This sums it up perfectly. So many times I am asked what I think of all this as a black person in tech. I don't think anything of it. It simply is how things are. You can either live with that chip on your shoulder, or learn the skills to navigate life with the cards you were dealt and deal with it. There is no other option, and how you feel about it is irrelevant. Some people are born with physical disabilities or mental handicaps. It's no different. Should we live in a world without racism? Of course. But we should also live in a world without war, poverty, and disease as well. It's a part of the human condition.
I'm not black, but I always frame it this way when I think about the problem: if I had children, what message would I want to convey to them to maximize their chances of success in life?
Life is difficult, there are lots of injustices in the world, but there is zero sense obsessing over that which you cannot control. Focus on being the best human possible and the world will take notice.
If people can, good for them. If not, I don't feel in any position to tell people that obsessing over injustices that I'm not experiencing makes zero sense.
What is the alternative?
That's the point. I, as a single individual, can't spend my extremely finite time and resources howling at the moon and railing against a monolithic machine that cares nothing for justice or humanity. I can only try to live my life as effectively as possible within the bounds of our current reality. The civil rights movement won us equality under the law. But expecting the same tactics to result in social equality is a pipe dream.
Someone had to try, and someone has to try. Same tactics, or different tactics, whatever. Try things, do more of what works. We have to split our time between ourselves and our communities.
Growing up as an immigrant Chinese person, "life is unfair, so you have to try harder than the white person" was what I was taught and what I did. It worked for my parents, to an incomplete extent, and it worked for my cohort of immigrants/ABC's, to a somewhat greater extent.
However, that same community today is wrestling with the problem that without unified political action in local/state/national politics, it won't get much better than being a model minority, which is to say it's a more privileged existence than being black is (sorry for the bluntness), but you're still acutely aware of your Asian-ness in other people's eyes and when it works against you, such as being co-opted into the message of "well why don't [minority group] just work harder like [model minority group]?" as a distraction from actually talking about addressing root causes.
On an individual level (just again from my own experience) operating as if sexism doesn't exist, in general, and looking at each individual I have to deal with as an individual is optimal on a daily basis. But I do have to come up to 30000 feet now and then to strategize about the bigger picture -- sometimes to figure out how I fit in, sometimes to figure out what I might want to do to help others with their goals, sometimes to point out to a friend that what might cost me too much in the workplace would be easy for them to suggest. I'm not a VC, just a worker drone. Must be interesting to be on the investment side!
A Black person can't just crucify themselves over injustice in the world and thus fail to get all their own mission done and expect it to accomplish what was desired. Going back to mathematics, my own original world, I saw Black mathematicians being overloaded with mentorship responsibilities and education responsibilities and speaking responsibilities and recruitment responsibilities and and and, and oh yeah the research they're actually evaluated on! So this great mathematician spends all her time in the committees and recruitment and teaching classes and organizing outreach... and then fails to get tenure because her publication record isn't strong enough (only three papers! and with collaborators, so she probably didn't do the work, right, she's doing so much else how could she have had the time?), and then has to look for another job. While the white guy who didn't do any education or recruitment or outreach published five crappy papers (with collaborators) and got tenure.
That Black mathematician's responsibility is her own survival and success. Her own survival and success is more valuable to the world than teaching freshman calculus this year, because if she gets tenure, she can teach freshman calc another year. "I don't live in a world where fairness is an option," is a fair statement. If she tries to change it alone, she fails and burns out. What was the benefit of that? What was the gain?
So the rest of us (for any given value of 'us') ought to step up.
As an Asian, I actually think that Asians are more privileged than White people. As a group we earn more, have better life expectancy, and have to deal with less historical baggage. If you search for it, any group can find areas where they feel they are being mistreated, but on the whole, your parents’ strategy has succeeded spectacularly. I think this is in part, because it was a win-win strategy. We were able to make our lives better without making another race feel bad or making their lives worse. Nobody had to lose for us to win.
The point I glean from OC is that he can't do the work. He can't stop people from being racist. That's not only not his job, it's also an impossible task. The people who need to do the work are the people who are making conscious or unconscious biased choices which disproportionately impact black lives. It's not up to black people. It's up to everybody else to do that work.
As a, er, planet, we've actually done fairly well at easing those over the last century, tho. Sure, they're not gone, and maybe they'll never be gone, but improvements can be made, and it's probably not helpful to treat them, or racism, as laws of nature.
I do think there's a perception problem, though. Basically no-one would claim that disease or poverty aren't problems anymore, but there are a surprisingly large number of (mostly white, obviously) people who claim racism isn't a problem anymore.
Speak for yourself.
I'm sure you'll get a lot of support for this point of view because it's the easy way out. (it's what white people love to hear to because that means "aha! this one gets it!")
Throw your hands up, keep your chin up right?
I don't roll over like this because it's not how I was raised. My parents came from less than poverty, my father all but lost a finger farming for pennies to cover school fees while his father drank away what little money they had in his home country.
My mother didn't have parents to raise her, she came from a home where she was seen as a burden foisted upon her caretakers by familial obligation, and their wish for her was to be a seamstress
Today they both hold doctorates, their siblings are doctors and nurses and engineers, all coming from the same backgrounds.
I wasn't raised to roll over and tell myself "it's not under my control", that mentality wouldn't have gotten them where they are today, and it wouldn't have gotten me where I am today.
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Fairness is always an option, the problem is it's expensive, it's hard work, it's humiliating sometimes, it's risky.
When you're slighted and you feel it's because of the color of your skin, the moment you say something, you're painting a target on your back. Sometimes it means you have to walk away from opportunity.
So some good little kids tell themselves it's not an option, they can't take that risk, they can't risk being the tall nail, or not grasping a opportunity they have just because it might be tainted with "unfairness".
Maybe it's a privilege that my parents have passed onto me, putting my in a position where I could take those risks and stand tall, but I grasp on to it proudly, and it makes me stronger than those who can't to the same.
I honestly don't have a problem with people who can't do the same, but trying to spread that brand of thinking is weak and shouldn't be done. It's a coping mechanism, it's not something to be paraded and shared as sound advice like your comment does.
Against all of what defines them, I'm sure there were times where my parents had to swallow that strength and put up with "unfairness" (in fact, I know of it from them first hand), but by not changing themselves, and by not buying into the narrative that "it is what it is, it's the human condition", they were able to pass on that strength to me, and put me in a much better place than they would have otherwise
I mean look _the whole passage_, the article is about a black man who is not buying "fairness is not an option" and yet you seem to have somehow picked out the counter-argument which is immediately torn down:
> "I don't live in a world where fairness is an option," he said. "I am certain that over the time in my professional career there are things that have made it difficult as an African American. I have put so little time in acknowledging those instances because that's what I expected."
> But that milieu may ultimately hurt venture's bottom line.
> Gompers, who looked at the performance of venture portfolios that had more diverse teams, found they achieved better returns than homogenous teams.
> "The importance of diversity is all about making better decisions," he said. "If you all look the same and have the same experiences, you are gonna make the same mistakes."
People still don't get this, diversity's reward is not different amounts of melanin in the skin of the people sitting at a table.
As long as people continue to make this basic misunderstanding, they will continue to fail to understand why diversity matters, and they will continue to feel as if it's needless feel good charity work.
Diversity is different walks of life and different ways of thought that come with it. People still see taking people of different backgrounds as some sort of charity, they don't understand how much stronger they can be than competitors where every person in the room is a different shade of the same background.
These are words to live life by.
What works for the 'person' often does not work for the 'people'.
Systemic inequalities only truly reveal themselves in statistics. Thus, an individual anecdote by a 'person' serves no purpose for a policy that's created for the 'people' what-so-ever. On the other hand though, those anecdotes are central to the 'person' and 'persons' who associate with them. Now, treating those same anecdotes with indifference can be catastrophic to your 'person'-al relationship.
It's how as a country I encouraging STEM as a policy for the people is a great idea. However, pushing/incentivizing your own child towards STEM when they clearly want to do something else is not so great.
As humans we need to compartmentalize the way we empathize, strategize and process emotions along the same lines of 'people' vs 'persons'.
Census Date: Total US Asian population
1970: 1.5M
1980: 3.5M
1990: 7.2M
2000: 10.6M
2010: 15.2M
2020 (proj): 19.7M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
We might earn more on average and might expect to live longer, but there's plenty of historical baggage. It's not a competition, but there's plenty of baggage. The internment camps of WWII are literally still in living memory. Personally, multiple times throughout K-12-college, in the most liberal cities in the US, I've been told to go back to where I came from. I don't let it bother me - I can't let it bother me - but it's still very real.
> If you search for it, any group can find areas where they feel they are being mistreated, but on the whole, your parents’ strategy has succeeded spectacularly.
It did, but there are some very important caveats:
1. My parents' strategy had to be built on top of the hard-earned victories by the black communities in the US in the 60's and 70's.
2. I personally benefited from my race's perception as "civil, unlike the other minorities". You don't get to choose which side of that fence you're born on.
3. My parents and their fellow immigrants were the product of extensive resources poured into their educations in their home countries. They were educated enough to perceive and understand the cultural "game" played by the American middle/upper classes. That's not a repeatable strategy for most people in the US, period, let alone for minorities.
4. In practice my upbringing, and that of my fellow immigrants and ABC's, wasn't just by our parents, it was a whole community's pooled time and energy. Just look at how Chinese American communities handle college admissions.
5. My parents understood, whether tacitly or explicitly, that as Chinese Americans the children would have to assimilate into mainstream American culture, and by doing so they could mostly pass as "white". My parents outright told me that it was necessary for my future career. Imagine telling that to a black person. Good luck doing that when your skin color literally doesn't let you do it.
> I think this is in part, because it was a win-win strategy. We were able to make our lives better without making another race feel bad or making their lives worse. Nobody had to lose for us to win.
That's not true. Chinese American communities, for example, enthusiastically engage in "opportunity hoarding". (https://belonging.berkeley.edu/richard-reeves-opportunity-ho...) The losers in this are usually other minorities. The effect is indirect, but it's real. A great example of this is the fact that Chinese Americans suddenly become politically active the moment there's even a whiff of anything remotely like affirmative action. We might frame it as a matter of meritocracy or fairness, but we also know it's not a win-win situation. We know it's about winning the game for our team to the detriment of other minority groups.
Sure, but if everyone has this attitude then the collective group suffers. e.g. bandwagon bias, and thus the individual suffers as a result.
> It's not up to black people. It's up to everybody else to do that work.
Sure, and clearly whats happening right now is that people who are not marginalized (e.g. white people) are learning what is required to do the "work". That doesn't happen without the activists showing up and saying "hey white people, educate yourselves, read XYZ".
> it's also ok for black children dream of being a doctor, programmer, VC, whathaveyou, without demanding that they also be martyrs for a cause that's entirely out of their hands.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that everyone has to be a martyr for a cause, just that (1) their existence is important and (2) if marginalized groups of people just accept status quo then there is little incentive for those martyrs to exist.
> The point I glean from OC is that he can't do the work.
Because he literally can't do it (handicapped?) or because they don't want to because it's risky? The point I lean from the OC is that he enjoys the luxuries of his life but is unwilling to fight for others who are similar.
In the original article the VC basically says "I don't waste my energy on acknowledging racial biases on a day to day basis because I already know these exist". This is not the same as saying "I can't be a martyr".
> That's not only not his job, it's also an impossible task.
People don't get paid to fix civil rights, it's not a job. People have taken it upon themselves to answer that calling. I think it's fine to say "I don't believe it's my role in life to" but to pretend it's not required while still enjoying the benefits of those who do sacrifice themselves is an extremely selfish outlook on life.
> The people who need to do the work are the people who are making conscious or unconscious biased choices which disproportionately impact black lives.
And how do you propose those people fix that? Do they just wake up one day and say "ya know what I'm gonna stop giving into my unconscious bias"?
That's exactly what's being said to white people right now, and as a white person, I don't think that any race should accept it. The current dilemma is that apparently not accepting racism towards white people, as a white person, seems to make me racist somehow. Go figure.
I wonder how many people are reading this person's quote and assuming the angle of the article matches what they wanted to hear.
The GP comment probably wouldn't have been downvoted if it had been more substantive. It's a bit hard to read where it's coming from, "this is such a defeated mindset" has a touch of name-calling about it (which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), "you're welcome to it all you want" has a touch of personal attack about it, and "some of us aren't willing to settle" would make a fine opening for saying more—like what that means, and why, and above all, sharing some of the experience that has led to that position—but it doesn't make a good closing for a one-liner.
This is not an argument in good faith.
You can stand against racism without "howling at the moon", this is almost a dog whistle at this point for people saying that not standing for racism means being loud and brash, as if black people don't know any other way to stand tall. It's legitimately sad to see one of my own people use it.
You don't need to be chanting at a protest on the lawn of the White House to not "accept racism". It's a valid form of standing tall, but realistically, not everyone can, or is willing to do that.
But turning down opportunities with parties don't show any effort at all at diversity (or even worse, show racial bias), being willing to put people on the spot for their actions even if it comes at personal risk or embarrassment, being willing to actively advocate for diversity in cases where you have power to do so.
There are so many ways at a personal level to not just accept the state of things that are not "all consuming", to act otherwise means you're not even interested in having a genuine conversation on the matter, and just comes as an attempt at post-hoc rationalization of giving up.
Personal opinion: yes, but also no. I think this is a false dichotomy.
As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. Maybe confront someone every now and then to improve things for a friend or coworker. But, for yourself, the only thing you can do is to accept that you have a shitty hand and do the best you can with it. The hand you have is the hand you have, arguing that it should be better won't make it better.
However, year by year, the reality is that there is a systemic problem, and when a whole population all have a shitty hand to play, statistically you're going to expect worse outcomes.
If you let yourself get crushed by the weight of the systemic issues, you're not going to be in any condition to help others, but if you don't do anything about the systemic problem, then future success stories of people like you will continue to be statistical anomalies. So take care of yourself, and then try your best to help the people that come after you.
The strategy so far was to publicly and politically fight (which is good) but after each protest the individuals are back to their own struggles with little to no help or care from other black people (again as a community). If everyone cares only for it's own issues it won't work. Our role is to educate young black people. Tell them how the world is but also show them that they have a functional place in it and that they can start to build it from elementary school!
> The GP comment probably wouldn't have been downvoted if it had been more substantive.
My 700 word reply with the same sentiment was at -1 within seconds. It only just got back to 1.
Now, I didn't write that to be popular, it's an intentionally uncomfortable comment if you're someone who agrees with the top level comment and I wanted it to be. The fact is, the audience here has shown time and time again they'd rather bury talk about uncomfortable conflict involving race.
Imagine this comment was downvoted, but multiple comment chains saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and "move on" are being propped up above it...
This isn't the first time I've seen this here, and it won't be the last. At the end of the day, HN's demographic reflects the demographics of the industries it intersects, and diversity is not high at all within them.
That allows people to bury their heads in the sand so to speak, these are uncomfortable conversations and they'd rather not have them
If you pick the cream of the crop from Asia, they are going to do well even if you kick them down a peg.
It sounds like you're in the second camp. You can work on people in the third camp. Be on the lookout for bias, speak out, and correct it. Be prepared for blowback; it's a risky business. But eventually some of them will wake up and say "wow, racism really does impact some people worse than others, maybe I should update my philosophy."
You can provide support to people in the first camp by providing support when they ask for it, learning about the conditions they experience, and not expecting them to fix your shit, and by confronting those in the fourth camp without being told or asked, especially when they act out in front of folks in the first camp. If you're in a position of authority, you can mete consequences to abusive folks in the fourth camp, you can adopt strict policies regarding misbehavior, etc. If you're making high level financial decisions, you can choose not to do business with folks from the fourth camp. One day, they might wake up and say "fuck, it is mighty unprofitable to maintain my conscious biases, maybe I should work on that."
I didn't say OC couldn't do the work because of disability. I said it in part because black people trying to talk to racists about racism is like putting fires out with gasoline. But also because I can't be responsible for a random stranger's actions -- I can react to them, but not prevent them.
This is precisely why activists organize groups of people: so that they may act together and stand a chance of effecting change. Historically, with large enough organization, it has worked pretty well at times.
It’s difficult to do this work when the system is trying its best to stop you.
I'd argue it's ultimately a much more effective way to combat racism/bigotry/whatever, unless you accept the Critical Race Theory definition of racism, which I do not.
The military is probably the best evidence that this works. They take black, white, hispanic, and Asian Americans and put them through rigorous training together. In the end, nobody gives a crap what the other people look like or where they came from - they're your brothers and sisters and you trust them with your life.
Dehumanizing people, calling them out, invoking the mob, getting people fired... these are all tactics that are doomed to stoke animosity, not reduce it.
Since this is such a sensitive topic, I think I need to elaborate a bit more on the individual vs. systemic perspective. When I was growing up, I was told that the game is rigged against me, and I was going to have to dig deep. I had to make peace with the idea that, for example, I needed better SAT scores for the same college applications. (I didn't pick the example for its severity, I picked it because it's a measured phenomenon.) That's just the reality of racism/sexism/ageism/whatever. That's the individual perspective: game's rigged against you, deal with it.
But where this line of thinking becomes racist is when, for example, one of the Chinese immigrant parents in my community asks "why don't black people just work harder?" How do you know how hard they work? If it was just about working harder, the problem would be solved by now. In that case saying that black people should work harder comes from a place of ignorance of the real problems, which proves the point that it's important to make noise about systemic problems. That's the systemic perspective.
I don't think either point has to invalidate the other, but I've personally experienced both people saying "work harder" as a form of victim-blaming out of ignorance as well as people blaming personal failings on the system holding them down, and everything in between including real role models who are just venting. So I tend to just keep my mouth shut about it in my personal life.
Uhhh why? That makes no sense to me. Understanding racism from a white person requires empathy which means to understand the feelings and emotions from the perspective of the other party. So quite literally you need black people to talk to racists about why it affects them. Whether those people choose to be empathetic is another question altogether.
> It sounds like you're in the second camp.
I'm not in any "camp". Nor was I looking into what I need to do in this situation, but rather commenting on how others are viewing this whole situation, particularly black people who take the "ya I know it exists, it's futile for me to actively do/say anything about it, someone else is taking care of this and yet I still get to benefit" camp. For the record, I don't actually think the people genuinely have that thought process, but rather that's how you described them, which I disagree with.
First off, black people confronting racists about their racism has significant risk of emotional and bodily harm. Even when it's unconscious bias from an otherwise well-meaning person, bringing it up is a risk.
For example, I don't tell my boss to stop staring at my tits. I do my best to grit that one out. He's otherwise an ally, and losing his support would mean losing my job. And winning unlawful termination suit is a mug's game: you might score a few grand, which is taxable income, your employer gets to write it off, and good luck finding a new job with the story "I sued my employer".
As I said before, not every black person wants to be an activist. And why should we expect that of them? If we have that expectation, it's extra work they need to do on top of the work required for their actual job / interests. What you're asking for is tantamount to asking for unpaid overtime. That's a great recipe for enlarging the wage gap, not shrinking it. People who aren't burdened by this crap get to otherwise spend their time and energy on career-boosting side projects, hobbies or other enjoyable activities and their mental health is improved as a result. I'm summarizing what I've read from black activists -- people who have devoted themselves to this. Here's a couple of articles by black authors on the topic. Please read them in an empathetic mindset.
https://www.mic.com/p/being-black-at-work-right-now-means-do...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/17/black-peo...
> I'm not in any "camp".
As I said, that was a gross oversimplification of the situation. But you are absolutely a participant in this society, and you fall somewhere in a gradient spanning the range that I described. On reflection, your assertion that you don't belong to any camp puts you squarely in the third camp: people who are well meaning, and don't see that they're part of the problem. That's an okay place to be. You're showing genuine curiousity about this issue, and you might read up on it and wake up one day with the understanding that you're responsible for taking up the work yourself.
> Nor was I looking into what I need to do in this situation, but rather commenting on ... particularly black people ...
Perhaps you should focus on what you can do about this situation, and not what you think black people are supposed to be doing. Like I said, you can only control your own actions.
It's also hard because a lot of positive opportunity for black kids growing up (at least in my experience Cincinnati, Ohio mid/late 90's early 2000s) has mainly come in through athletic sport initiatives, which was interesting to me as a kid to some degree, I was more interested in things not pertaining to athletic sports. Hell, I can barely relate to college educated black people who/want to work for companies like FB/GOOG/etc…
Have you ever wondered that being born into a system where odds are stacked against you might be a strength for you? Not for everyone in the group, but for you.
And so women who have been "MeToo'd" should just be silent? I don't get it. You're advocating exactly for why people in power continue to oppress, because complacency of victims fuels their power.
> As I said before, not every black person wants to be an activist.If we have that expectation, it's extra work they need to do on top of the work required for their actual job / interests.
And so they'll just leave that up the MLK's of the world? Got it. Thanks for your martyrdom MLK, I'm too busy WORKING!
> You're showing genuine curiousity about this issue, and you might read up on it and wake up one day with the understanding that you're responsible for taking up the work yourself.
I have told you NOTHING about what work I've done to be a better participant in society so why are you commenting on this?
> Perhaps you should focus on what you can do about this situation, and not what you think black people are supposed to be doing.
Perhaps you should too? But that's not the point of my comment and hence why I'm failing to understand your responses. /shrug