Pattern Matching, Racial Diversity and the Hypocrisy of Big Tech Media (opens in new tab)

That's what a lot of us have been saying in industry for awhile now but tech media has been pretty relentless in implications without clarification of the underlying difficulty (the pipeline we have to work with). It's good to highlight the hypocrisy.

thanks for this great post. I was wondering how does the Tech community in Nigeria feel about the renaming of Tech jargon as currently implemented by Githab, Redhat, Twitter and others (links below). Do you think this is something companies should be doing? It seems like a cheap shot to me personally and it would be cool to get your opinion on this in a future post on your blog.

thanks!

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/tech/twitter-jpmorgan-sla...

https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially...

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977....

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-dropping-coding-term...

What successful paths have you encountered in Nigeria that propels local disadvantaged populations into areas of the economy that would typically be out of reach to them and which may be applicable in the US?

> blackballed

Honest question - Is that a racist term? Doesn't appear to be based on Google search, but I see people removing words with black in them such as "blacklist" so I am curious.

> when you are busy pointing your torch at others, you forget to point it at yourself.

Big tech should stop fronting and you should stop pointing.

Please try your luck with Quillette[1] - it's a dissident media magazine, not only open for, but indeed interested in, publishing articles that go against the popular narrative.

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[1] https://quillette.com/about/ the "How can you pitch an article?" question

I am not sure about "dominant races," but there has been something akin to this move in another aspect of society: gender. Here's an article that outlines the effects of finally having enough men in congress convinced to ratify the 19th amendment (enabling universal suffrage) [1]. In this case, the "dominating" culture is the more correct term than "dominant," since the proportion of males to females in society is usually close to 50/50 - but I think it does give us some idea about the kind of policy ramifications that might happen with more representative representation:

> Some of the legislation championed by women lawmakers, such as the enactment in the early 1990s of the Violence Against Women Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, are remembered as signature achievements more than a generation later. But other victories were shockingly prosaic, correcting gender inequities that few would now believe lasted as long as they did, from giving women access to credit to ensuring that medical research included women as subjects.

A good example of the kind of prosaic mentioned: most people do not know that the NIH was not required to include female subjects for drug trials until 1993, though it is shockingly obvious that a drug could affect female bodies (e.g. reproductive system) differently [2].

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/how-wom... [2] - https://grants.nih.gov/policy/inclusion/women-and-minorities...

I wouldn’t look at it that way. As someone who is middle class and better off than most of the planet I see a more equitable world as the only way to prevent further instability and conflict.

The nature of the dominant classes has changed over time. In the early days of civilization like in ancient Egypt you had the pharaohs who ruled because they guarded the knowledge of when and where the river Nile would flood. The farmers were mere meat robots who were forced to farm in order to pay taxes. It didn’t really matter how educated the farmers were or how free the discourse was.

Today’s dominant classes rely on an extremely complex society to keep things going. You need a highly educated work force equipped with all the latest communication tools and critical thinking skills. It’s not so easy anymore to get away with unfair social structures.

Increasing automation means that a lot of this oppression is simply unnecessary.

As far as I’m concerned we either figure out how to build a more equitable society where every kid has a fair chance at self actualization or we risk actual revolution in the long term.

I prefer to be on what I see as the right side of history same as the people who fought to abolish slavery, give women the vote and establish a welfare state.

It doesn’t seem rational, the only way to make sense of it is if the dominating class accessorizes the pursuit of the goal (regardless of its merits) as a form of aggrandizement in their own meta social stratosphere.

Questionable motives, but hey if it moves the agenda, take whatever help you can get. It’s already an up-hill battle.

It's a result of non zero-sum economics, so you won't see it from any time before the 18th century.

There might be something in the history of Empires like Rome, where over generations minority groups are assimilated into the dominant culture. Give it a few generations and nobody remembers relations 100 years ago.

In the US people today tend to forget the surge of nativist sentiment in 1920 towards... Italians. Or before that... Germans.

While I would prefer to see my demographic represented in the analysis, I'm entirely fine with the lens being focused on black people. If anything good comes of it, underrepresented minorities in general will benefit.

Billing Black %, though important, as racial diversity erases all other non-Caucasian groups.

I think this is a lesser form of "all lives matter", because the "applies to other groups" subtext is pretty obvious. I'm not saying that you're saying "all lives matter", just that I disagree for comparable reasons: it's only an erasure of non-Caucasian groups if you interpret the author uncharitably.

Does it erase them or does it just take a moment to focus the conversation on the black part?

I’m pretty sure “racial diversity” here doesn’t mean “not white” but instead means racial division in proportion to the population in context.

The article is not pointing the blame toward discrimination, it addresses the hypocrisy of those with the means to affect change, who are glad to denounce while remaining passive. Apathy while in a position to influence is a form of tacit approval of the status quo. Basically, the article denounces a common form of virtue signaling by these people/organizations when it's convenient (like right now); They publicly plaster donations as flares to deflect attention, but then go back to their color blind ways once the storm has passed. If you're part of a community that has no valid reasons to be delineated along racial lines, at some point you have to wonder why people of a certain minority are underrepresented in your (tech, business, friends) circles. Do they ever ask? Do they care at all? Your stated explanation, incarcerations and lack of education, tends to be the quick goto. But it doesn't explain everything. It's rather increasingly becoming an excuse since, as the article is pointing out, there are instances of talent striving to emerge from those under-favored minorities despite the odds, yet the underrepresentation persists. If anything, the custodians of communities that supposedly transcend backward concepts like "race", should make efforts to encourage more forward-thinking notions such as diversity, as everybody ends up winning from the enriched perspective.

Not at all.

Without media coverage, it is hard for even myself to know of black founders in US tech.

Did you know the founder of the very popular Calendly was black? He lives in Atlanta and is Nigerian but I only got to know of him recently.

I just wanted to list a few names of people "I KNOW" that are doing spectacular things.

I hope more people make more lists of Black founders. We cannot have enough of them.

Are you flat out saying that some races and sexes are not intelligent enough to be in the tech industry?

I love seeing comments like this surface on HN, because they serve to show how some people can think of themselves as rational while being so oblivious about their ignorance. It can go on silently for years, because they think it's just politically incorrect to say it, but that the "facts" are true.

This is why, despite what you may believe, "race" issues are still of actuality in SV. You would be amazed at what some of the supposedly smart and powerful people in these circles believe when it comes to this stuff.

This rhetoric in commenting on venture capital and tech implies that whites and asians are more likely to fall into some biological distributions optimal for being in tech or being a venture capitalist.

could you explain what they are? Genuine question.