The rub is that on average, people who aren't white have a way harder time in America, hence the need for these types of opportunities. It doesn't matter that one white person may have had a hard life, it matters that systemically, non-white people have many disadvantages that white people don't have.
Among other things, the category "people who suffered lots of disadvantage" is more disadvantaged than either women or any racial group. Why do you explicitly exclude this subgroup of humans from consideration?
Downmodding, BTW, still counts as ducking the question. Good to know that it's a difficult one.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Because, and honestly I think you know this, in America a disadvantaged white person is still better off than a disadvantaged black person. A disadvantaged man trying to make it in tech is still better off than a disadvantaged woman trying to make it in tech. The problem in America is race and gender, everything else being equal - race & gender become filters because of racism and sexism. Two resumes that are _exactly_ the same, but one of them has a name normally associated with a black male will get far fewer bites from companies. Same thing with matching resumes but one has "Bob" and the other "Susan". The point of efforts like this is to close the gap that is created by sexism & racism. Yes, you could keep expanding the focus of the program until you become "Organization to solve every problem ever, LLC." ...but that's silly. There are some focused on AIDS/HIV, there are some people focused on Ebola, some people focused on Cancer.... and the people in this article are focused on race/gender in the tech industry.
The problem in America is race and gender, everything else being equal...
Again, let me repeat the question: why do you hold everything else equal?
A related question. I've observed that ever since LASIK, people find me more attractive but less intelligent. I'm currently running an experiment to objectively measure this. Suppose my experiment confirms my anecdata. Should we preferentially give scholarships to people with good vision?
If not, why not? I.e., what makes race special?
First, how does one directly measure disadvantage suffered? It's not a trivial thing to do. Hacker School doesn't have a lot of resources. Measuring race/gender/etc. is easy and correlates strongly with disadvantage. It's also a hard measure to "game" or fake.
Second, race/gender/etc. problems are (as pointed out) systemic in our society and in programmer culture specifically. That is to say, there are cultural habits, assumptions, attitudes, institutions, etc. which disadvantage people for no other reason than being nonwhite/nonmale. One thing that is enormously helpful in fixing these kinds of problems is simply having more nonwhite/nonmale people in the culture.
Helping a person who was disadvantaged by a mere quirk of fate helps only them. Helping someone disadvantaged by their race or sex helps them and helps everyone like them, in the long run. It reduces stereotype threat; it wears away at unfortunate cultural assumptions and attitudes; it provides positive role models; etc. etc.
Third, and most speculatively, I think these are the kind of problems that an organization like HS is particularly well-positioned to tackle. I believe that (e.g.) simple poverty and other forms of "brute disadvantage" are serious problems in our society (and indeed there still are some lingering class prejudices against poor people, so it's not an entirely "brute" disadvantage either). But I don't think that HS is likely to substantially help these problems by, say, merely offering grants to poor people. Poverty is too big, too general a problem to solve that way. But racism and sexism in programmer culture is a problem where HS actually has a shot at making a (small) difference.
First off, the rate of attrition among these specific minority groups is dramatically higher than it is for whites of any class. How many women who start as engineers are still engineers 10 years out? Look it up. If the disadvantages really are the same, then why is it that whites from lower income brackets do not have the same problem?
The answer -- as other users have pointed out to you repeatedly over the last few months -- is because the disadvantage is systemic and widespread.
That is why these scholarships are a good thing.
To prove this fact all I need to do is find a single black person who isn't. This proves that P(disadvantage|black) < 1, whereas P(disadvantage|disadvantage)=1.
So now we have the following groups, ordered by disadvantage:
white < black < disadvantaged
Why do you attempt to remedy the disadvantage of the second most disadvantaged group, but not the most disadvantaged group?
Telling me stats about blacks and whites does not address this question. The disadvantage stats are, by definition, higher for the group I've explicitly constructed to be 100% disadvantaged.
because society does.
You're getting caught up in a taking a very specific sample and comparing it to a general population.
