Slashdot Mirror
Is There an Institutional Bias Against Black Tech Entrepreneurs?
An anonymous reader writes sends this excerpt from CNN:
"The vast majority of top executives at the leading Silicon Valley tech firms are white men. Women and Asians have made some inroads, but African-American and Latino tech leaders remain a rarity. About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black, according to a study by research firm CB Insights. ... 'The tech industry is pretty clubby,' said Hank Williams, an African-American entrepreneur in the NewMe program who had success in the Internet boom of the 1990s. 'There are really no people of color in Silicon Valley.' Others say the issue could be rooted deep within the black community. The NewMe co-founders said African-American families don't typically encourage business leaders or programmers to pursue interests in tech."
Observing an apparent deficiency in demographics is not proof of bias, it is merely an observation of what is.
--- Bill
About 0% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of this year are white with my ethnic background.
I'm tired of being lumped together with "rich white men" just because I'm white.
There are 100 times as many white teenagers plastered to their monitor messing around with their computer as there are black teenagers. Since successful tech entrepreneurs tend to be the kids who spent thousands of hours in front of their computer when they were kids, and the kids spending thousands of hours in front of their computer are almost all white (or asian), then of course almost all the tech entrepreneurs will be white.
It's got nothing to do with silicon valley. It's due to the comparative lack of computer availability to young black teens, and a cultural difference where American black culture has a much lower opinion on average of nerdy endeavors as opposed to American white culture.
paintball
Anyone with $50 - $150 and a library card can pretty much obtain a PC and learn how to use it. Craigslist special. Cable companies are offering dirt cheap broadband, as well as various other gimmicks to get cheap net access. An individual so motivated to p0wn da webz only needs to make the time and effort. There has to be 10,000 other occupations with a higher barrier to entry.
My 2 cents.
So this story is based off the CNN documentary "Black in America: Silicon Valley." I haven't seen the actual show, but CNN has been pushing it a lot the past week and showing clips from it.
One really interesting clip that I saw had an Indian who had experience with VCs and start-ups and was also a professor somewhere giving a talk to the African American entrepreneurs.
Now Asians in general, and Indians specifically I don't think are as rare in Silicon Valley and are found amongst high level executives. Additionally, this particular individual was well spoken and articulate, capable of creative thinking, didn't have a strong accent, and in other ways didn't fit the stereotype of an Indian caricature.
However the ONE thing that he said was to get a good looking white guy to be your front man when going to VCs. He said that when we wanted to get funding, he got a (admittedly very capable and accomplished) white guy to be his partner. He said that's just how things work in the Valley. The African American audience he was speaking to was very shocked by this.
The point made was that VCs look for what works. And if they see a bunch of "successful" start-up companies run by young white guys, that's what they look to fund. Plus add in the inherent bias towards good looking white guys in business who fit the common archetype (with as Dilbert says good hair).
While we're on the topic, what about women (white or otherwise)? Are VCs more likely to discount a company being led by women as they're not thought to be "techy"?
So, any thoughts form people with experience here, either for or against this argument. Do all races (not just African Americans) need Caucasian male partners to improve their chances for success.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Ever heard of Vinod Khosla? How about legions of Asian programmers? Oh, no people of *his* color. Yeah, just another conspiracy by The Man to keep the bruthas down.
Seriously, when will this victim mentality shit ever end?
Hammer Time.
Let's look at the fundamental facts here. Well, fact, since there's only one inarguable thing:
African-Americans and Latinos are underrepresented in tech-firm leadership.
That's a correlation - executives in the tech industry tend to be white males (who are significantly overrepresented). Asians and white females are more or less as common as expected. Probably a bit less, but not as significantly.
Now, as we all know, correlation does not imply causation. But it does hint pretty heavily that there is something involved. Since I don't have access to many studies, and can't do my own, all I can do is list every possibility I can imagine, and informally think about it.
Possibility 1: There is a specific bias in technology against blacks and latinos. I find that a bit hard to believe - the tech industry trends liberal, and I'm sure plenty of techies would rather have Geordi La Forge for a boss than Gates or Ellison. It's still a possibility, and I'm not saying no techies are racist, but overall, I don't think this is the best explanation.
Possibility 2: There is a specific bias among business executives against blacks and latinos. That I can definitely believe, but I don't have any statistics to support or refute it, and I'm not sure it would explain it fully.
Possibility 3: There is a specific bias amongst blacks and latinos against entering technology. I suspect this may be a contributing factor, perhaps even the main one. It's only anecdotal evidence, but when I was in high school, there were very few african-american students in the tech program, and no hispanics at all. The ones who were there were fine (one of them remains a good friend, and one of the brightest people I've met), but you'd see a lot more in the art or music programs.
Possibility 4: There is a specific bias amongst blacks and latinos against becoming business executives. This probably isn't a major factor, but it may be a small one. At the very least, racial minorities tend to be less wealthy, which would naturally make them less likely to become major business leaders.
Going off gut instinct, I would say it's a combination of business leaders being biased against blacks/latinos, and blacks/latinos not being encouraged by their parents to enter the tech field. That would be my hypothesis. The best way to check would be to look at the independent factors - you should see a bias against blacks/latinos at all levels of technology, and a bias against black/latino business leadership in other industries, but neither bias should be alone as significant as that seen in tech business leadership. I'd look myself, but I haven't even RTFA yet.
"some of my best friends are black. or.. i mean. indians are black right? "
-- Johnny V., CEO Status Quo Capital
...but there is a socioeconomic one in the United States...
Note: Correlation does not imply causality.
Comic Con.
paintball
I don't think it is as simple as that. I think there is a strong bias against poor people and black people are far more likely to be poor. I suspect that white trailer trash are almost as likely to suffer the same problems as poor black people..
I think that there is also an element of racism involved against black people, but a lot of their problems stem from the money available to them when young.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Using the same logic as proponents of institutional bias, one could argue a pattern of discrimination against males because they do not make up half of all maternity ward patients despite being half of the population.
No. Because Cain believes that a person stands on their merits, not their skin colour. Being half-asian, I do the same. Institutional bias to 'create' groups of people and segregating them does more damage than anything, and the left are very happy to use those all the time.
Useful tip: You might want to actually look into his "computer related" background experience.
Om, nomnomnom...
Our whole society is biased against black people. They are denied education, and the people in power prefer their own kind. Most people who make more than maybe $60,000 a year aren't used to interacting with black people, are afraid of them, and assume they are stupid and shouldn't be trusted.
None of that is true, or only true in very exceptional cases. There's absolutely no discriminatory laws in place (except perhaps to advantage minorities, and very few racist individuals. Of those who are racist, the majority would never admit it.
The under-representation of particular races in particular fields have little to do with racism, and nothing to do with innate capability. It is purely a social artifact of history.
Go search 'Weird Al White and Nerdy' if you haven't already watched it a few dozen times.
Affirmative action has been used and found to have positive results when applied to other walks of life.
It's also been found to have detrimental effects when applied to other walks of life. The cure for racism is not to enshrine it into law, as affirmative action does. The important thing is to make race an irrelevant factor in success in a field... and I believe it is, in the tech industry.
I think it's very rare in Silicon Valley that an otherwise deserving businessman loses out because they're black. Rather, the deficiency is in the lack of deserving minority businessman in the first place. That's a social and cultural issue, and may not even be a problem. Not every culture needs to have equal representation in all fields; that's one of the ways in which cultures are different.
I worked at a Fortune 100 company in a large IT department in a major coastal city. We had some choice in where we worked. I first worked in a group alongside a black guy, who told me he worked in his group because he didn't get along with someone in another group, he was vague about who. I then went to work for that group. I got along with my manager, but he had it in for this black guy from the other group. In fact I would socialize with the manager and co-workers. At the bar, he would sometimes speak disparagingly on Arabs, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans and the like. When there were layoffs, the black guy was let go. He didn't have direct influence over the group, but having one of the managers there against you was certainly not a help. There didn't seem to be a logical reason for the antipathy either. Honestly, I still get along with this former manager, although I don't agree with his thinking in this respect.
I worked at another company, Fortune 1000. I worked alongside a black co-worker, with whom I had a common manager - white, from the Midwest, late 20s. Again, the manager had a lot of antipathy and made life hard for this co-worker, for no reason I could see. I think it's difficult to work in conditions when your manager is against you and is waiting to jump on any error you make (it happened to me once when a new manager wanted to push me out and get his friend in my position, which is a long story itself). Eventually my co-worker left, or was pushed out, or whatever - the co-worker never wanted to talk about it when I spoke with him after.
So from my experience, the racism is usually not from co-workers, or from upper management and HR, who would probably be happy with some functional, if token, black faces. It's usually from lower management types, who in my experience are often a bundle of neuroses and incompetence to begin with.
On another topic, to quote George Jefferson, with enough green you can always get people to forget the black. When the dot-com boom happened years ago, money flowed into the web properties of Vibe magazine, UBO, BET, Black Planet etc. Plenty of companies were interested in reaching the "urban" market. There is even cross-over - plenty of white teens listen to not only Eminem, but black hip-hop artists. I just read a piece in Adweek on how Android had captured the African-American demographic in the US. Of course, this still is a ghettoization of sorts - it really opens up when blacks get venture capital for new chip designs, or software products or the like, not just web and social media properties geared toward the urban market.
First off, whoever modded you Troll - I think they're wrong. I think you're asking a serious question. So I'll give you my serious answer.
The problem is cultural. The culture that a great many black children grow up in is simply broken. Are you familiar with the term "Uncle Tom"? It's an insult that black people aim at other black people that used to mean "sucks up to white people" but these days means "act too white", i.e. speaking proper English and getting good grades. It's actually frowned upon.
I'm not making this up. Here is an example. The one person is "less black" and an Uncle Tom because they grew up not poor, in a middle class area with both parents married. Less black. Think about that one for a bit.
And the submitter is wondering why you don't get a lot of scholastic achievement from this culture.
Black people are NOT denied education. My university has a list of grants and help as long as my arm for anyone who isn't Caucasian. The problem is that black people (in this area anyways, YMMV) are taught from birth that you are "less black" and something of a traitor to your people if you get good grades and act "too white". There is your real reason.
Think I'm kidding? Watch this bit from Chris Rock (nsfw). Why is everyone laughing? Because it *hits home*.
The culture itself is broken. Fix the culture and allow success to be defined as "gets good grades" and the numbers will change as if by magic.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There may be no laws in place, but the system is set up in a way (possibly, but not necessarily unintentionally) that is biased. Poor people are disproportionally black, and tend to live with areas with shitty schools and no jobs. Bam! They aren't getting out of it!
We have the same shit with the Romas here, and nobody likes to talk about it. They're often sent to substandard schools or schools for "special" children, and then everyone is surprised that they generally don't perform well and some turn out to be fuckups.
This is the kind of stupid argumentation that drives me crazy! (Disclaimer: It is not really a drive, but more like a short putt.)
Somebody notices a glitch in the distribution where the data has been sorted by a hot political topic, and immediately everyone starts expressing an opinion. They are jumping to conclusions which, by definition, means they have not done any meaningful research, analysis, or other investigation. The whole discussion becomes a time-waster or political agenda.
This is an opportunity for some sociology team, anthropology team, or maybe economics team to FIND OUT WHY, by researching the issue and discovering what actually influences the situation.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
According to Wikipedia, among workers aged 25-64, working full time, the following income amounts by race are:
... enjoy utopian fairness.
White 40,422
Asian 42,109
African American 32,021
Hispanic or Latino 27,266
So, by the logic of fairness and my calculations, the average is $35,454. This means we need to take $6655 from asian peeps, and $4968 from white peeps, and give it to the african americans and latino peeps. Then everything would be fair, and people would stop crying.
Problem solved
FWIW my company just had a massive payout to all investors (after a merger), and one of the cofounders had kids. So that's not a very good metric either.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What I know about VC's:
#1 They love money
#2 They never have enough money
#3 Nothing much else matters to them in this life other than acquiring more money
Given the above, I believe that most VC's would gladly suck a bag of dicks if it meant an additional $1B in their bank account. I assume that funding a black guy's tech firm is much more pleasant than sucking a bag of dicks. My conclusion is that VC's would be happy to fund black tech firms, or asian tech firms, or latino tech firms if they thought they could make a bunch of money from doing so.
The open question is whether or not VC's underestimate the ability of black/asian/latino firms to make them a ton of cash.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
Unless, of course, you find a way to make computers care about what the person writing code on them looks like. Good luck with that.
More like dumb habits, and old-school social networking that we take for granted.
For example: my father introduced a now-retired VC to the woman he married. That got me in the door, years ago, for a discussion about whether our startup had a prayer. My advisor introduced a currently-famous VC to the woman HE married. We're multiply-connected as FOAFs; he might know me by sight, we've been to parties and my advisor's funeral together, where we got into a raging argument about global warming with a mutual friend.
Friend of mine (one of the F's in FOAF above) was working for Apple years ago, was talking to them about how they recruited, and discovered that they recruited from the same habitually-white schools that most of the people already there came from. Not intentionally discriminating against blacks, but de facto, not getting many of them in for interviews.
Worked for a startup A years back, when we were later trying to pitch our startup B, the founder of the startup A very, very generously gave us loads of advice about business plans and pitches. Networking, again.
On the supply side, you have blacks disproportionately living in poor places (meaning, schools not as good), from parents that might lack education (meaning, less exposure to stuff that upper middle class whites take for granted, like early reading etc). All these disadvantages are correlated with not doing so well in school. Any discrimination experienced in education along the way also thins the pool. Doesn't have to be conscious, either -- assume that we're all capable of making mistakes, including some really unfortunate ones.
And this stuff takes loads and loads of time to change. When I was a gradual student, I went to a programming languages conference, and there were more albinos in the audience, than blacks. One of the guys on my thesis committee was Richard Tapia, and he has been busting his ass for the last 30 years (at least, that's just what I know) to get more Hispanics into the sciences. When I got my PhD, it was right around the time that the first big cohort of women also got PhDs in CS; they're still underrepresented, but that cohort started advising/mentoring/role-modeling wore women, and over time there's been (so it seems to me) more and more.
"said Hank Williams, an African-American entrepreneur" Seriously? Am I the only one amused by this?
What are people of color? Isn't everyone a color of some sort?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
A "business leader" has their kids in school, under care, etc. They're hardly ever active parents, because they don't have that kind of time, they delegate those responsibilities -- both because they can afford to, and because it makes them better -- a lot better -- at their job. They also tend to arrive as leaders; they're not in "build a company" mode or anything like it.
I built five companies, four of them successes. I'd *never* have pulled it off if I was burdened with kids in the traditional sense. And no, I'd never hire a parent in a role where I needed serious time commitments -- that is, more than 40 hours with constant time off for their kid's sniffles, parent-teacher meetings, ball games, and the rest of the interminable list of tasks and responsibilities any good parent will decide will come first. I have seen this over and over: parents are highly undependable employees -- and they should be, unless they can delegate that attention. But an undependable employee is really, really bad news for a startup -- engineer, secretary, janitor -- you need to be there, pushing the wheel as hard as everyone else, period.
It is politically correct to pretend that these things -- parenting in particular -- should not matter. But in fact, they do. Consequently, they are taken into account at investing, at hiring, at tasking, at promotion, and WRT transfer. Quietly and unaccountably, but with enormous weight.
You tell me you have (a) kid(s) or you or your spouse is pregnant and you're seriously expecting me to believe you're going to put in the energy needed to launch a startup? Sorry, even people who *don't* have that baggage often don't manage to put out enough energy. I'd have to be out of my mind to put money behind such a bad bet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think the primary component in a lack of minorities in IT is access to technology. And, yes it's silly to suggest that PC at the public library. I attribute my career choice to having PCs in my home that I had total access to; not kiosks with restrictions on availability and built-in security.
But, I also encounter racism in the industry. I've had White Americans flat out laugh in my face when I told them I was a software engineer; after all how can a Black person work with computers? One of my biggest annoyances is the "White Test" I get when IT people try to surreptitiously quiz me to prove that I really am in IT. Usually it's by someone who's not as smart as they think they are which adds to the frustration. I've heard coworkers drop N-bombs at work when they thought I was out of earshot. With all that, can you honestly say the playing field is level?
For all of you writing your speculative posts on what "must" be going on in the industry, how about going out and talking to someone instead of extrapolating from your limited experiences?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
We need more women and less guys of all races.
Most software houses are sword fests and that just sucks.
What sucks worse CNNs shallow report identifies an effect without ever trying to understand or identify the underlying cause.
There are almost no black people in the Northwest tech cities. While filming the show "Leverage" in Portland they had to ask for more black extras for the backgrounds to make it look more "American".
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2009/05/24/african-american-extras-needed-for-leverage
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I reject that this is entirely up to exposure.
My circles of friends growing up were nerds. We swapped commodore 64 pirated games. We played dungeons and dragons. At least until 13-14 or so we all fit the mould. The computer dorkery lasted a lot longer, through high school.
Of my 30 or so aquaintences, nearly all the anglos and asians have found themselves doing something technology related. A few are pretty hardcore doing EE or embedded programming. Many are more IT or programmer types like me. Some had other focuses and created web sites or "social networking" whatever (retch). Some went into videogames, or makeing art or music for them. Not one of the 5 african american kids ended up in anything tech related. One's a counselor, one's a piano teacher and church organizer, one dropped off the face of the earth, and one's an accountant.
There's a *huge* skew here. These kids were given computers as very young people. We played videogames together as teenagers. On the c64 sometimes you had to fix the basic that would screw up due to a bad crack. I shared my exp tracking program I wrote in BASIC, and someone added features to it (it was bad). But all the african american kids dropped it, and they dropped it after the age of 16-17, when I no longer was following their lives so closely.
This can't be soley from a lack of exposure and opportunity. There's more to it.
-josh
NSF statistics show that in 2006, 2.2% of masters degrees in electrical engineering were awarded to people who described themselves as "black, non-Hispanic." This is compared to 13% of the population that is black. This goes a long way toward explaining why "About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black,[...]" This applies to any field where you're talking about a group being underrepresented; you have to look at the talent pool. If the group is underrepresented in the talent pool, then it's too late to fix the problem. They're simply going to be underrepresented in the field.
And why is it necessarily a problem if a particular group is underrepresented or overrepresented in a particular field? There are a lot of Jewish doctors out there. Is that bad? It's only bad if the underrepresentation is the result of injustice. What if some of it is the result of culture, preferences, or factors such as becoming a dentist because your mom is a dentist?
It would be extremely interesting to know what fraction of entrepreneurs who receive venture capital come from families with below-median incomes. I'll bet you a nickel the figure is much, much lower than 50%. But the US is allergic to talking about class. We only want to talk about race.
Find free books.
The woman from Chicago says she is a Republican.
I'm posting anonymously because I'm fairly involved in hiring with a Silicon Valley company.
Right now there is a talent shortage in a number of areas, especially mid-senior to senior Unix/Linux admins. If we didn't hire the best PEOPLE who we could find, without regard to race / gender / ethnicity / sexual orientation / etc, we would be at a major competitive disadvantage because then these talented individuals would go to our competitors.
Most of the successful entrepreneurs have spent quite a bit of time in the trenches. Most of the jobs in the trenches are hard work that requires a great deal of fundamental understanding, which can be gained in a wide variety of ways (college, working on open source, etc).
However, for most people who are successful here, the path to developing this understanding starts way before college; it starts at home in the middle and high school years. If you don't get that head start, you're starting out behind. If you want to fix "underrepresented" group issues, you have to fix the parents and fix the home situation. You have to get the parents to support their kids taking hard math, hard science, and getting the help they need.
An anecdote on the parental issue - there was a fairly poor (but relatively organized) neighborhood in a not-quite-majority-black city that was offered free computers and wireless internet for all of the houses, to help the (many) kids in the neighborhood start to get past this digital divide. The parents overwhelmingly rejected the idea because the Internet might possibly lead to porn.
The fact is, the Valley is a meritocracy because anybody who doesn't treat it that way is at a competitive disadvantage. But a meritocracy means just that; no bonus points for the color of your skin.
Well this is an interesting article. I am black ... and I would like to add my voice - since most of the voices are very likely not black.
There are many facets to a story like this. For one white folks do NOT like to be lumped into the same pot and also do not like to be made to feel guilty about racism. But racism does exist (look at the Yahoo message boards - very OVERTLY racist comments all the time).
... you should get a fair shake ... I think if you are a graduating PhD from Stanford with some new fangled technology, then you will get a fare shake. I know this, because the blacks at Stanford are very happy and they innovate. I have seen some UNHAPPY black people at MIT - I think for a long time they had no tenured black faculty and the one head of department was run off after his department revolted. So MIT from I have heard is not the best place if you are black person ... at Stanford, all I have seen is happy people - they get VC money, they start companies, they get faculty positions ... I heard Berkley is good too ...
... there are usually very few and when one appears in a project - there can be a reaction - or no reaction at all depending on the attitude of the team. Prejudices can come out ... prejudice is stupidity - let me say that now.
... Linux and VxWorks are my lingua franca ... my experiences over the years have been fun ... a lot of great projects networking, codecs, robotics ... a lot of cool stuff ... Today it would be highly unusual if I encountered direct and overt racism - I would likely have a very very hard time with that. I am fortunate - I know that some black people do work in hostile environments where they are second guessed or berated ... it does happen.
I went to a private technological University - I had lots of black classmates - some of them have done really really cool stuff. I met fellow black peers at MIT, Stanford, Caltech and Berkeley ... there are many smart black people ... that go to some of the best schools. The challenge is that many us are buried away in great companies in labs or offices ... we are here ... but sometimes not seen.
The questions as posed, is whether this prejudice applies to Silicon Valley. If your idea is good
No one should be asking if there are smart, qualified black people - There are. There are smart qualified people of all kinds of backgrounds. If you discriminate, you shrink the talent pool.
I do think though that African people (Black Americans, West Indians, Africans and others) working in American technological firms can be viewed as space aliens
I am a programmer - I program in C++ and C mostly
I think one challenge may be that SOME white people do not know how to interact with black people in general. This is not controversial or alarming at all. Why? Well when I look at my managers - I see 40 something, 50 something and 60 something year olds. For the older ones, they very likely did not go to schools with black people due to segregation - I understand that! This is America, and there is a social consequence that affects guys who graduated in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Heck even guys I knew in college, that was their first time interacting with a black person. Truly for a good deal of white people there are sometimes few blacks in their elementary and high schools. Not to be an apologist for people - but from a social studies aspect - when a black person is suddenly introduced, people can act like a space alien fell from outer space. Will the black person lower the API score of my school (for Californians), is he qualified to work at my company? Did he get in through affirmative action? These are things black people think white people think about them.
So in o
The problem isn't that they were comparing "black" names to "white" names it is that they were comparing ghetto names to American names. "Jill" is a very normal, neutral, name in America. "Shaniqua" is a name you tend to only see come from, well, the ghetto. It is not a name that comes from African roots or anything. It sounds, well, lower class.
However turns out it isn't just "black" names that have that. Try hillbilly names. Have "Shaniqua" run against "Sheri-Moon" and see how that goes. Both names are "odd" to the American ear and both speak of a lower class upbringing.
In terms of "black" names I might note that someone who has a REAL "black name," as in one that has an African influence, currently holds the highest office in the land.
There is this expectation that they should go and do some sort of civil rights work, or something like that which helps the "black community". Neil DeGrasse Tyson gives a great talk on that at the HHMI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I5Fl1Qn-Do.
In it (at around 32 minutes) he talks about an experience on college where another smart, motivated, black student found out he was working to be an Astrophysicist and said to him "Astrophysics? The black community cannot afford the luxury of someone with your intellect to spend it on that subject."
So there is this pressure for smart black kids that you need to go do something that directly helps the black community. Be a leader in some respect. That of course negates doing engineering or anything like that.
Now if you continue to watch the video, Dr. Tyson points out how his path has done ever so much, despite not working for "the black community." The man is the director of the Hayden Planetarium, a minor celebrity, a living, breathing, example that it doesn't matter if you skin has more melanin in it, you can still be brilliant and excel in your chosen field.
But there's that pressure there. Once you've got out of the anti-intellectual community, which as you point out is EXTREMELY strong for black kids, you then face this pressure from the intellectual community that you should be doing some specific things. Doesn't matter what you are interested in, you "owe" your community to use your smarts in some way.
Hopefully, time and people like Dr. Tyson will change that. People will see him, and more people like him, and say "It is ok to be smart, no matter my skin colour, and it is ok to use my smarts on the field I like."
to the person who needs to unload an OS if one's mother knew the current President of IBM socially from mutual involvement in high-level charity fundraising.
"Not exactly poor" indeed.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The argument is that it would seem that having a "black name" or more appropriately here a name with African roots is not something that is a massive barrier that stops you from any kind of advancement. If you are looking for absolute parity on all issues then you are a poor student of humans and should realize that never happens. However it becomes harder to argue that a "black name" is something that fucks you over when Barack Hussein Obama is sitting in the white house.
I don't think anyone here is saying that racism doesn't exist, just that it isn't necessarily as prevalent or pervasive as some think.
You seem to want to go to the other extreme: If there is an inequality of any kind between people with different skin colour, and you define what that is, then racism must be behind it.
All I am saying with the name test is it wasn't properly controlled. They chose names that are seen as "normal" or "neutral" and compared them to names seen as "ghetto". Names like Matt, Patrick, Lee, Jeff, etc are not "white" names, they are normal American names. As point of fact, those are the names of four black people I happen to know. As such if the question is one of response to race, and not one of perceived socioeconomic or educational status, then you have to control the test and have other names that are low status names but associated with a different ethnic group. As I said, "hillbilly" names would be an excellent choice. While I've no doubt Matt would get more calls than Latifah, I'm guessing it would also get more calls than Cletus. Now if Cletus also got more calls than Latifah well then you probably have something.
I'm not interested in trying to deny racism, I see plenty of it where I live (I live near the Mexican border so it is more regarding Latino vs White here). However I'm also not interested in claiming that any time someone thinks there's an inequality, racism must be the cause. Not only is that inaccurate, but it is not useful. If you falsely identify the wrong cause then your solutions are not going to be effective.
Here's my 2 cents as an old white guy as to why. In the 60s, black people decided that they needed their own culture to survive, one different from white culture. Prior to this, most black people tried to be more white, culturally speaking. The problem is, when you isolate cultures, you increase alienation, decrease communication and decrease social connections.
So here we have a pretty successful (economically) culture of Europeans in the USA and a not-so-successful culture of African Americans. After the 60s, they go their separate ways, more or less. White culture was rejected by young blacks who become more isolated from social connections, education and attitudes that could help them be a success, economically. The result seems to be an African-American youth culture obsessed with activities and attitudes that guarantee failure. Sports. Entertainment. The development of the physical. A lack of interest in the mental. And most insidious of all, a tendency to go for immediate gratification, rather than to work for long term rewards. The history is different for Hispanics, who have linguistic separation and legal issues thrown in the the mix, but some of the cultural characteristics of separation are similar.
And so, failure is guaranteed as long as there is no assimilation into the majority culture. The only exceptions I've seen to this rule are situations where the children were acculturated in white neighborhoods with "white" values and little to no exposure to their own racial group's culture. Is this fair? No. Is it real? Sure looks that way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Have a look here:
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/06/06/School-Budgets-The-Worst-Education-Money-Can-Buy.aspx#page1