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Black IT Pros On (Lack Of) Racial Diversity In Tech
Nerval's Lobster writes While pundits and analysts debate about diversity in Silicon Valley, one thing is very clear: Black Americans make up a very small percentage of tech workers. At Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, that number is a bit less than 2 percent of their respective U.S. workforces; at Apple, it's closer to 7 percent. Many executives and pundits have argued that the educational pipeline remains one of the chief impediments to hiring a more diverse workforce, and that as long as universities aren't recruiting a broader mix of students for STEM degrees, the corporate landscape will suffer accordingly. But black IT entrepreneurs and professionals tell Dice that the problem goes much deeper than simply widening the pipeline; they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
Aren't you over this charade that the every white person on the planet is a racist and that everyone and society as a whole is against you? Can you stop victimizing yourselves now?
Black males are 5.5% of all college students in the US. From those graduating, 2% going to tech doesn't sound that bad, statistically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rate_by_race_2.gif
And maybe their diversity in tech would improve.
Since when did RACE only mean black... That's weird.
Oh shit i said black. Downmod me. I'm racist!
Basements whiten people.
In 2018 the explosion of the Yellowstone caldera will block the sun for years, killing everything that needs the sun to survive.
Leaving behind only IT professionals.
Thus, Morlocks.
Mr. Wells did build the friggin machine.
How about the fact that in urban America, there is an overwhelming mentality of selling out your black-ness if you do "smart white people" stuff... like going to college, studying, getting jobs where you wear suits, etc. Our kids are getting ostracized for not being black enough when they get good grades or have good behavior or dress well. Come on!
I applaud the young black people who make it through that and become successful professionals.
What does Neil deGrasse Tyson have to say about racial diversity in astrophysics?
That's right, nothing, so who fucking cares??
It has everything to do with brothers not getting into STEM fields. The few of us that are here get jobs pretty easily, actually. Companies want to be diverse, they just don't have the applicants for it.
When a white techie doesn't get the job, it's not because he isn't white enough but because he isn't competent enough, but when a black techie doesn't get the job it's never about competence but always about skin color? Ooook. Go to hell.
Says the AC posting on Slashdot instead of getting some actual work done.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I guess the new owners of Slashdot really want to run this site into the ground as all these other English majoring losers have done to the major media outlets. First gamergate, now this.
Listen up you nerds! You're all racists, sexists, and homophobes. The world sucks because of you. Get over it! And stop being such meanies!
these things all shape a kid's perspective in life and what they end up pursuing. for me it was watching movies like war games that really got me think this is what i want to do. I wonder.. if the main character was a girl... would I not have pursued it?
Are they not also a significant minority in the US? And yet somehow, they managed to vastly over-represent themselves in STEM fields. Maybe, and this may be just a wild ass guess, but maybe it's because they spent their time focusing on their homework rather than whining about diversity?
Washington DC Chapter of the BDPA, found on Potomac Area local tech links.
It's sad, but we're rare birds. It's not the fault of any one thing. Culturally, families DO encourage it, however, there are few mentors. I just lucked out and had a dad who was a real dad worthy of mentorship, in engineering. It's rare because of.... I'll leave it at "forces of history" (internal, and external, both).
The stereotypes can be hard to shake, though. Being taken seriously can be an obstacle. It's a different experience, I'm sure. The only way to break the cycle (IMO) is to get out there and try to teach/mentor/train (which is an entirely different can of worms.)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
The only thing that I can think of, as far as color goes in the IT field, is the wires. But even then, the color really doesn't mean anything, except whatever you decide to denote them as, for your own setup.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I use to work for a company that did phone support. We had a policy of hiring a certain percent of our work force as ethnic and time and time again I saw black people who flat out "didn't want to be like white people"... I also saw it growing up in school so it didn't surprise me to see it in the work place. These people were being given jobs with no skills and getting training and this is the mentality most black workers I've dealt with have. The racial bias isn't on the side of the fence at this point that most people like to think it is. Black's just want to complain they don't have something and then blame the color of their skin.
A week ago Slashdot had another funky racist article about a black woman calling all white people homogenous because she wanted to be around more black people at work. Again we have this black vs white mentality and it's all whitey's fault for something... Not sure what it was but something... something.... white people are homogenous.....
When I was in college (2 year community college) every quarter we had the gangsta black kids who showed up for about 2 weeks so they could collect their check for a free education. Then they would go away until next quarter. This is the reason why black people don't have high graduation numbers. Many of them are gaming the system for college and getting away with it. When I hear someone talk about this when talking about black education then we'll know someone's actually paying attention.
Why would you put the effort into playing a game that's rigged against you?
Dude, that's just a load of manure. And you know it. In all tech places I've seen so far, they were looking for competent professionals to do some specific jobs. If an applicant can cut it, no one cares if he/she/it is a friggin' martian. Let alone something as mundane and normal as an African American.
Seriously. For real tech jobs, no one cares. Be a competent coder/engineer/systems designer/whatever, and you are in.
Now management and such, I am afraid you have a point of sorts. At least in some places. But hardcore tech, the sort where you need real engineers (and not coding monkeys): nope, sorry. There are far too few good players around for the really difficult jobs, for anyone being able to have a racial preference.
Im a white guy, so take any "I know how to solve diversity problems" with a grain of salt, but one reason I'm able to be in tech is scholarships and grants.
I didn't have a lot of money growing up, and once I got to college, a state school since i couldn't afford much else, I got a free ride from grants and scholarships. Since then, I've paid years and years of taxes in payroll tax, house tax, sales tax, etc. Back then, i noticed a lot more diversity in my classes. I got my first job as a reference from a Mexican engineer who knew another Mexican engineer at the place I'd end up working. I sublet from two other Mexican engineers that went to Motorola There were a few black electrical engineers, a few female CEs, etc.
Now, it's very very expensive to go to school. If you were just on the "hey, i can barely afford to go to college" divide before, you're now on the no-I-sure-can't other side. In the US, who's more likely to be on the bad side of the can-I-afford-college question? Minorities. It's not Bull-Connor-with-a-firehose racism, but it's a filter on minorities, an extra burden on just some of us that skews numbers. And that will carry over to the next gen. Those who can't become engineers now will likely have less well paying jobs, less good school systems for their kids, and less money for kids tuition. Cycles are had to break and you really need to stop them as early as you can.
While some racial minorities are very under-represented in IT, it is not because it's an all-White profession.
Look around in most respectable engineering/computer science/IT-training schools and you will see many people with Indian-subcontient or Asian heritage. Not even counting current HB-1 and similar visas, you still see a significant number of people with Indian-subcontient or Asian heritage in the workforce.
Yes, people of African and Latin-American heritage are under-represented in IT. However, they are also under-represented in other professions that typically require similar educational paths. The solution is not to pretend this is an IT problem but instead to realize that this is a society-wide issue, and solve it that way.
Start in preschool and work up from there.
they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
Having once taught one of the most difficult to understand topics in mathematics, many of my students, after getting comfortable with me, told me they didn't expect me to be their teacher when they forst saw me. On one occasion, at the beginning of school, a this particular class continued with their business instead of acknowledging my presence at the podium, till I called the class to order.
Where I now work, members of the public will gravitate toward an office assistant to help them solve a problem instead of talking to me directly. This assistant then has to advise them to talk to me if anything is to be solved. I am the chief here.
I have gotten so used to this treatment that it doesn't bother me anymore.
Yet another dumbshit article about (the lack of) diversity in the workplace brought to you by your local bleeding hearts liberals. If it's not racial, it's gender. If it's not gender, they'll cry about ethnic diversity, sexual orientation, or something else.
Why aren't more women working in IT? Why aren't more men working as registered nurses?
Why aren't more homosexuals working in IT? Why aren't more heterosexuals working in interior design?
Why aren't more people of diverse racial backgrounds working in IT? Why aren't more people of caucasian background working in fast food?
Why do ducks quack? Because they look like a duck, and sound like a duck.
Quacking liberals.
And because some idiot seems likely to come along with some crap like "so says the ac," I'll echo this using my account.
For the last time - equal opportunity does NOT mean equal outcomes. Correlation is not causation - if you can actually prove the system is biased against minorities/women/any other special interest, then do it instead of complaining the outcomes aren't what you want. If you want to prove someone isn't being paid fairly, the ONLY way to do it is show that people with equal educations, equal experience, and equal OUTPUT are not being paid equally.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Bosnia is in CET tz, and it's 18:00 here. Work for me ended two hours ago. What's that about AC? What's your point?
I had this argument before w.r.t. affirmative action. I asked if they didn't want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, and was told - seriously - that quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., and he's "theirs," so I'm not allowed to use his quote in an argument. No,.. really.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I Graduated HS in class of 200 - 95% black, 3% white, 2% other in rural America.
How many went to college from that class? 4 total, 3 whites, 1 black (on a full ride athletic scholarship)
How many graduated? Two that I know of, I'm half. I got an Engineering Degree. The guy with the scholarship flunked out of NCAA eligibility in his 2nd year and one of the other two got an education degree. I hope more have graduated since, but I moved out of state so I don't know.
Who do they remember from my class at that school? The kid that flunked out of a full athletic scholarship.
It's not that this school was full of stupid people, it wasn't. None when to college because they didn't want too leave, or didn't want to be seen as a traitor to their race and get shunned by their friends. Many got stuck in the cycle of dependance. "I cannot wait to turn 18 so I can move out and start getting my own welfare checks!" was a commonly heard sentiment in the hallways. It still makes me sad to think many of my friends didn't even try.
This is a cultural issue not an opportunity issue. It is also a perception issue where we somehow think Outcome=Opportunity, regardless of the effort put in. This is an issue of dependance on welfare. Yet many of these people would be more than willing to look at me, a middle aged, middle class, white man as the problem. They think I am why they never succeed, but it's really because they never tried.
This is not to say racism is not a factor in some cases, I'm just saying it is not THE factor in why the statistical numbers looked skewed. We need to be totally honest with ourselves before we start suggesting solutions to this, or we will NOT fix anything, only make things worse.
Because people like to complain about their perceived natural handicaps more than breaking out of them.
20-30 years from now when Asians dominate actual tech innovation (if they haven't already) and all the lazy white guys like myself will be slagging the 'yellow guys stealing my job', or insert some other out group who I feel threatened of.
Racial / religious / sexual / etc.. intolerance happens, I try to avoid it like the plague but the only way to truly overcome is on a personal level. Donate money to outreach and education programs if you think it'll help (i'm doubtful) or be the shining image of what -insert said minority- can be by outshining your peers and FORCE them to recognize your achievements. Is it hard? Sure, but to assume no handicaps in this world is to welcome a very disappointing life. I'll welcome the world when we're all born with the same opportunities, but I'm not deluded enough to assume it'll happen in my lifetime.
Bye!
Are they not also a significant minority in the US? And yet somehow, they managed to vastly over-represent themselves in STEM fields. Maybe, and this may be just a wild ass guess, but maybe it's because they spent their time focusing on their homework rather than whining about diversity?
And you never stop hearing the white people whining about it! Right? Right!?!? It never stops!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
That's an absurd conclusion. Look at how many are graduating from STEM fields instead of liberal arts, then start making ridiculous claims like that. It's never convenient for the whiners to compare apples to apples, is it? (no pun intended)
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I see plenty of racial diversity. There are folks from India, China, Korea, Japan and many of the islands in the south Pacific where I work. And if you look closely at the so-called "white" folk, many come from all across Europe and Arabia. Are they represented equally? No. If anything, "white" people are underrepresented compared to their percentage of the population. It's a mistake to talk about "racial diversity" when that's not really the problem. It just distracts us by framing it as a problem of white people discriminating against non-whites.
I fell for the dicevertisment again
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This reminds me of the anarchist scare in the 20s. The communist scare in the 50s. The nuclear holocaust in the 60s. Then the "Japan invasion" in the 80s. Then the death of the American manufacturing economy in the 90s (which is still the world's largest, believe it or not). Then the IT outsourcing to India in the 2000s. Etc.Etc.
The only constant in this culture is people who claim it's about to collapse.
lucm, indeed.
Now, it is also undeniably true that such talent is not present in proportional numbers amongst various minorities. That's a problem, but it's not of the tech industry's doing. There's plenty of blame to go around. Many of those minorities still suffer from inadequate education. The members of those communities must shoulder some of the burden as well - it is, all too often, still not cool to be smart in those communities. Intellectual achievement is often met with derision even within families. Girls are usually conditioned against pursuing STEM interests. Such observation is not racist, or sexist. The lack of achievement is nothing to with race or gender. It has everything to do with what the community is doing, or not doing.
I have only a single data point so it's probably not worth anything... My only experience with a Black IT professional was a network admin for the company who took over my employer. I was the previous defacto network admin even though my job description was 'embedded firmware developer'. So this company takes us over and hires this guy as the network admin. I meet him in a conference call and his first task is to come up and migrate our servers over to their corporate platform. So I volunteer to give up my weekend to facilitate since he doesn't know our existing infrastructure... He shows up and I give him the nickle tour, show him to a meeting room where he can unpack boxes and start bolting things together. I go back to my cubicle and work on some bugs telling him "if you need anything, just come get me." ... So everything's cool. He gets things connected, and starts migrating data... Around dinner time I check in with him and suggest we go across the street for a bite and a pint while data copies across the network. We have a lovely dinner and chat about families, school, weather, previous work places, etc.. All the usual stuff when you go out for dinner with a co-worker... Then we go back to the office, stop in the machineroom and it's back to business... So that was basically the whole weekend... I made sure he had what he needed from our old servers and instead of sitting around like a lump, I try to get some work done while he configures his new servers...
Monday afternoon, I get a call from my ex-CEO who says there's been a complaint made against me and I need to fly down to meet with HR. In short, the complaint was that I treated him like a subordinate because he's black and that I should remember he doesn't work for me and that I'm not his boss. Prior to that meeting, it hadn't really registered that he was black. I mean sure, I could tell his skin color was different but so is the skin color of 75% of the people I worked with back then. None of my other co-workers were black though. They were either of asian descent, italian, or middle eastern... To me, they're just my co-workers... So I get this mark on my employee record and everything kind of blows over. My future dealings with this IT guy were subsequently 100% about work and that was that. I stayed away from him as much as possible except when unavoidable. A year later, I left the company but reports from my ex-co-workers were that this guy had complained about at least 2 other people in the company and they had eventually let this guy go... Of course you never find out why someone is let go but they hired someone to replace him in exactly the same position almost immediately so the subtext is "this guy has too much 'victim mentality'."
On LinkedIn, this guy doesn't seem to hold on to any jobs for more than 1-2 years and he never seems to 'move up'.
I had this argument before w.r.t. affirmative action. I asked if they didn't want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, and was told - seriously - that quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., and he's "theirs," so I'm not allowed to use his quote in an argument. No,.. really.
The proper response is to laugh in their face.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
White student: Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't have anything to say about racial diversity in astrophysics.
Black student: Neil deGrass Tyson isn't the emperor of black STEM professionals!
White student: (to himself) He told my father he was.
I'm in Telecom and over here Asian includes people from India, Pakistan, Philippines as well as Eastern Asian countries. As far color diversity goes, I think we're covered. So when Google or Facebook publish their stats everyone assumes Asian = all east asian countries forgetting that Sundar Pichay is Asian. Color is well represented in our fields.
...to judge a person by his or her skin color.
So let me get this straight: When I need to fire someone, I should never take skin color into account; however, if I'm hiring for a new position, I should always take skin color into account? OK, got it.
If you check at the "diversity reports" from tech companies and compare them with US demographics, you'll find that whites are underrepresented in IT, while Asians are strongly overrepresented. And a lot of those Asians are Indians (i.e., fairly dark skinned).
How can those demographics possibly be explained by white racism?
" ... a young man with a ponytail and an earring!"
Doesn't say "young white man", but one might infer as much from the ponytail.
-kgj
As Parent pointed out. Can I claim discrimination because I am a US citizen yet? Also the article is nonsense. If anything a company would be falling over themselves to hire a qualified black man, for many reasons. it is just a classic 'the first time it got hard they quit and later blamed it on racism' shtick.
I am black. Let me tell you my story. This was my last attempt to enter the IT industry
Once upon a time, a big financial company whose name ends in "berg" and begins with "Bloom" came to my school for an onsite interview for financial software developers. I went to the interview and blew their socks off. They told me there and then that we want you in New York for the final interview. They flew me to NY that evening and put me up in a hotel not far from their office.
Next morning I went to the office for the final interview. The HR lady looked at me and told me the position has been filled. No interview, no nothing. I never tried for any programming job since then. The end.
I left the computer field for pure finance, only doing programming purely as a hobby now.
Okay, here's the deal. I am passionate about computer science and programming. It's what I do, both for my job, and as my only hobby. I write code for open source projects, and I write code for work, and I design little one-off projects for my own entertainment.
I stayed up all night every summer growing up teaching myself how to code. When I go to the used book store, I go to the section and buy old computer science textbooks talking about esoterica (I'm the only person I know under 45 who knows any APL, for example). My bedtime reading last week was the Oberon System manual that I got off eBay for $5.00.
All this was despite the fact that I grew up in rural Texas and got my ass beaten on a daily basis for being a "geek". The fact that my family was the only non-Christian family in town meant that I couldn't go to the school administration for help; when I tried it turned into a "let's pray for you, son." And yet, I kept doing it because I was passionate about it.
And guess what? If you're that passionate about something, you'll do it regardless of what your peers think. You'll *make* it happen. We didn't have any money growing up, so I'd stay after school and work on the computers there. When we finally scraped up enough money to buy a used Commodore 64 in like 1992, I had that hooked up to an old black-and-white TV and taught myself 6502 assembly.
So yeah, I'm sick of people saying "it's someone else's fault that I can't do this." No, it's not. If you're passionate enough about it, you'll *make* it happen.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
In engineering and academia, I've appreciated those rare black colleagues. For one thing, they were all much more social (and it is well established that culturally and/or genetically, africans statistically have superior social ability to whites and asians), so I could enjoy hanging out with them more. Another is that they had different things to say, making our work environment litterally more diverse in terms of ideas.
However, in many ways, those black colleagues were not extremely "black" culturally. Dialectally, they sounded more mainstream, along with their general comportment.
As others have pointed out here, the biggest barrier to blacks getting into white collar jobs is black culture. Those who manage to escape the anti-education indoctrination demonstrate themselves to be just as smart as everyone else. It's not politically correct to suggest that different genetic sub-groups (i.e. races) might have different intelligence levels (albeit just averages), but it's anthropologically, it's an important question. However, what we find is that the culture dominates so strongly that we can't even begin to explore that question. (And of course, it is both stupid and unethical to assume that every member of a race is equivalent to the average (whatever that is) and prejudge them on that basis.)
Dude, I know you were trying to make a point here, but fucking seriously. The example of grammar here seriously questions your initial claim.
Not really. A lot of the posters on /. have terrible spelling and grammar.
/ducks
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
i doubt that will happen. asian countries have their own cultural obstacles to being and the forefront of tech.
First, we have constant articles on gender discrimination. Are we now going to get race discrimination articles? If we're all such white male racists here in Tech, why would women or black people even want to work here. These articles are getting so tiresome it almost feels like we're getting deliberately trolled.
Way to screw up my joke with your time zone facts.
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That looks more like a missed autocorrect via a smartphone post.
I end up having effectively poor spelling or grammar in a lot of my posts. The truth is that in person, when speaking, I have very good grammar, and my spelling ability is at least average. When writing posts, however, I tend to go back and edit them heavily, and somehow I end up missing that I've left old words in sections I meant to delete, etc. I suspect it's due to my ADD problems, diagnosed only as an adult.
Anyway, my point is that someone having poor grammar in posts doesn't necessarily say much about his grammar in other contexts.
Just curious, are you on the west coast? Something I noticed is that these newsline stories tend to focus on companies headquartered on the west coast. I just looked, and apparently California is only ~7% black. I wonder if diversity is a bit stronger in different areas, maybe an east coast IT company? Of course, this brings up the topic of lack of hispanics in IT out there, but that's another story.
I have slightly over 21 years of experience in this business now. Programmer, SW architect. Aerospace industry, logistics, small businesses. You name it. And in all these years, I encountered exactly one black person. He consulted with Red Bull, here in Austria. And - besides being impressively knowledgeable on network infrastructure - he was American. The only black person among the numerous Americans I met and worked with in this field. Yes - there were Asians. I trained a couple of highly gifted Senegalese. South Americans ? Nope - exact for the seemingly gifted girl I, enrolled in an MA with an unknown Brasilian university, I helped this week with her MA thesis by letting her interview me. That was the first time I professionally met a South American in 21 years. We have a long way to go.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
What a techie is supposed to look like? You mean the sort of thing that might be influenced by pop culture?
A particularly prominent "high tech" espionage show comes to mind.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Glad I'm not the only one that does this on occasion. The unfortunate nature of Slashdot is that it is perceived that one needs to post quickly to be seen.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Someone else put it best, on an earlier article about racial crap:
"which group is more diverse: 20 people of all races and genders who grew up in the same town, or 20 white guys who grew up all over the world?"
Maybe if we didn't focus so much on race when we talk about "diversity," race would cease to be such a major issue for society.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The problem in reality is that people in the top 1% (really more like the top .01%) income brackets want us to be pitted against each other. They pay good money to generate propaganda, pay people like Sharpten to spread hate, pay agent provocateurs to infiltrate groups they see as a risk to their propaganda campaigns. The fact that you can't see this is not surprising or uncommon. But your blame is in the exact wrong place.
Sadly there are plenty of people that buy into the lie and do what Sharpten does for free, because they can't see beyond the messenger. Listen to black community members like Professor Griff, or if you prefer history listen to MLK and MalcomX. They will all tell you the shape of the world. People need to stop believing everything they are told and actually "look" at the world to see it..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This is like the worst forum for this stuff. Half of the respondents are like there is no problem and the other half is like black people suck. Any black people reading this would say why would I want to be part of this community. I actually kind of think this is click-bait for white people rather than any interest in social issues.
Apparently some mod can't handle the truth.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
My sons Black (Adopted) and is getting his first computer in a few days for his 7th birthday. It's got Kubuntu, the Steam client for some games, and he's already learning some that will teach him about functions. He absolutely loves computers and is already running circles around Mama.
Tech billionaire in the making!
It is also a perception issue where we somehow think Outcome=Opportunity... They think I am why they never succeed, but it's really because they never tried.
Even if we accept this, it only raises the question, why doesn't outcome work out to be, over the long run, analogous to opportunity? I'm not asking, "why doesn't every single kid succeed equally," but if you have a bunch of kids and we suppose all of them have the same opportunities, why don't we an average success rate among different groups? Or even if we accept your analysis, that they "never tried", then why aren't they trying?
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying. Further, it offers no explanation as to why people wouldn't try, other than something like, "They're just not the sort of people who work hard," again implying idea that lack of economic success is simply a function of being inherently inferior. The explanation treats it as though it's simply a function of laziness and stupidity, neither of which have explanations, neither of which can be helped.
But it doesn't jibe with any of my experience of how people work. People are "lazy" when they're asked to do things that they don't see as benefiting them, or they're put into circumstance where they don't anticipate success. Contrary to the narrative we hear in some pockets of the media, it's not tons of fun being poor and on welfare. I doubt the kids you grew up with were intentionally choosing that because the perceived a bright future for themselves, but thought welfare would be more fun.
So all of this just raises the question, what's really going on here? Why are these kids feeling demotivated and disinterested in improving their own lives? Whether or not there had been a lot of opportunity for those kids, I suspect they didn't believe that there was. I would suspect that they had received a lot of messages in their lives, from whatever, sources, saying that college was not for them, not something they could do, not something that they would be successful at, and not something that would provide them with a better future. And whether the sources of those messages were from white people or black people, the messages themselves are bound up in a whole culture of racism.
According to the very article that says it is not the pipeline, avg black component in IT master graduates is 3.5%, the workforce is around 3%. Looks normal to me, at the workforce level, that is. The result indicates a completely disproportionate number of white males in IT university curiculums, and that's the problem that needs addressed. Before minorities can have a chance to compete on the good jobs, they need to have a chance to get the degrees for such jobs.
Here's one:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.
Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.
I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.
If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Employers' Replies to Racial Names
"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.
To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.
In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
Here's more:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/200...
Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hire
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."
"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."
There are more than 2 races on this planet ...
There is, to a certain degree, a culture of wanting children to do well. Saving for their child's education and working with them on school work probably contributes to success. Of course not everyone does well, but at least many motivated people get their chance.
==
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying.
You might already know this and just not be mentioning the name, but that is called the just-world hypothesis.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You repeated mostly what Charles Barkley said in an interview about a week back,
It's also what Bill Cosby has been saying for years now, and it's made him a bit of a pariah among many black communities.
Do you by chance have any links to Cosby saying these things? I'm not doubting in this case, merely curious. I have read and listened to Professor Griff talk about these things, but only know Mr. Cosby for his standup routines.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So the fix is simple, right?
Pick the right names for your kids; problem solved.
Sounds to me, that is very much is a discrimination situation. The government is aggressively and systematically enforcing a system of apartheid against these Black Americans with their system of welfare. They do the same thing over here in Canada with the Native Americans. It is a very effective system.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I can't think of too many qualified black candidates that I interviewed and then didn't hire. I'd have to say that percentage wise, people from Ohio (no idea) and India have the lowest success rate with me.
The name one I found dubious since they chose middle-class white names and lower-class black names. It's not like they chose Billy-Ray Luellen-Mae. I suspect that a lot of "racism" in the US is actually classism where being black correlates being lower-class, and so it forms the assumption "black means lower-class unless proven otherwise". This would explain why people forget that Colin Powell was black and other successfully black men. "Black", I posit, is a hybrid race/class construct. --- Annecdote: I met a black African girl from Tanzania who **hated** African American names and African Americans and had nothing good to say about them. That was the moment that really made me realised is that it is not actually about race-itself. Personally, I notice myself much more comfortable dealing with Africans than African Americans as cab drivers, much friendlier, jovial, positive, and animated.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that when we talk about race there are many confounding factors such as culture and socio-economic class and its hard to figure out what the actual underlying issues... and if you could its probably complicated.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
A couple of years ago, I met the guys from thedailywtf.com and as the only black guy at the table, I was asked my opinion on what should be done to get more "diversity" in technology. My answer was "Nothing. The last thing we need is to have more people getting into this field if they don't have a love of it."
There are two problems, as I see it.
First, there is the racism that exists in western society.
Second, there is the anti-intellectual facet to some parts of African American culture.
Racism is complex. It takes many forms, on one hand you have the outwardly hostile racist who just plain doesn't like people of #Race and then you have what Michael Gerson dubbed "the soft bigotry of low expectations". That is manifest where many people, who think they're progressive, automatically assume that a black person is less skilled than his white or asian counterpart. I have a very Anglicized name. It's not Demetrialis or some other ridiculous nonsense like that. When people get emails from me and speak to me on the telephone, they almost never assume that I'm black.
Occasionally, when I meet someone who has only seen my resumè or spoken to me of the phone, I can see the surprise in their face when instead of a skinny white guy, they find a 6'2" 250 pound black dude.
In September, there was a teacher strike at the local district and I addressed the school board. You wouldn't believe how many left-handed compliments I received about "how well spoken" I am.
The anti-intellectualism present in African American culture is extremely destructive. I have experienced it. In large parts of the US, any black kid who is smart, who achieves academically, who has college and career aspirations is derided as acting white. I have been accused of "thinking that[I'm} white". Fortunately, I had strong parents who gave me a much different message at home and reinforced it constantly.
I traveled in different circles, I had many groups of friends, all of them distinct. Of the core group of black guys with whom I hung out when we were growing up, two of us have never been to prison; three have and one is still there. Of the white guys who were my friends, none of them have been to prison.
We all grew up in the same area. At most, five miles separated all of the various neighborhoods. There's a reason why there's such a high rate of incarceration among the black guys. There's a reason why most of the white guys went to college. We were all middle-class. None of us had particularly wealthy parents. The white guys usually heard the message that education or training was important. It was necessary to go out there and be the best person you can be. A lot of the black guys, not all and certainly not most but a lot, were primarily concerned with getting money and bitches. Fast money and lots of bitches.
These things have consequences that last far beyond childhood.
I have a M.S. degree and I work a good job in tech. I'm the only black guy in my department. I was the only black guy in my last department and the one before that(I replaced the previous only black guy when he went back to school for his Doctorate) and the one before that and the one before that. It's not the industry's fault. It's mostly not the fault of racism. It's mostly the fault of a society, subculture and families that don't impress upon young black people, the value of education.
I love tech. I love the people. I love spending my entire day surrounded by geeks.
I find far more camaraderie in that than I do among people who share none of my interests or life experiences beyond being black.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
False. Neil deGrasse Tyson has an amazing story which is exactly about diversity in astrophysics. You can watch it for yourself here.
Factchecking is for winners.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Good point, They thought of that. Their answer is no.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w98...
In Section 5, we discuss possible interpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specic names we have chosen might also proxy for social class above and beyond the race of the applicant. Using birth certicates data on mother’s education for the dierent names used in our sample, we nd little relationship between social background and the name specic callback rates.
Also see Table 11.
It's funny how most of the well known and esteemed black technies that I know of are of recent immigrant background and how most of them are very, very much black. One would think that the "racist" White, Asian and Indian cabal that's doing all it can to keep the black man out of IT would hate african blacks even more than they hate african-american blacks, right ? I think I get it though. What we have here is the evil, racist Whites, Asians and Indians using divide and conquer, for sure. Also, the Whites, Asians and Indians work with Nigerians/etc but keep the African-Americans out because they're *know* that AAs so much more qualified than they are and that the Nigerians are not a threat, you see. Surely that must be why Nigerians and other immigrants are the only black face in IT. It has nothing to do with their own talents and abilities. It's all about the Whites, Asians and Indians scheming to keep the brother down!
No, it's not apartheid. Welfare goes to everybody who applies and is deemed qualifying. That it is given disproportionally by race says nothing about the welfare system and a lot about other things that go on.
There are discriminatory government programs, most obviously in law enforcement, but welfare isn't one of them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So the rest of the details are unimportant. About a third of the black community is imprisoned in this system of repression.
Welfare goes to everybody who applies and is deemed qualifying.
Oh, so just like Indentured Slavery then?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And people seem to be trying to avoid it. There aren't that many blacks interested in IT/Coding work and that ones that are, are drowned out and washed away in a see of other diversity hires namely from Asia and India. This isn't about racism, but a matter of sheer numbers. Blacks simply do not have them.
Searching through Wikipedia, I think the Pound Cake speech (a speech he gave to the NAACP during a celebration of 50 years of Brown v Board of Education) is a good starting point, where Cosby criticized a culture where if someone does something bad and they get into trouble with police, the culture immediately jumps on the police rather than criticize the black youth who committed the crime in the first place. "Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, 'If you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.' Not 'You're going to get your butt kicked.' No. 'You're going to embarrass your family.'"
Perhaps a better reference would be this Chicago Tribune discussion with Cosby where he ruminates on these topics. I think one of the most depressing criticisms Cosby gets is that people tell him he can't be saying these things publicly because then white people will hear it and think it's fine to say it about black people in general.
I can think of several major social structure differences between the history of black Americans and asian Americans. I just wrote half a book explaining it. Then deleted it. If you are curious you can figure it out yourself.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
Casteism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_politics_in_India
Casteism
Last I looked, the average stay on a welfare program was about three years. This suggests to me that getting out of the system is quite possible, and from what little I've seen welfare programs will try to encourage the recipient to become independent. The real killer tends to be medical care. A welfare mother who has a kid with an existing medical problem is going to be in a really bad position if she makes enough to get off Medicaid. She's very unlikely to go immediately into a group insurance program that doesn't care about pre-existing conditions.
It's likely that some people milk the welfare system for decades, but for every one who does that there have to be many that are on it for a year or two, and then get out.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes, but many come back in short order. And the question is not whether it is possible to use welfare for a short period and get off of it permanently, or even if the majority use it like this, but whether a significant number of people are held back because of it. +50% of the black community could still be stuck in a cycle of poverty fuelled by the welfare system, while the majority of welfare users were not, if welfare is used by a large enough portion of the total population.
And just because people get off of it, does not mean they are not stuck in a cycle of going back to welfare every few years, rinse repeat.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
In other words, it's like apartheid because you make up possibilities? Do you have any actual evidence for your opinion?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes