Trigger warning: (well-meaning non-hostile) criticism incoming. I have some background in philosophy (just a few years academically, more of personal interest) and countless of years participating in skeptics forums. This is to say, I am by nature exploratory thinker and am more suspicious of silent agreement than vocal disagreement.
A brief of issues relevant to this topic I fundamentally disagree with
speaking of US race relations as if they carry over to other countries.
ascribing collective responsibility (group guilt, group praise) instead of personal one. Eg ascribing collective guilt to groups instead of persons or policies actually responsible (or persons responsible for those policies). This should be painfully obvious from 9/11- muslims as a religious group should not and can not take responsibility for the tragedy carried out by extremists. Yet, here we are with race relations with the exact same logic.
disparity means discrimination
forcing quotas in professions to achieve some preplanned number. 99% of times, whatever you're trying to fixed ain't fixed by that. Sometimes it doesn't even need fixing.
Specifically about your points:
From your own post, this (at least as far as you mention specific reasons for the disparity) boils down to economic welfare and security, which grants earlier access to trade tools. This is by definition not race related, it may just happen to be that one race is economically worse off in one particular country while it might be the opposite in another. Maybe the post should be then titled the economic disparity of black Americans? Because this has zero to do with coding as a trade, this is not unique to coding.
Your post however seems to insinuate global coding community or coding as a profession is somehow at fault - at least insofar as they should actively seek a solution and maybe feel bad for the distribution of people in their profession based on skin color. In addition, as you say, where you come from is based on a anecdotal, limited experience. By limited experience I mean statistically speaking - you can never personally experience enough to grasp the state of global coding community as a whole. That needs other methodologies: polls, surveys etc. A lot of us are silent, because we prefer to not elevate certain political issues over others. Each of us may experience different turmoil and persecution in our respective countries.
On top of that, your experience is region-specific, that is to say, purely Americacentric. I assure you, there are plenty of poor white Estonians that did not have the same resources as I did to get into computers and eventually coding. We have Russian Estonians, who might have linguistic disadvantage in getting a job. Again, this stuff is very country specific.
the overall ideal of the "self-made man"
This characterization may be more or less correct, though I doubt many devs think they have acquired much (or all) the knowledge without any help from teachers, peers etc; or that their employment is purely because of their skill and not at least partly because of networking, social circle and pure luck.
But the real point is that the following "therefore" is such a non-sequitor, that this appears to be a strawman of your average dev's worldview, and indeed a rather myopic one.
Things not eliminating the possibility of racial discrimination somewhere in the hiring process:
Universal access to resources.
Having learned all coding yourself
Blind pre-screening
Being completely self-sufficient with superior skills and whatnot
I speculate, if this is based on any real world anecdotal conversations, they may be expecting you to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate actual discrimination in the HR. Perhaps your average dev is not really interested when the discussion evolves into the issues of race based economic disparity and how to solve it. To be fair, that is quite far from issues of coding.
Most of the devs I know don't think of this "problem" as being any kind of problem at all.
Let's give them some benefit of doubt. Maybe at least some of them have thought about it more thoroughly:
The problem
First, we need to identify the problem. The problem you have identified is disparity in numerical representation of a social group in a given trade. You need to explain why this is a problem to being with, as this is not actually apparent: I can give you plenty of examples of jobs where massive numerical disparity relating to social groups exists and society is fine with it. The thing is, disparity in and of itself does not necessitate discrimination.
The problem is not whiteness of coding. I'm sorry, but this is the definition of race-baiting. People's color of skin should never be the problem! .
The problem ought to be racial discrimination. So, we need to identify first where it happens, and then how it happens. Numerical disparity doesn't necessarily mean there's any discrimination going on within your company, or even within or profession.
I love static site generators, Elm, JavaScript and building things for the web.
In my previous life I was a working classical pianist. I try to combine music and programming when I can.
I don't know reading this response just feels like a lot of splitting hairs for the sake of playing devil's advocate reads like an effort to side step any critical engagement with the reality of racial disparity...even a bit defensive? Your response in some ways affirm some of the mechanisms of racism that Adam writes about. The pervasiveness of that system is dependent on seemingly innocent behavior that when closely examined point to its reification and reproduction.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
speaking of US race relations as if they carry over to other countries
Adam specifically addressed this early on in his post.
forcing quotas in professions to achieve some preplanned number. 99% of times, whatever you're trying to fixed ain't fixed by that. Sometimes it doesn't even need fixing.
You're right, of course, but what I think's being discussed is the disparity between the ratio of groups in the population and the ratio of groups in tech (specifically programming). That's a big difference, and while it's not absolute, it's a red flag that something does need to be fixed - or at least scrutinised.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I don't know. I guess if your M&Ms bags kept turning out to be full of 95% blue ones you might be suspicious that someone, somewhere was affecting the supply chain. It could be random, but it might also mean things aren't given equal distribution further back.
In such a situation, I would probably suspect a bug in the production line, rather than a systemic fault targeting me personally.
Such a bug only gets fixed if I really love some other colour of M&Ms enough to complain about it, but all the while, I have to accept that the bug is probably affecting other people, in other ways (you might only get yellow ones, etc).
But perhaps that's just my "M&M privilege", choosing to see it as a hiccup, rather than a targeted campaign.
If dev & design are about creating solutions, the lack of representation of marginalized communities means that the problems of these communities face are not addressed. It means that the scope of identifying problems and ideating their solutions will always fall short of being truly effective.
I can't speak for everyone, but dev & design rarely create any solution in isolation. In our case, there's BA and stakeholder reviews (fun fact: stakeholders never know what they want until they see it, and then they want something different).
Customers identify problems (mostly) and BA identify improvements. The acceptance criteria is set in stone. To put it in simple terms, if BA want to carry some amount of rocks from A to B, I can give them a pickaxe or explosives, and a horse or a truck. Stakeholders will tell you they want a truck and explosives, until they start blowing themselves up or having to pay repair bills on the truck (and give them a horse, they won't like paying a vet).
When the whole organisation is defining the desired outcome (the acceptance criteria), it really doesn't matter how many minorities are in your dev team. What matters, is how many are in your organisation and ultimately, how many are in your customer base (happy customers = successful business).
My problem is that minorities don't show up to interview, they don't send their resume. Well, they do, but in minorities - I think I interviewed one woman over the last 18 months.
If people aren't approaching me, when I have a job opening, I can't legally go to a local minority group hang out with "Hey, anyone want a job?" - because I'd also be discriminating some other group that way.
My problem is that minorities don't show up to interview, they don't send their resume. Well, they do, but in minorities - I think I interviewed one woman over the last 18 months.
Right. This mirrors what I wrote in the article - that it's unusual for me to receive even 5% minority applicants. That's why I think the issue is so complex - because it's not nearly so simple as pointing at any given employer or industry and saying, "You just need to hire more minorities!"
Lots of people will tell you that though, but if you look at the people saying it, it's people that don't have the job roles you & I do (and therefore haven't, for a variety of reasons, walked a mile in our shoes).
There's some that say the problem is with the education system - but even there, how can you teach someone if they don't apply to the course, regardless of the reasons why that individual doesn't apply?
The fact that you don’t think wealth inequality or economic welfare leads back to racism is baffling. The primary reason why wealth inequality exists as it does today (not just in America) leads back to colonialism which was inherently based on castes systems and “the upper class” vs “the conquered class” and if you don’t think this carries on till this day then you’ve never heard of 40 acres and a mule. In modern times people of WASP culture hold more wealth because back in the day their grandpappies made sure any wealth generated by enslaved people weren’t passed down to them or their generations to come. The same can be seen in many other countries where generations that come from the enslaved class didn’t get reparations or anything to make up for the fact that the dominant colonial class stole their resources and wealth. Wealth today as you can see can mean the difference between having access to certain privileges or not. Second because other “white” people like Russians or poor Estonians also get disadvantaged proves nothing against this article. He clearly stated the dominant culture they are compared to when assigning privilege isn’t white as a skin color or culture it’s W.A.S.P white Anglo-Saxon Protestant straight male. By definition these other white peoples you mentioned aren’t Anglo-Saxon. Proximity to this dominant class is what determines privileges granted. So yes these other people if they aren’t Anglo Saxon or straight or etc they get disadvantaged in one way but they still benefit from meeting at least one standard: “white”. So yes all of these problems do boil down back to racism. Wether it be wealth inequality, access to resources, etc etc the point is wealth goes far and generates more wealth and it isn’t just by chance that a certain people tend to hold more wealth it goes back to colonizing and enslavement. Typically the people of enslaved class were those of color and in other countries there were more intricate caste systems that will create a disparity but for the majority of the world the WASP culture is the dominant culture.
Racism has nothing to do with wealth inequality for like 90% of the world and to assert that is just painfully Americentric navel-gazing. But go ahead, you do you.
You do realize it was Europeans who colonized America and pretty much tried to do the same for the rest of the world right. American racism originated in it's eastern colonizers so yeah keep on proving you know nothing about history.
The origin of American racism was not being discussed. What was being discussed is racism being the cause of wealth inequality, which for majority of world is obviously not so. Hence the painfully Amercentric take. Many racially uniform countries/cultures with major wealth inequalities. I don't understand the need for this virtue signal. It simultanously is inaccurate and exposes lack of empathy for marginalization other than being caused by racism.
"The problem is not whiteness of coding. I'm sorry, but this is the definition of race-baiting."
Race-baiting implies an act meant to deliberately provoke an angry reaction or negative response in someone else, which what your provided Cambridge.org definition clarifies. Clearly the goal of the post was an earnest attempt at uncovering racial disparities in programming, as experienced by this developer. The goal here is not to provoke anger. Yet, your response, among others, is to claim that the mere mention of racial disparities is "race-baiting".
If by reading the post, the effect has been to generate anger in the reader, the issue is with the reader and not the post.
" Clearly the goal of the post was an earnest attempt at uncovering racial disparities in programming, as experienced by this developer."
I am not questioning the motivations of the OP, I'm sure they are not malevolent and it indeed reads as an earnest attept to examine the problem. This is why I even wrote my original response. It's a discussion worth having, hear all the sides.
"Yet, your response, among others, is to claim that the mere mention of racial disparities is "race-baiting"."
This is evidently not so. The mere mention of racial disparities itself amounts to little, nothing controversial in stating facts. Why people may see some part of it as race-baiting is perhaps defining the problem to be "Whiteness" (to be understood as White Culture and/or People). If you cannot see how this is racially provoking, try to reverse the races. You couldn't even publish an article like that on this platform.
"If by reading the post, the effect has been to generate anger in the reader, the issue is with the reader and not the post."
I don't think OP's post, in toto, is ragebait, nor in any substantial way race-baity, precisely because it seems earnest. Furthermore, it doesn't actually seem to enrage anyone. I think the accurate description is it's "starting a conversation". So I think you may be reading more into the responses than what's there.
There are some insightful observations and ideas being made in this post, as well as the rest of the series. When you're done with your faux-outrage™, I hope you will consider sharing something constructive. It's an important topic.
If you don't find my comment to the original post insightful or constructive, that's okay. What you cannot do is call it faux-outrage. It's neither an outrage, nor faux. In fact, your responses to me have mischaracterized my position, which I gladly, politely and constructively corrected. It's okay to misunderstand, that's why we're having a discussion in the first place.
Thank you. I hadn't wanted to bother responding to this comment (i.e., don't feed the trolls). But you've done a wonderful job of covering it. Greatly appreciated.
Trigger warning:(well-meaning non-hostile) criticism incoming. I have some background in philosophy (just a few years academically, more of personal interest) and countless of years participating in skeptics forums. This is to say, I am by nature exploratory thinker and am more suspicious of silent agreement than vocal disagreement.A brief of issues relevant to this topic I fundamentally disagree with
Specifically about your points:
From your own post, this (at least as far as you mention specific reasons for the disparity) boils down to economic welfare and security, which grants earlier access to trade tools. This is by definition not race related, it may just happen to be that one race is economically worse off in one particular country while it might be the opposite in another. Maybe the post should be then titled the economic disparity of black Americans? Because this has zero to do with coding as a trade, this is not unique to coding.
Your post however seems to insinuate global coding community or coding as a profession is somehow at fault - at least insofar as they should actively seek a solution and maybe feel bad for the distribution of people in their profession based on skin color. In addition, as you say, where you come from is based on a anecdotal, limited experience. By limited experience I mean statistically speaking - you can never personally experience enough to grasp the state of global coding community as a whole. That needs other methodologies: polls, surveys etc. A lot of us are silent, because we prefer to not elevate certain political issues over others. Each of us may experience different turmoil and persecution in our respective countries.
On top of that, your experience is region-specific, that is to say, purely Americacentric. I assure you, there are plenty of poor white Estonians that did not have the same resources as I did to get into computers and eventually coding. We have Russian Estonians, who might have linguistic disadvantage in getting a job. Again, this stuff is very country specific.
This characterization may be more or less correct, though I doubt many devs think they have acquired much (or all) the knowledge without any help from teachers, peers etc; or that their employment is purely because of their skill and not at least partly because of networking, social circle and pure luck.
But the real point is that the following "therefore" is such a non-sequitor, that this appears to be a strawman of your average dev's worldview, and indeed a rather myopic one.
Things not eliminating the possibility of racial discrimination somewhere in the hiring process:
I speculate, if this is based on any real world anecdotal conversations, they may be expecting you to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate actual discrimination in the HR. Perhaps your average dev is not really interested when the discussion evolves into the issues of race based economic disparity and how to solve it. To be fair, that is quite far from issues of coding.
Let's give them some benefit of doubt. Maybe at least some of them have thought about it more thoroughly:
The problem
First, we need to identify the problem. The problem you have identified is disparity in numerical representation of a social group in a given trade. You need to explain why this is a problem to being with, as this is not actually apparent: I can give you plenty of examples of jobs where massive numerical disparity relating to social groups exists and society is fine with it. The thing is, disparity in and of itself does not necessitate discrimination.
The problem is not whiteness of coding. I'm sorry, but this is the definition of race-baiting. People's color of skin should never be the problem! .
The problem ought to be racial discrimination. So, we need to identify first where it happens, and then how it happens. Numerical disparity doesn't necessarily mean there's any discrimination going on within your company, or even within or profession.
100% this!
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate 👍
Such a great response. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
I don't know reading this response just feels like a lot of splitting hairs for the sake of playing devil's advocate reads like an effort to side step any critical engagement with the reality of racial disparity...even a bit defensive? Your response in some ways affirm some of the mechanisms of racism that Adam writes about. The pervasiveness of that system is dependent on seemingly innocent behavior that when closely examined point to its reification and reproduction.
Adam specifically addressed this early on in his post.
You're right, of course, but what I think's being discussed is the disparity between the ratio of groups in the population and the ratio of groups in tech (specifically programming). That's a big difference, and while it's not absolute, it's a red flag that something does need to be fixed - or at least scrutinised.
Why?
I don't know. I guess if your M&Ms bags kept turning out to be full of 95% blue ones you might be suspicious that someone, somewhere was affecting the supply chain. It could be random, but it might also mean things aren't given equal distribution further back.
In such a situation, I would probably suspect a bug in the production line, rather than a systemic fault targeting me personally.
Such a bug only gets fixed if I really love some other colour of M&Ms enough to complain about it, but all the while, I have to accept that the bug is probably affecting other people, in other ways (you might only get yellow ones, etc).
But perhaps that's just my "M&M privilege", choosing to see it as a hiccup, rather than a targeted campaign.
If dev & design are about creating solutions, the lack of representation of marginalized communities means that the problems of these communities face are not addressed. It means that the scope of identifying problems and ideating their solutions will always fall short of being truly effective.
I can't speak for everyone, but dev & design rarely create any solution in isolation. In our case, there's BA and stakeholder reviews (fun fact: stakeholders never know what they want until they see it, and then they want something different).
Customers identify problems (mostly) and BA identify improvements. The acceptance criteria is set in stone. To put it in simple terms, if BA want to carry some amount of rocks from A to B, I can give them a pickaxe or explosives, and a horse or a truck. Stakeholders will tell you they want a truck and explosives, until they start blowing themselves up or having to pay repair bills on the truck (and give them a horse, they won't like paying a vet).
When the whole organisation is defining the desired outcome (the acceptance criteria), it really doesn't matter how many minorities are in your dev team. What matters, is how many are in your organisation and ultimately, how many are in your customer base (happy customers = successful business).
My problem is that minorities don't show up to interview, they don't send their resume. Well, they do, but in minorities - I think I interviewed one woman over the last 18 months.
If people aren't approaching me, when I have a job opening, I can't legally go to a local minority group hang out with "Hey, anyone want a job?" - because I'd also be discriminating some other group that way.
Right. This mirrors what I wrote in the article - that it's unusual for me to receive even 5% minority applicants. That's why I think the issue is so complex - because it's not nearly so simple as pointing at any given employer or industry and saying, "You just need to hire more minorities!"
Lots of people will tell you that though, but if you look at the people saying it, it's people that don't have the job roles you & I do (and therefore haven't, for a variety of reasons, walked a mile in our shoes).
There's some that say the problem is with the education system - but even there, how can you teach someone if they don't apply to the course, regardless of the reasons why that individual doesn't apply?
The fact that you don’t think wealth inequality or economic welfare leads back to racism is baffling. The primary reason why wealth inequality exists as it does today (not just in America) leads back to colonialism which was inherently based on castes systems and “the upper class” vs “the conquered class” and if you don’t think this carries on till this day then you’ve never heard of 40 acres and a mule. In modern times people of WASP culture hold more wealth because back in the day their grandpappies made sure any wealth generated by enslaved people weren’t passed down to them or their generations to come. The same can be seen in many other countries where generations that come from the enslaved class didn’t get reparations or anything to make up for the fact that the dominant colonial class stole their resources and wealth. Wealth today as you can see can mean the difference between having access to certain privileges or not. Second because other “white” people like Russians or poor Estonians also get disadvantaged proves nothing against this article. He clearly stated the dominant culture they are compared to when assigning privilege isn’t white as a skin color or culture it’s W.A.S.P white Anglo-Saxon Protestant straight male. By definition these other white peoples you mentioned aren’t Anglo-Saxon. Proximity to this dominant class is what determines privileges granted. So yes these other people if they aren’t Anglo Saxon or straight or etc they get disadvantaged in one way but they still benefit from meeting at least one standard: “white”. So yes all of these problems do boil down back to racism. Wether it be wealth inequality, access to resources, etc etc the point is wealth goes far and generates more wealth and it isn’t just by chance that a certain people tend to hold more wealth it goes back to colonizing and enslavement. Typically the people of enslaved class were those of color and in other countries there were more intricate caste systems that will create a disparity but for the majority of the world the WASP culture is the dominant culture.
Racism has nothing to do with wealth inequality for like 90% of the world and to assert that is just painfully Americentric navel-gazing. But go ahead, you do you.
You do realize it was Europeans who colonized America and pretty much tried to do the same for the rest of the world right. American racism originated in it's eastern colonizers so yeah keep on proving you know nothing about history.
The origin of American racism was not being discussed. What was being discussed is racism being the cause of wealth inequality, which for majority of world is obviously not so. Hence the painfully Amercentric take. Many racially uniform countries/cultures with major wealth inequalities. I don't understand the need for this virtue signal. It simultanously is inaccurate and exposes lack of empathy for marginalization other than being caused by racism.
"The problem is not whiteness of coding. I'm sorry, but this is the definition of race-baiting."
Race-baiting implies an act meant to deliberately provoke an angry reaction or negative response in someone else, which what your provided Cambridge.org definition clarifies. Clearly the goal of the post was an earnest attempt at uncovering racial disparities in programming, as experienced by this developer. The goal here is not to provoke anger. Yet, your response, among others, is to claim that the mere mention of racial disparities is "race-baiting".
If by reading the post, the effect has been to generate anger in the reader, the issue is with the reader and not the post.
" Clearly the goal of the post was an earnest attempt at uncovering racial disparities in programming, as experienced by this developer."
I am not questioning the motivations of the OP, I'm sure they are not malevolent and it indeed reads as an earnest attept to examine the problem. This is why I even wrote my original response. It's a discussion worth having, hear all the sides.
"Yet, your response, among others, is to claim that the mere mention of racial disparities is "race-baiting"."
This is evidently not so. The mere mention of racial disparities itself amounts to little, nothing controversial in stating facts. Why people may see some part of it as race-baiting is perhaps defining the problem to be "Whiteness" (to be understood as White Culture and/or People). If you cannot see how this is racially provoking, try to reverse the races. You couldn't even publish an article like that on this platform.
"If by reading the post, the effect has been to generate anger in the reader, the issue is with the reader and not the post."
I don't think OP's post, in toto, is ragebait, nor in any substantial way race-baity, precisely because it seems earnest. Furthermore, it doesn't actually seem to enrage anyone. I think the accurate description is it's "starting a conversation". So I think you may be reading more into the responses than what's there.
Your ability to strawman is excellent.
Care to elaborate, or is this just a projection?
There are some insightful observations and ideas being made in this post, as well as the rest of the series. When you're done with your faux-outrage™, I hope you will consider sharing something constructive. It's an important topic.
If you don't find my comment to the original post insightful or constructive, that's okay. What you cannot do is call it faux-outrage. It's neither an outrage, nor faux. In fact, your responses to me have mischaracterized my position, which I gladly, politely and constructively corrected. It's okay to misunderstand, that's why we're having a discussion in the first place.
Thank you. I hadn't wanted to bother responding to this comment (i.e., don't feed the trolls). But you've done a wonderful job of covering it. Greatly appreciated.
"I hadn't wanted to bother responding to this comment (i.e., don't feed the trolls)."
Why the hostility?
If you take that as "hostility", then there's nothing more to explain.
Calling someone a troll without any provocation is ill-willed in my book, I suspect there were nothing to explain regardless. All the best.