For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

I think the trouble here is the double meaning of the word racist. When some people hear the word, they think of cross-burning fanatics and mass murderers. On the other hand, the current big conversation is about how everyone is racist and that society is rife with systemic racism.

That creates a catch-22 for anyone who commits a faux-pas (like mistaking the black CEO for a subordinate). Either admit to racism and cast oneself in with the cross-burners, or bail out of the situation ASAP.

We have the same kind of problem with the label of "sex offender." It's a category that runs the gamut from "guy who got arrested for public urination while walking home drunk from the bar one night" all the way to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Scott over at Slate Star Codex has a fantastic piece that covers this phenomenon [1]. The core idea has to do with the tension between central and non-central examples of a category:

Remember, people think in terms of categories with central and noncentral members – a sparrow is a central bird, an ostrich a noncentral one. But if you live on the Ostrich World, which is inhabited only by ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, then probably an ostrich seems like a pretty central example of ‘bird’ and the first sparrow you see will be fantastically strange.

I'm glad we're having this conversation in society. I honestly don't know what to do about it though.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...

Yes - perhaps if the current big conversation was rephrased as "everyone is biased and that society is rife with systemic bias" - people would be more willing to agree that its a problem and agree that they are part of the problem and would be more willing to be involved in solving it.

To be honest - everyone, no matter who they are, makes judgements and has biases.

" I honestly don't know what to do about it though."

That's a major criticism I have of the crusaders against "systemic racism." While I think the term is intended to capture the accumulated, "death by a thousand cuts" set of disadvantages that are faced by marginalized groups, it characterizes the problem in such a way that it makes it seem intractable. This is a perfect framing for politicians and activists, whose focus (IMHO) is on getting people mobilized by describing/raising awareness about problems, rather than actually solving them.

To me, when somebody describes specific examples of "systemic racism", I am immediately able to suddenly identify specific actions that can be taken to address each tractable problem. Replace "America is inherently racist" with "End Qualified Immunity" and "ensure public schools share funding across regions", etc. I think framing things like this makes the problems more solvable and far less politically useful for the demagogues.

Now that you mention it, it reminds me of another big "movement" that has a very nebulous problem statement with no clear instances of the problem to solve: Climate Change. Well, at least no problems + solution combinations that people are willing to do.

For sure. Bias is a much better word to use here, unless your goal is to project ill will on the person you describe.

Well, there are people that are racist. They are easy to spot because they make no apology about that. There is also systemic, or institutionalized, racism and the current state of law enforcement in the US is a prime example of that. What is interesting is how the systemic racism bleeds into everyone else's minds to form or reinforce their biases. If we can eliminate systemic/institutionalized racism then I would expect that most people's personal biases will eventually disappear.

Try approaching someone in denial about their alcoholism and talk about alcoholism they will act very similarly. These people need rehab.

This point of view is out of line with my experiences surrounding discussions of systemic racism. My experience has included detailed demands with qualitative and quantitative targets made at my place of work, codified changes in the structure of the police department in the city I live in, and new state laws regarding use-of-force passed in the last few weeks alone. I think there’s lots of discussion going on around what will enact effective change (and what won’t), which is fair, but I feel your painting with a very broad brush to say people are crusading and assuming the problem to be intractable. Hard for me to imagine all this effort coming from people who think there’s nothing to be gained.

I’m not sure I fully appreciate the point your making with breaking down the idea “America is inherently racist.” Outside of Twitter I’ve encountered exactly zero conversations that start and immediately end with such a statement. Of course things like qualified immunity and equitable education come into play - these topics have been heavily discussed in the public sphere for decades! To link them in this case to speak to a community’s broader experience seems both reasonable and necessary.

For a light hearted analogy — say I get a burrito from a taqueria on Monday and shit my pants and then go back Tuesday for tacos and shit myself again. When I’m retelling that story on Wednesday over sushi, you’d better believe I’m using the name of the restaurant.

I think that's a reasonable analogy but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. If you divide the world into alcoholics who need rehab and normal people who don't, you end up with a lot of people who refuse to admit they have a drinking problem because they don't want to pay the social costs of doing so.

Yes definitely there is a group of people who are outright racist in the typically defined sense. And the group which can self-identify as racist is probably very small (unfortunately).

The group which can self-identify as biased is probably much larger (fortunately?). The challenge is that by naming/labeling the big discussion systemic racism, its possible for a much larger (and perhaps more influential) group of people to blissfully ignore the big discussion being had about both systemic racism and systemic implicit bias - the latter of which to a certain extent the original article seems to be about.

the deep problem, to me, is that nuance and complexity are self-censoring.

any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation.

this ultimately favors certain corners of the anti-censorship crowd, for you can be vocally against censorship while knowing full well that it is the most overbroad, reductionist and populist strains of messaging that prevail under such conditions.

The whole thing makes white people subconsciously want to avoid minorities because of the risk of mob punishment if they fail to follow new rules being created for conduct.

Same thing happened after me too where many men were afraid to risk power for a real life hookup with the risks involved and have opted out for paided (where legal) risk free transactions. Which in turn has reduced the amount of relationships in general and made everyone lonely.

Interesting idea, but is there any evidence for it?

Something many alcoholics and nearly all non-alcoholics have in common is they deny being alcoholics.

P(Alcoholism|Denial of Alcoholism) = P(Denial of Alcoholism|Alcoholism) * P(Alcoholism) / P(Denial of Alcoholism)

Pop in any reasonable numbers for those terms and it becomes readily apparent that denial of alcoholism does not constitute meaningful evidence of alcoholism.

The problem you describe, of the double meaning of the term “racism”, is very real, but only among white people. When communicating with a Black CEO, you can safely assume that they understand the true meaning of the term, from experiencing it every day. And as a result will appreciate the admission and apology. The second mistake to avoid is to not expect a medal, so to speak, for doing the bare minimum. In my experience that is a common pattern: demonstrating a basic understanding of systemic racism, then expecting to be treated as a hero for it - then being disappointed when we’re (understandably) not. Sometimes this can be quite exhausting to someone targeted by racism, because it adds to their mental burden instead of lightening it.

Somehow you proposed a "double meaning" of racism and missed the actual meaning that's being addressed by our society. Racism isn't about personal prejudice, although it's certainly a participation trophy for them. Racism is not about who is burning crosses, or about who is born into privilege. Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status. The advantage can range from "more likely to be taken seriously in a board meeting" to "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all", with a ridiculous amount of "more likely to end up prison labor" in the middle. Not everyone experiences the system exactly the same way, but even the most privileged POC are likely to point it out, and even the most unprivileged white people are likely to dismiss it as nonexistent.

It doesn't take a single prejudiced person to enact it. It's built into the laws and the systems and considered "neutral".

>Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status.

Can you give any specific examples of these rules and laws? I assume you mean rules and laws that are actually written down.

I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.

(Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

I can assure you that many older professional white men are conciously avoiding 1:1 interactions with women (moreso those under 40) and minorities in the workplace today.

It would be dumb to assume this doesn’t impact managers hiring decisions, conciously or unconciously. Olds can just think of it as culture fit.

> Racism isn't about personal prejudice, although it's certainly a participation trophy for them. Racism is not about who is burning crosses, or about who is born into privilege. Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status.

Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.

You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.

There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.

Racism is a form of bias, propably the nastiest one. And that is why you pick one particular for f bias when you start fighting it. Just lumping racism in with other forms of bias, while not factually wrong, is only helping the status quo.

And it seems that majority of people is supporting the current protests and BLM movement.

If it is a faux-pas, an immediate excuss is the solution. At least for mature people. There is no explicit racism involved in the CEO example, as long as you treated both persons decently and politely and only misjudged the ranks.

The sex offender thing looks a lot like a straw man argument, so. When I think about racists, yes KK Nazis and so on come to mind. But more often I think about the daily, systematic racism white folks show towars people of colour, migrants, other religions. More often than not accompanied by discriminating women and the LGBTQ community.

Both movements propose very concrete solutions for the respective problems. Both problem statements are also very clear to begin with.

And there seem to be quite a lot of people willing to implement said solutions.

I would love to get some more details, ideally sources, for the last paragraph.

If true, it says a lot more about the men than anything else.

I implore you to listen to this recent podcast on the matter of systemic police racism in the US. The statistics simply dont back up your claim https://samharris.org/podcasts/207-can-pull-back-brink/

>a group of people who are outright racist //

That group is perhaps ironically the most racial diverse group one could conceive.

Perhaps not men but human nature. Avoiding conflict is not a male trait.

"Xenophobes of all countries, unite!"

> Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.

It's not a change of definition. It has always been systemic. Slavery abolitionists and civil rights activists were not fighting to get white people to stop calling black people the n-word, they were fighting to end institutions that treated black people as subhuman. Black Lives Matter isn't trying to end people's personal prejudices, it's trying to end an endless stream of black lives being taken.

Racism is, and always has been, about power and control. It certainly intersects with, and is bolstered by, individual feelings of racial prejudice. We can certainly call those individuals racists. But they are invariably helping to reinforce a system, not atomically expressing personal hate in a vacuum.

> You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.

> There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds like you were predisposed to treat me as an enemy already. I didn't personally attack any individual. Describing a system, and who is disadvantaged or advantaged by it, is not a statement about any of the people affected by it.

> Can you give any specific examples of these rules and laws? I assume you mean rules and laws that are actually written down.

The 13th Amendment is a pretty big one, worth starting there.

> I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.

If your criteria is that it must be "explicit", you're dismissing the entire concept without considering it. These laws and rules take advantage of context and produce predictable outcomes without needing to put on a white robe and state their intent.

> (Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)

> [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi....

I can't get past the paywall, but it is actually true. What I can see above the paywall fold doesn't even represent your claim. And even if it did, "in comparable situations" isn't the criteria. Cops can (hypothetically) behave equally violently in all situations, and still be more likely to kill black people because they police black people and communities more.

What you write is generally true. You're taking it to an unjustified extreme, though, and glossing over the fact that the advantages diminish rapidly as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, to the point where the "white advantage" for impoverished folks looks more like regular fluctuations in the noise than it does a clear above-the-noise signal. That is to say: the poorest whites might on average have some advantage over their peers in some contexts, but as a matter of practice day-to-day living isn't that different.

I know there is a lot of well-deserved focus on the ways our racist systems do more damage to blacks. That doesn't mean we should exaggerate, simply because the ground truth is horrific enough.

Hi. My extremely poor white brother in Appalachia told me today about his most recent encounter with a cop. The scenario was disturbingly similar to scenarios where traffic stops have ended with black people dead. My brother got cut slack, allowed to leave with his car out of compliance with state law. Advised by the cop to take back roads to avoid further scrutiny.

YOU might not see white privilege, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If my brother had been black, in his words... “I HOPE I would have been treated the same way”. But he knew that’s a false hope. If my brother had been black, would he be just one more statistic to debate here?

By the way “blacks” is a dead giveaway you’re either very ignorant or not sincere. Just by the way.

Your brother's anecdote doesn't erase my lived experience, okay? You have an extremely poor white brother; I grew up an extremely poor white guy in a mixed-race neighborhood. I know, better than most, what privilege being white buys me in this society. It exists. But existence is far from universal, or uniform.

You're off the mark. Way off.

My brother and I grew up in a world that sounds similar to yours. I’m not negating your experience. The fact that you and I have privilege doesn’t negate our own hardships.

Oh : acting in your best interests is "telling", so?

Strange : society and "systems" are responsible for everything when it's about certain people but individuality and personal responsibility are the reason when it's other type of people...

You’re playing a bit loose, here. When you write that 100% of whites are advantaged, you are engaged in exaggeration that erases the practical reality. It is true that our system is structured to advantage whites. It does not necessarily follow that all whites are equally advantaged (other things being equal) or that all whites live a life in which they experience these advantages.

How so? I’ve engaged in numerous conversations about race and its suffusing everything in this country with non-white close friends and casual acquaintances alike who’ve never made the suggestion you make. This isn’t an issue of them being hesitant to challenge me (lawd knows they don’t show any hesitation to challenge in other areas of race-related conversation we engage in: I’d be surprised if this were the one issue that weren’t true for).

On the contrary, I'm choosing my words and considering their meaning very carefully. This topic is too important to "play loose".

100% of white people are advantaged by racism. I didn't claim that all experience that advantage equally, and I didn't claim that the advantage negates any other disadvantages each individual white person experiences due to the specifics of their lives, their class or social status, any number of other systems of identity-based power, or even countervailing individual prejudices.

You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists.

"100% of white people are advantaged by racism." No, this is an extraordinary claim without evidence that you are asserting.

"You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists," isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.

> No, this is an extraordinary claim without evidence that you are asserting.

There are libraries worth of literature on the subject. I encourage you to spend some time seeking it out and understanding it better.

> isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.

It was carefully worded, but you don't seem to be interested in coming to the discussion to understand. You seem determined to fight. The wording was intended to give you the grace that maybe other challenges in your life make it difficult to see this particular advantage. The words chosen were intentionally placed in the same comment with other words giving that grace explicitly.

Have you considered that you are making assumptions (e.g. that I have not done reading on this subject) or that you are making personal accusations (e.g. that I may not recognize advantages) based also on assumptions? That perhaps my interest isn’t in fighting but merely challenging your assertion and assumptions?

It appears to me you take the position that you are correct, and that any challenge is necessarily one coming from a position of ignorance or malice. I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.

> Have you considered that you are making assumptions

Always, and always open to reconsidering my position or approach.

> (e.g. that I have not done reading on this subject)

You're not demonstrating familiarity with the subject. Your questions have come from a perspective that is addressed in the subject matter.

> or that you are making personal accusations (e.g. that I may not recognize advantages)

That wasn't an accusation. It was a fig leaf. Your positions have rejected your advantages as a white person. "You're off the mark. Way off."

> That perhaps my interest isn’t in fighting but merely challenging your assertion and assumptions?

Your interest increasingly seems to be defensive.

Edit:

> I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.

Thank you, but no thank you. You don't seem to be interested in actually discussing the topic, or reconsidering your own positions. I'm 99% certain that I won't make any headway with you regardless of my approach.