But when it happens over and over and over, you can't help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techcrunch (I was in 2017), where you have clearly introduced yourself. You get off-stage, they greet your colleague and ask him the questions as if he was on stage.
I was often in the interview room waiting for my interviewer, only to have him show up, and tell me I must be in the wrong room. A simple "Hey are you XYZ?" could have avoided this frustration.
I've written an article about my experience working as a black developer, I'll post it here in the near future. You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
This is a huge part of the problem isn't it?
I believe these painful interactions would be much less common if tech culture were more diverse in the first place.
Women share a similar fate. Whenever I hear some of these stories I cringe. Some of them are surprising/shocking even.
But this seems important. Hearing those stories including the ones you mentioned. Not necessarily to point fingers (although sometimes we should) but rather to fight this common, widespread ignorance.
I think this is the problem.
Say a black guy with gold teeth, tons of tattoos and colorful dreadlocks and a middle aged white guy walk in. One of them is a rapper. Who is it?
Based on experience, most people will certainly assume the black guy is. What if it turns out it’s the white guy?
Are they unconsciously racist against white people or are they just following experience-based heuristics? Would they have decided differently if rappers were commonly middle aged white guys?
I say for sure. If black people in tech become more common this particular problem will solve itself.
Both! Today's discussion about racism isn't (mainly) about critiquing the motivations in peoples' deepest heart. It's about acknowledging that the outcomes of this kind of assumption can be racist, regardless of whether any harm was intended.
The person who is assumed to be subordinate, or less educated, or more prone to criminality will be given fewer opportunities. Society will systematically fail to recognize and utilize their talents, and can ultimately do them great harm through neglect - even if the individuals involved were "just following experience-based heuristics".
Acknowledging your potential to participate in racism doesn't mean admitting you have a cartoonish hatred. It means recognizing that it requires a proactive effort to keep assumptions from becoming self perpetuating in harmful ways.
Words have meaning. If an act wasn't done with a racist motive then it isn't racist. As the previous commenter said, it's just heuristics : they can be more or less in tune with reality. The only way to make someone change his heuristics is when reality and his map of reality become too different from one another.
> Acknowledging your potential to participate in racism doesn't mean admitting you have a cartoonish hatred. It means recognizing that it requires a proactive effort to keep assumptions from becoming self perpetuating in harmful ways.
So now people have to go against an evolutive and efficient process that enables them to not spend 1h thinking about how to behave in front of a lion or a boss ? The self-perpetuation will stop by itself when people's experience will change.
With such wishful thinking are you conscious you could then ask people to believe anything you want, regardless of reality?