
Why are there so few black tech entrepreneurs? - SJSque
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53761632
======
founderofcolour
Posting anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm not black, but I am a minority. The
racism in tech is so obvious, my eyes bleed sometimes. At my workplace, they
will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special
schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher
than others.

Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises,
projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a
24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who
has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real
work.

The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none.

Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the
"diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why _would_ they be motivated
given what goes on?

Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens
in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current
venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech
being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I
think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.

~~~
adwn
> _At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no
> special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until
> they are multiple levels higher than others._

Are you saying that they also discriminate against _above-average_ white
workers in favor of _average_ white workers?

> _The entire c-suite has a single person of color._

How many people are in the C-suite, and what's the ratio of PoC to total
number of employees in your company? I'm not trying to disprove you, it's just
that a single number (1 PoC in the C-suite) doesn't provide any insight into
your situation.

~~~
founderofcolour
How many people are in the C-suite? 8 with 1 PoC

We have a bit over 100 employees and about 30% are PoC.

------
Ancapistani
While bias in hiring is certainly an issue, I don’t believe that its the
primary factor.

Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US
are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field.
They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college
on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system
necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture,
and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of
their energy to financial survival in the first place.

Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is
the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities,
easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.

~~~
umvi
> the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable
> families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and
> lower housing costs.

That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from
pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You
can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to
bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families
start in middle/high school.

And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant
among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the
world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.

~~~
jknz
Truancy: the action of staying away from school without good reason;
absenteeism. (Had to google it! Thanks for a new word)

Truancy can be dealt with by providing food to the kid at the end of the
school day, food meant to be brought home.

There are of course arguments against this, e.g., school are not meant for
this. Well, schools are not meant to operate with absent students and whatever
can fix should be considered.

~~~
burfog
Perform a trick to get a food reward?

It sounds like training dolphins.

I don't even know if that is a good sign or a bad sign, but... wow.

~~~
adwn
Sure, you can turn up your nose at this "trick", shrug with resignation, and
tell yourself "Well, nothing we can do about it!"

 _Or_ you can get off your high horse, try something new, and see whether it
solves this problem.

------
umvi
Like mentioned in the article, only 13% of Americans are black[0].

Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1].

So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in
poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You
could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there
so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for
that.

[0]
[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219)

[1]
[http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...](http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.html)

~~~
Ancapistani
“Cultural reasons” is often a “dog whistle” term. I don’t believe that’s the
case here, and am responding in that spirit.

Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”?

I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are
disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I
don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups
segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be
much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to
culture.

What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the
root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in
which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At
best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to
first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges.
Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of
westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully
integrated into our society.

I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to
do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate
either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time.

Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.

~~~
krapp
>Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”?

One factor - white Americans have historically identified not as "white"
primarily, but by country of origin - Italian, German, British, etc. "White"
as a culture tends to be used as a reference in contrast with and in
comparison to "black" culture or people.

Whereas African slaves and their descendants were deprived of the opportunity
to identify with their culture and countries of origin, so they had to build a
cultural identity around the only common attribute and heritage they were
afforded - their race.

------
danhak
Generational wealth. Ask yourself why there are so few entrepreneurs—of any
race—who can take big risks without a family safety net to fall back on.

Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal
segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic
racism are ongoing.

~~~
umvi
And not just generational material wealth, but generational intellectual
wealth as well. What % of black people have parents they can go to ask complex
financial questions about investing, mortgages, loans, retirement, etc. vs
white people? Or even just basic cooking/diet/physical health questions?
People vastly underestimate the value of intellectual wealth passed from
successful, educated parents to their offspring.

~~~
strikelaserclaw
agreed, cultural and intellectual wealth is far more valuable than material
wealth. Take the Jewish people for example, the reason they can go from one
place to the other with no material wealth and still come out on top is
probably due to their inherited cultural/intellectual wealth.

------
Mc91
Tech entrepreneurs come out of IT.

In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were
doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot
did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high
school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route
a lot of them fell off.

Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it
in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more
difficult for them etc.

~~~
athms
I have been in the IT business for thirty years in Silicon Valley and have
interviewed hundreds of candidates, not one of them was black. I can count on
one hand the number of blacks I have worked with in that period of time.

Black college students are over represented in low earning majors. Blacks that
focus on high paying majors go into law, medicine, or business. If black
leaders want more black IT executives, they need to push black kids into IT
related careers.

[https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-
majo...](https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majors/#full-
report)

>I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in
for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason

That mentality can be seen in anybody. When I did consulting in the late
1990s, I had a client company where an Indian manager refused to promote or
hire non-Indians. Same company, an engineer from Taiwan gave bad marks on
interviews if the candidate was of Korean descent. He told me, "I won't work
with gooks."

~~~
dingsbumps
> That mentality can be seen in everybody

Various humans have various racial biases -- but that doesn't mean we should
just throw our hands up and give in to those biases! Seeing those biases
should spur us to recognize them as real and damaging, rather than normalize
them

------
brainless
I didn't think about it before but just thinking now - I know more Indian
origin tech founders in the US than Black tech founders in the US.

I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the
US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this.
And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.

~~~
strikelaserclaw
Well ask your self are the Indians founders from the upper castes or lower
castes in India? I read an article which states that Dalit's make up only like
2-5% of all the Indians who come to America. African Americans are like the
dalits of india in that they have faced systematic discrimination which has
probably effected every part of their existence for a long time, it is not
something that can easily change with the waving of a magic wand.

~~~
brainless
Yes I think these are points we have to accept but many are not willing to. I
myself come from a lower caste, although not Dalit. But I'm lucky to come from
a region where caste system wasn't strong many decades back even (Bengal). But
I can imagine, from news and other sources, what it might have done to my
social existence if applied to me. I'm thankful to say the least.

------
dumbfoundded
This article seems to solely focus on venture-backed startups. It would be
interesting to understand how the venture world does in terms of inclusivity
versus more traditional entrepreneurship like starting a restaurant or other
small local business.

According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar.
This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general
racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest
financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a
huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating
more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of
the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society.

(1) [https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-
business...](https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-businesses/)

------
renewiltord
Interesting note that with sufficient discrimination, even non-discriminating
agents will have the discrimination propagate to them. If I know that a black
woman is going to have a hard time raising loans, hiring, finding a business
partner and a white guy is going to have an easy time doing all that, even a
non-discriminating VC will just go for the latter. After all, you're just
blindly chasing outcomes. And there's no edge to be had by choosing someone
who is holistically less likely to succeed because the environment doesn't
favour them.

------
ksk
Isn't there just an infinite series of questions that you can ask? How come
there are so few paraplegic entrepreneurs? How come there are so few Eskimo
entrepreneurs? I don't think that equality of opportunity will necessarily
lead to homogeneity and equal representation in every single field of
commerce. People are all wired differently with different
inclinations/desires/ambitions/goals/skills.

~~~
charlesu
Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there
should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your
argument?

~~~
ksk
>Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that
there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that
your argument?

Maybe I used the term wired a bit loosely, we're all the same DNA to be sure,
but we are shaped by our environment, biology, wealth, upbringing, culture and
so many other factors. I don't think how given a multitude of factors you can
achieve equal representation unless you also have equal representation along
the other axes. (Edit: Also, humans are not robots. There is still the element
of free-will here. It may well be that Eskimos have no interest in
entrepreneurship. :))

------
bberenberg
This Planet Money episode investigate the issue in an interesting analysis:
[https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-
racism](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism)

------
morceauxdebois
Gee, why aren't a predominantly economically unfortunate demographic majorly
present in an area requiring capital or higher education?

~~~
bsanr2
*economically sabotaged

~~~
charlesu
I don't know why you're being down voted. Blacks were purposefully if not
explicitly excluded from many economic programs for decades, from the
Homestead Act to the GI Bill. Several of their towns and communities we're
destroyed, like Greenwood Tulsa. That sounds like sabotage.

~~~
bsanr2
It's a sore subject, particularly on HN, because it calls into question the
meritocracy Americans want to believe they epitomize. Suffice it to say that,
while the examples you relate were significant and infamous, such sabotage
also manifests insidiously in smaller ways.

------
cvhashim
Why is this flagged?

~~~
burfog
It won't generate a reasonable intellectual discussion. Some of the most
common opinions on the matter are unspeakable in polite society.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.

~~~
krapp
>You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.

Yes, you certainly can.

Looking through the thread I see a lot of what appears to me to be honest
discussion, and I would also consider it of reasonable intellectual level.
Those common "unspeakable" opinions you allude to tend to drag the quality of
discussions down, rather than lift them up.

But if it helps, everyone is aware of those opinions, it's just that most
people just don't find them interesting or worth discussing.

------
mytailorisrich
For whatever reasons, it seems to me that relatively few black people study
for engineering and science degrees. At least that's my feeling in Europe.

Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose
this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook,
etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies).

So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a
long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity"
in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue
signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause.
Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they
wanted to do actual good long term.

~~~
tootahe45
I've pointed this out for the women in tech debate. Probably 3 of the 30 or so
CS students were women here.

So the question becomes why do blacks and women want tech jobs without
becoming qualified for said tech jobs? or do they even want tech jobs in the
first place? is it just someone else who wants them to have tech jobs?

~~~
mytailorisrich
There's never been many women in technical subject in Western countries. I
think this stems from the traditional view that some jobs are for men, and
some jobs are for women.

That's why we now have campaigns here in the UK to make girls in primary and
secondary schools interested in these subjects and to make the message that
girls can study anything they want. The same goes for boys and 'girly subject'
though the push seems less visible.

