Most active commenters
  • pdonis(6)
  • TeaDrunk(3)

←back to thread

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

(www.bloomberg.com)
677 points saeedjabbar | 16 comments | 16 Jun 20 15:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
Show context
hn_throwaway_99 ◴[16 Jun 20 21:01 UTC] No.23544053[source]▶
I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment/defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who "just wanted to get the hell out of there" after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO.

I've recently been reading/watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic racism - here's a great starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7mzj0cVL0Q. She also wrote the book "White Fragility".

Thinking about that, I'm just wondering how different it would be if one of those people who mistook the employee for the CEO instead turned to the CEO and said "I'm sorry, please excuse me for the instance of racism I just perpetrated against you, I promise it won't happen again." I realize how outlandish that may sound writing that out, but I'd propose that the fact that it does sound outlandish is the main problem. Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not. We can't address them if we're so embarrassed by their existence as to pretend they don't exist.

replies(22): >>23544136 #>>23544188 #>>23544280 #>>23544344 #>>23544345 #>>23544384 #>>23544423 #>>23544456 #>>23544643 #>>23544857 #>>23545414 #>>23545975 #>>23546597 #>>23546614 #>>23546741 #>>23546766 #>>23546819 #>>23547024 #>>23547096 #>>23547756 #>>23548377 #>>23549659 #
JPKab ◴[16 Jun 20 21:22 UTC] No.23544344[source]▶
I've read "White Fragility".

While I completely agree that the stories in this article are hugely problematic and represent issues that need to be solved, I think books like "White Fragility" are not helpful in solving them. This is due to a focus on group identity, and describing "White" as if it's a monolithic group of people, all with the same culture, emotions, and reactions.

Another interesting aspect I identified while reading the book was it's description of the emotions that one can expect to see when confronting white people about race issues: the description could have been used to describe any human being you will ever meet when you accuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do. It really does read like a horoscope in that sense.

I find it ironic that people on HN, who are typically super data driven, get on board with works like "White Fragility". Diangelo is one of many academics from the humanities departments who are incredibly pseudo-scientific. Data is incredibly scarce, measurements and studies even less so. Statistical knowledge isn't present in the vast majority of these folks. Typically, the "scientific method" is reading and writing essays/novels. When you don't attempt to quantify a problem, you can't propose solutions and then measure their results. You instead just keep yourself busy finding ever more ways to describe the water to the drowning person.

replies(6): >>23544576 #>>23544672 #>>23544719 #>>23544732 #>>23544829 #>>23546503 #
lukev ◴[16 Jun 20 21:54 UTC] No.23544732[source]▶
If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress.

Meanwhile, a central point of the book is one that should be self evident. Talking about racism makes white people[1] uncomfortable. I know this to be true from experience. And we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.

I don't see how you need "statistical power" to recognize this or adopt this strategy.

Also, this:

> ccuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do

That's not what the discomfort is about. Of course none of us are _personally_ responsible for the systemic racism in the US. But if we can't even talk about it without getting uncomfortable, how are we going to fix it?

1: If this doesn't apply to you, great, I wasn't talking about you [2]

2: Except if this topic makes you annoyed enough to disagree then yes, I probably am talking about you.

replies(5): >>23544872 #>>23545334 #>>23547224 #>>23548180 #>>23549657 #
1. pdonis ◴[16 Jun 20 22:06 UTC] No.23544872[source]▶
> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.

I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.

replies(3): >>23545014 #>>23546301 #>>23546307 #
2. pessimizer ◴[16 Jun 20 22:21 UTC] No.23545014[source]▶
Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first?

Are the only important problems universal ones?

replies(3): >>23545333 #>>23546064 #>>23547184 #
3. Avicebron ◴[16 Jun 20 22:55 UTC] No.23545333[source]▶
No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.
4. pdonis ◴[17 Jun 20 00:16 UTC] No.23546064[source]▶
> Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad

You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption.

And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.

5. TeaDrunk ◴[17 Jun 20 00:44 UTC] No.23546301[source]▶
But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer
replies(1): >>23547629 #
6. fzeroracer ◴[17 Jun 20 00:45 UTC] No.23546307[source]▶
We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

replies(1): >>23547443 #
7. x86_64Ubuntu ◴[17 Jun 20 02:50 UTC] No.23547184[source]▶
>...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people?

Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

replies(2): >>23547402 #>>23549718 #
8. pdonis ◴[17 Jun 20 03:25 UTC] No.23547402{3}[source]▶
> the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

No the "go-to move" is to refuse to realize that we as a society have been trying to "fix" racism for decades now (arguably centuries), and it's not helping. The very people all the landmark civil rights laws and court decisions were supposed to help are worse off now than they were in the 1960s when those laws were passed.

So instead of continuing to do this not-working thing, maybe we should ask whether the root problem is something else, and work on fixing that instead.

9. pdonis ◴[17 Jun 20 03:32 UTC] No.23547443[source]▶
> We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem.

> You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.

replies(1): >>23549118 #
10. pdonis ◴[17 Jun 20 04:02 UTC] No.23547629[source]▶
> isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights?

Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it.

But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.

replies(2): >>23549108 #>>23550999 #
11. jacobush ◴[17 Jun 20 08:23 UTC] No.23549108{3}[source]▶
I think you have both generic problems and module specific problems.
12. jacobush ◴[17 Jun 20 08:24 UTC] No.23549118{3}[source]▶
I hear that a lot, were blacks really better off living under Jim Crow than they are today?
13. raxxorrax ◴[17 Jun 20 10:08 UTC] No.23549718{3}[source]▶
Because it is the correct approach. There is no white fragility.
14. TeaDrunk ◴[17 Jun 20 13:19 UTC] No.23550999{3}[source]▶
Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).
replies(1): >>23552081 #
15. pdonis ◴[17 Jun 20 14:48 UTC] No.23552081{4}[source]▶
> There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s

That doesn't mean we haven't been trying to fix racism for more than half a century. It just means the "fix" hasn't been working.

replies(1): >>23552512 #
16. TeaDrunk ◴[17 Jun 20 15:22 UTC] No.23552512{5}[source]▶
Fixing racism hasn’t garnered significant traction with significant capital support for a while. Additionally, I would argue that attempting a 50 fix for systems that are multiple centuries old (and have had that much time to work their way into every part of society) seems short sighted.