarship to an engineering university, and I'm acutely aware of how much luck is involved in that story, and of how much would have been difficult if not impossible if my family hadn't been at least middle class to start with. We do have a very real class problem in America, exacerbated by a deep urban/rural cultural divide, and it is a disgrace how little we're talking about it. Unfortunately, we also have a very real racism problem, and I don't think it's helpful to say "the real problem is classism". The very real problems include both racism and classism. It's too hard to get into tech as a poor white man. It's too hard to get into tech as a middle class black man. For that matter, it's too hard to get into tech as a middle class white woman. And it's way, way too hard as any combination of those. In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. It derails the conversation from a very real problem into arguing about who has it worse. And the worst part is that most of the changes that would help the racism issue would also help most of the other -isms. Blind hiring, more support for remote work, and less dependence on specific universities in hiring pipelines helps everybody. And even very targeted interventions help indirectly to the extent they erode the stereotype that only upper-middle-class 20-something white guys need apply.
- tzs 10y ago
  > In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. What if the classism problem is a significant cause of the racism problem? Race and class correlate, so if someone has a problem with a particular class they are going to learn to associate certain races with that class, and their classism issue becomes a racism issue to the outside observer.
tzs 10y ago
> These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity. I think that is one of the big impediments to actually solving many of the current problems that involve race. For instance, take the issue of people getting shot by police. It is a fact that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites in the United States. It is also a fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. Most people get hung up on one of those two facts and won't go farther. The liberal side (I'm going to be doing some broad generalizations from here on...) gets hung up on blacks getting shot at a higher rate and attributes it to obvious racism on the part of police. They don't want to consider that the police may be shooting blacks at a higher rate for non-racist reasons. The conservative side points to the higher crime rate among blacks, takes that as a satisfactory explanation for the police shooting data (and they are probably reasonably right, at least for the proximate cause of police shootings), and then gets hung up on that. They don't want to consider that there may be some factors that are disproportionately pushing blacks into conditions that tend to foster higher crime rates among people in those conditions regardless of race. In particular, there is a pretty solid correlation between race and wealth in the US. Black people are disproportionately in poorer cites and states, where schools are worse, prospects are dimmer, and there is high population density. Those kind of areas tend to produce higher crime rates regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people that live in them. (Well, to be accurate, that should be "higher crime rates for the kind of crimes that often gets you shot by police". White collar crime tends to be a lot safer during the arrest, because those arrests tend to come at the end of a long investigation and the arresting officers know your movements and can put a lot of planning into your apprehension. When you get arrested for robbing a liquor store or shooting a rival gang member, the arrest tends to be a more hastily organized affair, with a lot more improvising). I've seen dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines that have looked at the police shooting data, and heard numerous stories about it on my local public radio station, but none that I've seen/heard have looked at how this relates to wealth levels. I realize that would be harder to do because that's generally not something that is directly in the data. But without that analysis being done, we are just going to be stuck at the "police are racists"/"blacks commit too much crime" level, which is not productive.