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Reflections on the color of my skin
- camillomiller 6y agoUpvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed. https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/
- isakkeyten 6y agoWith risk to sound controversial but since when is not having a single black person in a team considered a indicator of a negative view towards black people? Would you rather they have a token black person to avoid this?
- nekopa 6y agoMichael Seibel - joined Y Combinator as its first African-American partner in October 2014.
- camillomiller 6y agoYou’re right. One of eighteen partners. 1/18. Since six years.
- Tenoke 6y agoThere's a significant amount of people of color on that page including (at least) one black person. It's a bit beyond me how you can think comments like yours are helping anyone.
- camillomiller 6y agoCan you indicate the African-americans from that page? I’m not questioning diversity or pointing out that YC enforces any kind of anti-diversity policy. Quite the contrary: despite being a diverse organization, the amount of people of African-american descent in that page are basically statistically irrelevant, if there’s any. Either this tells you something about the state of things in tech and Silicon Valley, or you’re just as unaware of the problem as many other Americans seem to be.
- bzb4 6y agoI’m mostly happy not to have too much politics on hn. Discussions on politics are usually uninteresting and many times too heated; a net negative most of the time.
- ganzuul 6y agoIt is difficult to solve people-problems with a clever hack.
- camillomiller 6y agoThis is exactly the problem. YOU are politics. Tech is effing politics.
- jpxw 6y agoI come to HN to get away from political discussions, I’d rather it stayed like it is now.
- nindalf 6y agoI like a space free of politics too. However, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. There are folks out there who can't ignore politics because their lives are made worse by those very politics. It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.
- hanselot 6y agoThe privilege of ignoring politics. Imagine something like that needing to exist. Certainly all ER's should have a cognisant and healthy debate about politics as part of their discourse. How about air traffic controllers, perhaps they should discuss the guilt associated with their skin colour before attending to their privileged professions?
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago> It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them. This, I think, is the crux of any minority disenfranchisement. Their bubbles of reality are just different, and it's almost impossible to see from within someone else's bubble. Also, ignoring politics is tacit approval of the status quo, which is a choice as much as any other.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoYeah, if we could get rid of all those all stories about pages being deleted, tweets being annotated or apps being taken down that would be nice.
- jpxw 6y agoI don't know if this is sarcastic, but yeah I'd like that too.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
- laichzeit0 6y agoWhat are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about the second. Do you think that black people have not had equal opportunity?
- Traster 6y agoEquality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve. However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken. In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- camillomiller 6y agoYes, I might have rushed my comment, but that’s what I meant. If even a diverse organization like YC can’t have enough African-Americans in their ranks, it has to mean something about the access these people get compared to white folks and people of other heritage. To further elaborate: Reddit hiring a black person to fill a board seat vacated By a white man on the premise of giving it to an African-american is a patch that’s worse than the hole.
- echelon 6y ago> I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. We're not out of touch! We're incredibly supportive. There's a huge outpouring right now. Even Mitt Romney is out on the streets. This has the nation's attention.
- birracerveza 6y agoThis kind of claim is ridiculous and hurts your cause. If you are going to hire people based on the color of their skin you are actively being racist, even if it is in order to promote diversity. EDIT: I would add, if you think that I'm wrong I encourage you to reply to me to let me understand why. If you just angrily push the downvote button I'll not understand your point of view.
- lokedhs 6y agoBecause once racism is systemic, actively avoiding racism will continue to perpetuate the current situation. Great if you're part of the privileged group, not so much much if you're hoping for a change.
- birracerveza 6y agoI feel like this is an issue that must be fixed at the root (education), not at the leaves (actual job). I agree that there is a systemic discrepancy that needs to be addressed, but in my opinion this is a completely wrong way to approach the problem.
- lokedhs 6y agoI'm not trying to tell anyone what the correct solution is (I've experienced societies with wildly different approaches to this), but doing it at the leaf (as you express it) is a solution. It's not the only solution, but it is one. Furthermore, this solution does work to some degree, and it has quite quick results, compared to education which takes generations to impose any real change.
- tangue 6y agoI would separate the board issue with the disconnection from reality. But yes, as some tech leaders are expressing themselves on twitter, each time I log into HN I have the feeling I can hear "Whitey on the moon".
- camillomiller 6y agoGood to know I’m not alone.
- audessuscest 6y agoAnd just like that, everybody is obsessed with race again. Such a progress.
- Jonnax 6y agoWhat utopia of a country do you live in where people didn't care about race up until people started protesting about police brutality against black people?
- audessuscest 6y agoyou missed the word "obsessed"
- kstenerud 6y ago6 months training for a police officer is appallingly low. German police officers undergo 3 years of training, including extensive training in de-escalation.
- fxtentacle 6y agoYeah, one would also hope that the police officers handling military equipment would get even more training than those who carry only one small handgun. I presume this is to cut costs. But the logical conclusion of that - giving people a companion app and only 1 month of training - appears very inhumane to me. And it wouldn't be surprising to me if less training with other humans leads to less care for other humans in the field.
- dogma1138 6y agoThat’s 6 months in the academy, they are then made probationary officers for about 2 years. In Germany it depends on the path, the police academy includes not only police training but general education (hence why they are called police universities and offer degree programs too) to at least college levels in the US and you may also elect to get your bachelors degree as part of the training. If you already have a degree your training would be substantially shorter. While I don’t disagree that the police officer training might need to be reviewed the 4-6 months for the most part is a clickbait that if you look at how most other countries train their police force it’s not that different. Please note that many police forces in the US require a 2 year college degree / enough credits for one or higher to join the academy in the first place and you have to be 21, countries with much longer “academic” studies for police forces tend to allow people to join the academy at 16-18 and get their 2 years of secondary education as part of their training. I think the big difference is that most police forces in the US exempt you from this requirement if you have served 2 years or more of active military duty and were honorably discharged.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoI've heard claims that a large part of the problem is this probation period, during which the candidates are made to unlearn all the teaching from the academy and taught the real ways of the street: that is to say the actual practice at the station that has been handed down since time immemorial.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ReticentVole 6y agoIn New York city, the portion of Black people killed by police gunfire is perfectly aligned with the portion of Black people firing on police officers: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2012.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... 52.6% of murders are carried out by African Americans: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 49% of Black children live in single-mother households, which is double the rate of Hispanic children and 5x the rate of White children. The problems of the African-American community are mostly their own, and mostly cultural. If there was significant systemic bias, then African migrants to the USA would not outperform African-Americans so significantly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Nigerian immigrant median household income: $60,000. Ghanaian: $66,000 African American: $41,000 There are ways to help African Americans, but presenting an endless narrative of victimhood is not it.
- hanselot 6y agoHow long till this clear and factual reply gets nuked?
- rbinv 6y ago> The problems of the African-American community are mostly their own, and mostly cultural. Wow. > If there was significant systemic bias, then African migrants to the USA would not outperform African-Americans so significantly Maybe people who successfully migrate to the US are not your average kind of person? There are a lot of hurdles to overcome (financially, too), so it's probably somewhat skewed.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoOh, I guess you didn't see any of the "unarmed" deGrasse used in his text (It was only six times, once more than the word "die"). You should know the text is about police killings of unarmed people, nobody is really arguing about the shoot outs at the moment.
- 6y ago