

Watch low level racism evolve in realtime on hackernews - nashequilibrium

&quot;I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume 
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6033567&quot;<p>I noticed this title on the front page and remembered a similar story but based on race.<p>The link below was flagged as not being worth hackernews, but i found it a contradiction that the above link was so much more welcomed and people related more sincerely than this one:&quot; Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Skyrocket (2012) https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6034800 &quot;<p>Therefore i decided to search for the link and resubmit it to see the comparison in compassion and tolerance. So far the difference is night and day, the top comment on the thread dismisses the whole article, despite the amount of comments and points, the article is already kicked off the front page of HN yet the other one has over 300pts and is trending really well! Why is there this lack of compassion and disdain for discrimination based on race vs gender? I am currently scraping the comments to run sentiment analyses so that i have facts to back up this point. I kind off feel bad for black people in the U.S. it seems like anything race based is automatically pushed off as whining and not worth the tech communities time.<p>&quot;The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.&quot;
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coryl
Definitely detected some unconscious racism (or at least willful ignorance) by
apsec112's post. Saying that "this doesn't belong on HN" when HN has anecdotal
articles about job/interview experiences and startup hiring stories on its
front page every day.

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pudquick
The best I can do is give a personal account of my thoughts as I read both
articles:

Reading the techyville article:

* Honestly never heard of the site before, not terribly pleasing to the eye but oh well.

* Ok, hit in the face with a "racism is bad" quote.

* This person is applying for jobs in the insurance industry, which I'm not part of - hope this is interesting.

* Gah - monster.com? How old is this article?

* Ok - so she also changed her name to "Bianca White" \- what was her original name? Yolanda Spivey? Ah.

My take away from the article:

monster.com (a site I do not recommend using for jobs) appears to mandate you
answer a question regarding your race. This woman submitted two different
profiles to the site, with different choices for race in each - and her actual
name also appears to be stereotypically associated with the black community.

In the end, she got many more responses from her profile that did not indicate
she was black. My gut reaction to this was that a.) monster.com allowing you
to see the candidate's race choice is a bad thing (yet another reason not to
use the site) and b.) the insurance industry appears to suck, glad I don't
work in it.

Reading the quartz article:

* Wow, _another_ quartz article? This site is really heavily submitted (along with medium.com) as of late. Oh well, at least it's pleasing to look at.

* Wow, they quit their job? I wish I had that confidence. They must be single.

* Supply and sales experience - and engineering too? Wonder what job field this is. Sounds somewhat interesting.

* "Mr. Kim" sounds awkward to me.

* "example everyone used to show that it could be done" \- what kind of field does this guy work in where they routinely have to tout that women working in it is a definite possibility? I don't think I've ever had a discussion like that with my peers.

My take away from the article:

Not really sure how I feel about it. The article seemed to have a lot less
specific details ("engineering" could be any number of industries) and didn't
seem to focus on a single method for applying for jobs (no mention of a single
website used, etc.).

Looking back on the two articles - honestly, I just had a more fulfilling
experience reading the one at quartz.com.

The whole website experience was more pleasant, the story did not immediately
put me on the defensive by providing a quote telling me about the depravities
of humanity at the beginning, and the story seemed to have at least a little
bearing on my interests and possibly fields of work related to my own.

I understand that injustice happened in both articles. I just didn't feel any
connection to the techyville content. The most I came away with it was "It
sounds like monster.com is poorly built and allows hiring companies to filter
based on race - and it's happening as a result".

I don't feel that I made a preference based on racism vs. gender
discrimination and somehow classed one inexcusable thought process as less
harmful than another. The presentation of the two articles just really hit me
differently.

I think there's just too many variables here to easily say that the techyville
doesn't do as well because racism is tolerated more.

Maybe someone will have to do some A/B testing.

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tokenadult
Is there a possibility that long-time users here recognize resubmissions and
flag them?

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gverri
I very much doubt that. Most people here can't even remember what they lunched
two days ago.

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jongraehl
If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and
don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something
obvious :)

I guess the above explanation is too uncharitable, and people don't believe
they're racist but do believe they (or the industry) are sexist. I feel like
racism is somehow more evil. I think "low level racism" is a decent label -
you shouldn't be surprised that at a superficial level of acquaintance (resume
screening), people subconsciously pull expectations of competence/"fit"
according to the reference class they see the resume as belonging to (oh,
another 25 yr old brogrammer!)

Also, there are more women in the U.S., so if women and blacks were similarly
discouraged from coding, we'd want to throw more resources at encouraging
women, hypothetically.

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nashequilibrium
"If you're implying that HN would generally prefer more female coworkers and
don't really prefer to have more black ones, you may be on to something
obvious :)"

I was thinking along the same lines but to put it more plain context, i wonder
if HN sees white female > black person? As i was looking at this trend today,
i got detoured onto this topic and started to see if there is any evidence of
this kind of stuff. Its seems that in South Africa, after apartheid ended the
Black government instituted affirmative action for black people and white
woman. A few yrs later they dropped white woman from the AA policy and
released numbers that showed white females reached their goal quota levels
while black male and females hardly made any ground. Therefore it seems like
the next best thing after a white male is a white female in a model that
stifles white male employment. Very interesting!

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bayesianhorse
For me, racism is a subset of a larger problem of "too much judgement, too
little perception".

Christian teachings tell us to avoid judging others, Buddhists tend to take it
even more to the extreme.

But the maxime of "no judgement" isn't about altruism at all. In the case of
employers it's really not a good idea to sort by race or gender because it's
too easy to miss out on talent that way.

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muyuu
I have to admit discussions on racism and sexism bore the hell out of me. I
don't know if that makes me a sexist or a racist.

I'm trying to focus in stuff that I think it will teach me something practical
or cover something important to me directly. I think it's mainly because I'm
rather short on time these days.

~~~
swang
Yet you are on HN, posting on a thread about racism. I think you have a bit
more time than you think.

~~~
muyuu
It's Friday night here and I'm chillin'. Happens only so often.

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jfc
I will be interested to see the results. But why is this in Ask HN? Seems to
me it should be a regular thread.

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jchrisa
Slightly OT: Just today I realized I have a corpus of text that needs
sentiment analysis. If you can help please email me at jchris@couchbase.com I
need to find the diamonds in the rough in some mailing list archives.

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chipsy
The first sign that a comment is bad is that it is a judgment.

