5 ms·

Watch low level racism evolve in realtime on hackernews

"I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033567" I noticed this title on the front page and remembered a similar story but based on race. The link below was flagged as not being worth hackernews, but i found it a contradiction that the above link was so much more welcomed and people related more sincerely than this one:" Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Skyrocket (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6034800 " Therefore i decided to search for the link and resubmit it to see the comparison in compassion and tolerance. So far the difference is night and day, the top comment on the thread dismisses the whole article, despite the amount of comments and points, the article is already kicked off the front page of HN yet the other one has over 300pts and is trending really well! Why is there this lack of compassion and disdain for discrimination based on race vs gender? I am currently scraping the comments to run sentiment analyses so that i have facts to back up this point. I kind off feel bad for black people in the U.S. it seems like anything race based is automatically pushed off as whining and not worth the tech communities time. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

bayesianhorse 13y ago
For me, racism is a subset of a larger problem of "too much judgement, too little perception". Christian teachings tell us to avoid judging others, Buddhists tend to take it even more to the extreme. But the maxime of "no judgement" isn't about altruism at all. In the case of employers it's really not a good idea to sort by race or gender because it's too easy to miss out on talent that way.
chipsy 13y ago
The first sign that a comment is bad is that it is a judgment.
jfc 13y ago
I will be interested to see the results. But why is this in Ask HN? Seems to me it should be a regular thread.
muyuu 13y ago
I have to admit discussions on racism and sexism bore the hell out of me. I don't know if that makes me a sexist or a racist. I'm trying to focus in stuff that I think it will teach me something practical or cover something important to me directly. I think it's mainly because I'm rather short on time these days.
- swang 13y ago
  Yet you are on HN, posting on a thread about racism. I think you have a bit more time than you think.
  - muyuu 13y ago
    It's Friday night here and I'm chillin'. Happens only so often.
tokenadult 13y ago
Is there a possibility that long-time users here recognize resubmissions and flag them?
- gverri 13y ago
  I very much doubt that. Most people here can't even remember what they lunched two days ago.
coryl 13y ago
Definitely detected some unconscious racism (or at least willful ignorance) by apsec112's post. Saying that "this doesn't belong on HN" when HN has anecdotal articles about job/interview experiences and startup hiring stories on its front page every day.
jchrisa 13y ago
Slightly OT: Just today I realized I have a corpus of text that needs sentiment analysis. If you can help please email me at jchris@couchbase.com I need to find the diamonds in the rough in some mailing list archives.
jongraehl 13y ago
If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something obvious :) I guess the above explanation is too uncharitable, and people don't believe they're racist but do believe they (or the industry) are sexist. I feel like racism is somehow more evil. I think "low level racism" is a decent label - you shouldn't be surprised that at a superficial level of acquaintance (resume screening), people subconsciously pull expectations of competence/"fit" according to the reference class they see the resume as belonging to (oh, another 25 yr old brogrammer!) Also, there are more women in the U.S., so if women and blacks were similarly discouraged from coding, we'd want to throw more resources at encouraging women, hypothetically.
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  "If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something obvious :)" I was thinking along the same lines but to put it more plain context, i wonder if HN sees white female > black person? As i was looking at this trend today, i got detoured onto this topic and started to see if there is any evidence of this kind of stuff. Its seems that in South Africa, after apartheid ended the Black government instituted affirmative action for black people and white woman. A few yrs later they dropped white woman from the AA policy and released numbers that showed white females reached their goal quota levels while black male and females hardly made any ground. Therefore it seems like the next best thing after a white male is a white female in a model that stifles white male employment. Very interesting!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marcofloriano 13y ago
O.P., thank you very much for this post. As Latin black, now i´m sure i will keep myself very far from U.S. You know, i´m just a small business guy from Brasil, but my dream, until today, was to create an start-up at U.S.
pudquick 13y ago
The best I can do is give a personal account of my thoughts as I read both articles: Reading the techyville article: * Honestly never heard of the site before, not terribly pleasing to the eye but oh well. * Ok, hit in the face with a "racism is bad" quote. * This person is applying for jobs in the insurance industry, which I'm not part of - hope this is interesting. * Gah - monster.com? How old is this article? * Ok - so she also changed her name to "Bianca White" - what was her original name? Yolanda Spivey? Ah. My take away from the article: monster.com (a site I do not recommend using for jobs) appears to mandate you answer a question regarding your race. This woman submitted two different profiles to the site, with different choices for race in each - and her actual name also appears to be stereotypically associated with the black community. In the end, she got many more responses from her profile that did not indicate she was black. My gut reaction to this was that a.) monster.com allowing you to see the candidate's race choice is a bad thing (yet another reason not to use the site) and b.) the insurance industry appears to suck, glad I don't work in it. Reading the quartz article: * Wow, another quartz article? This site is really heavily submitted (along with medium.com) as of late. Oh well, at least it's pleasing to look at. * Wow, they quit their job? I wish I had that confidence. They must be single. * Supply and sales experience - and engineering too? Wonder what job field this is. Sounds somewhat interesting. * "Mr. Kim" sounds awkward to me. * "example everyone used to show that it could be done" - what kind of field does this guy work in where they routinely have to tout that women working in it is a definite possibility? I don't think I've ever had a discussion like that with my peers. My take away from the article: Not really sure how I feel about it. The article seemed to have a lot less specific details ("engineering" could be any number of industries) and didn't seem to focus on a single method for applying for jobs (no mention of a single website used, etc.). Looking back on the two articles - honestly, I just had a more fulfilling experience reading the one at quartz.com. The whole website experience was more pleasant, the story did not immediately put me on the defensive by providing a quote telling me about the depravities of humanity at the beginning, and the story seemed to have at least a little bearing on my interests and possibly fields of work related to my own. I understand that injustice happened in both articles. I just didn't feel any connection to the techyville content. The most I came away with it was "It sounds like monster.com is poorly built and allows hiring companies to filter based on race - and it's happening as a result". I don't feel that I made a preference based on racism vs. gender discrimination and somehow classed one inexcusable thought process as less harmful than another. The presentation of the two articles just really hit me differently. I think there's just too many variables here to easily say that the techyville doesn't do as well because racism is tolerated more. Maybe someone will have to do some A/B testing.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

For me, racism is a subset of a larger problem of "too much judgement, too little perception". Christian teachings tell us to avoid judging others, Buddhists tend to take it even more to the extreme. But the maxime of "no judgement" isn't about altruism at all. In the case of employers it's really not a good idea to sort by race or gender because it's too easy to miss out on talent that way.

chipsy 13y ago

The first sign that a comment is bad is that it is a judgment.

jfc 13y ago

I will be interested to see the results. But why is this in Ask HN? Seems to me it should be a regular thread.

muyuu 13y ago

I have to admit discussions on racism and sexism bore the hell out of me. I don't know if that makes me a sexist or a racist. I'm trying to focus in stuff that I think it will teach me something practical or cover something important to me directly. I think it's mainly because I'm rather short on time these days.

swang 13y ago
Yet you are on HN, posting on a thread about racism. I think you have a bit more time than you think.
- muyuu 13y ago
  It's Friday night here and I'm chillin'. Happens only so often.

tokenadult 13y ago

Is there a possibility that long-time users here recognize resubmissions and flag them?

gverri 13y ago
I very much doubt that. Most people here can't even remember what they lunched two days ago.

coryl 13y ago

Definitely detected some unconscious racism (or at least willful ignorance) by apsec112's post. Saying that "this doesn't belong on HN" when HN has anecdotal articles about job/interview experiences and startup hiring stories on its front page every day.

jchrisa 13y ago

Slightly OT: Just today I realized I have a corpus of text that needs sentiment analysis. If you can help please email me at jchris@couchbase.com I need to find the diamonds in the rough in some mailing list archives.

jongraehl 13y ago

If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something obvious :) I guess the above explanation is too uncharitable, and people don't believe they're racist but do believe they (or the industry) are sexist. I feel like racism is somehow more evil. I think "low level racism" is a decent label - you shouldn't be surprised that at a superficial level of acquaintance (resume screening), people subconsciously pull expectations of competence/"fit" according to the reference class they see the resume as belonging to (oh, another 25 yr old brogrammer!) Also, there are more women in the U.S., so if women and blacks were similarly discouraged from coding, we'd want to throw more resources at encouraging women, hypothetically.

nashequilibrium 13y ago
"If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something obvious :)" I was thinking along the same lines but to put it more plain context, i wonder if HN sees white female > black person? As i was looking at this trend today, i got detoured onto this topic and started to see if there is any evidence of this kind of stuff. Its seems that in South Africa, after apartheid ended the Black government instituted affirmative action for black people and white woman. A few yrs later they dropped white woman from the AA policy and released numbers that showed white females reached their goal quota levels while black male and females hardly made any ground. Therefore it seems like the next best thing after a white male is a white female in a model that stifles white male employment. Very interesting!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marcofloriano 13y ago

O.P., thank you very much for this post. As Latin black, now i´m sure i will keep myself very far from U.S. You know, i´m just a small business guy from Brasil, but my dream, until today, was to create an start-up at U.S.

pudquick 13y ago

The best I can do is give a personal account of my thoughts as I read both articles: Reading the techyville article: * Honestly never heard of the site before, not terribly pleasing to the eye but oh well. * Ok, hit in the face with a "racism is bad" quote. * This person is applying for jobs in the insurance industry, which I'm not part of - hope this is interesting. * Gah - monster.com? How old is this article? * Ok - so she also changed her name to "Bianca White" - what was her original name? Yolanda Spivey? Ah. My take away from the article: monster.com (a site I do not recommend using for jobs) appears to mandate you answer a question regarding your race. This woman submitted two different profiles to the site, with different choices for race in each - and her actual name also appears to be stereotypically associated with the black community. In the end, she got many more responses from her profile that did not indicate she was black. My gut reaction to this was that a.) monster.com allowing you to see the candidate's race choice is a bad thing (yet another reason not to use the site) and b.) the insurance industry appears to suck, glad I don't work in it. Reading the quartz article: * Wow, another quartz article? This site is really heavily submitted (along with medium.com) as of late. Oh well, at least it's pleasing to look at. * Wow, they quit their job? I wish I had that confidence. They must be single. * Supply and sales experience - and engineering too? Wonder what job field this is. Sounds somewhat interesting. * "Mr. Kim" sounds awkward to me. * "example everyone used to show that it could be done" - what kind of field does this guy work in where they routinely have to tout that women working in it is a definite possibility? I don't think I've ever had a discussion like that with my peers. My take away from the article: Not really sure how I feel about it. The article seemed to have a lot less specific details ("engineering" could be any number of industries) and didn't seem to focus on a single method for applying for jobs (no mention of a single website used, etc.). Looking back on the two articles - honestly, I just had a more fulfilling experience reading the one at quartz.com. The whole website experience was more pleasant, the story did not immediately put me on the defensive by providing a quote telling me about the depravities of humanity at the beginning, and the story seemed to have at least a little bearing on my interests and possibly fields of work related to my own. I understand that injustice happened in both articles. I just didn't feel any connection to the techyville content. The most I came away with it was "It sounds like monster.com is poorly built and allows hiring companies to filter based on race - and it's happening as a result". I don't feel that I made a preference based on racism vs. gender discrimination and somehow classed one inexcusable thought process as less harmful than another. The presentation of the two articles just really hit me differently. I think there's just too many variables here to easily say that the techyville doesn't do as well because racism is tolerated more. Maybe someone will have to do some A/B testing.