7 ms·

How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans ther

How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?

dawhizkid 8y ago
SF used to having a thriving black population. It has declined for decades due to exclusionary housing policies that have forced low/middle income earners out of the city, which disproportionately affects minorities. But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
- scarmig 8y ago
  That leaves out quite a lot. Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city. The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime. And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings. That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures. Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
- tmh79 8y ago
  "This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue" While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
ng12 8y ago
Also because you can tap into the white guilt/white savior complex and make a lucrative career out of being a diversity specialist.
api 8y ago
"Methinks they doth protest too much..." I think what you're seeing is intellectualized social liberalism and what many call "virtue signaling." Many of the residents of SF harbor intellectual views that are very liberal but are not willing to support policies that actually help the poor or disadvantaged minorities if those policies conflict with any other priority they might have (like protecting the valuation of overpriced real estate). BTW the left has no monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy. Driving through an ultra-conservative region of West Virginia a while back I saw two billboards on opposite sides of the road. One said "Lust: a path straight to hell!" and had a Bible reference. The other advertised a combination strip club and adult bookstore. The region has massively high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and many other vices, but many of the residents of such regions are pretty self-righteous about how much more Godly they are than the heathens in places like California and New York. I have found that self-righteousness tends to coincide with hypocrisy.
- cljs-js-eval 8y ago
  I'm guessing the lust billboard guy made their sign as a response to the adult entertainment billboard guy, and the two don't share that much in common.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Right. It's quite unlike San Franciscans virtue signaling about equality but then trying to end the school lottery system.
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      I'm not sure how it's not similar. San Francisco is an area where you have the wealthy NIMBYs and the younger more liberal generation creating policy friction. The older generations tend to be guaranteed votes and will show up to influence policy. Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Can you give examples/evidence of this "aggressive political rhetoric" coming from "this area"?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  The reaction to Damore's memo.
sbzodnsbd 8y ago
A black friend of mine lived in Savanah, ATL, NYC and in the Midwest. She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
- vowelless 8y ago
  I completely agree with her. Some of the worst racism I experienced was passive aggressive type on the west coast. It made me leave my job and move back to the east coast. Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  I have to wonder... Do all the southern racists hide it less... Or are there so many blatant racists that the coy ones are a lot harder to detect? I'm sure there are plenty of racists everywhere, but I do find it hard to believe that there aren't more percentage-wise in the south.
  - vowelless 8y ago
    I think the west coast passive aggressive types don’t do dog whistling. Southerners do that quite a bit.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I think you're asking the wrong question with the "more" or "less" type thinking. My own view is that everyone is prejudiced. But people are different. Some are prejudiced and loud mouthed. Some are prejudiced and liars. Some are prejudiced and just quiet. But everyone is prejudiced, so does it matter if one is more loud than the other? I mean, if you go into a room full of pregnant high school girls, sure, some are loud mouthed. Some are liars. Some are quiet. But there are no virgins in the room.
    - mistermann 8y ago
      Some are "negatively" prejudiced (racists), some are positively prejudiced (~progressives). Very few people in my experience are able to think about this topic in a purely rational and non-emotional manner.
kadendogthing 8y ago
>How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric What does this even mean?
bilbo0s 8y ago
>I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination... ??? Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta? Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?
idlewords 8y ago
Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.
- Funes- 8y ago
  >Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?
  - stevedt 8y ago
    https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWII-brought-blacks-to-the-East-Bay-whites-13417228.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWI... https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-racism/Content?oid=9251259 https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-r...
  - idlewords 8y ago
    If you search on 'redlining' you can find an extensive literature.
  - lacey 8y ago
    Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war. There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
  - tmh79 8y ago
    this is a really good, and short-ish book on housing generally, and lots of good content about the bay area https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/ https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten... Long story short: Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.
orangecat 8y ago
White progressives are often further left than minorities on issues of identity politics. See https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020 https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white...
anbop 8y ago
Have you paid attention to the “cityhood” movement in Atlanta, where white people are using their friends in state government to split themselves off from the black neighborhoods in their towns?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  I have not and if that's true, that's fucked up and why I'm a libertarian. In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
  - anbop 8y ago
    Wouldn’t the libertarian position be that a group of people looking to secede from a municipality be allowed to do so? Even if they do so in a bloc that includes only wealthy neighborhoods plus lucrative commercial real estate?
justin66 8y ago
> I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, blacks, etc.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- virusduck 8y ago
  That actually varies with how you define "Atlanta"--by city limits, "ITP," or the 28‑county metro...
mercutio2 8y ago
Hmm. A few points. 1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with 2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF 3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  1. Damore 3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.
tathougies 8y ago
SF is incredibly diverse despite what you read about. The main issue (if you can even call it that) is that the 'minorities' live in separate enclaves
manfredo 8y ago
I'd attribute it to two or three key factors: 1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore. 2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-diversity-fails-point-the-way-forward https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di... 3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged. This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.
- tzs 8y ago
  > Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.

dawhizkid 8y ago

SF used to having a thriving black population. It has declined for decades due to exclusionary housing policies that have forced low/middle income earners out of the city, which disproportionately affects minorities. But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.

scarmig 8y ago
That leaves out quite a lot. Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city. The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime. And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings. That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures. Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
tmh79 8y ago
"This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue" While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.

ng12 8y ago

Also because you can tap into the white guilt/white savior complex and make a lucrative career out of being a diversity specialist.

api 8y ago

"Methinks they doth protest too much..." I think what you're seeing is intellectualized social liberalism and what many call "virtue signaling." Many of the residents of SF harbor intellectual views that are very liberal but are not willing to support policies that actually help the poor or disadvantaged minorities if those policies conflict with any other priority they might have (like protecting the valuation of overpriced real estate). BTW the left has no monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy. Driving through an ultra-conservative region of West Virginia a while back I saw two billboards on opposite sides of the road. One said "Lust: a path straight to hell!" and had a Bible reference. The other advertised a combination strip club and adult bookstore. The region has massively high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and many other vices, but many of the residents of such regions are pretty self-righteous about how much more Godly they are than the heathens in places like California and New York. I have found that self-righteousness tends to coincide with hypocrisy.

cljs-js-eval 8y ago
I'm guessing the lust billboard guy made their sign as a response to the adult entertainment billboard guy, and the two don't share that much in common.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Right. It's quite unlike San Franciscans virtue signaling about equality but then trying to end the school lottery system.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    I'm not sure how it's not similar. San Francisco is an area where you have the wealthy NIMBYs and the younger more liberal generation creating policy friction. The older generations tend to be guaranteed votes and will show up to influence policy. Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Can you give examples/evidence of this "aggressive political rhetoric" coming from "this area"?

atom-morgan 8y ago
The reaction to Damore's memo.

sbzodnsbd 8y ago

A black friend of mine lived in Savanah, ATL, NYC and in the Midwest. She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.

vowelless 8y ago
I completely agree with her. Some of the worst racism I experienced was passive aggressive type on the west coast. It made me leave my job and move back to the east coast. Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
wccrawford 8y ago
I have to wonder... Do all the southern racists hide it less... Or are there so many blatant racists that the coy ones are a lot harder to detect? I'm sure there are plenty of racists everywhere, but I do find it hard to believe that there aren't more percentage-wise in the south.
- vowelless 8y ago
  I think the west coast passive aggressive types don’t do dog whistling. Southerners do that quite a bit.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I think you're asking the wrong question with the "more" or "less" type thinking. My own view is that everyone is prejudiced. But people are different. Some are prejudiced and loud mouthed. Some are prejudiced and liars. Some are prejudiced and just quiet. But everyone is prejudiced, so does it matter if one is more loud than the other? I mean, if you go into a room full of pregnant high school girls, sure, some are loud mouthed. Some are liars. Some are quiet. But there are no virgins in the room.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    Some are "negatively" prejudiced (racists), some are positively prejudiced (~progressives). Very few people in my experience are able to think about this topic in a purely rational and non-emotional manner.

kadendogthing 8y ago

>How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric What does this even mean?

bilbo0s 8y ago

>I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination... ??? Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta? Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?

idlewords 8y ago

Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.

Funes- 8y ago
>Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?
- stevedt 8y ago
  https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWII-brought-blacks-to-the-East-Bay-whites-13417228.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWI... https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-racism/Content?oid=9251259 https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-r...
- idlewords 8y ago
  If you search on 'redlining' you can find an extensive literature.
- lacey 8y ago
  Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war. There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
- tmh79 8y ago
  this is a really good, and short-ish book on housing generally, and lots of good content about the bay area https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/ https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten... Long story short: Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.

orangecat 8y ago

White progressives are often further left than minorities on issues of identity politics. See https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020 https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white...

anbop 8y ago

Have you paid attention to the “cityhood” movement in Atlanta, where white people are using their friends in state government to split themselves off from the black neighborhoods in their towns?

atom-morgan 8y ago
I have not and if that's true, that's fucked up and why I'm a libertarian. In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
- anbop 8y ago
  Wouldn’t the libertarian position be that a group of people looking to secede from a municipality be allowed to do so? Even if they do so in a bloc that includes only wealthy neighborhoods plus lucrative commercial real estate?

justin66 8y ago

> I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?

atom-morgan 8y ago
Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, blacks, etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
virusduck 8y ago
That actually varies with how you define "Atlanta"--by city limits, "ITP," or the 28‑county metro...

mercutio2 8y ago

Hmm. A few points. 1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with 2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF 3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.

atom-morgan 8y ago
1. Damore 3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.

tathougies 8y ago

SF is incredibly diverse despite what you read about. The main issue (if you can even call it that) is that the 'minorities' live in separate enclaves

manfredo 8y ago

I'd attribute it to two or three key factors: 1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore. 2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-diversity-fails-point-the-way-forward https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di... 3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged. This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.

tzs 8y ago
> Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.