I want to comment on the anti Affirmative Action arguments here.
I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year, our AP Computer Science teacher hooked up a few of us with internships at the finance firms, specifically in tech (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). Now, sure, I did really well and studied really hard to get into my high school. However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship besides taking AP Computer Science. My Computer Science "expertise" was hardly valuable. I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country.
In the end, that internship did wonders for me getting into college and getting future jobs. And plus, I made 3k that summer. And yes, I finished a useful project at the firm. But the reason I had that opportunity was totally orthogonal to earning the opportunity. I know we like to boast about being a meritocracy and all that, but this is one of those cases where it was correlation, not causation.
Because you're not the person AA hurts. AA doesnt hurt top 1% people, it hurts say top 10% people who are in the wrong ethnic group and lose out to people in the correct ethnic group. Just ask a lower class Asian person with top 10% MCAT scores, and why he lost a med school spot to a middle class URM person with top 20% scores.
But isn't that how you achieve systematic equality? For example, say there are two races X and Y. X is the overachiever (doesn't even have to be a majority, there could be a 50/50 population), while Y is the underachiever, for whatever historical reasons these two groups faced. So, to get Y on the same level as X and restore a meritocracy, you must admit more of Y, even if X does better in some cases. Meritocracy only makes sense if everyone starts off with the same advantages. Otherwise, the populations must converge until such a point is reached. It becomes an argument for shortchanging certain populations for the greater good of society, to undo the disparity of the past. Is that not why AA exists?
It's absolutely fine to give extra advantages to people with low incomes. That's economic progressivism.
It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics, essentially saying that some people "genetically poor" or "genetically rich", which is what Affirmative Action does.
It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics. Therefore, giving an extra advantage to someone who is not given those other extra advantages, evens the score.
Affirmative action will prefer a middle-income black person to a low-income white person. It 'evens the score' for some poor people, but not for others.
There are plenty of systems that benefit some areas of society and not others. It sounds from your comment that you're all for an even distribution of rewards across society. Is that a fair characterization? Why is this case particularly egregious to you compared to other inequalities?
There won't be glaring unfairness in the system where an upper middle class black kid gets preference over the child of poor, uneducated Fujian immigrants who can barely speak English
If there's an imbalance along racial lines, any reversal to that trend is better than nothing. The ideal world is one where there's no glaring unfairness, but maybe we can address at least some of that unfairness.
I'm of the opinion that university should be free.
There are clearly multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex. A fair and equal admissions policy should account for all of those.
How does "disparities of the past" account for modern-day disparities between e.g. Latinos and Indians? Both relatively recent to the US in large numbers; Indians seem much more represented in tech than Latinos. The proposition that all modern day population disparities are explained by historical "evil white people" seems tenuous at best. Kicking deserving top 30% people out of middle class life tracks because you insist reality must adhere to your sense of statistical proportion seems unjust to me.
Yes, it is not 'just' from a Kantian perspective, where the suffering of one is always bad, but this is just from a utilitarian perspective, that the ends justify the means. Indeed, that percentage of people are kicked out for a proportional percent who are accepted, but after some time, there is proportional equality. Some must suffer in the short term for the benefit of many in the long term.
I think what you're saying is a great way to describe what advantages accrue with wealth, even middle class wealth.
Essentially you had the system work in your favor and in turn knew how to work to system. You got a warm intro into an internship, this helped you get into college afterwards. These kinds of subtle boosts are mostly a function of being in the right place within the system and knowing how to pull the right levers, and if you don't know to look for those levers, you'll never know they're there and be disadvantaged as a result.
In your case, it was being in the right place and having the flexibility to take that internship. For someone else it might be knowing how to work the college financial aid system, or something else. I look back and see that throughout my academic career, if I didn't have people who knew how the system worked telling me, "you should do this, and this is how", I don't think I'd have gotten where I am.
Essentially, I got a better shot at things even though I was no more qualified on a purely intellectual basis.
AA is an imperfect tool to give people some of those same advantages, and I'm a little ambivalent about it. But I think it or something like it is probably necessary to give everyone an equal shot.
Another thing to consider is that I worked the system in New York City. And the system in NYC has a fair amount of access and resources, if you work it right. Why not create a similar amount of access and resources at Howard University?
I don't see that as traditional Affirmative Action, which we primarily think of happening during an admissions process. This is just creating more channels to resources in tech, which is entirely reasonable, even from a conservative economics perspective.
I have mixed feelings about AA as well. All of these subtle boosts as you call them come from more than just being in a school, although I agree that helps a LOT more than not being in the school. There is the obvious advantage of living in a culture that values such things as education, career progress etc. The most important is probably encouraging and supportive parents.
In short, I think we need to do more than just let people from other communities simply join our prestigious institutions but to recognize that these institutions need to be changed to help these students achieve what students from other backgrounds get as well.
I know all the meritocracy crowd here will come after me with pitchforks for saying this, but I do think it is justified in putting all that effort into helping people that are born in disadvantaged families. Is it fair to the other kids who may have worked really hard but get less attention simply because of their family background? Maybe...but they were lucky to be born in a great family in the first place...
I too got very lucky by being born in a great family.... I'm eternally grateful for it having helped me to have a happy and fulfilling life. I hope others can have a shot at such a life as well.
The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race.
Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.
The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it
The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.)
Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them.
You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too.
Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.
Not entirely sure what your point is. The best solution is of course to provide African American communities with good schools from the beginning. Like many other ethnic groups Asian Americans have been free to implement their own communities, largely based on family ties, because they weren't brought to the US in chains.
> "if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there"
That's an extremely strong statement to make. The proportion of Asians in professional soccer is substantially lower than the population distribution. Are you claiming that the main reason for this is selection discrimination?
No, that wasn't my intended claim. I'm not saying that the problem is just racial discrimination I'm saying that often how people are selected for colleges and jobs biases towards certain groups. Colleges want volunteering, lots of AP tests, and a high ACT for example and while anyone can do well at those some people, often through little fault of their own, have a much harder or easier time getting those things. If you select on those you are selecting not only for intelligence (which makes sense) but also how affluent their parents were and how much their community valued education (neither of which they would have control over). I'm not saying that everyone is racist, just that ignoring all the implicit biases seems illogical to me.
> However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship ...
As someone who spends a lot of time in Europe, I find this exclusively-individualistic view of "earning advantage" to be too limiting, and characteristic of US ideas about class and privilege (Europe has its own, different problems).
Yes, you personally didn't earn that specific thing. But there's a very high chance that your family unit earned itself into being in a position to collect that "free" (at the point of accrual) benefit.
I think the most fundamental problem we face right now in terms of equalizing the game for historically disadvantaged people (an important goal worthy of some sacrifices) is how to square that with the very natural, and IMO totally fair, desire for parents to be able to pass some forms of fairly-earned advantage on to their children.
After graduation, sure we probably do better than average. But at the moment I received the internship, my skills were no more or less qualified than any other CS student. And, at the end of the day, am I really that much better of a developer than most people? I really doubt that.
What does that have to do with affirmative action though? It sounds like you are advocating that we should be improving our high school curriculum, not using race as a basis for admissions to certain programs.
If you ever bring up the point about, say, how the rate of criminality among blacks in America is so much higher than whites/asians/latinos, you'll frequently hear a response about the lurking variable of poverty(poor people are more likely to be criminal -> blacks are over-represented among poor people).
So, why doesn't that same logic carry over to affirmative action? If you made the test about income levels, and not race, it seems like some of the absurdity of the system that people hate would be lessened. Right now with AA, we implicitly say that a black kid from a multi-millionaire family is disadvantanged, and needs help, relative to the son of a poor Chinese immigrant.
If you were the one who gets screwed by AA, you would have told another story. This is what liberals do. Already have your piece of pie and play the moral high ground. How about you giving your spot to a black kid?
Arguably I did get "screwed over" by Affirmative Action in terms of what college I got into (still salty about it). But this program with Howard University is really different than traditional, admissions-based Affirmative Action. It's increasing the supply, not lowering it or putting a quota on it. I'm not saying I didn't earn my spot at my school, but I definitely got lucky with that internship, which I don't feel like I earned. I was making a simple point about the side effects we get as "hard workers" that have much deeper benefits than we tend to think. And I'm not sure those side effects are always deserved.
I'm very happy to see this. I grew up in a town that, before I was born, decided to actively integrate (from being an historically all white, wealthy suburb) and I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community. I'm in mountain view now and it's all "silicon valley white", and something actively needs to be done. I worry when I realize my kid can go a week or more without seeing a black person, and I'm disappointed in myself when I realize I have no black friends (when as a kid they were my neighbors).
You don't consider the thousands of immigrants who grew up in completely different cultures with different primary languages in Asia and Europe as diversity?
Instead, you consider the American born Black person whose primary language is English and who grew up with American culture as "diversity"?
Drive through the neighborhoods of Chicago, through enclaves of Irish, Polish, German, and Jewish people. You won't miss them: the signage will abruptly change to Polish, or the streets will be full of men in suits wearing their hair in payots. This is a form of diversity, to be sure. But it's not the kind we're concerned about.
The problem here is the word "diversity", which is very easily hijacked to distort discussions. I think we're all pretty much on the same page that the concern being addressed here is the exclusion of specific, prominent ethnicities from SFBA tech culture, not the absolute number of different ethnicities being represented.
It's fine if you want to lament the lack of black people in any given domain, but to generalize and say there is no diversity at all because a lack of black people is short changing not only the efforts of many people, but many people as well.
Of course immigrants and different languages increase diversity. But it's also true that other people from within the US are critical to developing a balanced view of the world. A black person is going to have a very different experience that I will as a white dude, and we are all poorer for it when we don't know people with those experiences. The same goes for the white farmer who grew up on a ranch in Nebraska, I would love to know more of those people, they see the world differently than I do.
What would an optimal diversity level be in your opinion? Should your child see a black person on a daily basis? Should the black people your child sees be from a diverse socioeconomic range? Should the black people be a mixture of African Americans and literal Africans?
My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way there.
(Not trying to offend anyone, but feel safer with throwaway account.)
This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration.
It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome.
But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore.
Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.
First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way.
Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
> Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
Family lore has it that my great-grandparents (German descent, first generation born here) were concerned when their only son, my grandfather, married an Irish girl, my grandmother (also first generation born here).
> I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community.
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
That plus living in a city like most young people are starting to do today, I find exposure to different cultures to be highly accessible with little investment. This is not really the result of forced integration policies but simply through technology, market options (restaurants, entertainment, etc) and proximity in dense housing areas.
It's interesting that not long after the Civil Rights act passed (which included legislation to make mandatory increases in housing and school integration) that there was a big migration from cities to suburbanization starting in the 1970s - reducing integration in both schools and housing. Most people falsely believed 'white flight' to be a cultural thing when if fact it was largely the result of regulatory policy making. There's a great book about how local government policies was the largest cause of this shift towards suburbia: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933115157/
I've read that statistically today's schools in the US are even more segregated than even before the civil rights act. Yet one could argue that despite this the young generation is the most open and accepting to other cultures than ever before.
So I'm not sure that (mandatory) integration policies are a necessary construct in order to improve social conditions and relationships between communities/races - as much as it used to be. The solution may simply be to reverse a lot of the existing legislation that pushed so many communities away from dense naturally integrated urban areas to small towns and suburbs.
Trying to improve economic and quality of education via integration is another question (I'm mostly looking at cultural considerations). Although I've also heard of mostly black charter schools in poor communities doing as well as public schools in upper class neighbourhoods. So, again, on the surface that seems to be more about access to quality services rather than racial integration.
You have to be careful not to mistake the chicken for the egg.
It's true that schools are more segregated. It's also true that there's abundant evidence that bussing programs had strong positive effects for the students who used them. These programs were systematically dismantled in the nineties, though, largely because of racist policies in the communities receiving the bussed students.
Desegregation works. Saying that the issue is access to quality resources reduces to separate but equal policy, doesn't it?
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
In my opinion the internet makes it just as easy to be culturally homogeneous if you want to. There are many people that, due to interest or necessity will be exposed to a variety of cultures, but you can just as easily filter your internet usage so you engage mostly with people that are like you. It doesn't help that on the internet, in text discussions, you don't know what someone's background is without research due to anonymity. For example, by default I assume everyone on HN is an upper middle class or wealthy white male in his mid-20s to early 40s, unless otherwise stated in the context of the comments, even though I know this isn't true. This creates the problem of, instead of viewing internet communities as diverse collections of people, they are viewed as stereotypical hive minds, further enforcing discrimination and stereotyped views of large groups of people.
So, let's say you were born in China. Would you have a similar level of anxiety about never seeing anyone outside of your ethnic group? I find it very odd how white people are seemingly the only ethnic group so hung up on seeing people of different races one day-to-day basis.
On a related note, if being around so many white people bothers you so much, why aren't you living in, say, East Palo Alto or Richmond?
I think this is part of the implicit contract of the American 'melting pot'. A vanishing percentage of Americans are actually descended from America, and for better or worse, integrating or failing to integrate people has been a major part of our history-- from slavery and genocide to New York being arguably the most important city in the world.
So, what could be seen as white people seeming to have a pathological need to observe those with different melanin is, I'd argue, a representation of our awareness of that compact. If we're all living here, and they're all living there, is it possible that they're not too happy, or that they're being forced to live with substandard lives or living situations? If that's the case, that could potentially breed societal instability and rupture, as happened in the '60's and '70's.
From my personal perspective, I don't necessarily want to live in Compton or Camden, but it's certainly the case that I want people who live there to be able to move to where they want in America-- "not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character".
Edit: You can't just replace White with Chinese: unless Chinese people enslaved and murdered a race of people for hundreds of years, then segregated them in tiny ghettos while charging higher rents than other 'Chinese' had to pay, to finally - allow - them to leave the ghetto only to "redline" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) any community that crossed the color line, outlaw discrimination - after - poverty had set in... (not to mention Chinese-flight, I mean, white-flight from communities that reached a tipping point of racial integration.)
The issues of race in American are legacy issues that won't just dissolve in time. And full dissolution cannot take place if the underlying issues of poverty are not corrected (read: aggressively attacked). This is but a small step in that direction.
I don't understand this line of thinking for a couple of reasons:
1) Framing diversity as being about white people avoiding anxiety by surrounding themselves with people from other ethnic groups is egocentric and weird. Pushing for diversity is ideally about expanding access to lucrative careers, not bringing in people-as-window-dressing.
2) On the note of lucrative careers, comparing membership in a well-paid, prestigious career field within (say) the United States with being born in a more ethnically homogeneous country is disingenuous. It's the very fact that we don't live in a mono-culture that should make us wonder about the high correlation between being white and male and being in our field.
Only in some areas. I grew up in one of those flyover states, according to wikipedia the demographics of my town were 97% white while I was a teenager (~94% white now).
I much prefer being in more diverse areas, but I don't think where I grew up was somehow bad or wrong. It is a very middle class place, so it's not like the minorities were being pushed out, there just weren't many non-white people that wanted/want to live there! ...but to be fair, a lot of white people don't want to live there either, it's quite boring.
The history of housing discrimination in the US would challenge the notion that a middle class suburb would not push out minorities. This practice was rampant in the period after WW2 and continued into the 70s and 80s. It has little to do with notional affordability.
Interesting. I suppose that could have some effect, but I was not even born until housing discrimination was over with and when I moved into my small town it was largely farmland and not much of a suburb until a decade later.
Further, if housing discrimination was still going on in the 90's and 00's, I have no idea where these people were being "pushed out" to. The closest towns/cities with significant racial minority populations were at least 250 miles away...the city I grew up outside of was 90% white (currently 82% white) and there were/are plenty of undesirable locations there. It's middle America, there are just a ton of white people (sorry?).
I think the appropriate dig is "where are the Hispanics in tech" and "where are the Hispanics in tech building explicit bridges to their communities." HBCUs are the result of affluent blacks fighting for land grants at the turn of the 20th century since many states refused to grant land for the formation of integrated colleges and universities. This program, love it or hate it, is 100+ years in the making.
It's more telling than you might realize that you took their complaint to mean "I'm upset I'm around so many white people" and not "I'm upset a part of the population isn't included in my area / culture". It certainly makes the rest of your comments less surprising.
Eh, considering that much of the social pressure of Chinese society presumably stem from a lack of cultural diversity, I would very much be bothered never seeing anyone outside my ethnic group if I'd grown up in China. I'd probably want to move anywhere else just for that fact.
"Better off" seems subjective, especially when looking at the particulars.
I didn't grow up in a diverse community, and living in one now I certainly feel the lack. How do you quantify a cultural divide? How do you quantify what it means to you?
Given your comment, I can guess, but that would be rude.
I'm sure there are awesome monocultures and ideologies one can wrap themselves in permanently, but every one I've been in for an extended period looks like a prison in hindsight.
One thing I struggle with is measurement of progress. For example, what Google is allowing here with Howard U is obviously good for the AA community. However, is Google in general doing things that are good or bad for AAs in general? It's difficult to say.
Excessive advertising can be used to poor people's disadvantage by creating more debt by encouraging more unnecessary expenses. AAs consist of a disproportionally large percentage of poor people and have chronically low wealth levels [1]. One could argue Google is bad for AAs by making advertising more mainstream and accurate.
In any case, at least they're trying, PR or not. Some companies do nothing. I do feel strongly about this because the amount of segregation in Boston is ridiculous.
You kind of touch upon the question of an incrementalist approach to social change, which works within a flawed system versus a more radical approach, which says "the system is radically flawed, we must change it drastically."
"The system" here being, imho, the role advertising plays in our society.
When a positive outcome is almost certain, there's less need for fine measurements. For example, how much effort is it worth to determine whether tech job placement for Howard University students goes up by 2x or exactly 2.15x?
I disagree that a positive outcome is almost certain. What's happening here is effectively Affirmative Action, and that's hardly a positive outcome in everyone's eyes.
For example, Google could just simply give internships to those at HBCU's, an action one may see as definitely positive. However, if for whatever reason those students fail to perform, in the eyes of the non black colleagues, stereotypes of incompetence will be created, if not exacerbated. Black people are punished more harshly for signs of incompetence of similar magnitude than Whites [2].
A somewhat similar thing happened with minority lawyers, as law schools tried to prop up the supply with affirmative action policies [1].
Which is why having additional instruction and additional acclimation to the Silicon Valley environment, which Google and Howard are doing here, is so important - to creating a culture where diverse engineers can thrive.
>When a positive outcome is almost certain, there's less need for fine measurements.
Gonna have to strongly disagree, here. Declaring that a "positive" outcome is "almost certain" is an invitation for punting on specifically defining what that "positive" outcome is and then hand-waving any measurement of progress. This is especially dangerous when the "positive" outcome comes at non-trivial expense.
But in this case? It seems like they're trying to optimize the pipeline from college into the work force. It seems like it would be trivially measurable.
Let's not talk about how Google made access to an entire world of information 100x easier and cheaper, so anyone with a cheap tablet or phone can get information you used to need a $1k encyclopedia for.
Let's not talk about how Google drove Android, a platform which gave a huge number of people internet access by giving them $100 phones or tablets.
Let's not talk about how Google has (done its best) to scan every book ever written to make books available online and free.
Google has done vast amounts to level the playing field, making top-tier services like Gmail and Google maps free, where previously people had to pay for Garmin navigation or Outlook or w/e.
The kind of argument the OP makes is shallow, petty, and out to use a hammer for every grudge. Yeah, Google makes money via ads. No, that doesn't mean they are racist, sexist, or whatever the hell you feel like making up just to complain about advertising.
They're not saying that Google is "out to get" poor people - they're saying that Google's advertising practices cause disproportionate harm to the poor. I don't think that Google's executives mean to diminish the welfare of the hardest off, but that they're (possibly willfully) ignorant of the broader consequences of their business model.
This collaboration with Howard, as well as the other humanitarian/public services you've mentioned, seem to support the latter.
The top comment was a hit piece, not an attempt at honest conversation.
It's whataboutism, to distract from the actual conversation. "Oh, Google is doing a good thing, but what about all the bad things they do"
If you feed it, you talk about what they want you to talk about, which is inherently negative about Google in this case. It's a standard tactic of state-sponsored propaganda machines (not that I think it is in this case).
Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone else.
You cannot fix racism by implementing racist programs. You do it by removing race from the hiring equation to the maximum extent possible, and making it known that applicants of all races are welcome and that they will be judged based solely on their skills and qualifications. The kind of program announced today will, and should, backfire on Google.
The point of affirmative action is that it's impossible to remove race from the hiring equation, because race affects your applicants right up to the point they send in an application. If you say "I'm colorblind", you're also pretending that everyone else in the world is colorblind, and race had no impact on your applicants' resumes.
Race is a society-wide issue, and it's not possible to solve without recognizing and correcting for it. If you close your eyes and ignore it, racism will still exist and continue to affect people. Even if racism disappeared from America overnight, the issue would not be solved because there would still be lingering cyclical effects from past racism. Parents with fewer opportunities raise kids with fewer opportunities because we live in an imperfect world, and these things require active correction.
I'm describing how affirmative action should be used, not how it always is. Certainly there are plenty of companies who just want different colored people in their website photos so they don't look bad.
By the time anyone of any race becomes a viable Google candidate, they have excelled in both high school and at elite universities, earned advanced degrees, and in many cases have already done interesting things in their field. Their socioeconomic background is irrelevant by that point in their lives. People wind up in Google interviews because they have earned the right to be there with the best and the brightest. At that level of competition, it would truly be a shame for race to play any part in a hiring decision.
You're describing the world we all wish we lived in. There are plenty of studies showing that employers are less likely to consider a resume with a black-sounding name, regardless of their qualifications. The effect is usually subconscious and marginal, but it's there.
You're right, it is a shame for race to play a part, but we have a responsibility to work for the betterment of our society and not ignore the bad parts that don't affect us directly.
I am describing a very specific part of the world that we do live in. Google applicants with any chance at all of being hired tend to be exceptional people that have already overcome most of the challenges that their socioeconomic background may have imposed upon them. Google recruiters aren't likely throwing out resumes with black-sounding names, if the resume their resume stacks up well against competing resumes of any other race. The effect you are describing exists in the world, but far less so at companies as selective and focused on innovation as Google.
I don't know why you think tech companies would be immune to this kind of thing. I'm not talking about cartoonishly racist people ripping up resumes from black people, I'm talking about unconscious biases that make a recruiter think a white candidate seems like a more polished "better fit" for reasons they can't quite put their finger on. They aren't bad people, this is just a fact of life that we need to actively combat, not ignore.
And like I said, even if Google recruiters are somehow completely free of bias, that doesn't solve the problem. Black people are less likely have the necessary qualifications because of lingering effects of racism in the past, which means they're less likely to get well-paying jobs and move up the socioeconomic ladder, which means their kids are less likely to move up and the cycle continues even if racism completely disappears. Obviously it would be nice if we could solve this problem at the source by making education and childhood development completely independent of socioeconomic background, but that's sort of an impossible ideal. I don't think it's unreasonable for Google to try and address the symptoms when the cause is fairly insurmountable.
And one more thing, you're right that anyone hired by Google has exceptional qualifications, but consider what it takes to get your resume in front of a recruiter. When I applied to Google, it was through a friend who had just been hired giving my name to their recruiter. This clearly gave me an advantage over just uploading my resume to a job site. And during the application process, they asked for the names of anyone I knew currently working at Google so they could ask for recommendations. This is a fine step to have in a recruiting process, but you can see how network effects would continue to affect a group that's been discriminated against in the past, even if they're treated completely equally today. They're less likely to have a direct connection to a recruiter, less likely to have internal recommendations, less likely to get that extra boost.
A thought experiment. You have a program that costs $5. You collect that $5 at the door. In order to get to your program, participants must walk down a corridor. In that corridor there are people who will, at gunpoint, take all the money, except $2, from ethnic group A, but not ethnic group B. There is no way to ask for the money later.
You can do nothing about the gunmen in the corridor. You cannot move. Its a thought experiment.
Do you:
a) Say the cost is $5. Because to do otherwise would be racist. No people from group A can take your course.
b) Say that the cost is $5, unless you are from ethnic group A, in which case the cost is $2. Everyone who shows up can take your course. Because to do otherwise would fail to acknowledge the inherent racism of the larger system.
In the US, the larger system is demonstrably racist. People who should have $5 have $2. People who should have 4.0s have 2.0s.
This will backfire on Google in the same way that the "But they ask algorithms questions in their interviews" will backfire on Google: they'll attract smart people who can do the job.
>This will backfire on Google in the same way that the "But they ask algorithms questions in their interviews" will backfire on Google: they'll attract smart people who can do the job.
No, it will backfire on them by discouraging people of other races from even applying because they know they are starting with a disadvantage.
Very few engineers in Silicon Valley interact with black engineers. That's a problem. You can't have positive experiences to remove your bias if you have zero experiences.
> You can't have positive experiences to remove your bias if you have zero experiences.
Who is to say they have any? You're implying they're somehow racist because they haven't met a black engineer? Just because of their skin color you're gonna judge 'em? Well sounds like you're the racist.
While this may not be the data GP is referring to, data from studies of people's responses in controlled circumstances when factors other than the apparent race/ethnicity of the person they are responding to are held constant shows that Americans, in general, are racist.
This is unfair. It is also unfair that blacks receive harsher punishments, starting in preschool, and that this prejudice follows them their entire lives. Can you imagine that? Being told by society that you are bad and predisposed to being a criminal, probably every fucking day? In small and large ways. Learned helplessness is real. I may not see the injustice vividly, because I am not black nor do I have any close black friends (I have a college bud that I hardly talk to, that's it). But it's everywhere. Google knows the inequity exists and is taking a step to address it.
I think we are in need of an open discussion on redefining "diversity".
Race is not a good metric for diversity. Nationality completely trumps it.
People of the same nationality with the same primary language have much more in common with each other. You can actually see this dynamic play out at work where people hang out with others from the same nationality. Americans hang out with Americans, Mandarin Chinese hang out with Mandarin Chinese, Indians with other Indians (don't know enough about Indian culture to split this group up further), Germans with Germans, etc.
With this metric, tech is one of the most diverse fields in the world.
Seen through this new point of view, the racial categories are very shortsighted. The difference between Indian and Chinese (or even Chinese and Korean) cultures is immense, yet they are assigned as part of the same category. African Americans have their own category, yet they are culturally and linguistically(same native language) very similar to white Americans.
Now let's move onto the controversial "disadvantages" discussion.
African Americans generally have family whose native language is English and who understand American culture and can impart these skills and knowledge to their children. They have the language and cultural knowledge to fight for their interests and a powerful organization (NCAAP) to back them up. With these advantages, African Americans are basically seen as honorary Americans similar to white Americans. These advantages even put them in a better position than white immigrants (and sometimes their American born children who have a harder time assimilating).
With these advantages and affirmative action based advantages(educational programs, scholarships, diversity internships and hiring, easy access to colleges/universities from affirmative action[works out to something like +150/2400 SAT and +0.2 GPA which is huge when competing in top percentiles]) middle class and upper middle class African Americans are very privileged.
Edit:
And on disadvantages in the workplace.
Americans are the largest group and the language spoken is English, so Americans (of any race) and native English speakers are privileged.
It's kind of wild you think the NAACP is this huge factor tipping the scales. I'd guess that's a product of consuming alt-right news, which tends to massively amplify organizations and figures within the black community that can be smeared as corrupt, but who knows.
Every study I've read relating to economic mobility points to having economic leverage in the first place as the greatest factor. Blacks have a disproportionately low share of wealth ownership in America (can't cite this atm), which combined with systematic biases puts them at a pretty significant disadvantage. Speaking English isn't enough to counteract that.
You make some interesting points re: how to categorize diversity, but it sounds like you're just moving the goalposts.
> African Americans generally have family whose native language is English and who understand American culture and can impart these skills and knowledge to their children. They have the language and cultural knowledge to fight for their interests and a powerful organization (NCAAP) to back them up. With these advantages, African Americans are basically seen as honorary Americans similar to white Americans.
This is laughably inaccurate. Try again after you've met and spoken with at least _several_ African American families from each class stratification, education level, and region of the country.
This doesn't make any sense. It ignores so much, including obvious things like gender (white women from the US are still disadvantaged in our field, despite having the same language, ethnicity, and nationality of the most privileged class).
It seems like you wrote a reactionary comment, rather than a well thought through one.
African Americans are very culturally different than white Americans. The fact that people just assume that they are the same is one of the reasons that African Americans are in the situations that they are in and get the wrap that they do. Also, the assertion that the NAACP is powerful enough to put African Americans on equal footing with white Americans is just wrong.
If this succeeds, how will Google and Howard keep whites and Asians from taking too many positions in the class? Outright racial discrimination in university admissions is still illegal, and Howard couldn't seriously argue that they're engaging in affirmative action (their student body is over 90% black)
● Google’s Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE): This four-week experience is for 8th graders to gain exposure to CS. This summer we will have around 130 students, and we hope to further expand this content to organizations and schools around the country. We are looking to test this new model with MS2 in Washington, DC this summer.
● LEAD Program for Computer Science: This is a rigorous and exciting summer residential program for underrepresented minority students in grades 9-11, held at four universities in its upcoming inaugural year..
● Trailblazer Award: This is an award (in Europe) that is given internationally for participation in national science fairs. Winners are all treated to a 2-day Trailblazer retreat with fellow winners to learn more about the possibilities of a career in CS.
● Counselors for Computing: This program trains counselors to teach their fellow guidance counselors the benefits of CS degrees. Through our partner members at NCWIT, we are hoping to scale impact through these critical influencers.
● CS4HS is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote CS and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curriculum by hosting CS teachers at campuses worldwide to learn about leading edge practice in the field.
● Computer Science Teachers Association: We are an ongoing supporter of the CSTA and, in particular, recently hosted their CS&IT symposium for 200 CS teachers at our Mountain View campus.
I want to suggest a naive way to reduce the effect of affirmative action.
1) Join forces to donate to educational institutions specifically to increase the number of students they enroll. If there are X spots being reserved for AA, then ask the school to add X additional spots not usable for AA. Donate specifically for them to build additional dorms, classrooms, etc.
For some schools, their endowment is so large, they don't really need the donation, they just need pressure. I think pressuring them to expand should be more likely than pressuring them to end AA.
2) Invest in poor communities. AA stems from the desire to end a cycle of poverty. If we worked to "upgrade" poor communities then the need for AA would greatly decrease. So invest to improve K-12, housing, and businesses in poor communities.
I use the word "invest" because real estate in poor areas is usually under market. I think you can make a really good return if you build high quality housing. Just make sure you are willing to sell/rent to the current residents at below market prices. You should still be able to make a profit from the housing you build that is sold/rented to the middle class looking for better deals in your "upgraded" community.
There doesn't have to be a zero-sum battle between those who benefit from AA and those who don't.
> There doesn't have to be a zero-sum battle between those who benefit from AA and those who don't.
When resources (jobs, college admissions slots, government funding for programs, etc.) are scarce, there often will be.
When I was in college, one of my classes included a unit on public speaking. We were encouraged to speak on a contentious topic and attempt to be persuasive. On the day I presented, I sat through multiple presentations on the subject of affirmative action. All of them were against it on the basis that it hurt certain ethnic groups. None of the people presenting on that subject were white.
I have to say just how excited I am about this. I know two black developers. TWO. I've worked with numerous female developers and know plenty more. I've worked with hispanic, asian, white and european developers (no native american that I know of). I think that this is a great move to help bring in more diversity (and certainly a very different perspective)
This sounds really cool to me just because of the novelty of having a campus at a megacorporate site. I would've loved to work at the Googleplex as a college student! I think it's really cool that kids these days can have that opportunity, and hope more companies will follow suit.
Google is trying to bring good jobs to people in the US who need good jobs by helping to develop their talent and match it to a role within the company. i don't think that's a bad thing. i think Google will be happy to see how well this approach works.
Is this legal? Is this really a school that only allows people of a certain race? I don't mean scholarships or other affirmative action type stuff. An actual entire school that excludes based on race?
Yes, instead of the students learning anything, when you send a student to the university you're returned a new student which is almost the same only with more knowledge.
If you build a company without thinking too much about diversity and it finds itself unbalanced in race and sex when it has thousands of employees, the math becomes daunting. 10% set-asides would take decades to get you near balance.
This is why extraordinary efforts have to be made, and made at scale.
It's nitpicky and maybe trivial, but I'm happy to see them use the word "Black" so prominently. I always got peeved at "African American." If we're going to discuss race, nationality doesn't really figure into the equation.
Then again, if you start talking scientifically, the concept of "race" is shaky at best, but there's no denying the cultural implications of the idea.
It is nitpicky but not so trivial. As I understand it, once upon a time you would have German Americans and Italian Americans as distinctive subgroups in the United States with their own unique cultures. But Negroes couldn't really say they were Nigerian-American or Angolan-American, largely because most colored people did not know exactly where in Africa they came from. In a historical context it makes sense that a subgroup defined by both culture and appearance would be intentional in adopting a name. This is especially true when the names given to them: negroes, colored folk, and even black had racist baggage associated with them.
I personally don't mind African American for the same reasons I don't mind Asian American. Both subnational groups are comfortable with their designation I believe.
Speaking of Asian Americans, are you peeved with the term "Asian American"? Would you rather them self-identify as "yellow"? I ask because I like consistency.
Hm, good point regarding Asian American. Using "yellow" seems ridiculous but is value-wise the same as saying "black." And I can't just claim "just get rid of it all and call'm people!" because there are very useful reasons to be able to define general race (for example, when reporting a crime, you give gender, race, hair, clothing, approximate height). Even that though will become trickier as the genetic pool equalizes.
Dunno man, good point. I hadn't thought of it because all of my "Asian-American" friends have very distinguishable country-specific characteristics that they can identify because their family migrated more recently than your average Black family's, and they don't have a history of slavery obfuscating their origins.
EDIT: Thinking more on it, I believe I'm used to hearing "Asian" to describe race, as opposed to "Asian-American" to describe heritage or nationality.
EDIT2: And also thinking more, I believe my friends use "FOB" to describe an actual Asian, i.e. someone born in Asia. Which probably will be a horribly offensive slur one day and I'll be the 2060 equivalent of "the grandpa that says 'negro' way too much."
I've been told that FOB is offensive and is rarely used in a positive, or even neutral, manner. I mean it hasn't become taboo like nigger has but I've been told its not a polite thing to call someone.
But my larger point is African American "works". Its not offensive, speaks to a unique identity the same way Italian/Jewish/German American does, and for the most post is accepted by the black American community.
Also the genetic pool won't equalize anytime soon. Admixture leading to a near homogenous population of humans outside of small sparsely populated areas is millenia away.
Well, I am surprised to see that pretty much every study I have seen confirming the phenomenon had been conducted before those meta-analyses, and is in fact almost 10 years old or more. Healthy skepticism created. Thank you!
> However, if for whatever reason those students fail to perform, in the eyes of the non black colleagues, stereotypes of incompetence will be created, if not exacerbated.
It's not really a concern. Nobody's worried about competent students underperforming.
I really must be missing something. You even said it yourself:
"Nobody's worried about competent students underperforming."
I didn't say this, nor did you... so who are you replying to? Unless you assume all black students will be competent or somehow black students don't have regular instances of incompetence like their white, asian and hispanic peers?
Is this a way to use blacks to increase the supply and decrease the salary of software engineers?
Regardless the people that go to Howard are pretty well off anyway. Its a private U so either you have money or enough educations/connections/... to get a scholarship.
Edit: Im not criticizing this. I think it is great.
Howard is prestigious for an HBCU, but it's not Harvard. HBCU's deal with a notorious lack of funding, so the connections that you assume are not always there. I can say this specifically applies to Howard.
The reason we even have HBCs in the first place because most universities did not accept black people. So HBCs were created by black people and their allies.
Many HBCs pre-date the civil right changes and school integration prior to the 1960. Many of them go back to the Civil war and some event pre-dated the war.
There's also HSI, short for Hispanic Serving Institutions. This concept was create in the mid-1960s. Unlike HBCs, institutions could be designated HSI as a result of a federal law. And the law didn't require that these were primarily representing hispanics. Instead the law allowed general institutions to be labeled HSI if they enrolled a certain percentage of latina/latino students along with some additional socio/economic pre-conditions.
As you can see HBCs / HSIs are somewhat different concepts and have a different history. Additionally, in recent years there's been an iflux of hispanic students to HBCs as well.
I hope that other large organizations like Google have more partnerships with HBCs/HSI/Native/Tribal educational organizations. This seams like a start, no real to not cheer it on.
There's no reason to pit groups against one another... it's much better to work together. There's a great datapoint in the history of the VRA (Voting Rights Acts) the people who became enfranchised with the first passing of it fought for expanding the VRA via the 1975 amendment to expand the VRA to other groups including Hispanic/Native/Tribal & Asian minorities. Prior to that states and manipulates in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, south California were actively working to suppers the Hispanic (such as the Chicanos) vote.
Historically-Black Colleges and Universities are a product of the history of absolute exclusion of blacks from other institutions in much of the US.
While Hispanics have faced disadvantages and discrimination, they have not faced the kind of outright exclusion that blacks faced for about a century under Jim Crow.
Anecdotally, I went to Tennessee State and we had a fairly decent population of Caribbean students, including Caribbean Hispanics from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year, our AP Computer Science teacher hooked up a few of us with internships at the finance firms, specifically in tech (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). Now, sure, I did really well and studied really hard to get into my high school. However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship besides taking AP Computer Science. My Computer Science "expertise" was hardly valuable. I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country.
In the end, that internship did wonders for me getting into college and getting future jobs. And plus, I made 3k that summer. And yes, I finished a useful project at the firm. But the reason I had that opportunity was totally orthogonal to earning the opportunity. I know we like to boast about being a meritocracy and all that, but this is one of those cases where it was correlation, not causation.